Mar 27, 2026

 For the 2nd part of our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight we check in on Kerr's "lost years" at MGM to see what Hollywood was finding for her to do before her breakthrough performance in From Here to Eternity. In Norman Taurog's Please Believe Me (1950) she leads a cast of oddballs, including Robert Walker and Peter...

Mar 20, 2026

With this episode we launch the first of Elise's three-part Special Subject, Family Freak-Outs. We start with some musings about how to define this micro-genre, what makes it different from a standard family melodrama and its relationship to horror, and then we move into our first two freak-outs, Charles Burnett's To...

Mar 13, 2026

For this Paramount 1934 episode we watched Search for Beauty, which pits beauty-as-health (a wasted and almost unrecognizable Ida Lupino and frequently topless, sometimes bottomless, and always witless Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe) against beauty-as-sex in a meta-commentary on pre-Codes released just before the...

Mar 6, 2026

Our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight starts strong with two entertaining progressive WWII-era British films, John Baxter's Love on the Dole (1941), a socialist portrayal of working-class life in Manchester during the Great Depression, and Alexander Korda's Perfect Strangers (aka Vacation from Marriage), a sort of...