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PODCAST

There"s Sometimes a Buggy

Elise Moore and Dave

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

01:38:07

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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01:30:05

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 6: MORE...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/09/23

In this week's entry in our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we look at Alfred E. Green's comedy More Than A Secretary (1936) and Frank Borzage's genre-defying screwball melodrama History Is Made at Night (1937), pairing Arthur with up-and-coming romantic lead Charles Boyer. We compare More Than A Secretary with Green's better-known film about sexual politics in patriarchal office culture, Baby Face, and the possibly influential blending of genres and the lovers' achievement of Borzagean

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01:00:04

September Special Subject – German Sirk Sampler –...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/09/16

In Part 2 of our look at The German Sirk, the director discovers "cinematic values" with two unhinged melodramas that place a strong emphasis on music, Schlußakkord (Final Chord/Final Accord), from 1936, and La Habanera, from 1937. We dig into a couple of Sirk's complicated "villains" in these movies about extra-marital love triangles, and discuss La Habanera's Nazi propaganda overtones and the ways in which the film possibly subverts them. Then, in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, we

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01:10:26

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1940:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/09/09

For this Universal 1940 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at a Vincent Price double feature that also features the same director (Joe May), cinematographer (Milton Krasner), and key screenwriter (Lester Cole, who will become one of the Hollywood Ten): The House of the Seven Gables, an adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, and The Invisible Man Returns, the first sequel to James Whale's adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel. We talk non-naturalistic acting, the genius of Vincent Price, and the

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01:03:52

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 5: MR....

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/09/02

In this week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view cast, we revisit Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) for thoughts old and (hopefully) new, and then look at two minor screwball comedy variations on genre films from 1936, the RKO murder mystery The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, co-starring William Powell, and a weird little riff on Mr. Deeds combined with a crime thriller, Adventure in Manhattan, co-starring Joel McCrea. Join us as we discuss Gary Cooper's complex performance and creepy sexlessnes and

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01:33:51

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1940: VIGIL IN...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/08/26

This week's studio is RKO, 1940, and we have two great movies: Vigil in the Night, starring Carole Lombard as a saintly nurse and Anne Shirley as her flawed sister in George Stevens' noirish medical drama; and Abe Lincoln in Illinois, based on Robert E. Sherwood's play, with Raymond Massey reprising his stage role of Abraham Lincoln. We discuss the latter as an anti-fascist film and argue for both films as examples of RKO's particular brand of progressivism, which continues even after the departure

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01:01:47

August Special Subject – German Sirk Sampler – Part 1...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/08/19

Our Special Subject for August is also our first look at German filmmaking under the Nazis, with two mid-1930s films by left-wing director and future Hollywood auteur Douglas Sirk: The Girl from the Marsh Croft, based on the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, and Pillars of Society, based on the play by Henrik Ibsen. We consider the question of how it was possible to make liberal films under these circumstances and find early evidence of Sirk's interest in "split characters" and unconventional protagonists.

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01:23:37

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 4: THE...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/08/12

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we look at 3 Jean Arthur movies: The Defense Rests (1934), an excellent corrupt lawyer drama that we were previously unable to find; and from 1935, two very different romantic comedies featuring real or pretend marriages of convenience, The Public Menace and If You Could Only Cook. The simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic young lawyer, screwball liar, and Depression comedy heroine she plays in each of these films respectively give us several aspects

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01:04:38

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

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/08/05

For this Fox 1940 episode, we look at a couple of films with the same director (Henry Hathaway), same cinematographer (Arthur Miller), and same nominal star (Tyrone Power), but radically different stories. Brigham Young tells the story of the persecution of the Mormons and their journey westward from Illinois to the Great Salt Lake, recasting this American epic as an implicit anti-Nazi tale with progressive values. Then we shift from Fox's traditional sophisticated "rural" storytelling to their new

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01:00:45

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 3: PUBLIC...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/07/29

In this week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we look at two more movies from 1935, Public Hero No. 1 (directed by J. Walter Ruben for MGM) and Diamond Jim (directed by A. Edward Sutherland for Universal, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges). In the first, Arthur injects some screwball swagger into a Code-era gangster drama with an FBI agent hero; in the second, she has a dual role as the love(s) of Edward Arnold's life. We consider the qualities Arthur brings to these films, for which

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01:25:52

July Special Subject – Duels in Max Ophüls – LIEBELEI...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/07/22

Our Special Subject for this month, Duels in Max Ophüls, covers films from all three decades of the itinerant filmmaker's career: Liebelei (1933), made in Germany; Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), made in Hollywood; and Madame de... (1953), made in France. We consider the proposition that Ophüls' films are about superficially superficial people, and examine the evolution of a certain set of characters and scenarios in these three films dealing with the subject of tragic love and its (futile?)

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01:16:04

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

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/07/15

Our Warner Bros. 1940 episode this time is a Bette Davis double feature in which Bette plays the Other Woman in two melodramas based on real-life sex-and-murder scandals, but the Wronged Woman in only one. We discuss the combination of sexual repression and critique of colonialism in William Wyler's The Letter and Anatole Litvak's study of societal constraints and thwarted romance with the very different setting of the last years of the Orléans monarchy in mid-19th century Paris, All This, and

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01:06:29

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 2: THE...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/07/08

In our second Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, Arthur moves into her A-picture period at Columbia with John Ford's curious comedy/crime melodrama, The Whole Town's Talking, starring Edward G. Robinson in a dual role, and Erle C. Kenton's Children's Hour-reminiscent Party Wire. While we see more of the familiar Arthur comedy persona emerge in The Whole Town's Talking, she gets to show off her quiet moral authority and perspicacity in Party Wire, playing a woman who becomes the victim of

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01:23:33

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM – 1940:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/07/01

An odd pairing for this MGM 1940 episode: King Vidor's Northwest Passage, which is not about finding the Northwest Passage at all but about an attack on an Abenaki village by an independent ranger company attached to the British Army; and Frank Borzage's mystical prison break movie, Strange Cargo. We make the argument for a Starship Troopers reading of Northwest Passage before grappling with the many issues of Strange Cargo, from Borzage's use of Crawford and Gable's star personas, to the movie's

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01:01:30

June Special Subject – Silent Dreyer Sampler –...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/06/24

This Week's Special Subject is a look at the early silent cinema of Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, during the years preceding The Passion of Joan of Arc. We discuss Michael (1924), about the relationship between a famous painter and his male model, and Master of the House (1925), a comedy about the taming of a tyrannical patriarch. Subjects include Dreyer's unique take on the visionary possibilities of love, which can allow you to transcend ordinary human experience in one way or another; and

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01:40:19

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Jean Arthur – Part 1 –...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/06/17

In our inaugural Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we join Gladys Georgianna Greene as she signs on at Columbia Pictures, two years before her star-making team-up with Frank Capra. Her first two films for Columbia, Whirlpool and The Most Precious Thing in Life, are a couple of curious weepies with missing-parent plots that allow Arthur to play first the daughter, then the mother, but never the love interest. First, Dave gives us an account of why Jean Arthur is so important to him, and

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01:19:52

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount – 1940:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2022/06/10

For this 1940 Paramount episode, an Akim Tamiroff (and Muriel Angelus) double feature in which we unlock the secrets of Preston Sturges' inspiration. First, we look at The Way of All Flesh (directed by Louis King), a little-known proto-noir Christmas movie that seems to have taken its inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne, as filtered through the sensibilities of top screenwriters Lenore Coffee and Jules Furthman. Then we move on to the first movie directed by dynamo screenwriter-turned-sui

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