Special Subject – Halloween with Bergman – THE SILENCE (1963) & CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972)

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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 family. Guess what? It doesn’t go any better. Can agonizing suffering bestow on certain individuals the ability to translate the language of God for a battered and bewildered humanity? Or when you die do you just go from one void to a bigger one? We ask the big questions–but also, Cries and Whispers is easily the most horrifying movie Elise has ever seen (with the possible exception of Fire Walk With Me), even before the part with the zombie vampire of love.

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s:                    THE SILENCE (1963) [dir. Ingmar Bergman]

0h 26m 31s:                    CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972) [dir. Ingmar Bergman]                                                 

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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

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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1937: STAGE DOOR & QUALITY STREET

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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 discuss whether Quality Street lives up to Hepburn’s reunion with either her Alice Adams director or her Little Minister source author, and dig into the class analysis of Stage Door, one of the best American comedies of the late ’30s.

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s:                       RKO Data

0h 03m 55s:                       QUALITY STREET [dir. George Stevens]

0h 24m 15s:                       STAGE DOOR [dir. Gregory La Cava]

           

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

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel 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

 

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Acteurist oeuvre-view – Margaret Sullavan – Part 5: THE SHINING HOUR (1938) & SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940)

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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 Sullavan and Crawford as his magnetic poles of female superheroism; and reflect on the qualities Sullavan brings to Lubitsch’s tale of low-income workers negotiating urban isolation.

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s:                    THE SHINING HOUR (1938) [dir. Frank Borzage]

0h 30m 30s:                    THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940) [dir. Ernst Lubitsch]                                            

+++

* 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

 

Check out this episode!

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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – 20th Century Fox – 1937: CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OLYMPICS & WAKE UP AND LIVE

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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 portraying the title character). Meanwhile the musical Wake Up and Live, featuring notorious gossip columnist Walter Winchell as himself, bursts with character actors and radio in-jokes. From touring with Nazimova to translating Strindberg to embodying a beloved aphorism-spouting B-movie detective, from New Deal leftist to McCarthyite paranoiac and finally pariah, from the Klondike to the seminary to Broadway to Hollywood character actor, and from Frank Fay’s comic foil to Tallulah Bankhead’s “personal assistant” to the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical: no one needs to tell these Fox players to wake up and live!  

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s:        CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OLYMPICS (dir. H. Bruce Humberstone)        

0h 31m 22ss:       WAKE UP AND LIVE (dir. Sidney Lanfield)            

         

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

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel 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! 

Check out this episode!

Read Full Post »