“You can’t entirely dislike a man who’s tried to kill you.” Old Hollywood’s gift for complicating rugged individualism is on vibrant display in this late-period work from Vincente Minnelli, about a cracked-up actor getting a second chance at fame by rescuing a troubled film shoot in Rome. 

Edward G. Robinson plays the tyrannical old director Maurice Kruger, who by the end of the second act has taken ill and is in need of the kind of legacy-rescuing only a suffering former protege can provide. Kirk Douglas is Jack Andrus, fresh from the sanitarium, who tempers his pride, his cleft chin, and his raspy snarl into instruments of firm compassion, calmly slicing through clouds of empty glamor and toxic ambition as he takes Kruger’s place and wrestles the volatile production back on schedule. 

Dave and Jeremy marvel at the fraught path to redemption the movie lays out, rife with spite and malice even as forgiveness and acceptance prevail. When that path puts our hero behind the wheel of a top-down Maserati for a raving one-car death race through nighttime Roman streets–by which our hero hopes to affirm that he is NOT suicidal–the subtext is clear: reckless emotional intensity is the solution to–and the cause of–all of life’s problems. 

Pack your bags (and your Oscar™ statuette, if you’re as hungry for past glory as Jack Andrus) and join Dave and Jeremy for TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN.

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Music by Jeremy Donald.

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David Lynch’s unsettling tale of Tinseltown ambitions gone sour first gives us Betty and Rita, the plucky outsider aiding the star in crisis, then takes us through a magic portal to an alternate vision of the same bodies, now living different lives as Diane and Camilla (but are they different lives?). Dave parses the often non-linear timeline and discusses the film’s origins as a shelved television project, while Jeremy proposes clues in hopes of reconciling the several not-quite-compatible narratives. “David Lynch is totally unironic,” it’s been said, and there is real emotion in this object lesson in artifice, fate, jealousy, and betrayal. Join Dave and Jeremy as they gush over the intensity of some scenes and the comedy of others, all while treading lightly through the anticipation and terror that give MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001) its dazzling highs and devastating lows.

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Music by Jeremy Donald.

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Dave and Jeremy encounter the sublime, the ridiculous, and the achingly mundane as they unravel the interwoven passions of Millie, Pinky, and Willie, whose destinies tangle in Robert Altman’s 3 WOMEN, a curious and beguiling exploration of shifting identities and wayside desperation.

Will Altman pull off a K-Mart-coded mashup of Ingmar Bergman and Sam Shepard? Did Olive Oyl and Stephen King’s Carrie once room together in an alternate timeline? Can a director really shoot half of a mid-career art film through a Lava Wave Motion Machine™  and then go on to make GOSFORD PARK?

Join Dave and Jeremy as they wade through the shallows and plunge into the deep end with the titular trio of Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule. Listen as they pluck at loose ends, trace the development of motifs, and pick out core influences in the Cool Whip fever dream that is 3 WOMEN.

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Music by Jeremy Donald.

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Dave and Jeremy dive deep into Dave’s pick, a domestic drama from director Yasujiro Ozu. In post-war Tokyo, 27 year old Noriko resists mounting pressure to marry and leave her widowed father’s home. Filled with moments of everyday tranquility, LATE SPRING evokes powerful emotions with unusual camera placement and subdued performances that gently advance the painful conflict faced by Noriko and her father.

Join Dave and Jeremy as they admire the effectiveness of Ozu’s style and puzzle over the tantalizing ambiguities that bring his characters and their fates to life. This episode's conversation touches on the critical responses to Ozu’s oeuvre, his recurring cast members, and the vision and craft with which this innovative director renders the turning points in this subtly devastating study of self and family. Cue up, hang out, and rewind as much as you like as Dave and Jeremy relish the warmth of LATE SPRING.

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Music by Jeremy Donald.

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Suffering in mink takes a human turn as Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis), the unwillingly sheltered adult child of Boston society matron Mrs. Henry Vale (played with iron menace by Gladys Cooper) embarks on a quest to establish a confident independence. Or is it an independent confidence? Aided by the wise and kindly Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains) following a nervous breakdown, Charlotte has only to overcome her sense of obligation to the world and define her own happiness. Was there ever a more favorable portrayal of therapy? If so, this must predate them all–and it is all the more remarkable for the chauffeur-and-chandelier backdrop of its inhabitants.  

Dave and Jeremy marvel at this lost world of fictional high society, and at how easily Bette Davis conveys the inner journey of a character who transcends that world, transformed by her willingness to “be interested in everything,” as Dr. Jacquith instructs her, while at the same time learning to say no when it counts. Could any other actress nail scene after scene with as much self-possession as Davis does when Charlotte resists pressure to return to her old, unhappy life? The love interest here is played by Paul Henreid, gentle instigator of our hero’s romantic agency, whose own self-determining arc mirrors Charlotte’s just enough to put her nuanced star turn in brilliant relief. Join Dave and Jeremy for a celebration of a late-blooming camellia in this episode where we set sail with Warner Brothers’ 1942 production of NOW, VOYAGER.

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Music by Jeremy Donald.

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Fortunes change with the seasons in this 2002 exploration of social consequences set in 1950s Hartford, Connecticut.

Kathy Whittaker, played by Julianne Moore, achieves peak surburbia just as her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) begins having gay dalliances and Raymond, a new gardener, awakens Kathy’s need for romantic connection. That Raymond, played by Dennis Haysbert, is Black, allows Kathy to experience an instructive dose of otherness on her visit with him to the Black parts of town. This translates to very real social shunning once her bigoted peers learn of her relationship, and Kathy’s standing is threatened on nearly all sides. Haynes serves up this compelling parable in the unblemished jewel-tones and maudlin violins of mid-century melodrama. With dialogue as stiff as Frank’s starched collars juxtaposed with unexpectedly naturalistic performances, more than a few scenes combust to devastating effect within the button-down milieu.

Dave delights in the throw-back nod to Douglas Sirk and the genre of the ‘women’s picture,’ and in the uncanny blend of cliches and earnest heartbreak. Jeremy questions the narrative goals at work in the movie, musing on the resistance the film offers to any easy moral judgments. Did Kathy change, or was she a fish-out-of-water the whole time? Is the audience–or even the whole film–complicit in a white lady pity-party? And does anyone who lives in a split-level house still wear a tux to their own holiday party?

Never trust the guy who makes the first toast at your anniversary party!

Jeremy responds to Dave’s inaugural choice of Hitchcock’s I CONFESS with Brian De Palma’s 1976 film OBSESSION, starring Cliff Robertson and Genevieve Bujold, with a treacherous frenemy turn from John Lithgow. Something is rotten in New Orleans in this genteely lurid steambath of loss and longing, as Robertson’s Michael Courtland hopes to recapture the love of his life by wooing a younger woman whose uncanny resemblance to his dead wife alarms those closest to him. With Bujold playing both female roles, we’re firmly in Hitchcock territory, with nods to VERTIGO piling up like stacks of cash in the ransom scheme that robbed our hero of his wife and daughter years before. 

Dave unpacks the parallels between Hitchcock’s masterpiece of fetishism and OBSESSION’s layers of imitation, while Jeremy marvels at the artistic choices that made Roger Ebert enthusiastically describe this film as “overwrought melodrama” in which “excess is its own reward.” With Lithgow twanging his way through a series of white linen suits and languid, spiteful glances, Robertson’s stoic and deeply tanned widower and his new paramour both find themselves retreading familiar ground as they approach the uncanny denouement. 

Is it good-bad or bad-good? Can you blame a guy for believing the unlikeliest of coincidences? Don’t you want to see what happens when he goes all in? Join us for our next episode where we uncover the image behind the image that is OBSESSION. 

Music by Jeremy Donald.

Find Dave here:

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Here we go…it’s our first episode!

Sure, Jeremy’s seen the big Hitchcock movies like REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO, and he even has a couple of black and white favorites (SHADOW OF A DOUBT and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN). But what will he make of a lesser Hitchcock film?

This month we take on Dave’s pick, the underappreciated and now relatively forgotten 1953 film I CONFESS, starring Montgomery Clift. Clift stars as Father Michael Logan, a Quebec City priest whose vows prevent him from revealing the identity of a murderer, even when he himself becomes the prime suspect of the investigation.

What is this movie? Canadian cozy mystery? Location-heavy quasi-noir?  Hitchcock’s love letter to Catholicism in the form of a risqué morality play? 

Dave and Jeremy talk about mood and style, the ethical dilemma at the heart of the movie, and weigh in on that burning question: was Montgomery Clift the original “hot priest?”

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We’ll be back next month with Jeremy’s reply.

Music by Jeremy Donald.

Find Dave here:

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In this introductory episode, Dave and Jeremy talk about how their everyday conversations about obscure movies planted the seed for this show.

Plus that all-important question: how often will Jeremy gaslight Dave with made-up, late 60s Gene Hackman movies?