Podcasts TV There's Sometimes a Buggy Special Subject Have Yourself a Monty Woolley Christmas THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER (1942), LIFE BEGINS AT EIGHT-THIRTY (1942) and THE BISHOPS WIFE (1947) + Fear & Moviegoing in Toronto

Special Subject Have Yourself a Monty Woolley Christmas THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER (1942), LIFE BEGINS AT EIGHT-THIRTY (1942) and THE BISHOPS WIFE (1947) + Fear & Moviegoing in Toronto

Published: Dec. 22, 2023, 5:24 a.m.

For our December 2023 Special Subject, we're having ourselves a Monty Woolley Christmas! We look at three Christmas-adjacent movies from the 1940s featuring the anti-Santa in roles big and small:\xa0The Man Who Came to Dinner, in\xa0which he stars as\xa0 waspish radio personality Sheridan Whiteside, who takes over the home of a bourgeois Middle American couple;\xa0Life Begins at Eight-Thirty, in which he plays a great actor who's been broken by alcoholism; and\xa0The Bishop's Wife, in which he adds some New York Bohemian intellectual colour to the holiday\xa0classic. We discuss the cultural and political implications of\xa0The Man Who Came to Dinner\xa0and the uncanniness of Cary Grant and debate the appeal of alcoholism. Then in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we briefly discuss Ernst Lubitsch's\xa0Cluny Brown\xa0(fully discussed in our Jennifer Jones series) and a new release, a Christmas movie even darker than our Monty Woolleys, William Oldroyd's\xa0Eileen, starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway (a rare spoiler-free exchange of impressions from us). And as a bonus, we become possessed by the spirit of Monty Woolley and rant about how much we hate contemporary movie trailers. (No analysis, just invective.)

Happy Holidays!\xa0

Time Codes:

0h 00m 45s:\xa0 \xa0\xa0\xa0 Extremely brief Introduction to Monty Woolley

0h 04m 38s: \xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0 THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER (1942) [William Keighley]

0h 31m 24s:\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0 LIFE BEGINS AT EIGHT-THIRTY (1942) [Irving Pichel]

0h 42m 47s:\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0 THE BISHOP\u2019S WIFE (1947) [Henry Koster]

0h 54m 37s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto \u2013 Ernst Lubitsch\u2019s Cluny Brown (1946) and William Oldroyd\u2019s Eileen (2023) \xa0

+++

* Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project \u2013 a discussion of Late Spring

* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

* Intro Song: \u201cSunday\u201d by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of\xa0The Internet Archive)

* Read Elise\u2019s piece on Gangs of New York \u2013 \u201cMaking America Strange Again\u201d

* Check out Dave\u2019s Robert Benchley blog \u2013 an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist\u2019s 2000+ pieces as he can locate \u2013 Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!\xa0

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