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Aug 26, 2022

This week's studio is RKO, 1940, and we have two great movies: Vigil in the Night, starring Carole Lombard as a saintly nurse and Anne Shirley as her flawed sister in George Stevens' noirish medical drama; and Abe Lincoln in Illinois, based on Robert E. Sherwood's play, with Raymond Massey reprising his stage role of...


Aug 19, 2022

Our Special Subject for August is also our first look at German filmmaking under the Nazis, with two mid-1930s films by left-wing director and future Hollywood auteur Douglas Sirk: The Girl from the Marsh Croft, based on the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, and Pillars of Society, based on the play by Henrik Ibsen. We consider...


Aug 12, 2022

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we look at 3 Jean Arthur movies: The Defense Rests (1934), an excellent corrupt lawyer drama that we were previously unable to find; and from 1935, two very different romantic comedies featuring real or pretend marriages of convenience, The Public Menace and If You Could Only...


Aug 5, 2022

For this Fox 1940 episode, we look at a couple of films with the same director (Henry Hathaway), same cinematographer (Arthur Miller), and same nominal star (Tyrone Power), but radically different stories. Brigham Young tells the story of the persecution of the Mormons and their journey westward from Illinois to the...