Jul 25, 2025

For our Universal 1931 Studios Year by Year episode we took in a Sidney Fox double feature, Bad Sister (adapted from a Booth Tarkington novel, with an early role for Bette Davis as the good sister) and Strictly Dishonorable (adapted from Preston Sturges' only successful play and directed by John Stahl). Laemmle Jr.'s...

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...