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Jul 29, 2022

In this week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we look at two more movies from 1935, Public Hero No. 1 (directed by J. Walter Ruben for MGM) and Diamond Jim (directed by A. Edward Sutherland for Universal, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges). In the first, Arthur injects some screwball swagger into a...


Jul 22, 2022

Our Special Subject for this month, Duels in Max Ophüls, covers films from all three decades of the itinerant filmmaker's career: Liebelei (1933), made in Germany; Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), made in Hollywood; and Madame de... (1953), made in France. We consider the proposition that Ophüls' films are about...


Jul 15, 2022

Our Warner Bros. 1940 episode this time is a Bette Davis double feature in which Bette plays the Other Woman in two melodramas based on real-life sex-and-murder scandals, but the Wronged Woman in only one. We discuss the combination of sexual repression and critique of colonialism in William Wyler's The Letter and...


Jul 8, 2022

In our second Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, Arthur moves into her A-picture period at Columbia with John Ford's curious comedy/crime melodrama, The Whole Town's Talking, starring Edward G. Robinson in a dual role, and Erle C. Kenton's Children's Hour-reminiscent Party Wire. While we see more of the familiar...


Jul 1, 2022

An odd pairing for this MGM 1940 episode: King Vidor's Northwest Passage, which is not about finding the Northwest Passage at all but about an attack on an Abenaki village by an independent ranger company attached to the British Army; and Frank Borzage's mystical prison break movie, Strange Cargo. We make the argument...