There's Sometimes a Buggy

For our Warner Bros. 1941 episode we watched two Raoul Walsh love triangle movies: Manpower, in which Edward G. Robinson pines for Marlene Dietrich, who pines for George Raft; and one of Dave's all-time faves, The Strawberry Blonde, in which Olivia de Havilland pines for James Cagney, who pines for Rita Hayworth. We discuss Walsh's treatment of women as desiring subjects; the productive tension between acteur and studi-auteur in the pairing of Dietrich and Warner Bros.; Walsh's unHawksian take on male dynamics in dangerous workplaces, and more. But what makes these uniquely Warner Bros. pictures? You'll have to listen to the episode to find out.

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s: THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE [dir. Raoul Walsh]

0h 44m 26s: MANPOWER [dir. Raoul Walsh]

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Warner Brothers Story by John Douglas Eames

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler

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* 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 latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave's new 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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Our Halloween 2022 subject is "The Haunted Mizoguchi," for which we looked at two films made by Kenji Mizoguchi toward the end of his life: the supernatural fantasy Ugetsu (1953) and a film we agree is a candidate for best movie ever made, Sansho the Bailiff (1954). We use Mizoguchi's explicit treatment of ghostly themes in Ugetsu as a springboard for discussing the haunting qualities of Sansho the Bailiff and the relationship between nature, the transcendent, and the miraculous in the film. We also consider the question of whether the film argues for political action or resignation as the best way of dealing with the systemic injustice from which we can't seem to escape and the threat of hopelessness.

Time Codes:

0h 1m 00s: UGETSU (1953) [dir. Kenji Mizoguchi]

0h 34m 32s: SANSHO THE BAILIFF (1954) [dir. Kenji Mizoguchi]

1h 20m 29s: Listener Mail with Daves and Elise – on Capra, Comics & Noir City

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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!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at [email protected]

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we arrive at arguably Jean Arthur's biggest year of stardom, 1939, with her appearance opposite Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings, Howard Hawks' ode to male professionalism, and her iconic performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, opposite Jimmy Stewart. We do our best to get at the essences of Hawks and Capra and consider whether Arthur can embody both the Hawksian and the Capra woman. And in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, we discuss Jacques Rivette's Love on the Ground (1984) as a kind of inversion of his surrealist classic Celine and Julie Go Boating.

Time Codes:

0h 1m 00s: ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939) [dir. Howard Hawks]

0h 42m 44s: MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939) [dir. Frank Capra]

1h 26m 57s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – L'amour par terre AKA Love on the Ground (1984) by Jacques Rivette

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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!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at [email protected]

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

For this MGM 1941 episode, we again pair a classic with a rarity: Cukor's A Woman's Face, starring Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas, and Conrad Veidt, and The Trial of Mary Dugan, directed by Norman Z. McLeod and starring Laraine Day, Robert Young, and Tom Conway (aka "The Nice George Sanders"). We discuss A Woman's Face as a proto-Warner Bros. Crawford noir, the persona of Robert Young, the uses of no-subtext acting, and the starkly different construction of these two women-on-trial movies. And in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, we take a brief look at Buck and the Preacher, directed by and starring Sidney Poitier (and co-starring future acteurist spotlight subject Ruby Dee, although she doesn't get a lot of screen time in this one).

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s: A WOMAN'S FACE [dir. George Cukor]

0h 50m 59s: THE TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN [dir. Norman Z. McLeod]

1h 21m 53s: FEAR & MOVIEGOING IN TORONTO: Sidney Poitier's Buck and the Preacher (1972)

Studio Film Capsules provided by The MGM Story by John Douglas Eames

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler

+++

* 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 latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave's new 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!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at [email protected]

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

In our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view this week, we look at two of Arthur's best-known comedies, Easy Living (1937), directed by Mitchell Leisen, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, and You Can't Take It With You (1938), directed by Frank Capra. Dave explains why Jean Arthur's performance in Easy Living is his all-time favourite comedy performance by an actress. (Hint: it involves a pig called "Wafford.") We ponder Arthur's transformation into a glamorous romantic lead, even as she retains her (slightly off-kilter) ordinary person qualities, and the contrasting comic visions of Sturges and Capra. Then, in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, we discuss our second double feature of Tod Browning's Dracula and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, the subject of our 2019 Halloween episode. This time around we find a lot to say about Coppola's Dracula as a Dionysian Christ figure who can lead Winona Ryder out of the death-in-life of civilization.

Time Codes:

0h 1m 00s: EASY LIVING (1937) [dir. Mitchell Leisen]

0h 49m 27s: Jean Arthur v. Harry Cohn – 1937/1938 (from John Oller's Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew)

0h 54m 19s: YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU (1938) [dir. Frank Capra]

1h 22m 35s: Fear & Moviegoing in Toronto – DRACULA (1931) by Tod Browning & BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA (1992) by Francis Ford Coppola

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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!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at [email protected]

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

A tonally disparate pair of great films for Paramount 1941: Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, one of the greatest movies ever made, according to Elise; and a real rarity, William Wellman's Reaching for the Sun, starring some important Sturges actors: Joel McCrea, Ellen Drew, and Eddie Bracken. We interrogate the strange central relationship in The Lady Eve, examining its sadistic, maternal, narcissistic, you-name-it qualities, and Sturges' masterful blending of comedy tropes, melodrama structure, and painful personal psychology. Then we turn to the interesting mixture of "universal" (20th century Western) gender tropes and modern modifications of them in Wellman's tale of a man torn between urban opportunity and Thoreauvian freedom. Then, in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, we briefly discuss the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and its curious misunderstandings of Capra, and Brian De Palma's brilliant Femme Fatale and its channeling of Lynch and Verhoeven, but with De Palma's peculiar mixture of sweetness and satire.

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s: THE LADY EVE [dir. Preston Sturges]

0h 46m 28s: REACHING FOR THE SUN [dir. WILLIAM A. WELLMAN]

1h 14m 35s: FEAR & MOVIEGOING IN TORONTO: THE HUDUSCKER PROXY (1994) by Joel and Ethan Coen & FEMME FATALE (2002) by Brian DePalma

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Paramount Story by John Douglas Eames

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler

+++

* 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 latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave's new 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!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at [email protected]

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

In this week's entry in our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we look at Alfred E. Green's comedy More Than A Secretary (1936) and Frank Borzage's genre-defying screwball melodrama History Is Made at Night (1937), pairing Arthur with up-and-coming romantic lead Charles Boyer. We compare More Than A Secretary with Green's better-known film about sexual politics in patriarchal office culture, Baby Face, and the possibly influential blending of genres and the lovers' achievement of Borzagean transcendence in History Is Made at Night, which gave Arthur her most glamourous role up to that point.

Time Codes:

0h 1m 00s: MORE THAN A SECRETARY (1936) [dir. Alfred E. Green]

0h 36m 37s: HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT (1937) [dir. Frank Borzage]

+++

* 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!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at [email protected]

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

In Part 2 of our look at The German Sirk, the director discovers "cinematic values" with two unhinged melodramas that place a strong emphasis on music, Schlußakkord (Final Chord/Final Accord), from 1936, and La Habanera, from 1937. We dig into a couple of Sirk's complicated "villains" in these movies about extra-marital love triangles, and discuss La Habanera's Nazi propaganda overtones and the ways in which the film possibly subverts them. Then, in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, we give our impressions of Alfred Hitchcock's deeply personal, disturbing, and bonkers Marnie, an old favourite of Elise's and new favourite of Dave's.

Time Codes:

0h 1m 00s: THE FINAL CHORD (1936) aka THE FINAL ACCORD

0h 32m 51s: CHEATED BY THE WIND (1937) aka LA HABANERA

0h 51m 49s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964)

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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!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at [email protected]

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

For this Universal 1940 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at a Vincent Price double feature that also features the same director (Joe May), cinematographer (Milton Krasner), and key screenwriter (Lester Cole, who will become one of the Hollywood Ten): The House of the Seven Gables, an adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, and The Invisible Man Returns, the first sequel to James Whale's adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel. We talk non-naturalistic acting, the genius of Vincent Price, and the progressive moment of 1940, when anti-fascism gives courage to Hollywood's leftists.

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES [dir. Joe May]

0h 45m 28s: THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS [dir. Joe May]

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Universal Story by Clive Hirschhorn

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler

+++

* 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 latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave's new 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!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at [email protected]

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

In this week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view cast, we revisit Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) for thoughts old and (hopefully) new, and then look at two minor screwball comedy variations on genre films from 1936, the RKO murder mystery The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, co-starring William Powell, and a weird little riff on Mr. Deeds combined with a crime thriller, Adventure in Manhattan, co-starring Joel McCrea. Join us as we discuss Gary Cooper's complex performance and creepy sexlessnes and Arthur's wholesome lack of naivety and self-lovemaking in Mr. Deeds, a deeply romantically and politically confused movie, and the reasons why Arthur doesn't (and shouldn't) give screwball performances in her most famous roles.

Time Codes:

0h 1m 00s: MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN (1936) [dir. Frank Capra]

0h 31m 59s: THE EX-MRS. BRADFORD (1936) [dir. Stephen Roberts]

0h 41m 54s: ADVENTURE IN MANHATTAN (1936) [dir. Edward Ludwig]

0h 56m 03s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – CELINE ET JULIE VONT EN BATEAU (1972)

+++

* 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!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at [email protected]

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!