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...

Sep 1, 2023

MGM, 1944 is an odd one. First, MGM's effort to help the war, Song of Russia (directed by Gregory Ratoff), prompts us to ask the question, "What were all of these Communist writers doing working for Louis B. Mayer?" And then, William Dieterle's Kismet, starring Ronald Colman as an amoral magician with misguided...

Aug 25, 2023

In our penultimate Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, another pair of films in which only one of McGuire's "mother roles" affords her a dramatic opportunity. Find out which is which, between Delmer Daves' Susan Slade (1961) and Disney's Summer Magic (1963). We also discuss stealth soap opera radicalism,...