Jul 18, 2025

Our final Oscar Levant Special Subject episode covers his contribution to two of the greatest MGM musicals, Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951) and The Band Wagon (1953), plus a 20th Century Fox curiosity, The I Don't Care Girl (1953) in which Mitzi Gaynor supposedly plays early 20th century vaudeville wild...

Jul 11, 2025

The movies we viewed for this RKO 1931 Studios Year by Year episode couldn't be more different: the sprawling Cimarron (starring Richard Dix as America's psychotic inner conflict) prompts us to speculate about Edna Ferber as a source auteur and the intertwining of her vision of America with Hollywood across three...

Jul 4, 2025

Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view continues with A Woman's Secret (1949), an oddball psychological drama with a screenplay by Citizen Kane writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and directed by Grahame's new husband Nicholas Ray; and Roughshod (1949), a consciously feminist Western written by a bunch of leftists. Proving...

Jun 27, 2025

A curious pairing for this Fox 1931 Studios Year by Year episode: an unsung WWI drama, but as good as any, William K. Howard's Surrender, starring Warner Baxter, Leila Hyams, and an almost unrecognizable (both his appearance and his performance) Ralph Bellamy; and the Will Rogers version of A Connecticut Yankee in King...

Jun 20, 2025

We say farewell to Farrow and Allen (for now, although we'll probably encounter them individually on the podcast again) with this final episode on their cinematic collaboration, covering Alice (1990), Shadows and Fog (1991), and one of their very best, the ill-fated Husbands and Wives (1992). In the first two, two...