Another Kind Of Distance: A Time Travel, Twin Peaks, Film, Doom Patrol And Nostalgia Podcast

We start off 1939 with a bang with two Paramount movies that gave us a lot to discuss. First, Cafe Society (directed by Edward H. Griffith), the first of several pairings of Fred MacMurray with early Hitchcock blonde Madeleine Carroll, with an original screenplay by future Columbia Pictures producer Virginia Van Upp, takes the screwball (for the most part) out of class-conscious 30s romantic comedy, replacing it with a high degree of sexual tension and, especially, an unusual focus on the moral growth of the heroine. We discuss the textual evidence of female auteurship and note certain similarities with Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party (discussed in our Clara Bow series). Next, we explain why Frank Borzage's Disputed Passage, based on the Lloyd C. Douglas novel, is really a superhero movie, in what sense it is and isn't a soap opera, and how it's not about the proper way to be a doctor but rather about the proper way to lead the religious life. And in our returning (again) Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segmen