Sep 30, 2022

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...

Sep 23, 2022

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...

Sep 16, 2022

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...

Sep 9, 2022

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...

Sep 2, 2022

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...