Screen Test of Time (Suzan Eraslan and David Daw)

Another in the weird 1930s trend of "hilarious" comedies about divorce, The Awful Truth, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, is the film equivalent of a bottle of champagne that's been left open for three days.

Just in time for Pride month, the undeniably queer Stage Door is not not an odd couple romantic comedy. A terrific movie where the Powerful Lesbian Energy fan service is only barely subtextual— Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers play two up and coming Broadway actresses thrown together by circumstance who pretty obviously fall in love with each other. While it takes a hard left turn at the very end, this funny, sweet, and ultimately very moving women-centric movie still manages to stick the landing thanks to its darling central couple.

TRIGGER WARNING: This episode contains a lot of references to sexual assault that takes place in the movie.

Another in the “musical drama disaster film” genre of San Francisco, this week’s movie is a fictional telling of the family of Mrs. O’Leary, whose cow, for at least a century, was held responsible for starting the Chicago Fire. Starring Tyrone Power, Alice Brady, and Alice Faye, In Old Chicago is a movie so chock full of the worst Classic Film offenses that David made up a bingo card for it. It’s also the last film of 1937, so find out if the Academy’s winner holds up!

1938 is off to a rough start-- one movie in, and our hosts have already broken the glass on the Bengal Lancer Clause*… sort of. Suzan does sum up the entire movie in one sentence, but mostly our hosts talk about how great 2015 was for movies that weren’t even nominated for Best Picture. Spoiler warnings for The Wire, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Magic Mike XXL.

*For those who haven’t heard Ep. 47: The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, the eponymous clause can be invoked only once a calendar year, when a movie is just too egregious to warrant a review

An extraordinary film-- not in the sense that it's excellent-- but that it constantly teeters on the precipice of disaster, held only together by the strength of Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, and Clark Gable. On paper, Test Pilot is a frankly ludicrous story about an ace test pilot, the woman he meets after he crash lands on a farm and then marries the next day, and his best friend, who end up in an unconventional ménage à trois— as in “household of three,” not the other way… maybe?

Errol Flynn and Olivia Havilland return to the podcast in the ur-Robin Hood movie from 1938. The second Oscar nominated movie fully in Technicolor, it’s David’s grandfather’s favorite movie ever. Suzan, however, makes a case for the Disney animated version and, yes, even the much maligned Kevin Costner adaptation as improvements over the classic. Still, it’s a fun romp through Sherwood Forest, chocked full of fantastic action scenes, with Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone rounding out a great cast.

When asked what 2 movies he would take with him on the ark, Orson Welles replied that La Grande Illusion would be one of them (and couldn’t name the other). Our hosts are happy to report that they don’t question his decision. A war movie with no battles, a film that is not about racism and anti-semitism but addresses them better than any film they’ve watched so far, and a clear inspiration for countless films to follow, La Grande Illusion is a masterpiece, even through the lens of the Screen Test of Time. (It was so good, Suzan made popcorn— though, as David makes clear, she has a rather unusual definition of “popcorn movie.”)

Tyrone Power and Alice Faye are back in Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and better than ever… which isn’t saying much. The musical numbers may swing, but the plot will rock you to sleep.

This movie should be called Four Daughters (and an Embarrassment of Baxters). Four pretty, almost indistinguishable adult women with some level of musical talent, their music professor dad (played by Claude Raines), and their spitfire spinster aunt basically make life miserable for a bunch of men in this disjointed soap opera.

Ahhh… at last, our hosts can breathe a sigh of relief before hitting play on this week’s movie, You Can’t Take It with You. With the Screen Test of Time proven Frank Capra at the helm, and Jimmy Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, and Jean Arthur in front of the camera, what could possibly go wrong?

Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney don’t have the greatest track record here on Screen Test of Time, and they co-star in Boys Town, a biopic about a priest who started a literal incorporated town for homeless boys cum bad-kid-goes-good fairytale.

This week on Screen Test of Time, the 1938 film adaptation of Pygmalion starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller takes Suzan utterly by surprise because… she kind of likes most of it? Luckily, David assuages her conflicted feelings over enjoying a movie with such a misogynist foundational narrative, by pointing out the movie’s one huge, self-annihilating flaw.

At last, 1938 is over! Our hosts have finally completed the last year of nominees before Hollywood’s “Best Year” with this week’s movie, The Citadel, and the good news is David doesn’t regret using the Bengal Lancer card earlier. But which flick deserved the Oscar for 1938?

After nearly 2 years of counting down the weeks to film’s most legendary year, 1939 is off with a bang… and some surprising controversy! For the first time in a long time, our hosts find they deeply disagree. Will David and Suzan come to a compromise, or will Stagecoach be the rare SToT movie with a split score?

On this week’s episode, David and Suzan discuss the structure of Gothic storytelling, the perils of adapting a too long book into a too short movie, the merits of War and Peace and 10 Things I Hate About You to 1939’s Wuthering Heights.

The basis for the much more widely seen remake starring Cary Grant, Love Affair starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer was a difficult one for our hosts to grade. Moments of brilliance abound, but they are so disconnected from an unbelievable overall story, that it’s hard to know what is important is in this melodramatic romance.

The first of the sick bed tearjerker dramas to be nominated for Best Picture, Dark Victory is another in the list of movies where if people just talked to one another, there would be no story. Starring Bette Davis, some incredibly forgettable guy, the only real tragedy here is an underused Humphrey Bogart. Oh, and Ronald Reagan is in it.

Editor’s note: Screen Test of Time would like to apologize for the brevity of this week’s episode, but there really wasn’t much to say about Goodbye, Mr. Chips. We assure you that next week we will be back with a very long episode.

The first of the nominees that both of our hosts have already seen, The Wizard of Oz is getting some scrutiny neither of them had ever given it before. Will the classic starring Judy Garland hold up to our hosts’ critical evaluation, or will David and Suzan pull back the curtain to reveal it’s not so wonderful after all?

Frank Capra’s classic is considered the ultimate story of a Washington insider taking on the corrupt political machines holding Congress hostage, thanks to an absolutely brilliant performance by Jimmy Stewart in the titular role. But how well does it stand the Screen Test of Time in today’s political climate?

Perhaps the best thing about 1939 is that it brings our hosts the final Ernst Lubitsch film they will have to watch! After loathing every other film by the prolific director, will Greta Garbo in the title role upset the streak of poor ratings for Lubitsch, or is even she unable to salvage a film that was marketed only with the two words “Garbo laughs!”?

The long awaited (...or should we say dreaded?) watch of the wildly dated, over long, overrated, and overtly racist Gone With the Wind.

Of Mice and Men is a solid, workmanlike adaptation of the famous Steinbeck novel— competently made, well acted, and with a script by the author himself. But does it rise to the level of Best Picture? It’s the last movie of 1939, so find out if it’s the nominee that’s best stood the Screen Test of Time, or if David and Suzan choose another one of the nominees for the real Best Picture of 1939!

The Grapes of Wrath makes two Steinbeck adaptations in a row here at Screen Test of Time. John Ford’s classic starring Henry Fonda is a masterwork of American cinema, with beautiful cinematography by Gregg Toland, already demonstrating some of the genius he’ll bring to 1941’s Citizen Kane. It’s an excellent movie, no doubt about it— but should you watch it? 

It’s our 100th episode we watched and reviewed Alfred Hitchcock’s 1st American film— 1940’s Best Picture winner, Rebecca, a creeping gothic story of a never named woman (played by Joan Fontaine) who marries dashing but obviously troubled widower, Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). Suzan and David both think it’s great, but can they justify 10s two weeks in a row?

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is widely considered to be THE Great American Drama, a sentimental paean to small town Americana that tells the story of two families joined by marriage and separated by tragedy that just happens to be performed on a mostly bare stage. But the 1940 film adaptation starring Martha Scott and William Holden inadvertently challenges the order of importance of these elements— and perhaps it’s not the story of Main Street USA that’s important after all?

After multiple days of trying to record, our hosts finally get to sit down and talk about yet another Bette Davis film that leaves them baffled at her superstardom (though with a brief interruption by Suzan’s cats). Charles Boyer co-stars as Davis’s employer and… sort of? love interest, in a film that could have been captivating but had to bend so much to the Hays Code as to be an overlong, toothless melodrama.

The second of two Hitchcock films nominated in this year proves to be a little divisive for our hosts!

It’s John Ford and Greg Toland vs boats— which will win out for David, the director and cinematographer he loves or the setting and subject he hates? Certainly this combo will work for Suzan… right? See what our hosts think of this adaptation of 4 short Eugene O’Neill plays.

Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, starred in, and composed for this (sadly) still very relevant satire of the rise of fascism in Europe. David struggles not to give it a 10, and Suzan struggles with why she doesn’t want to for once.

What is the deal with Bette Davis, anyway? Screen Test of Time investigates… and comes up blank on this week’s episode reviewing The Letter.

In this episode, Suzan nearly has a complete bisexual meltdown over The Philadelphia Story, starring Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Cary Grant, which is entirely too many attractive people if you ask her. David, however, is a little clearer eyed and probably offers to give a more accurate (and very precise) score on this extremely problematic, but ultimately entertaining film.

Deanna Durbin is back in this bizarre Depression Era concert movie cum Cinderella story, and our hosts are genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of our young heroine. One hundred men and not one of them can get the girl to school or tell her to stay out of bars?

Dead End welcomes the legendary Humphrey Bogart to the podcast for the first, but not the last time! An excellent ensemble cast, a class warfare theme, and a handful of impressive bits of cinematography result in David having to reel in a very jetlagged Suzan from way over rating this movie.

Our hosts aren’t sure that anything could make them forgive Paul Muni for The Good Earth, but the lackluster biopic and incomprehensible 1937 Best Picture Winner, The Life of Emile Zola isn’t it.

David and Suzan take you on a giddy, punch drunk voyage of fish bonding, bad Portuguese (question mark?) accents, and entirely unbelievable rich dads in this week’s episode reviewing Captains Courageous. Freddie Bartholomew, Spencer Tracy, and a young Mickey Rooney return to the podcast, but this time they’re not panned! Lionel Barrymore and an unreasonably handsome John Carradine co-star.

The original A Star is Born (and only other Best Picture nominee besides the Lady Gaga one), is a good movie with the bones of a great movie, and the first nominee entirely in color! Screen Test of Time favorites Frederic March, Janet Gaynor, and Alfred Anjou turn in excellent performances… just not necessarily in the same film. All the same, it’s still, unquestionably, a movie… which isn’t always the case here at SToT.

The first Frank Capra movie we haven't been immediately sure should have won the year, Lost Horizon is never the less still leading the pack for 1937. (Of course, that’s not saying much, since the only other nominee our hosts have seen so far is the dreadful Good Earth.) Ronald Coleman gives a great performance in the original Shangri-La story, though it’s not as tight or profound as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, as clever as It Happened One Night, or as quirky and heartwarming as Lady for a Day, but one thing’s for sure: it’s definitely a movie, cause Capra doesn’t know how to make anything that’s not.

1937 is not off to a good start with The Good Earth. A cast led by Paul Muni and Luise Rainer, white actors in yellow face hair and makeup, portraying rural Chinese peasants at the turn of the 20th century, this may be the most infuriating movie Suzan and David have seen so far.

The 1936 nominees wrap up this week with Three Smart Girls, a sort of musical that’s basically a proto-Parent Trap… but are there three smart girls in it? There are three daughters of indeterminate age, true, but are they girls? And if so, why are we supposed to be rooting for two of them to date clearly adult men? Our hosts also wrap up their assessment of the 1936 Academy’s choice— spoiler, David and Suzan are not impressed.

Start with It Happened One Night as the foundation, add William Powell and Myrna Loy back on their witty repartee from The Thin Man, and top with Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow, and you seemingly have a recipe for success, right? Libeled Lady has all the ingredients to make a tasty romantic comedy, but the different elements never quite gel, with a bizarre twist ending that makes for a deeply unsatisfying dish.

A film that tries to justify a husband’s neglectful, sometimes abusive treatment of his wife basically because she wants to go on a vacation he promised her over 20 years ago, Dodsworth is a misogynistic polemic masquerading as the unholy marriage of a grand tour narrative and the slow, agonizing story of a couple’s divorce.

With Leslie Howard (41) and Norma Shearer (34) as the titular characters, Romeo and Juliet begins the long Hollywood tradition of casting extremely age inappropriate actors as teenagers. An obvious cash grab after the success of 1935’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, this movie’s best quality is that it reminded our hosts how good the Baz Luhrmann version actually is.

Never before have our hosts said, “But whatever,” as many times as in this episode (please do not turn this into a drinking game— you have been warned). Despite SToT favorite Frederic March giving it his all as the titular character, Anthony Adverse is a confusing and confused muddle devoid of character development and made worse by a middle third fraught with all kinds of racism. But it does have the distinction of being the lowest rated Best Picture nominee on Rotten Tomatoes, so at least it has that going for it.

San Francisco starring Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracey, and Clark Gable, is nearly two and a half hours of muddled confusion. Is it an historical dramedy? A musical disaster film? Or just an historical disaster?

Frank Capra continues his streak of good movies with the best one so far: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It’s a funny, quirky, extremely moving, and socioeconomically progressive gem starring an incredible Gary Cooper as the eponymous Mr. Deeds and a delightfully complex performance by Jean Arthur. A fantastic film and the first 10 to be awarded by David and Suzan!

The winner of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld is absolute Academy catnip: a big flashy musical that’s also a biopic, almost three hours long and lousy with famous stars, and generally a celebration of the entertainment industry— Hollywood loves few things more than a movie about itself. But is it any good?

So far, 1936 holds steady with the totally acceptable biopic, The Story of Louis Pasteur. Telling the somewhat… uh… sanitized version of Pasteur’s proving the existence of microbes and the germ theory of disease, Paul Muni plays the famed chemist as a crotchety genius at odds with the rather sociable and charming members of the medical establishment, personified by Fritz Leiber as the fictional Dr. Charbonnet. Anita Louise (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Donald Woods (A Tale of Two Cities) also return to the podcast as Pasteur’s daughter and son-in-law, respectively. Not the best movie ever made, nor even the best our hosts have watched for Screen Test of Time, but a solid entry that gives them hope the curse of 1935 has not persisted into the following year.

It was the best of times, it was the— actually, know what? It’s just the best of times, because 1936 has kicked off with a solidly good movie! A Tale of Two Cities is a dream come true after the slog of 1935, and in many respects is a wish granted to our hosts who have received all the things they wished they’d seen in David Copperfield. Ronald Coleman gives a moving and brilliant performance as Sydney Carton, and a number of supporting actors from Copperfield return, this time in better roles, under better direction, and with better acting. This one may not be the Best Picture of 1936 (after all, it’s the first of the nominees), but it definitely won Suzan and David over!

Captain Blood is the 1930s version of a big, brainless action movie— David suggests Jason Statham would star in this today— and yet Hollywood hadn’t yet figured out how to make a big, brainless action movie. Starring Errol Flynn as a doctor named Peter Blood (which Suzan cannot actually say without laughing) who becomes an indentured servant and then a pirate, with Olivia de Havilland and Basil Rathbone, this movie has possibly the most confused politics of anything our hosts have watched thus far. And at the end, they break down the nominees for this, perhaps the worst year of Oscar contenders— find out if the Academy chose right in 1935!

There are a number of movies where Charles Laughton has been acting in an entirely different film than everyone else on screen, but this is the first where that one seems like the better movie. Based on a true story, Mutiny on the Bounty departs radically from history for all the wrong reasons… if you can find a reason at all. Fraught with white washing British colonialism and naval history, not to mention the cast of white actors playing native Tahitians, not even a shirtless (albeit sadly clean shaven) Clark Gable nor one very impressive boat can save this poorly paced dud.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

Being anti-Nazi is literally the least a film can do. It's also the most The Pied Piper does.

Starring Greer Garson and Ronald Coleman, both of whom are in better movies nominated this year, Random Harvest features the the rare x2 double amnesiac combo multiplier in a plot that is so ludicrous it strains the bounds of Suzan’s sanity and somehow makes David more resistant to its glaring problems.

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.

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.)

At the end of last week's episode, David and Suzan were sure that A Farewell to Arms, which stars Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, had to be a good movie. Suzan expected that nothing with these two stars could possibly be bad, and David, for whatever reason, didn't expect it to be so "Hemingway-y." Boy, were they wrong all around. Not that you'd expect a WWI movie to be a bundle of laughs, but this one's a real bummer. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. Cary Grant plays an undercover fed who is posing as a priest, which is maybe the most believable element in this convoluted narrative that strains credulity. 

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? Suzan believes the sole reason for this movie being made was because the camera operators figured out how to put a camera on a roller coaster. Janet Gaynor returns to the Screen Test of Time for the first time since the premier episode! 

On last week's episode, Suzan was certain that this would be amazing and her choice for the 1932/1933 nominees, and her track record on week before proclamations holds steady. The first and only musical featuring Busby Berkeley's choreography to be nominated for Best Picture, 42nd Street has, no question, the best musical numbers of any movie so far featured on the Screen Test of Time, and Ginger Rogers has a cameo as a chorus girl that provides the funniest bit of business with a monocle ever to be documented on film. But will it take the Screen Test of Time award for Best Picture? 

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. The sinking of the Titanic? Check. World War I? Check. The Roaring 20s? Check. Well developed characters that we care about? Uh... Romanticism of the British class system? Check. Suzan has just returned from a trip to Thailand is super punchy with jet lag. David's just punchy as usual. 

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. But does the movie stand the Screen Test of Time when so many other versions of the story have been told since? 

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. After a quick discussion of the Academy's upcoming addition of the Best Popular Film category, Suzan and David mostly rave about the first Frank Capra movie to be nominated for Best Picture... mostly. But unfortunately, like too many of these 1930s movies, its rating is brought down by an inexplicably random scene of unconnected racism leaving our hosts to wonder-- will any movie in the '30s manage to pass this part of the Screen Test of Time? 

The first of many onscreen adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel, the Katherine Hepburn starring Little Women is also the first that our hosts have been exposed to the story, at least for Suzan. David thinks he's seen the Winona Ryder one from the 90s but can't quite remember. This week wraps up the 1932/1933 nominees, so tune in to find out which movie they think should have won instead, and if any of the Academy's choices in a year when they chose the top 3 made the cut! 

This week, on a very special episode of the Screen Test of Time: it was really a movie! A very good movie! Frank Capra's It Happened One Night starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert is the Ur-romantic comedy, the movie to which most of the tropes in the genre can trace their lineage. It's not perfect, but it's the highest scored movie David and Suzan have watched so far. The first of a dozen nominees and the winner from 1934, it's going to be tough to beat. 

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. Non-Jewish actor George Arliss, who played the eponymous character in Disraeli, nominated for Best Picture in 1929, returns to play not one two members of the family of European bankers, in this tone deaf mess. 

This week, David and Suzan begin their undertaking with 7th Heaven, a 1927 silent romantic comedy(?) about a Parisian sewer worker who falls in love with a pretty orphan girl before going off to WWI. 

Just how many WWI movies with wacky romantic comedy subplots can one Academy Award season handle? Apparently, the answer is two. This week, our hosts review the 1927/1928 winner, Wings. David hates it, Suzan loves it, but they both agree Clara Bow is adorable. Also, there's amazing plane fights, a poorly developed love quadrangle, a shockingly brief bit of Gary Cooper for him to get billing on the poster, and the most delightful drunk sequence this side of Dumbo.

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. Don't get too excited, though, cause The Godfather this ain't. David has a very good argument for why this is a good movie, but Suzan is having none of it. Also, find out if the Academy's pick for this year was the right one, after all! 

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? David has some praise for a surprisingly particular extra, as well as some suggestions as to what you should do instead of watch this movie. 

They like it, they really like it! Finally, David and Suzan watch a movie nominated for Best Picture that they actually enjoy! The Broadway Melody isn't the best movie they've ever seen, or anything, but it's really, genuinely good... aside from the fact that the title song is sung literally five times, and our hosts are not entirely sure that the film makers knew what they were doing. Still, a major milestone in this podcast. 

They've watched good movies. They've watched more bad movies. But never have Suzan and David watched a movie as utterly confounding as In Which We Serve.

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. This week's selection, Alibi, is all of the above, and David and Suzan are wildly unimpressed, despite the one scene in the movie that really strives for artistry. Better luck next week, kids, cause this one's a real snooze. 

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, featuring a flapper dancing Joan Crawford, Laurel and Hardy, and a call back to The Broadway Melody with Anita Page, all MCed by Jack Benny and Conrad Nagel. You'd think that would at least be memorable, but our intrepid hosts find that they're suffering from a bizarre shared amnesia when it comes to this movie. Are Suzan and David just suffering from early onset memory loss, or is this film truly that forgettable? Find out, on this week's Screen Test of Time! 

What do you get when you mash up a drawing room comedy, a spy caper, and a proto-biopic? Well, you get something of a mess, but at least a mostly entertaining one. Disraeli starts off the 1929/1930 nominees with a confused morass of a movie, but great fodder for David and Suzan to explore questions like "Should a paean to a guy who made Queen Victoria the Empress of India even exist?" "Are ladies men always inherently awful sexists?" "What really is a restoration comedy?" 

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. David thinks this is a sexist monstrosity, Suzan thinks it’s a subversive comment on the absurdity of men’s entitlement, but they both agree that the end of How I Met Your Mother was terrible. Just listen to the episode and it will all make sense. 

Ten movies in and we've finally found the origin of the Oscar bait flick! Which is not to shade All Quiet on the Western Front, which is great, but here's the origin of the Epic Horrors of War Film that will continue to dominate the nominees for, oh, ever. This week's episode is an exploration of German vs. American nihilism, WWI vs. WWII movies. Join us as David makes connections to some surprising later films this movie inspires and Suzan reveals her guaranteed personal cure for insomnia on this week's Screen Test of Time! 

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. The Divorcee is all glitter and very little gold, despite the last act Jane Eyre hail Mary. David quotes scripture and Suzan makes a plea for someone to put together a Tumblr so no one need watch this movie ever again. 

Both of your hosts are sniffling through head colds, but they persevere to bring you the final episode reviewing the 1929/1930 nominees! 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. Find out if this year the Academy continued its streak of picking the right movie! 

This week kicks off the nominees for 1930/1931 Oscars, a year that the Academy seems to wish it could forget. (Only 3 of the 5 nominees exist outside of a single copy in a vault at the UCLA film archives!) Our intrepid hosts almost lost their will to move forward with the project at all after this year's honorees, but they persevered starting with this week's movie (and fittingly unlucky episode 13), Cimarron, 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. A series of barely connected, over the top dramatic moments, it's just a smorgasbord of Oscar bait with no real plot that annoys Suzan and basically breaks David's brain. Hold on to your seats, everyone, cause the Screen Test of Time is going to get weird.

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. Impressive, definitely, but is it any good?

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. But does this befuddling blend of gothic horror, WWI movie, Dickensian intergenerational family drama, and light hearted romantic comedy ever really find its feet? And the more pertinent question: do our hosts recover from the genre switching whiplash? 

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! But does it deserve to be Best Picture? Find out if David and Suzan disagree with the Academy for the first time!