For our second Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we watched The Emperor Jones (1933), a film by Dudley Murphy loosely based on the Eugene O'Neill play, and the Kordas' Sanders of the River (1935), an experience that proved crucial in Robeson's own political education. We discuss the Modernist appropriation of African culture and the figure of the African American, methods of rationalizing British colonialism, and the kinds of protagonist roles available for a Black actor of Paul Robeson's popularity with white audiences in the first half of the 20th century.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: THE EMPEROR JONES (1933) [dir. Dudley Murphy]

0h 23m 45s: SANDERS OF THE RIVER (1935) [dir. Zoltan Korda]

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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!

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We devoted our 2024 September Special Subject to American silent film auteur Lois Weber. We discuss four films, the allegorical Hypocrites (1915), which created a sensation at the time with its full-frontal female nudity, and three films that showcase Weber's progressive Christian social vision, Where Are My Children? (1916), which confusedly tackles the subjects of birth control and abortion, and the masterpieces Shoes (1916) and The Blot (1921), dramas centered on the consciousness of women that deal respectively with working-class and genteel poverty.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: Brief Introduction: Lois Weber

0h 05m 07s: HYPOCRITES (1915) [dir. Lois Weber]

0h 18m 09s: WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN? (1916) [dir. Lois Weber]

0h 27m 56s: SHOES (1916) [dir. Lois Weber]

0h 40m 26s: THE BLOT (1921) [dir. Lois Weber]

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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!

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!

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!

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

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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!

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!