In this RKO 1932 Studios Year by Year episode we discuss a couple of trademark Selznick productions: What Price Hollywood?, the first iteration of the A Star Is Born story, starring Constance Bennett as the rising star Mary Evans, "America's pal," and Lowell Sherman as her tormented director mentor; and The Animal Kingdom, based on the Philip Barry play, with Leslie Howard, Ann Harding, and Myrna Loy in a highbrow Pre-Code love triangle. Marriage takes a real beating in these rare movies exploring alternative kinds of loving relationships between women and men. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we cover the second new movie we've seen in 2025, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 35s: WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? (1932) [dir. George Cukor]

0h 28m 33s: THE ANIMAL KINGDOM (1932) [dir. Edward H. Griffith]

1h 00m 00s: Fear & Moviegoing in Toronto – Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025)

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

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler

1932 Information from Forgotten Films to Remember by John Springer

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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!

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This week's Gloria Grahame episode sees our acteur making some questionable career decisions: a rare headlining role in Columbia's Orientalist stinker Prisoners of the Casbah (1953), displaying a phenomenal lack of chemistry with Turhan Bey; and a micro-role in intriguing British heist noir The Good Die Young (1954) as a pragmatic actress tormenting husband John Ireland with her indifference. We find what there is to like in this quality dip, or, failing that, what there is to mock.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: PRISONERS OF THE CASBAH (1953) [dir. Richard L. Bare]

0h 18m 43s: THE GOOD DIE YOUNG (1954) [dir. Lewis Gilbert]

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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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For this 1932 Fox Studios Year by Year episode we watched Frank Borzage's unloved Young America, an idiosyncratic, primitive melodrama starring Spencer Tracy as a wealthy drugstore owner at odds with a disadvantaged delinquent, and Passport to Hell, Fox's surprisingly good take on the Sternberg-Dietrich formula, starring Elissa Landi as a woman of ill repute at odds with the colonial authorities in German West Africa. No rural themes in sight in this episode, just the tribulations and heroism of the underdog.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 35s: YOUNG AMERICA (1932) [dir. Frank Borzage]

0h 28m 14s: PASSPORT TO HELL (1932) [dir. Frank Lloyd]

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Fox Film Corporation: 1915-1935 by Aubrey Solomon

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler

1932 Information from Forgotten Films to Remember by John Springer

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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!

In this week's episode of the Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, our heroine battles an organized crime ring in Fritz Lang's classic noir The Big Heat and the Soviets, or in any case her beleaguered circus capitalist husband, Fredric March, in Elia Kazan's Man on a Tightrope (both 1953). Dave and Elise are somewhat at odds about the effectiveness of Tightrope's anti-censorship message, but united on the effectiveness of Lang's use of the noir genre, and Grahame, to depict heroism in a world familiar with the horrors of fascism.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: Man on a Tightrope (1953) [dir. Elia Kazan]

0h 22m 10s: THE BIG HEAT (1953) [dir. Fritz Lang]

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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 Special Subject for September 2025 led us to watch a couple of wartime British films starring Laurence Olivier and his amazing accents: Québécois in Powell and Pressburger's The 49th Parallel (1941), which opposes a Platonic Idea of Canada to Nazi ideology, and Russian in Anthony Asquith's The Demi-Paradise (1943), an alarmingly Soviet-friendly use of the romantic comedy genre to promote cross-cultural understanding. The accents may lack technical accuracy (much like the films' depictions of various cultures), but the ideas on display are worth grappling with and the presentation entertaining, while Olivier himself is rivetingly eccentric and weirdly endearing. Other notable players include FOP Penelope Dudley-Ward, Margaret Rutherford, Glynis Johns, Leslie Howard, Felix Aylmer and Powell/Pressburger regulars Eric Portman and Anton Walbrook.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: The 49th Parallel (1941) [dir. Michael Powell]

0h 43m 38s: THE DEMI-PARADISE (1943) [dir. Antohny Asquith]

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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!

st drop us a line if you'd like to join!

This Warner Bros. 1932 episode is a double feature of Glasmon-Bright scripts directed by Pre-Code wizards: Mervyn LeRoy's Three on a Match, a tight little melodrama about the cryptic and arbitrary nature of self-destruction with Ann Dvorak as a wealthy housewife beset by ennui; and Roy Del Ruth's Taxi!, in which Loretta Young has to stand up to James Cagney's hot-headed cab driver, although neither his violence nor her self-control is going to help them fight those who have more power under capitalism. At 63 and 69 minutes respectively, they pack a Cagney-style punch--no flab, just Warners Pre-Code energy!

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: Warner Brothers and 1932

0h 05m 08s: TAXI! [dir. Roy Del Ruth]

0h 33m 09s: THREE ON A MATCH [dir. Mervyn Leroy]

Studio Film Capsules provided by The Warner Brothers Story by Clive Hirschhorn

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler

1932 Information from Forgotten Films to Remember by John Springer

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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!

Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvreview recovers from last week's rough spot with two excellent roles in two excellent films that display her range as a character actress. In Vicente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), for which Gloria won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, she's a sweet but silly Southern belle curiously sacrificed by Kirk Douglas' relentlessly driven movie producer; and in Maxwell Shane's The Glass Wall (1953), she's a fed-up proletarian who rediscovers her humanity by helping Vittorio Gassman's Hungarian refugee. Our conversation moves from the opaque depths of Minnelli's Hollywood melodrama to the cruel but redeemable America of Shane's leftist docu-noir, which somehow slipped under the radar of the blacklist.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952) [dir. Vincente Minnelli]

0h 28m 48s: THE GLASS WALL (1953) [dir. Maxwell Shane]

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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 1932 MGM Studios Year by Year episode is a Robert Montgomery double feature, although the spotlight is on his leading ladies: an incandescent Marion Davies in Blondie of the Follies (directed by Edmund Goulding), and a distraught Tallulah Bankhead in Faithless (directed by Harry Beaumont). We discuss the strengths and incoherencies of Anita Loos' and Frances Marion's screenplay for Blondie of the Follies (spoilers: it may have been tampered with by some guy named Hearst) and then turn to our strong reactions to MGM's intense Depression melodrama, in which Hugh Herbert plays a sexual predator so convincingly it gave Elise a nightmare! Speaking of nightmare fuel: in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto we discuss Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas (1995), starring Elisabeth Shue and Nicholas Cage in a kind of reverse Vertigo, which was playing as part of the TIFF Story in 50 Films series.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: 1932 and MGM

0h 05m 41s: BLONDIE OF THE FOLLIES [dir. Edmund Goulding]

0h 37m 26s: FAITHLESS [dir. Harry Beaumont]

01 00m 20s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

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Studio Film Capsules provided by The MGM Story by John Douglas Eames

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler

1932 Information from Forgotten Films to Remember by John Springer

+++

* 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!