Sep 13, 2024

In this 1947 Universal Studios Year by Year episode, a little Ella Raines never hurt no one: we struggle to understand her role in the intermittently riveting Gothic melodrama Time Out of Mind (stylishly directed by Robert Siodmak), while Edmond O'Brien struggles to understand her role in Vincent Price's life in The...

Sep 6, 2024

The first episode of our Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view series has a high context-to-text ratio, as we introduce one of the most important figures in entertainment and political activism of the 20th century. The two movies we look at, Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul (1925) and Kenneth Macpherson's Borderline (1930),...

Aug 30, 2024

We've been waiting for this episode, a 1947 RKO noir double bill with two of the all-time greats, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum's cool detective and Jane Greer’s psychopathic moll work at cross purposes in their attempts to escape their shady pasts so that they can be free to love, and...

Aug 23, 2024

We went deep for our second King Vidor Special Subject episode, looking at four films from the 1930s: Street Scene (1931), adapted by Elmer Rice from his famous stage play about working-class New Yorkers; the little-known Cynara (1932), starring Ronald Colman as a kindly upper-middle-class man who stumbles into...

Aug 16, 2024

Our final Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is an odd one, with Dave arguing for the value of John Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant (1985), a Nazi conspiracy thriller from a novel by Robert Ludlum, and Elise arguing for the value of The Other Side of the Wind (2018), Orson Welles' startling comeback...