There's Sometimes a Buggy

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 playwright/screenwriter Robert Anderson's very contemporary-feeling analysis of the performance of gender (masculinity in particular) and Kerr's role as a Sex Christ, and Beloved Infidel's good-bad-and-ugly, but empathetic, approach to a troubled, abusive relationship.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: TEA AND SYMPATHY (1956) [dir. Vincente Minnelli]

0h 33m 45s: BELOVED INFIDEL (1959) [dir. Henry King]

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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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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 puma and fawn), the latter, we argue, is an animal protagonists movie with some genuinely original features.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: 1934 & MGM

0h 04m 39s: A WICKED WOMAN [dir. Charles Brabin]

0h 26m 28s: SEQUOIA [dir. Chester M. Franklin]

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

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

1934 Information from Forgotten Films to Remember by John Springer

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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!

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 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 Jeannie creator and bestselling trashy novelist work out some interesting ideas about gender via miserable Orientalist stereotypes and an oil crisis backdrop of unfortunate contemporary relevance. If these aren't masterpieces, it can't be said, anyway, that these are run-of-the-mill Hollywood comedies (if there is such a thing).

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: PLEASE BELIEVE ME (1950) [dir. Norman Taurog]

0h 24m 18s: DREAM WIFE (1953) [dir. Sidney Sheldon]

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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!

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 different, the capacity to freak out may be a universal feature of the family; and in these two movies, at least, freaking out can lead to healing. Then a quick Fear and Moviegoing in honour of Catherine O'Hara's passing, Christopher Guest's Best in Show.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: Microgeneric Musing Re: Freak-Outs

0h 06m 03s: TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) [dir. Charles Burnett]

0h 31m 50s: THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001) [dir. Wes Anderson]

1h 03m 22s: Fear & Moviegoing in Toronto: Christopher Guest's Best in Show (2000) at the Carlton Cinema (Catherine O'Hara Tribute)

+++

* 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 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 studio of idiosyncratic auteur experimentation, while the former adds to the evidence that Paramount often flounders without its auteurs.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: 1934 & Paramount

0h 09m 04s: SEARCH FOR BEAUTY [dir. Erle C. Kenton]

0h 26m 53s: CRIME WITHOUT PASSION [dirs. Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur & Lee Garmes]

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

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

1934 Information from Forgotten Films to Remember by John Springer

+++

* 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!

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.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: Brief intro – Deborah Kerr

0h 06m 20s: LOVE ON THE DOLE (1941) [dir. John Baxter]

0h 34m 29s: PERFECT STRANGERS aka VACATION FROM MARRIAGE (1945) [dir. Alexander Korda]

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* Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project – a discussion of Late Spring

* Capsule reviews from John Springer's Forgotten Films to Remember (Citadel Press, 1980)

* 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 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 adaptation of his play about early 20th century American antisemitism and how to live with the knowledge of one's moral compromises. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we took in a Valentine's weekend screening of Sternberg's The Devil Is a Woman at the TIFF Lightbox cinematheque, giving us another opportunity to grapple with its ironies and opacities.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: 1933 and Universal

0h 03m 51s: THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933) [dir. James Whale]

0h 19m 21s: COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW (1933) [dir. William Wyler]

0h 48m 06s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto: Josef von Sternberg's The Devil is a Woman (1935) at TIFF Lightbox

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Universal Story by Clive Hirschhorn

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

1933 Information from Forgotten Films to Remember by John Springer

+++

* 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!

We bid a fond farewell to our Acteurist Spotlight on Delphine Seyrig with the greatest movie of all-time (as of the most recent BFI critics' poll), Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and its "sequel," Golden Eighties (1986), Akerman's retro-80s-while-it's -still-happening musical. We give our latest thoughts on anxiety, oppression, and orgasms in Jeanne Dielman before turning to a very different Jeanne played by Seyrig and a different aspect of Akerman's grappling with her family history. In Golden Eighties, Akerman takes a wistful snapshot of the moment when postwar capitalism was undeniably failing but denial hadn't yet failed, smuggling social commentary and emotive dramaturgy into goofy musical comedy.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975) [dir. Chantal Akerman]

0h 41m 06s: GOLDEN EIGHTIES (1986) [dir. Chantal Akerman]

+++

* 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!

Our 2026 Valentine's Day episode explores the romantic appeal of Adam Sandler through his first rom com pairing with Drew Barrymore, The Wedding Singer (1998), and his celebrated collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love (2002). While The Wedding Singer pursues a sweetness and sincerity alien to the studio-era romantic comedies it in some ways emulates, Anderson's enigmatic fairy tale riffs on the combination of terrifying vulnerability and terrifying rage in Sandler's persona, positioning him between the grace of romantic salvation and the gravity of a punitive superego (who owns a mattress store). May you say: "That's that!" to your superego this Valentine's Day.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: THE WEDDING SINGER (1998) [dir. Frank Coraci]

0h 34m 05s: PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (2002) [dir. Paul Thomas Anderson]

+++

* 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!

This 1933 RKO Studios Year by Year episode takes us from the sweepings on the floor of a palatial early 20th century department store to celestial shenanigans high above Rio de Janeiro. Lester Cohen's adaptation of his Dreiseresque novel Sweepings (directed by John Cromwell), another failson saga strongly anticipating HBO's Succession, struggles to translate generational saga into a coherent 80 minutes, but Gregory Ratoff's performance as a hired man trying to get his dues in spite of anti-Semitism is one of the things that make it worth watching; and while a climactic bevy of aerial showgirls can't make Flying Down to Rio the equal of either the 1933 Warner Bros. Busby Berkeley musicals or the Fred and Ginger musicals at RKO to come, the Astaire and Rogers team film debut does offer a curious glimpse of an alternate universe in which they were comic buddies instead of love interests at odds. But already setting the world on fire when they put their heads together as a dance team.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: 1933 and RKO

0h 04m 02s: SWEEPINGS (1933) [dir. John Cromwell]

0h 26m 14s: FLYING DOWN TO RIO (1933) [dir. Thornton Freeland]

0h 45m 16s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto: Final Screening of the Naruse Retrospective at TIFF Lightbox – Untamed (1955)

Studio Film Capsules provided by The RKO Story by Richard B. Jewell & Vernon Harbin

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

1933 Information from Forgotten Films to Remember by John Springer

+++

* 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!