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PODCAST

There"s Sometimes a Buggy

Join Dave and Elise every week for a buggy-ride of cinematic exploration. A bilingual Montreal native and a Prairies hayseed gravitate to Toronto for the film culture, meet on OK Cupid, and spur on each other"s movie-love, culminating in this podcast. Expect in-depth discussion of their old favourites (mostly studio-era Hollywood) and their latest frontiers (courtesy of the TIFF Cinematheque and various Toronto rep houses and festivals). The podcast will be comprised of several potentially

tv & film philosophy

All Episodes

01:00:49

Valentine’s Day 2023 – KISS ME GOODBYE (1982) and MY...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2023/02/10

Our Valentine's Day 2023 episode is all about loves from the past who have inconveniently returned. In My Favorite Wife (1940), Irene Dunne is newly remarried Cary Grant's presumed dead wife, while in Kiss Me Goodbye (1982), James Caan is Sally Field's actually dead, or undead, husband, interfering with her engagement to the (ostensibly) less charismatic Jeff Bridges. We apply Stanley Cavell's concept of the "comedy of remarriage" to these movies and conclude that the comedy of My Favorite

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01:15:26

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM – 1942: WOMAN OF...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2023/02/03

Our MGM 1942 episode is a problematic Spencer Tracy double feature in which we're treated to the full range of his persona, from smug saint to semi-demon: George Stevens' brilliant but flawed Woman of the Year, the first Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedy, and Victor Fleming's Tortilla Flat, in which Tracy co-stars with John Garfield, Akim Tamiroff, and Frank Morgan as John Steinbeck's idea of Monterey, California paisanos. We try to explain just how Woman of the Year's humanist critique of feminism ends

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01:31:17

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Dorothy McGuire – Part 1:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2023/01/27

Our Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view begins with Claudia (1943) and The Enchanted Cottage (1945), in both of which she's paired with Robert Young. We talk about the qualities McGuire imported to the screen from the stage role she made famous, in the 1941 play Claudia, by Rose Franken, David O. Selznick's marketing of them, and the career vicissitudes that possibly negated this nascent persona. After diving deep into the complex psychology of Claudia, we discuss John Cromwell's great romantic

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01:19:36

January Special Subject – Ginger Rogers & Fred...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2023/01/20

Our January Special Subject is Part 2 of our look at the films of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, for which we watched Follow the Fleet (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), Carefree (1938), and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). Fred and Ginger's popularity was on the decline in his period, but these movies include some of Dave's favourites. We discuss the ways in which these films adhere to and depart from the formula established in their earlier films, for better and worse, then turn our

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01:19:39

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount – 1942: ...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2023/01/13

For our Paramount 1942 episode, we hit the road with a comedy with a lot on its mind, Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, and a comedy without any mind, the Hope/Crosby road movie Road to Morocco. We debate just how much deep thinking a comedy should do and consider what kind of thinking comedy itself can do without any help from an auteur. We also isolate some of the unusual features of the Hope/Crosby double act that lend Road to Morocco an invigorating unpleasantness. And then, in our Fear and

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01:31:01

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 12: THE...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2023/01/06

There's Sometimes a Buggy says hello to 2023 and goodbye to Acteur Jean Arthur with three movies by three auteurs (Virginia Van Upp, Billy Wilder, and George Stevens): The Impatient Years (1944), A Foreign Affair (1948), and Shane (1953). Elise decides in real time that The Impatient Years, a sour mid-40s comedy of remarriage, is a great comedy because it's not very funny (using another Shakespeare reference to get there). We discuss the geopolitical context of Wilder's remarkable A Foreign Affair,

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01:29:37

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1941:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/12/30

For our Universal 1941 Studios Year by Year episode we looked at two films about love and sex by a couple of master filmmakers, Rene Clair's The Flame of New Orleans, a terrific Bruce Cabot vehicle (Marlene Dietrich is also in it), and Gregory La Cava's Unfinished Business, a sexually daring romantic drama (with some screwball elements) starring Irene Dunne that manages to seem like a Pre-Code despite the year in which it was made. We dig into the presentation of Theresa Harris's scheming maid

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01:34:03

Christmas 2022 Special Subject – REMEMBER THE NIGHT...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/12/23

The movies we discussed for our 2022 Christmas Special Subject are a little on the dark side, as all great Christmas movies are, but these ones perhaps more obviously than ever. We paired Mitchell Leisen's Remember the Night (1940), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, with William Dieterle's I'll Be Seeing You (1944), two movies about women who've fallen afoul of the law, and whose experience of falling out of step with society is contrasted with the comforts that bourgeois family life can offer

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01:15:05

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 11: THE...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/12/16

Our penultimate Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode features a couple of sexy romantic comedies, George Stevens' The More the Merrier and William A. Seiter's The Lady Takes a Chance (both 1943), that Arthur made at the height of her stardom and glamour, when she was in her early 40s - at which point she retired from movies. (Though not quite yet, or permanently, as we'll see in the final episode.) We discuss the different ways Arthur smolders with co-stars Joe McCrea and John Wayne; George

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01:39:07

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1941: CITIZEN...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/12/09

Our RKO 1941 episode turns out to be well-timed, giving us an opportunity to weigh in on the 2022 Sight & Sound Critics' Poll, canon formation, and the uses (if any) of canons. From there we segue into a discussion of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and its place in the cinematic canon, and then into a discussion of the film itself, and especially Kane's relationship with Susan Alexander Kane. Our second film, another unique work of art from the brief period when RKO's motto was Genius Over Showmanship,

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01:14:58

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 10: THE...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/12/02

This episode of our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view provides us with two examples of Hollywood leftism to discuss: a Norman Krasna department store comedy directed by Sam Wood, The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), and a comedy of ideas directed by George Stevens, The Talk of the Town (1942). We discuss the way The Devil and Miss Jones portrays political radicalism and the difficulty of labor organizing within the framework of a Hollywood fairy tale; and the marriage of moral and intellectual debate to

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01:14:29

Special Subject – Noirvember Sirk – LURED (1947);...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/11/25

Our November Special Subject is Sirk Noir-vember: four noir or noir-adjacent movies directed by Douglas Sirk in the late 1940s/early 50s: Lured (1947), Sleep, My Love (1948), Shockproof (1949), and Thunder on the Hill (1951). We discuss to what extent these films can be considered "auteur" works and in what ways they qualify as noirs; Sirk's use of actor personas and his own "acteur" theory; the relative merits of Sam Fuller's and Harry Cohn's ideas about how to end a movie; nun movie tropes; and

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01:18:17

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – 20th Century Fox –...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/11/18

American involvement in WWII is imminent at the time of these 20th Century Fox selections from late 1941 for this Studios Year by Year episode, producing what may be the first "true" noir, I Wake Up Screaming (directed by H. Bruce Humberstone), and a plea for American solidarity with England, war correspondent movie Confirm or Deny (directed by Archie Mayo, from a story co-written by Samuel Fuller). We talk about what it might mean to be a "true" noir and what might differentiate the Fox noir from

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01:26:03

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 9: TOO...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/11/11

This week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is a directed-by-Wesley Ruggles double feature of disparate genres: the bigamy farce Too Many Husbands and the epic Western Arizona (both 1940). Although the films, both with screenplays by Ruggles' frequent collaborator Claude Binyon, interrogate marriage and gender respectively, one ends with the reassertion of patriarchal authority, while the other... fails to stick to its (or her) guns. We talk about Ruggles' special version of the romantic

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01:26:42

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Warner Brothers –...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/11/04

For our Warner Bros. 1941 episode we watched two Raoul Walsh love triangle movies: Manpower, in which Edward G. Robinson pines for Marlene Dietrich, who pines for George Raft; and one of Dave's all-time faves, The Strawberry Blonde, in which Olivia de Havilland pines for James Cagney, who pines for Rita Hayworth. We discuss Walsh's treatment of women as desiring subjects; the productive tension between acteur and studi-auteur in the pairing of Dietrich and Warner Bros.; Walsh's unHawksian take on

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01:28:24

Halloween 2022 Special Subject – The Haunted...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/10/28

Our Halloween 2022 subject is "The Haunted Mizoguchi," for which we looked at two films made by Kenji Mizoguchi toward the end of his life: the supernatural fantasy Ugetsu (1953) and a film we agree is a candidate for best movie ever made, Sansho the Bailiff (1954). We use Mizoguchi's explicit treatment of ghostly themes in Ugetsu as a springboard for discussing the haunting qualities of Sansho the Bailiff and the relationship between nature, the transcendent, and the miraculous in the film. We also

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01:38:07

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 8: ONLY...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/10/21

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we arrive at arguably Jean Arthur's biggest year of stardom, 1939, with her appearance opposite Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings, Howard Hawks' ode to male professionalism, and her iconic performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, opposite Jimmy Stewart. We do our best to get at the essences of Hawks and Capra and consider whether Arthur can embody both the Hawksian and the Capra woman. And in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, we discuss

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01:28:38

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM – 1941: A...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/10/13

For this MGM 1941 episode, we again pair a classic with a rarity: Cukor's A Woman's Face, starring Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas, and Conrad Veidt, and The Trial of Mary Dugan, directed by Norman Z. McLeod and starring Laraine Day, Robert Young, and Tom Conway (aka "The Nice George Sanders"). We discuss A Woman's Face as a proto-Warner Bros. Crawford noir, the persona of Robert Young, the uses of no-subtext acting, and the starkly different construction of these two women-on-trial movies. And in our

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01:36:31

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 7: EASY...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/10/07

In our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view this week, we look at two of Arthur's best-known comedies, Easy Living (1937), directed by Mitchell Leisen, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, and You Can't Take It With You (1938), directed by Frank Capra. Dave explains why Jean Arthur's performance in Easy Living is his all-time favourite comedy performance by an actress. (Hint: it involves a pig called "Wafford.") We ponder Arthur's transformation into a glamorous romantic lead, even as she retains her

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01:23:35

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount – 1941:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/09/30

A tonally disparate pair of great films for Paramount 1941: Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, one of the greatest movies ever made, according to Elise; and a real rarity, William Wellman's Reaching for the Sun, starring some important Sturges actors: Joel McCrea, Ellen Drew, and Eddie Bracken. We interrogate the strange central relationship in The Lady Eve, examining its sadistic, maternal, narcissistic, you-name-it qualities, and Sturges’ masterful blending

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