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May 28, 2021

MGM, 1936: the studio of stars, glamour, and conservatism. Or so goes our thesis, which we attempt to complicate by taking a close look at two movies that make romantic rivals of Jean Harlow and Myrna Loy: Clarence Brown's melodrama Wife vs.Secretary and Jack Conway's atypical screwball comedy Libeled Lady....


May 21, 2021

In this week's Clara Bow Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we're finally there: Clara's first two sound films, both from 1929. First, we engage in an extensive analysis of Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party, Clara's talkie debut. The star plays a college girl rebelling against the Victorian strictures on campus sexuality, but...


May 14, 2021

We look at four noirish British films distributed in the United States by Eagle-Lion: Waterloo Road (1945, directed by Sidney Gilliat), I See a Dark Stranger (1946, directed by Frank Launder), The October Man (1947, directed by Roy Ward Baker), and The Blue Lamp (1950, directed by Basil Dearden). We explore the mental...


May 7, 2021

In this week's Clara Bow Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, two of Clara's best directors, Victor Fleming and Dorothy Arzner, present us with two very different versions of Clara that are both nevertheless logical developments of her persona. In Fleming's Hula (1927), Clara is a wild child of nature and a real loose cannon,...