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Jul 31, 2020

This time on our oeuvre-view of Setsuko Hara's (English-subtitled) career, Kurosawa's The Idiot/Hakuchi, based on Dostoevsky, is paired with Ozu's Early Summer for maximum tonal dissonance. Our heroine proves her range again—even with her Noriko roles. Join us for a discussion of sexual psychosis and tragic caritas in...


Jul 24, 2020

MGM, 1933. Two very different movies: Penthouse, a crime drama and romantic comedy directed by W. S. “One-Take Woody” Van Dyke, and King Vidor's hard-to-find The Stranger's Return, an agrarian family melodrama reputed to have been Ozu's favourite movie. Myrna Loy, as an unflappable and lovable party girl, with her...


Jul 17, 2020

Summer comes even to a virus-ravaged northern hemisphere, and we're here to celebrate with two teen movies that have a surprising amount in common: Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953) and Delmer Daves' A Summer Place (1959). The former turns out to be much less about sex than its reputation would have you...


Jul 10, 2020

Paramount, 1933 (or so): a Charles Laughton and Karl Struss double feature. We start with Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, pitting piety against perversion. Fredric March in a mini skirt, Claudette Colbert in a milk bath, Laughton as a ditzy Nero, and a bunch of Christians bedecked with arrows. But are...


Jul 3, 2020

We get to the first Ozu in our Setsuko Hara Acteurist Oeuvre-view at last, but first we look at Tadashi Ima's two-parter, Blue Mountain Range/Aoi sanmyaku (1949), a surprisingly fun movie that leads us to discuss Allied Occupation liberal propaganda, dating as a recent invention, why all men will want to have sex with...