I love old movies — but I didn’t always! In fact, I needed many years of directed classwork to fall in love with them. But if you’re not in the mood to pause your life and take on significant graduate debt, THERE ARE STILL OPTIONS, and Margaret H. Willison and I are here to offer them. In this episode, we offer specific suggestions to listeners based on short lists of their (recent) film favs, talk about “aesthetic friction” and how to overcome it, strongly invite you to put your phone in the other room, and travel all over film history in a very earnest attempt to help you find your own entry point into the expansive mansion that is “old movies,” broadly defined.
Find out more about Margaret’s course on Mansfield Park here
If you want to learn A LOT more about Pre-Code Cinema, this book is my go-to (and very accessible)
A bunch of classic streaming services have challenged some of the arguments in this piece, but it’s a decent overview re: the disappearance of classic film from Netflix
If you want to go deep on screwballs and the comedy of remarriage
My Scandals of Classic Hollywood on Warren Beatty lives on
EVERY MOVIE MENTIONED AND WHERE TO FIND IT
(as best as Melody could figure out) (recs for checking the local library are implicit)
Vertigo (1958) - rent
Paper Moon (1973) - Paramount+
Badlands (1974) - rent
Tokyo Story (1953) - Max
An Autumn Afternoon (1962) - Max
Gosford Park (2001) - rent
What’s Up, Doc? (1972) - rent
Bringing Up Baby (1938) - rent
The Lady Eve (1941) - Criterion, rent
Sylvia Scarlett (1935) - rent
Now, Voyager (1942) - Tubi, TCM, rent
Sullivan’s Travels (1941) - rent
The Palm Beach Story (1942) - rent
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944 ) - rent
Shampoo (1975) - rent
To Be or Not To Be (1942) - Max, Criterion
Born Yesterday (1950) - rent
The Philadelphia Story (1940) - Tubi, rent
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) - Tubi, rent
North by Northwest (1959) - Criterion, Tubi, TCM, rent
Foreign Correspondent (1940) - Max, Criterion, Tubi, rent
Singin’ in the Rain (1952) - Max, rent
Magnolia (1999) - Paramount+, rent
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) - rent
Cabaret (1972) - Tubi, rent
New York, New York (1977) - not available for streaming :(
Broadcast News (1987) - Starz, rent
Desk Set (1957) - rent
The Conversation (1974) - Paramount+, Criterion, rent
Evil Under the Sun (1982) - Prime, rent
Double Indemnity (1944) - rent
The Third Man (1949) - rent
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) - rent
The Shop Around the Corner (1940) - rent
Holiday (1938) - rent
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Criterion, rent
The Women (1939) - rent
All About Eve (1950) - rent
Funny Face (1957) - rent
Barefoot in the Park (1967) - rent
Charade (1963) - Prime, rent
Anatomy of a Murder (1959) - rent
Rear Window (1954) - Criterion, rent
Dark Academia
How cookbooks get made
Van/Skoolie/RV Life
Spiritual care for non-religious people
Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything, it’s literally the name of the segment!
You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here