Sep 25, 2026

Our final Sandra Dee episode for a while sees us battling out whether the inanities of the Ross Hunter melodrama Portrait in Black (1960), based on a play by the writing duo behind White Heat, are fun or just dumb, after which we turn to Peter Ustinov's Romanoff and Juliet (1961), the most curiously gentle satire of...

Sep 18, 2026

For our September 2026 Special Subject we read Susan Sontag's essay "Bergman's Persona" and applied its ideas to Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, mentioned in the essay, and Robert Altman's 3 Women, which owes a great deal to Persona. Following Sontag, we ask what it would mean to try to approach a narrative...

Sep 11, 2026

For this RKO 1935 episode, FOTP Ann Harding returns in Enchanted April (directed by Harry Beaumont), based on a novel by Elizabeth von Armin that Elise declares, based on the cinematic evidence, to be the missing link between Jane Austen and Jane Bowles. Then we turn to one of Dave's favourites, In Person (directed by...

Sep 4, 2026

For our second Sandra Dee episode we watched two films from 1959 (March 1959, to be exact): the Ross Hunter family melodrama A Stranger in My Arms (directed by Helmut Käutner), from a novel by the author of Written on the Wind, and the infamous Gidget (directed by Paul Wendkos), based on Frederick Kohner's novel...