Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 13: RIDE OUT FOR REVENGE (1957); ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959) and RIDE BEYOND VENGEANCE (1966)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Release Date: 12/19/2025
Acteurist Spotlight – Isabelle Huppert – Part 1: LOULOU (1980) and COUP DE TORCHON (1981)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For our first Isabelle Huppert Acteurist Spotlight episode, we watched Maurice Pialat's Loulou (1980), in which Huppert stars with Gérard Depardieu, and Bertrand Tervanier's Coup de Torchon (1981), in which she supports Philippe Noiret in a transposition of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 to French West Africa. We discuss our first impressions of these two late 20th century French auteurs, the cross-class romance and punk ethos of Loulou, and Huppert's venture into broad black comedy in Coup de Torchon, playing a pragmatist whose gradual awakening to the moral...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Warner Brothers – 1934: I AM A THIEF & I’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
On this week's Warner Bros. 1934 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at some of the studio's mid-30s B-output: the jazzy, Modernist, montage-ist, telephonic I've Got Your Number, starring Pat O'Brien as an insouciant and sometimes insolent Everyman (in a comedy team-up we never knew we needed with fuming mentor Eugene Pallette) whose redemption arc is sparked by beleaguered working girl Joan Blondell; and I Am a Thief, with Mary Astor and Ricardo Cortez playing hot potato with the title's claim. Do either of these films qualify as "termite art"? Do both? Listen and learn! ...
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The Archers in Black and White – A CANTERBURY TALE (1944); I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! (1945) and THE SMALL BACK ROOM (1949) + 2026 Toronto Silent Film Festival
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our Special Subject for this month is The Archers in Black and White: A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), and The Small Back Room (1949). We discuss Powell and Pressburger's interest in the claims and sins of tradition and modernity, their handling of intense romantic relationships, and their search for transcendence in nature and the past. Then, in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we briefly discuss the films we saw at the 2026 Toronto Silent Film Festival, including the 1926 Beau Geste with Ronald Colman,...
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Acteurist Spotlight – Deborah Kerr – Part 3: TEA AND SYMPATHY (1956) and BELOVED INFIDEL (1959)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
We conclude our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight with a couple of her big Hollywood movies after the turning point of From Here to Eternity: Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy (1956), in which she appears as Laura Reynolds, a role she originated on Broadway; and Henry King's Beloved Infidel (1959), in which she stars as Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham in an autobiographical account of a fascinating rags-to-modest-wealth-and-influence story intersecting with F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years of alcoholic decline and exile in Hollywood. We discuss Minnelli and...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM – 1934: A WICKED WOMAN & SEQUOIA
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our MGM 1934 episode this week is a Jean Parker (Beth in RKO's 1933 Little Women) double feature. She plays the rebellious daughter in the family melodrama Wicked Woman, which features a fine central performance by noted theatre actress and blacklistee Mady Christians, and a conservationist's daughter who starts an "unlikely animal friends" experiment with a puma cub and a fawn in Sequoia. While the former treads relatively familiar territory with a mixture of pre-Code intensity and wacky domestic humour (supplied by Sterling Holloway and Betty Furness, an odder couple than the...
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Acteurist Spotlight – Deborah Kerr – Part 2: PLEASE BELIEVE ME (1950) and DREAM WIFE (1953)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For the 2nd part of our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight we check in on Kerr's "lost years" at MGM to see what Hollywood was finding for her to do before her breakthrough performance in From Here to Eternity. In Norman Taurog's Please Believe Me (1950) she leads a cast of oddballs, including Robert Walker and Peter Lawford, as a respectable British girl who learns how to be American by first being mistaken for, and then deciding to become, a Stanwyck-type comedy heroine; and in Sidney Sheldon's satirical Dream Wife (1953) she helps the future I Dream of...
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Special Subject - Elise’s Family Freak-Outs – Part 1 - TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) and THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS (2001)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
With this episode we launch the first of Elise's three-part Special Subject, Family Freak-Outs. We start with some musings about how to define this micro-genre, what makes it different from a standard family melodrama and its relationship to horror, and then we move into our first two freak-outs, Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger (1990) and Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenebaums (2001). While the problems these families are dealing with in their very specific milieus of middle-class black South Central LA and upper-middle-class white fairy-tale Manhattan are very...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount – 1934: SEARCH FOR BEAUTY & CRIME WITHOUT PASSION
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For this Paramount 1934 episode we watched Search for Beauty, which pits beauty-as-health (a wasted and almost unrecognizable Ida Lupino and frequently topless, sometimes bottomless, and always witless Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe) against beauty-as-sex in a meta-commentary on pre-Codes released just before the crackdown, and the Hecht-MacArthur-Garmes Crime Without Passion, starring Claude Rains and Margo as a couple destined to destroy each other in a full-blown film noir six years before that "cycle" started. The latter adds to the evidence for Paramount as the...
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Acteurist Spotlight – Deborah Kerr – Part 1: LOVE ON THE DOLE (1941) and PERFECT STRANGERS (1945)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight starts strong with two entertaining progressive WWII-era British films, John Baxter's Love on the Dole (1941), a socialist portrayal of working-class life in Manchester during the Great Depression, and Alexander Korda's Perfect Strangers (aka Vacation from Marriage), a sort of comedy of remarriage that envisions a radically new kind of marriage arising out of wartime upheavals in gender roles and middle-class routine. Elise confesses and recants her previous opinion that Deborah Kerr was a solid but slightly boring choice....
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1933: THE INVISIBLE MAN & COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For this Universal 1933 Studios Year by Year episode we commit the sacrilege of trashing a James Whale movie, The Invisible Man, which is also Claude Rains' first major screen role, albeit mainly as a voice. A ranting, irascible voice in a movie with very little evidence (in our irresponsible opinion) of Whale's voice. But then we turn to a movie bearing a strong directorial imprint, William Wyler's Counsellor at Law, which contains probably John Barrymore's best screen performance. We discuss Wyler's contested status among auteurists and the multiple layers of Elmer Rice's...
info_outlineIt's our final Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, with which we also say goodbye to our comprehensive approach toward attaining a privileged vantage point on an actor's entire oeuvre. Of course, we cheated a little on this one and stopped short of Gloria's exploitation film era. Our oeuvre-view ends with two Westerns, Ride Out for Revenge (1957) and Ride Beyond Vengeance (1966), entirely unrelated despite their similar titles, which we liked for very different reasons, and a last Gloria Grahame left-wing film noir appearance in Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), produced by Harry Belafonte's production company with a screenplay secretly written by blacklistee Abraham Polonsky at Belafonte's behest. After we reveal our Top 10 Gloria Grahame movies, Fear and Moviegoing returns with a vengeance (in keeping with the episode's themes) with three by Mikio Naruse from the TIFF Lightbox retrospective (Floating Clouds, Repast, and Mother) and two Carlton 90s retro screenings, Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects and Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers.
Time Codes:
0h 00m 25s: RIDE OUT FOR REVENGE (1957) [dir. Bernard Girard]
0h 22m 08s: ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959) [dir. Robert Wise].
0h 32m 36s: RIDE BEYOND VENGEANCE (1966) [dir. Bernard McEveety]
0h 45m 32s: Gloria Grahame Top 10s
0h 49m 44s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) & Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers (1997) at The Carlton Cinema; Part I of TIFF Cinematheque’s Mikio Naruse Retrospective - Floating Clouds (1955); Repast (1951) & Mother (1952)
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* Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project – a discussion of Late Spring
* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s
* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)
* Read Elise’s piece on Gangs of New York – “Making America Strange Again”
* Check out Dave’s Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!
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