On this week's Warner Bros. 1934 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at some of the studio's mid-30s B-output: the jazzy, Modernist, montage-ist, telephonic I've Got Your Number, starring Pat O'Brien as an insouciant and sometimes insolent Everyman (in a comedy team-up we never knew we needed with fuming mentor Eugene Pallette) whose redemption arc is sparked by beleaguered working girl Joan Blondell; and I Am a Thief, with Mary Astor and Ricardo Cortez playing hot potato with the title's claim. Do either of these films qualify as "termite art"? Do both? Listen and learn!

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: 1934 & Warner Brothers

0h 03m 17s: I'VE GOT YOUR NUMBER [dir. Ray Enright]

0h 26m 41s: I AM A THIEF [dir. Robert Florey]

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

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

1934 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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Our Special Subject for this month is The Archers in Black and White: A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), and The Small Back Room (1949). We discuss Powell and Pressburger's interest in the claims and sins of tradition and modernity, their handling of intense romantic relationships, and their search for transcendence in nature and the past. Then, in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we briefly discuss the films we saw at the 2026 Toronto Silent Film Festival, including the 1926 Beau Geste with Ronald Colman, Chaplin's The Kid (1921), Garbo and Gilbert in (Edmund Goulding's) Love (1927), Eisenstein's nightmarish Strike (1925), and Lewis' Milestone's romantic comedy The Garden of Eden (1928).

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: A CANTERBURY TALE (1944) [dirs.. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger]

0h 26m 31s: I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING (1945) [dirs.. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger]

0h 42m 28s: THE SMALL BACK ROOM (1949) [dirs.. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger]

0h 58m 31s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – 2026 Toronto Silent Film Festival – Herbert Brenon's Beau Geste (1926), Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921), Edmund Goulding's Love (1927), Sergei Eisenstein's Strike! (1925) and Lewis Milestone's The Garden of Eden (1928); also: Laurel and Hardy in Brats (1930), Baby Peggy in Peg o' the Mounted (1924) and the Lumière Brothers' Aroseur et arosée (1896)

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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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Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com

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We conclude our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight with a couple of her big Hollywood movies after the turning point of From Here to Eternity: Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy (1956), in which she appears as Laura Reynolds, a role she originated on Broadway; and Henry King's Beloved Infidel (1959), in which she stars as Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham in an autobiographical account of a fascinating rags-to-modest-wealth-and-influence story intersecting with F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years of alcoholic decline and exile in Hollywood. We discuss Minnelli and playwright/screenwriter Robert Anderson's very contemporary-feeling analysis of the performance of gender (masculinity in particular) and Kerr's role as a Sex Christ, and Beloved Infidel's good-bad-and-ugly, but empathetic, approach to a troubled, abusive relationship.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: TEA AND SYMPATHY (1956) [dir. Vincente Minnelli]

0h 33m 45s: BELOVED INFIDEL (1959) [dir. Henry King]

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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 MGM 1934 episode this week is a Jean Parker (Beth in RKO's 1933 Little Women) double feature. She plays the rebellious daughter in the family melodrama Wicked Woman, which features a fine central performance by noted theatre actress and blacklistee Mady Christians, and a conservationist's daughter who starts an "unlikely animal friends" experiment with a puma cub and a fawn in Sequoia. While the former treads relatively familiar territory with a mixture of pre-Code intensity and wacky domestic humour (supplied by Sterling Holloway and Betty Furness, an odder couple than the puma and fawn), the latter, we argue, is an animal protagonists movie with some genuinely original features.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: 1934 & MGM

0h 04m 39s: A WICKED WOMAN [dir. Charles Brabin]

0h 26m 28s: SEQUOIA [dir. Chester M. Franklin]

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

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

1934 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!

For the 2nd part of our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight we check in on Kerr's "lost years" at MGM to see what Hollywood was finding for her to do before her breakthrough performance in From Here to Eternity. In Norman Taurog's Please Believe Me (1950) she leads a cast of oddballs, including Robert Walker and Peter Lawford, as a respectable British girl who learns how to be American by first being mistaken for, and then deciding to become, a Stanwyck-type comedy heroine; and in Sidney Sheldon's satirical Dream Wife (1953) she helps the future I Dream of Jeannie creator and bestselling trashy novelist work out some interesting ideas about gender via miserable Orientalist stereotypes and an oil crisis backdrop of unfortunate contemporary relevance. If these aren't masterpieces, it can't be said, anyway, that these are run-of-the-mill Hollywood comedies (if there is such a thing).

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: PLEASE BELIEVE ME (1950) [dir. Norman Taurog]

0h 24m 18s: DREAM WIFE (1953) [dir. Sidney Sheldon]

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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

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With this episode we launch the first of Elise's three-part Special Subject, Family Freak-Outs. We start with some musings about how to define this micro-genre, what makes it different from a standard family melodrama and its relationship to horror, and then we move into our first two freak-outs, Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger (1990) and Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenebaums (2001). While the problems these families are dealing with in their very specific milieus of middle-class black South Central LA and upper-middle-class white fairy-tale Manhattan are very different, the capacity to freak out may be a universal feature of the family; and in these two movies, at least, freaking out can lead to healing. Then a quick Fear and Moviegoing in honour of Catherine O'Hara's passing, Christopher Guest's Best in Show.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: Microgeneric Musing Re: Freak-Outs

0h 06m 03s: TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) [dir. Charles Burnett]

0h 31m 50s: THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001) [dir. Wes Anderson]

1h 03m 22s: Fear & Moviegoing in Toronto: Christopher Guest's Best in Show (2000) at the Carlton Cinema (Catherine O'Hara Tribute)

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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!

For this Paramount 1934 episode we watched Search for Beauty, which pits beauty-as-health (a wasted and almost unrecognizable Ida Lupino and frequently topless, sometimes bottomless, and always witless Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe) against beauty-as-sex in a meta-commentary on pre-Codes released just before the crackdown, and the Hecht-MacArthur-Garmes Crime Without Passion, starring Claude Rains and Margo as a couple destined to destroy each other in a full-blown film noir six years before that "cycle" started. The latter adds to the evidence for Paramount as the studio of idiosyncratic auteur experimentation, while the former adds to the evidence that Paramount often flounders without its auteurs.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: 1934 & Paramount

0h 09m 04s: SEARCH FOR BEAUTY [dir. Erle C. Kenton]

0h 26m 53s: CRIME WITHOUT PASSION [dirs. Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur & Lee Garmes]

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

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

1934 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!

Our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight starts strong with two entertaining progressive WWII-era British films, John Baxter's Love on the Dole (1941), a socialist portrayal of working-class life in Manchester during the Great Depression, and Alexander Korda's Perfect Strangers (aka Vacation from Marriage), a sort of comedy of remarriage that envisions a radically new kind of marriage arising out of wartime upheavals in gender roles and middle-class routine. Elise confesses and recants her previous opinion that Deborah Kerr was a solid but slightly boring choice.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: Brief intro – Deborah Kerr

0h 06m 20s: LOVE ON THE DOLE (1941) [dir. John Baxter]

0h 34m 29s: PERFECT STRANGERS aka VACATION FROM MARRIAGE (1945) [dir. Alexander Korda]

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* Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project – a discussion of Late Spring

* Capsule reviews from John Springer's Forgotten Films to Remember (Citadel Press, 1980)

* 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!