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Oct 6, 2023

Our Fox 1944 episode features a prestige production, The Eve of St. Mark, based on a Maxwell Anderson play and directed by John Stahl, and a modest marital drama, In the Meantime, Darling, directed by Otto Preminger just before he makes a name for himself in noir with Laura. Between the two, the problems facing the men...


Sep 29, 2023

In our first Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we spend some time with Lilli in England and take in her screen debut, in the "Quota Quickie" Crime Unlimited (1935); her small role in Hitchcock's eccentric Secret Agent (1936), in which she gets to play with an unhinged Peter Lorre; and a thankless role in a...


Sep 22, 2023

This Special Subject is something extra-special: we discuss philosopher Stanley Cavell's idiosyncratic classic of film criticism, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage and three classic comedies that are the subjects of essays in that book, Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth, Howard Hawks' His Girl...


Sep 15, 2023

This Warner Bros. 1944 episode makes good use of Warner Bros.' A-list stars, A-list character actors, B-list stars, and B-list character actors. Casablanca and Maltese Falcon alumni converge in both Michael Curtiz's Passage to Marseille, starring Humphrey Bogart as a morally compromised hero, with Claude Rains and...


Sep 8, 2023

Warning: our final Dorothy McGuire episode contains very little Dorothy McGuire in our discussion of the films, although we also compare our Top 10 performances and give a final analysis of how her career was shaped by its cultural moment. However, we still find lots to talk about in the oddball final feature films in...