Episode 26: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

Episode 3: The Racket: This week, David and Suzan round out the last of the nominees for the very first year with a break from WWI and the very first gangster flick to get a Best Picture nod, The Racket. by Screen Test of Time

41 min listen

Episode 8: Disraeli: What do you get when you mash up a drawing room comedy, a spy caper, and a proto-biopic? by Screen Test of Time

38 min listen

Episode 32: The Private Life of King Henry VIII: You know the clichéd portrayal of Henry VIII as an gluttonous, overgrown man child? Charles Laughton's portrayal of the English king with many wives in The Private Life of Henry VIII is where it all began. by Screen Test of Time

38 min listen

Episode 19: Five Star Final: Another nominee that focuses on the behind the scenes business of newspapers, this time as an indictment of tabloid journalism. by Screen Test of Time

33 min listen

Episode 25: Smilin' Through: Our hosts start off the 1932/1933 Academy Awards with Smilin' Through. Norma Shearer, short shrifted in The Divorcee as a glamorous doormat, finally gets her due in the role of spitfire Kathleen, and co-stars Frederic March and Leslie Howard match her stellar performance. by Screen Test of Time

51 min listen

Episode 11: The Divorcee: Norma Shearer wears a Parisian dress shop's worth of fabulous outfits and Conrad Nagel plays the least immoral character in this movie as a man with a blatant disregard for the sanctity of other people's marriages. by Screen Test of Time

39 min listen

Episode 2: Wings: Just how many WWI movies with wacky romantic comedy subplots can one Academy Award season handle? by Screen Test of Time

43 min listen

Episode 13: Cimarron: Cimarron is the story of a politically woke dude, who still manages to be a bad partner and deadbeat dad, single handedly founding the state of Oklahoma. by Screen Test of Time

43 min listen

Episode 4: In Old Arizona: The moral of this week's show is "Be careful what you wish for." Last week, Suzan was over silent films and excited to finally get to the talkies. In Old Arizona granted her wish, but at what cost? by Screen Test of Time

30 min listen

Episode 6: Alibi: There are movies that are bad because they're offensive, movies that are bad because they're poorly acted, and movies that are bad because they're generally unimportant nonsense stories that don't need to be told. And then there's the rare film that hits all three. by Screen Test of Time

30 min listen

Episode 16: Skippy, Trader Horn, ...and City Lights?: David and Suzan prove their courage by watching a possibly cursed video copy of Skippy, so if you haven’t heard from them next week, they’ve been claimed by a ghost girl from a well. by Screen Test of Time

32 min listen

Episode 23: One Hour With You: Ahhh... there's nothing like the unfettered glee of a true hate watch, and Suzan and David are downright giddy this week. by Screen Test of Time

35 min listen

Episode 14: The Front Page: Despite being extremely resourceful, your intrepid hosts did not manage to find a copy of East Lynne this week, as there’s apparently only one extent copy that sits in a vault at the UCLA film archives. by Screen Test of Time

27 min listen

Episode 15: (Not) East Lynne: What do your long suffering hosts do when they still can't find a copy, no matter how grey market, of the 1931 version of East Lynne? by Screen Test of Time

32 min listen

Episode 12: The Big House: The Big House is sort of a watch-one-get-one-free movie: come for the surprisingly progressive commentary on the criminal justice system and you'll get a strange romantic melodrama dropped in the middle for free. by Screen Test of Time

32 min listen

Episode 9: The Love Parade: Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade is a classic fairytale— boy meets girl, girl is the queen of some place called Sylvania, boy slept with her ambassador’s wife, but instead of ending up exiled forever, they get married and live happily ever after… and that’s just the first third of the movie. by Screen Test of Time

30 min listen

Episode 21: Arrowsmith: No, this week's movie is not about the guys who wrote "Love in an Elevator." It is, however, the movie that definitively answers the question, “Can a movie have too much plot?” by Screen Test of Time

32 min listen

Episode 22: Shanghai Express: Shanghai Express has so much going for it: Marlene Dietrich smolders, the cinematography is gorgeous, the cast is funny, the costumes ravishing, the dialogue smart. So why aren't Suzan and David in raptures and awarding it their first 10? by Screen Test of Time

37 min listen

Episode 24: Grand Hotel: At last, we reach the end of the 1931/1932 Oscars with the winner Grand Hotel. Sort of the first Ocean's Eleven, it's chock full of stars: Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery of The Champ fame, Greta Garbo (who delivers her iconic line, "I want to be alone"), and not one but two Barrymores! by Screen Test of Time

52 min listen

Episode 26: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang: The second film nominated for the 1932/1933 awards, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was a ripped from the headlines, based on a true story, adapted from a book smash, and the rare movie that actually made an impact on changing the oppressive system it profiled. by Screen Test of Time

36 min listen

Episode 7: The Hollywood Revue of 1929: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 was definitely a departure from the Oscar nominated movies so far: a musical revue that feels like it was plucked right off a Vaudeville stage. by Screen Test of Time

29 min listen

Episode 10: All Quiet on the Western Front: Ten movies in and we've finally found the origin of the Oscar bait flick! by Screen Test of Time

46 min listen

Episode 33: Lady for a Day: Lady for a Day is an almost entirely delightful rags-to-sort-of-riches fairytale with a brilliant ensemble cast of at the time relative unknowns. by Screen Test of Time

44 min listen

Episode 20: The Champ: This week, Jackie Cooper is back, baby, and this time in a movie David and Suzan can actually watch! by Screen Test of Time

43 min listen

Episode 31: Cavalcade: The winner for 1932/1933, Cavalcade is like a season and a half of television that they've just slammed into a hundred and fifty minutes... or the first three seasons of Downton Abbey, with basically the same plot. by Screen Test of Time

41 min listen

Episode 28: She Done Him Wrong: Clocking in at a mere 66 minutes, Mae West's She Done Him Wrong is the shortest movie ever nominated for Best Picture. Through some kind of manipulation of the space time continuum, however, it manages to have roughly five hours of musical numbers all stuffed in at the end. by Screen Test of Time

37 min listen

Episode 41: One Night of Love: Grace Moore stars as a helpless aspiring prima donna who runs away to Italy to study with a famously cruel and abusive vocal coach, while consistently rejecting a genuinely good rich guy who just wants her to live her own life in this deeply misogynistic trash fire. by Screen Test of Time

48 min listen

Episode 29: State Fair: In this week's episode, David posits the conspiracy theory that State Fair, remade half a dozen times in various media, is funded by the shadowy State Fair Lobby... but is his assertion as wild as it seems? by Screen Test of Time

43 min listen

Episode 46: Flirtation Walk: Whatever you do, do not play a drinking game in which you drink every time our hosts sigh dejectedly this episode. You will be hospitalized. by Screen Test of Time

37 min listen

Episode 36: The House of Rothschild: If you're looking for a master class in how well meaning racism is still racism, look no further than The House of Rothschild, a film that tries to indict anti-semitism while reinforcing anti-semitic stereotypes. by Screen Test of Time

31 min listen

Discover this podcast and so much more

Episode 26: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

Episode 26: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

Description

Titles in the series (100)

More Episodes from Screen Test of Time

Related podcast episodes