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Aug 27, 2021

For our Paramount 1937 episode, we look at two movies starring Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray: Mitchell Leisen's comedy/melodrama Swing High, Swing Low and Wesley Ruggles' screwball comedy True Confession. Topics include our surprise at Leisen's go-for-broke portrayal of male abjection and MacMurray's risk-taking...


Aug 20, 2021

Our second Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view entry delivers emotional whiplash as we move from King Vidor's Civil War drama So Red the Rose (1935), in which Sullavan plays a southern belle who's forced to mature when the world she knows collapses around her ears, to William Wyler's comedy The Good Fairy (1935),...


Aug 13, 2021

In this episode we cover three films from the period of Jean Renoir's flirtation (or fornication?) with Communism: The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), The Lower Depths (1936), and La Marseillaise (1938). We discuss how Renoir's depiction of the French Revolution differs from the one familiar to the Anglo-American world,...


Aug 6, 2021

In this Studios Year by Year episode, we witness the changing of the guard at Universal in 1936, in which James Whale's Show Boat brings down the Laemmle Era, and Deanna Durbin's first feature, Three Smart Girls, ushers in the Bankers Era. We find good things to say about both, but we're not gonna lie, most of the...