ABOUT THE EPISODE:

David: Suzan, I might have gotten slightly  drunk watching this movie over the course of like four hours.

Suzan: I mean, I didn’t, because I don’t drink, but I definitely felt like I had ingested some bad bread mold and was hallucinating.

This week, our hosts Shakespeare-nerd out pretty hard for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A German expressionistic adaptation of the play, directed by a man who literally didn’t speak English, starring James Cagney as a surprisingly fantastic Bottom, Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, Dick Powell as a dreadful Lysander, and a 14-year-old Mickey Rooney in the most enraging performance maybe ever committed to film. Suzan gets frustrated trying to find an accurate enough simile to convey just how bad Puck is, while David apologizes at least half a dozen times for his deep dive into the textual details.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

Additional audio: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Ten episodes ago, David and Suzan told you to hold off on watching The Gay Divorcee, because once they had watched this week’s movie, Top Hat, they would tell you which was the better Oscar nominated Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. We're sorry to report, they still don't know.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

Additional audio: “Top Hat, White TIe, and Tails” and “No Strings” sung by Fred Astaire from Top Hat (1935)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

1935 has been a rough year for our hosts, but this week, they have a wonderful, if surreal respite, in The Broadway Melody of 1936! A totally bonkers plot threads through some truly spectacular musical numbers, starring Eleanor Powell, who was such a phenomenal dancer that Fred Astaire did one movie with her, and then wouldn’t work with her again because she was that much better than he was. Rounding out the cast are an adorably sassy Una Merkel, Robert Taylor as a condescending jerk who looks like the prince of the fairies from a young adult novel, and Jack Benny as a strangely influential gossip columnist who can take a punch better than Rocky.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

Additional audio: “I’ve Got a Feeling You’re Foolin’” and “Sing Before Breakfast” from The Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Happy New Year, Screen Testers! Our intrepid hosts begin their second year of their quest with the Katherine Hepburn vehicle, Alice Adams. Something of a shaggy dog story, it’s a strange little film in which very little happens, with some confused things to say about class struggle and capitalism. On the plus side, Hepburn gives a striking performance as a complicated and largely unlikable Alice, and it is the first film Suzan and David have watched that unabashedly indicts racism.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

Additional audio: Alice Adams (1935)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

They did it! David and Suzan have watched a Best Picture nominated film and released their review every week for a year. The final flick of the year is The Informer, the story of a former Irish Republican Army member turns in a friend for reward money, and the fall out that ensues. Suzan is sick, but powers through; David is just sick of the movie.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

Additional audio: The Informer (1935)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Suzan has been waiting this entire first year for the opportunity to geek out about Les Miserables. This week, she also fell in love with Frederic March, who entirely proved she and David wrong when they assumed, last episode, that he couldn’t off Valjean… unfortunately, they were absolutely right about Charles Laughton as Javert. But how good can a 100 minute Les Miserables actually be?

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

Additional audio: “La Marseillaise” arranged and conducted by Carmen Dragon; “La Marseillaise” performed by the Red Army Choir (1935)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Primary lessons learned from Naughty Marietta: don’t wiggle raw, unrefrigerated shrimp in a woman’s face as a way of flirting. This very loosely adapted version of a wildly confusing operetta stars Jeanette MacDonald as a French… Princess? who runs away to New Orleans to escape marrying some Spanish duke, and ends up falling for a rakish captain played by Nelson Eddy.  Musical numbers ensue, including a completely bonkers puppet show. 

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

Additional audio from Naughty Marietta (1935)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

The story of an English valet who gets traded away in a poker game to basically the Beverly Hillbillies, Ruggles of Red Gap stars Charles Laughton in the first of three 1935 Best Picture nominations. On its surface, it’s a broad, goofy fish-out-of-water class comedy, but something more insidious flows underneath.

SHOW NOTES

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

Additional audio from Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

On this week’s episode, Suzan and David recommend half a dozen other adaptations of David Copperfield you could watch instead of this one. David has a hard time remembering names of real life people, Suzan has a hard time remembering names of characters, and there may or may not be evidence of time travel dropped in this movie (and Dickens’s book). Also, they discuss Hugh Dancy’s relationship to the philosophy of moral particularism and Taylor Swift’s “Most For The PR” Boyfriend.

SHOW NOTES

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

Additional audio from David Copperfield (1935)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

If you give thanks for only one thing this holiday, let it be that Suzan and David love you, their listeners, enough not to subject you to this terrible, terrible film.

SHOW NOTES

Year Eligible: 1935 (Nominated)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

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. That Flirtation Walk was nominated in the same year as Here Comes the Navy is straight up confounding. Actually, that it was nominated at all is confounding. But David and Suzan wrap up the 1934 nominees and tell you if the right movie was rewarded.

SHOW NOTES

Year Eligible: 1934 (Nominated)

Additional audio from Flirtation Walk (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

The final Claudette Colbert nominee for 1934, Imitation of Life attempts to deal with issues of racism, passing, and white supremacy in America. The first movie in this project that really had its claws removed by the Hays Code (a full year before it was universally enforced), this is at least a fascinating artifact in the history of Hollywood’s failed attempts to tell stories dealing with racism.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1934 (Nominated)

Additional audio: Imitation of Life (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

The movie they should have watched this week, The White Parade, is unavailable to watch (outside of the super secret UCLA Film Archives vault that they still haven’t managed to crack), so our hosts chose another movie from 1934 with a spooky Halloween theme! What is it? You’ll have to listen to find out!

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1934 (Not even nominated)

Additional audio: Music from the movie (no spoilers!) (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Our hosts' first foray into the world of Fred and Ginger, The Gay Divorcee is a bit of a mixed bag, but at least it's an improvement over the last two weeks! The good: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sing and dance a bunch, Alice Brady plays a hilarious one liner machine named Aunt Hortense, and the sets are so beautiful the movie single handedly increased the sales of Venetian blinds (no, really). The bad: some outdated and frankly dangerous tropes, a frankly nonsensical plot, and a desperate attempt by the studios to, as David puts it, "Make fetch happen." Find out what he means on this week's episode!

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1934 (Nominated)

Additional audio: “The Continental” from The Gay Divorcee (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

SToT favorites Norma Shearer and Frederic March star in this unfortunately agonizing biopic about Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Charles Laughton returns in a brutal role that entirely erases the memory of his jovial and sympathetic-ish Henry VIII in this period drama torture porn. But there is a cute dog.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1934 (Nominated)

Additional audio: The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

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.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1934 (Nominated)

Additional audio: One Night of Love (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Last week, Suzan predicted this was going to be 100 minute of Claudette Colbert fan service, and for once, her instincts were spot on. An absolute burlesque of a film that specifically pushed the limits the year before the Hays Code was going to be enforced, Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra is gorgeous to look at, but has an absolute mess of a script. But does that matter when there’s so many beautiful costumes and so much cleavage on display?

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1934 (Nominated)

Additional audio: Cleopatra (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

The aircraft carrier and the airship featured in this movie both figured into horrible accidents after this film was shot. And that's the most interesting thing about Here Comes the Navy. A confusing romantic comedy(?) that seems to center more on two boys making each other miserable than a guy and a girl falling in love, this Jimmy Cagney vehicle is not just nonsensical and filled with unlikable characters, it’s also super racist. The worst movie our hosts have watched yet.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1934 (Nominated)

Additional audio: Here Comes the Navy (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

The Thin Man is almost perfect: main characters Nick and Nora Charles, are perhaps the world’s most charming detective couple; they have an adorable dog; the banter is fast and witty; and the multiple side characters are fleshed out and fascinating… and yet there’s one little problem. David realizes that a B+ movie frustrates him more than a solid C, while Suzan comes to the disheartening revelation that the history of film is not, in fact, a straight line toward cultural and political progress.

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1934 (Nominated)

Additional audio: The Thin Man (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Another in a long line of Hollywood white wash casting, Viva Villa! is an absolutely infuriating, stereotypical portrayal of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa by Wallace Beery (The Champ, Grand Hotel). Not going to bury the lede— this movie fails the Screen Test of Time hard, but at least this episode will remind you of a minor Looney Tunes character you probably forgot about…? (Editorial correction: Katherine DeMille’s father died in World War I, not World War II.)

SHOW NOTES:

Year Eligible: 1934 (Nominated)

Additional audio: Viva Villa! (1934)

(Explicit language, as always)