I love old movies — but I didn’t always! In fact, I needed many years of directed classwork to fall in love with them. But if you’re not in the mood to pause your life and take on significant graduate debt, THERE ARE STILL OPTIONS, and Margaret H. Willison and I are here to offer them. In this episode, we offer specific suggestions to listeners based on short lists of their (recent) film favs, talk about “aesthetic friction” and how to overcome it, strongly invite you to put your phone in the other room, and travel all over film history in a very earnest attempt to help you find your own entry point into the expansive mansion that is “old movies,” broadly defined.

• Follow Margaret on Instagram!!

• Find out more about Margaret’s course on Mansfield Park here

• If you want to learn A LOT more about Pre-Code Cinema, this book is my go-to (and very accessible)

• A bunch of classic streaming services have challenged some of the arguments in this piece, but it’s a decent overview re: the disappearance of classic film from Netflix

• If you want to go deep on screwballs and the comedy of remarriage

• My Scandals of Classic Hollywood on Warren Beatty lives on

EVERY MOVIE MENTIONED AND WHERE TO FIND IT
(as best as Melody could figure out) (recs for checking the local library are implicit)

Vertigo (1958) - rent

Paper Moon (1973) - Paramount+

Badlands (1974) - rent

Tokyo Story (1953) - Max

An Autumn Afternoon (1962) - Max

Gosford Park (2001) - rent

What’s Up, Doc? (1972) - rent

Bringing Up Baby (1938) - rent

The Lady Eve (1941) - Criterion, rent

Sylvia Scarlett (1935) - rent

Now, Voyager (1942) - Tubi, TCM, rent

Sullivan’s Travels (1941) - rent

The Palm Beach Story (1942) - rent

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944 ) - rent

Shampoo (1975) - rent

To Be or Not To Be (1942) - Max, Criterion

Born Yesterday (1950) - rent

The Philadelphia Story (1940) - Tubi, rent

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) - Tubi, rent

North by Northwest (1959) - Criterion, Tubi, TCM, rent

Foreign Correspondent (1940) - Max, Criterion, Tubi, rent

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) - Max, rent

Magnolia (1999) - Paramount+, rent

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) - rent

Cabaret (1972) - Tubi, rent

New York, New York (1977) - not available for streaming :(

Broadcast News (1987) - Starz, rent

Desk Set (1957) - rent

The Conversation (1974) - Paramount+, Criterion, rent

Evil Under the Sun (1982) - Prime, rent

Double Indemnity (1944) - rent

The Third Man (1949) - rent

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) - rent

The Shop Around the Corner (1940) - rent

Holiday (1938) - rent

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Criterion, rent

The Women (1939) - rent

All About Eve (1950) - rent

Funny Face (1957) - rent

Barefoot in the Park (1967) - rent

Charade (1963) - Prime, rent

Anatomy of a Murder (1959) - rent

Rear Window (1954) - Criterion, rent

• Dark Academia

• How cookbooks get made

• Van/Skoolie/RV Life

• Spiritual care for non-religious people

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