Jun 30, 2023
Our Dorothy McGuire episode this week is guaranteed to give you mood whiplash. We begin with Disney classic and Boomer phenomenon Old Yeller (1957), the most hellish depiction of the war of all against all in nature we've seen since King Kong, with a moving central performance by Tommy Kirk as a boy ungracefully...
Jun 23, 2023
In this extra-special 20th Century Fox 1943 episode, we stare agog at a couple of dazzling musicals: Stormy Weather, whose all-Black cast is headlined by Bill Robinson and Lena Horne and boasts an embarrassment of geniuses; and Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, a Technicolor psychedelic extravaganza that's the...
Jun 16, 2023
Our June Special Subject samples the surviving silent cinema of Dave's favorite director (now revealed!), King Vidor. We tease Vidor's auteur preoccupations out of these four early films—The Sky Pilot (1921), Peg o' My Heart (1922), Wild Oranges (1924), and La Bohème (1926)—and find a common focus on the...
Jun 9, 2023
We continue last week's theme of Hollywood's attitude toward the Soviet Union as our Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode takes us beyond not only the Popular Front era but just a shade beyond the heyday of McCarthyism. We also find that we spoke too soon about McGuire entering her mom-roles era, as in this...
Jun 2, 2023
Our Warner Brothers 1943 episode is a very special one, a Popular Front anti-Nazi double feature, the Stalinist propaganda film Mission to Moscow (directed by Michael Curtiz) and Lewis Milestone's drama about Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation, Edge of Darkness. We attempt (as complete non-experts!) to lay out...