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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

01:18:24

Noirvember Special Subject – Anthony Mann noirs –...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/11/19

For our Noirvember episode, we look at four Anthony Mann noirs, Railroaded! (1947), T-Men (1947), Raw Deal (1948), and Side Street (1950). We follow Mann as he ascends from Poverty Row to a collaboration with one of film noir's most distinctive cinematographers, John Alton, to the big-time at MGM, with his protagonists only getting more sweaty and desperate and his underworld brutes remaining just as psychotic. We discuss the scapegoating structure of Mann's noirs, their nihilism, their

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01:05:39

The Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal –...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/11/12

This Universal 1937 episode stays paused on the pivotal moment in the studio's history, with another James Whale/Deanna Durbin pairing: Whale's last hurrah, The Road Back, and Durbin's second outing, One Hundred Men and a Girl. Whale's film, based on a Remarque novel about Germany between the wars (familiar territory for the pod), compromised by Nazi censorship, and mutilated by the studio, may not represent the director's vision, but is the emphasis on the low comedy characters played by Slim

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01:15:07

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Margaret Sullavan – Part 6:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/11/04

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, Margaret Sullavan takes on the Nazis in Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940) and Fannie Hurst in Robert Stevenson's Back Street (1941). We discuss the subtleties and broad strokes of this early Hollywood depiction of Nazi Germany, Borzagean heroism, and performative fascism. Turning to Back Street, we consider what this Code-era remake of a classic Pre-Code has to say about which gender has it worse under patriarchy (or the Code). Also: an

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58:30

Special Subject – Halloween with Bergman – THE...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/10/29

Halloween is always a good time to ponder the horror of incarnation, familial feeling, and our alienation from God. While there are strict horror movies that tackle these subjects, Ingmar Bergman definitely puts his own twist on them, and so we bring you Halloween with Bergman. In The Silence (1963), a woman dies in a hotel room in a foreign country where the people speak no known language, abandoned by her family. In Cries and Whispers (1972), a woman dies in her family home, surrounded by her

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01:12:44

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1937: STAGE...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/10/22

For RKO 1937, Katharine Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from effervescent-but-repressed to robot-with-a-heart-of-gold in the last entry in her latest series of box office bombs, the J. M. Barrie dual-identity farce Quality Street (directed by George Stevens), and her brief return to critical and commercial viability, Stage Door (directed by Gregory La Cava), with Ginger Rogers. Two films that have little in common besides their star but do both invert the typical Hollywood movie gender ratio. We

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01:05:00

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Margaret Sullavan – Part 5:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/10/15

In this week's episode of our Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we look at a couple of thirds: Sullavan's third film directed by Frank Borzage - the crazed melodrama The Shining Hour (co-starring Joan Crawford) - and third (and most famous) pairing with Jimmy Stewart: the melancholy romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner (directed by Ernst Lubitsch). We consider The Shining Hour as Borzage's "two women movie" (setting up next week's discussion of Stage Door in the bargain), with

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57:28

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

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/10/08

In our Fox 1937 episode this time around we cover a couple of oddities that nevertheless provide a good snapshot of the studio's latter 30s. Charlie Chan at the Olympics, starring Shakespearean-trained Swedish-American Warner Oland in his final year as Honolulu's Chinese Sherlock Holmes, flaunts racially integrated American Olympic teams at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, while failing completely to acknowledge the distressing existence of Nazism (not to mention the slight problem of a white man

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01:27:03

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Margaret Sullavan – Part 4:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/10/01

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we follow Margaret Sullavan to MGM, watching two films from 1938, Three Comrades and The Shopworn Angel. Borzage's film, based on Erich Maria Remarque's Lost Generation novel about Germany between World Wars, could not be more different in tone from H. C. Potter's love triangle melodrama, but both centre on a love that transcends the conventional, selfish two-lovers romance. Sullavan gives us two versions of a woman losing her disillusionment, and we

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01:11:30

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

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/09/24

For this pass at Warner Bros. 1937, we have two more vehicles for Dave's favourite actress, Kay Francis: Confession, Joe May's scene-for-scene remake of the German melodrama Mazurka; and Michael Curtiz's Stolen Holiday, a version of the Stavisky affair with Francis, Claude Rains, and Ian Hunter making up the Curtiz Triangle and Orry-Kelly, as usual, fearlessly emphasizing the outré bodies of Warner's female stars. How do you prefer to see Kay Francis: as a sort of combination of Stella Dallas and

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01:56:47

Special Subject – Marcel Carné & Jacques Prévert,...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/09/17

Our Summer in France series concludes with a look at the dynamic duo of poetic realism, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. We discuss their first collaboration, Jenny (1936), and two noirish Oedipal fever dreams, Le quai des brumes (1938) and Le jour se lève (1939). We also look at a Carné film from the period in which Prévert was not involved, Hôtel du Nord (1938), and find both continuity with and difference from the surrounding films. Proletariats, perversion, the death

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01:29:13

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM – 1937: CONQUEST...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/09/10

In this MGM 1937 episode, we look at two star-studded historical romances about charismatic political leaders and their mistresses: Conquest (directed by Clarence Brown), with Charles Boyer's Napoleon Bonaparte and Greta Garbo's Marie Walewska, and Parnell (directed by John Stahl), with Clark Gable's Charles Stewart Parnell and Myrna Loy's Katharine O'Shea. Despite the poor-to-terrible reputations of the films, we find a lot to recommend, from Conquest's surprisingly canny politics to Parnell's

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01:12:38

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Margaret Sullavan – Part 3:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/09/03

Our third Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode features another odd juxtaposition: Next Time We Love (1936), a melodrama of ideas that pairs Sullavan with Jimmy Stewart for the first time; and The Moon's Our Home, a (flat) screwball comedy in which she co-stars with ex-husband Henry Fonda (1936). We do some deep reflecting on love, gender roles, and human potential, and try to get a grasp on the Sullavan persona. 0h 1m 00s: NEXT TIME WE LOVE (1936) [dir. Edward H. Griffith]

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01:28:44

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount – 1937:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/08/27

For our Paramount 1937 episode, we look at two movies starring Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray: Mitchell Leisen's comedy/melodrama Swing High, Swing Low and Wesley Ruggles' screwball comedy True Confession. Topics include our surprise at Leisen's go-for-broke portrayal of male abjection and MacMurray's risk-taking in Swing High, Swing Low; the quiet virtues of Paramount's leading men; the moment when John Barrymore became Late Al Pacino; and Lombard's adorable sociopath in True Confession as a

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01:35:42

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Margaret Sullavan – Part 2:...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/08/20

Our second Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view entry delivers emotional whiplash as we move from King Vidor's Civil War drama So Red the Rose (1935), in which Sullavan plays a southern belle who's forced to mature when the world she knows collapses around her ears, to William Wyler's comedy The Good Fairy (1935), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, in which she plays a naive orphan who causes complications when she stumbles on an opportunity to do a good deed. We discuss the relationship of So

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02:13:34

Special Subject – The Radical Renoir – LES BAS-FONDS...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/08/13

In this episode we cover three films from the period of Jean Renoir's flirtation (or fornication?) with Communism: The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), The Lower Depths (1936), and La Marseillaise (1938). We discuss how Renoir's depiction of the French Revolution differs from the one familiar to the Anglo-American world, uncover the woman behind the Radical Renoir, and analyze the interaction of class, community, and virtuous violence in the films. And if that sounds heavy, just watch The Crime of

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01:27:49

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1936 –...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/08/06

In this Studios Year by Year episode, we witness the changing of the guard at Universal in 1936, in which James Whale's Show Boat brings down the Laemmle Era, and Deanna Durbin's first feature, Three Smart Girls, ushers in the Bankers Era. We find good things to say about both, but we're not gonna lie, most of the episode is devoted to Edna Ferber/Kern and Hammerstein/Whale's Show Boat and its combination of quiet radicalism, family melodrama, and musical entertainment. Musical entertainment is just

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02:08:39

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Season 4 - Margaret Sullavan...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/07/30

This week on the pod, we get started with our new Acteurist Oeuvre-View series: Margaret Sullavan. We were expecting solid entries from the selective Sullavan, but weren't fully prepared for John Stahl to match his Back Street achievement with Sullavan's screen debut, Only Yesterday (1933). We discuss its relationship to Opühls' Letter from an Unknown Woman, with which it shares a source, while concluding that it has more in common with Mervyn LeRoy's Random Harvest. We also posit Stahl-Sullavan as

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01:33:37

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1936: MAKE WAY...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/07/23

RKO, 1936: Anne Shirley and Katharine Hepburn have father trouble. In Make Way for a Lady (directed by David Burton), Shirley gets hysterical at the thought of indulgent 20th century dad Herbert Marshall developing a sex life; while in A Woman Rebels (directed by Mark Sandrich), Hepburn blames stern Victorian dad Donald Crisp for her sexual aberrance. We discuss the careers of the source novelists, Elizabeth Jordan and Netta Syrett, both born in 1865, in America and England respectively; find reason

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01:21:33

Acteur/Auteur Special Subject– Max Ophuls & Edwige...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/07/16

Dave's first Summer in France Special Subject is devoted to two lesser-known Max Ophüls movies starring Edwige Feuillère that were made just before the Nazis occupied France and Ophüls fled to Hollywood, Sans lendemain (1939) and De Mayerling à Sarajevo (1940). We consider the two films in light of those dire circumstances and Ophüls' oeuvre, arguing that they deserve more attention--especially the beautifully shot, noirish Sans lendemain (There's No Tomorrow), with its creatively suicidal heroine

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01:24:45

Acteurist oeuvre-view – Clara Bow – Part 12: CALL HER...

There"s Sometimes a Buggy ·

2021/07/09

Clara Bow gets a wonderful finale to her (unfortunately foreshortened) career in our final Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode devoted to her. Fox comes through with two excellent vehicles: Call Her Savage (1932), directed by John Francis Dillon and brilliantly shot by Lee Garmes, a delightfully lurid Pre-Code that nevertheless contains a critique of white supremacy; and Hoop-La (1933), a sweet-natured romantic comedy with a circus setting and a hard-boiled veneer. We review, one last time, why Clara Bow

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