May 30, 2025

Our second Gloria Grahame Acteur-Oeuvre-view episode includes a curious under-use of our acteur in the all-around baffling musical comedy It Happened in Brooklyn (nevertheless memorable for the chemistry between Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante), and a judicious use of her by RKO in Edward Dmytryk's anti-fascist...

May 23, 2025

For this MGM 1931 episode we watched The Easiest Way, a feminist subversion of melodrama tropes by director Jack Conway and screenwriter Edith Ellis, starring Constance Bennett as the fallen woman and a young Clark Gable, verging on stardom, as her judgemental brother-in-law; and possibly the most sentimental...

May 16, 2025

Our Farrow v Allen series continues with four more collaborations: September (1987), Another Woman (1988), Oedipus Wrecks (1989, part of the anthology movie New York Stories), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). We count the ways in which Allen mashes up his favourite playwrights, filmmakers, and Russian novelists,...

May 9, 2025

Welcome to our inaugural Gloria Grahame episode, which is also our final Acteurist Oeuvre-view! In this episode we consider Gloria's first significant movie role, as the cause of Blonde Fever (1944), in which she and Philip Dorn confuse each other and provide occasion for Mary Astor's multiple levels of irony. We then...

May 2, 2025

Our streak of finding gynocentric crime film gems continues with our second Paramount 1931 episode, featuring two movies directed by Sylvia Sidney specialist Marion Gering. 24 Hours pairs a despairing Clive Brook and Miriam Hopkins, haunted by marriages they can't escape in one way or another. And Ladies of the Big...