Dec 6, 2024

Sadly, it's time to say goodbye to another acteur after an all-too-short time. For our final Paul Robeson episode, we watched Julien Duvivier's Tales of Manhattan (1942), which notoriously brought an end to Robeson's career as a film actor, and two extraordinary socialist documentaries to which he contributed his...

Nov 29, 2024

This 1948 20th Century Fox Studios Year by Year episode is a doozy, a doubleheader of psychotic lovelorn men with bad ideas in their heads. First, in Jean Negulesco's rural noir Road House, Richard Widmark's spoiled road house owner selects Ida Lupino's unlikely and unforgettable femme fatale as his reluctant...

Nov 22, 2024

Part 1 of our Oscar Levant Special Subject sees us explain our very personal relationship with this singular figure of 1940s/50s Hollywood in preparation to discuss Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945), great Warner Bros. woman's picture/noir Humoresque (1946), Doris Day debut Romance on the High Seas (1948),...

Nov 15, 2024

For our penultimate Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we watched Thornton Freeland's Jericho (1937), in which Robeson plays a court-martialed WWI officer who takes up a new life as the leader of a group of Saharan herders and traders, and Pen Tennyson's The Proud Valley (1940), often cited as the film Robeson...

Nov 8, 2024

For this 1948 Warner Bros Studios Year by Year episode, we watched a couple of the studio's most prestigious releases for the year, John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Jean Negulesco's Johnny Belinda. We explore some extraordinary performances by Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Jane Wyman in these...