In this 1947 Universal Studios Year by Year episode, a little Ella Raines never hurt no one: we struggle to understand her role in the intermittently riveting Gothic melodrama Time Out of Mind (stylishly directed by Robert Siodmak), while Edmond O'Brien struggles to understand her role in Vincent Price's life in The Web, a white-collar film noir directed by future blacklistee Michael Gordon.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: TIME OUT OF MIND [dir. Robert Siodmak]

0h 20m 07s: THE WEB [dir. Michael Gordon]

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Universal Story by Clive Hirschhorn

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joe W. Finler

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* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise’s latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave’s new Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!

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Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com

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The first episode of our Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view series has a high context-to-text ratio, as we introduce one of the most important figures in entertainment and political activism of the 20th century. The two movies we look at, Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul (1925) and Kenneth Macpherson's Borderline (1930), by auteurs from radically different backgrounds with radically different aims, provide a fascinating glimpse of the spectrum of possibilities for independent cinema in the late silent era.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 30s: Brief Introduction to Paul Robeson

0h 08m 53s: BODY & SOUL (1925) [dir. Oscar Micheaux]

0h 34m 03s: BORDERLINE (1930) [dir. Kenneth Macpherson]

References:

Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary by Gerald Horne

“The Homesteader” article in The Believer by Will Sloan

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* Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project – a discussion of Late Spring

* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise’s piece on Gangs of New York – “Making America Strange Again”

* Check out Dave’s Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

We've been waiting for this episode, a 1947 RKO noir double bill with two of the all-time greats, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum's cool detective and Jane Greer’s psychopathic moll work at cross purposes in their attempts to escape their shady pasts so that they can be free to love, and Robert Wise's Born to Kill, in which Claire Trevor's morally flexible social climber and Lawrence Tierney's paranoid psychopath just work at cross purposes. Elise agrees with Bosley Crowther that Born to Kill, one of her Top 10 favourite movies, "is not only morally disgusting but is an offense to a normal intellect," but will Dave be able to convince her that Out of the Past is "flawless"?

Time Codes:

0h 00m 30s: BORN TO KILL [dir. Robert Wise]

1h 07m 09s: OUT OF THE PAST [dir. Jacques Tourneur]

1h 35m 31s: Listener Communiqué

Studio Film Capsules provided by The RKO Story by Richard B. Jewell & Vernon Harbin

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joe W. Finler

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* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise’s latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave’s new Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

We went deep for our second King Vidor Special Subject episode, looking at four films from the 1930s: Street Scene (1931), adapted by Elmer Rice from his famous stage play about working-class New Yorkers; the little-known Cynara (1932), starring Ronald Colman as a kindly upper-middle-class man who stumbles into adultery and the abyss; Our Daily Bread (1934), Vidor's eccentric, self-produced response to the Great Depression; and Stella Dallas, one of the great woman's pictures, centered on one of Barbara Stanwyck's greatest performances. Class, gender, transformation of consciousness, and how they're served by melodrama story structures all come in for examination as we find links with the films of other auteurs, from Ozu to Lynch. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we take a quick look at monster movie tropes and James Cameron's masochistic feminism in The Terminator. All this and more feedback on our Lilli Palmer series!

Time Codes:

0h 00m 30s: More general musings on Vidor

0h 05m 49s: STREET SCENE (1931) [dir. King Vidor]

0h 26m 44s: CYNARA (1932) [dir. King Vidor]

0h 45m 32s: OUR DAILY BREAD (1934) [dir. King Vidor]

1h 00m 46s: STELLA DALLAS (1937) [dir. King Vidor]

1h 39m 13s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto: James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984)

1h 45m 23s: Listener Communiqués

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* Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project – a discussion of Late Spring

* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise’s piece on Gangs of New York – “Making America Strange Again”

* Check out Dave’s Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

Our final Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is an odd one, with Dave arguing for the value of John Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant (1985), a Nazi conspiracy thriller from a novel by Robert Ludlum, and Elise arguing for the value of The Other Side of the Wind (2018), Orson Welles' startling comeback film-that-never-was. Then we give our favourite Lilli Palmer films, with rationales, and respond to some listener communiqués.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 30s: THE HOLCROFT COVENANT (1985) [dir. John Frankenheimer]

0h 22m 19s: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (2018) [dir. Orson Welles]

0h 58m 27s: Lilli Palmer Top 10s; Letter from Listener Steven

+++

* Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project – a discussion of Late Spring

* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise’s piece on Gangs of New York – “Making America Strange Again”

* Check out Dave’s Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

This Fox 1947 Studios Year by Year episode looks at two examples of the docu-noir: Boomerang! (directed by Elia Kazan), starring Dana Andrews as a prosecuting attorney who has to decide between morality and political expedience; and Kiss of Death (directed by Henry Hathaway), in which Victor Mature's sympathetic gangster is menaced by Richard Widmark's psychopathic gangster and the legal system. Then another oddball assortment of movies in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and Spellbound (1945).

Time Codes:

0h 00m 30s: BOOMERANG! [dir. Elia Kazan]

0h 27m 35s: KISS OF DEATH [dir. Henry Hathaway]

0h 54m 55s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) by Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) by Mike Nichols and Spellbound (1945) by Alfred Hitchcock

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Films of Twentieth Century-Fox by Aubrey Solomon and Tony Thomas

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joe W. Finler

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* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise’s latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave’s new Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

Our penultimate Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode brings us Lilli as a protagonist again at last, in Lotte in Weimar (1975), based on the Thomas Mann novel, and Lilli Lite in The Boys from Brazil (1978), an outrageous anti-Nazi sci fi story in which Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck wage an epic battle (and also get into a very brutal girl-fight). And this week's Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto is a real smorgasbord: Saturday Night Fever, Coffy, It Happened One Night, and Beverly Hills Cop. From the charm of young John Travolta to screwball brutality and from exploitation auteurism to... the charm of young Eddie Murphy. We've got the movie talk you crave!

Time Codes:

0h 00m 35s: LOTTE IN WEIMAR (1975) [dir. Egon Gunther]

0h 32m 51s: THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978) [dir. Franklin J. Schaffner]

0h 50m 08s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – Saturday Night Fever (1977) by John Badham; Coffy (1973) by Jack Hill; It Happened One Night (1934) by Frank Capra; and Beverly Hills Cop (1984) by Martin Brest

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Films of Twentieth Century-Fox by Aubrey Solomon and Tony Thomas

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joe W. Finler

+++

* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise’s latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave’s new Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!

This Warner Bros. 1947 Studios Year by Year episode features two gems that put their own particular slant on noir's familiar theme of murderous conflict between women and men: Curtis Bernhardt's Possessed, starring a more-than-usually deranged Joan Crawford, with Van Heflin as the rakish object of her obsession, and Delmer Daves' Dark Passage, starring an unusually passive Humphrey Bogart as a man convicted of killing his wife, with Lauren Bacall as an eccentric socialite who decides to help him. And in our Fear and Moviegoing segment, a real clash of moods: Ridley Scott's terrifying sci-fi/horror classic Alien and Wong Kar-wai's whimsical romantic comedy (of a sort) Chungking Express. Though admittedly it also has its terrifying aspects. (If only Van Heflin had been charmed by Crawford's fixation, how differently it could have gone!)

Time Codes:

0h 00m 35s: POSSESSED [dir. Curtis Bernhardt]

0h 41m 53s: DARK PASSAGE [dir. Delmer Daves]

1h 11m 24s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – Alien (1979) by Ridley Scott at the TIFF Lightbox and Chungking Express (1994) by Wong Kar-wai at the Revue Cinema

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Warner Brothers Story by Clive Hirschhorn

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joe W. Finler

+++

* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise’s latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave’s new Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!

Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy

Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com

We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!