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Dec 31, 2021

It's 1938 and Warner Bros. is in its prime, and so is Bette Davis, just now moving into the kind of top-quality romantic melodramas in which she'd excel. No longer the studio of James Cagney, Joan Blondell, gangster heroes and Busby Berkeley spectacles, it's now the studio of Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, glossy melodramas...


Dec 24, 2021

For our Xmas 2021 episode, two bittersweet intellectual soap operas about forbidden love and sexual non-conformity in mid-20th century America, Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955), starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and Todd Haynes' Carol (2015), starring Rooney Mara and Cate Blachett. We talk about the...


Dec 17, 2021

We bid Margaret Sullavan a sad farewell with her two final films, Cry 'Havoc' (1943), a very dark WWII propaganda film with an all-female main cast in which the Battle of Bataan meets Stage Door, and No Sad Songs for Me (1950), a peak-crazy woman's picture in the mode of The Shining Hour with a slyly progressive...


Dec 12, 2021

For this week's Studios Year by Year, it's MGM 1938 and two aviation movies starring the King and Queen of Hollywood, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. In Jack Conway's wildly entertaining Too Hot to Handle, Loy is a daredevil aviator with a sentimental mission and Gable an unscrupulous journalist who doesn't know whether he...


Dec 3, 2021

For our penultimate Sullavan episode, two movies widely disparate in tone: John Cromwell's So Ends Our Night (1941), the fourth and final Sullavan appearance in an anti-Nazi film (and the second based on an Erich Maria Remarque novel); and Appointment for Love (1941), a less bitter Woman of the Year in which Sullavan...