Special Subject: King Vidor Sampler, the 1930s – STREET SCENE (1931), CYNARA (1932), OUR DAILY BREAD (1934) & STELLA DALLAS (1937)

There's Sometimes a Buggy

We went deep for our second King Vidor Special Subject episode, looking at four films from the 1930s: Street Scene (1931), adapted by Elmer Rice from his famous stage play about working-class New Yorkers; the little-known Cynara (1932), starring Ronald Colman as a kindly upper-middle-class man who stumbles into adultery and the abyss; Our Daily Bread (1934), Vidor's eccentric, self-produced response to the Great Depression; and Stella Dallas, one of the great woman's pictures, centered on one of Barbara Stanwyck's greatest performances. Class, gender, transformation of consciousness, and how they're served by melodrama story structures all come in for examination as we find links with the films of other auteurs, from Ozu to Lynch. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we take a quick look at monster movie tropes and James Cameron's masochistic feminism in The Terminator. All this and more feedback on our Lilli Palmer series!

Time Codes:

0h 00m 30s: More general musings on Vidor

0h 05m 49s: STREET SCENE (1931) [dir. King Vidor]

0h 26m 44s: CYNARA (1932) [dir. King Vidor]

0h 45m 32s: OUR DAILY BREAD (1934) [dir. King Vidor]

1h 00m 46s: STELLA DALLAS (1937) [dir. King Vidor]

1h 39m 13s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto: James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984)

1h 45m 23s: Listener Communiqués

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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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