Dec 30, 2022

For our Universal 1941 Studios Year by Year episode we looked at two films about love and sex by a couple of master filmmakers, Rene Clair's The Flame of New Orleans, a terrific Bruce Cabot vehicle (Marlene Dietrich is also in it), and Gregory La Cava's Unfinished Business, a sexually daring romantic drama (with some...

Dec 23, 2022

The movies we discussed for our 2022 Christmas Special Subject are a little on the dark side, as all great Christmas movies are, but these ones perhaps more obviously than ever. We paired Mitchell Leisen's Remember the Night (1940), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, with William Dieterle's I'll Be Seeing You (1944),...

Dec 16, 2022

Our penultimate Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode features a couple of sexy romantic comedies, George Stevens' The More the Merrier and William A. Seiter's The Lady Takes a Chance (both 1943), that Arthur made at the height of her stardom and glamour, when she was in her early 40s - at which point she retired...

Dec 9, 2022

Our RKO 1941 episode turns out to be well-timed, giving us an opportunity to weigh in on the 2022 Sight & Sound Critics' Poll, canon formation, and the uses (if any) of canons. From there we segue into a discussion of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and its place in the cinematic canon, and then into a discussion of the film...

Dec 2, 2022

This episode of our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view provides us with two examples of Hollywood leftism to discuss: a Norman Krasna department store comedy directed by Sam Wood, The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), and a comedy of ideas directed by George Stevens, The Talk of the Town (1942). We discuss the way The Devil...