Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Dorothy McGuire – Part 6: I WANT YOU (1951) and INVITATION (1952)

Our two Dorothy McGuire movies for this week are wildly different in tone: Samuel Goldwyn's I Want You (1951, directed by Mark Robson), about a family's reaction to the Korean War draft, and, for MGM, the Jamesian melodrama Invitation (1952, directed by Gottfried Reinhardt). Dave makes the case for I Want You as a complex leftist look at early Cold War America, and then we unpack the Jamesian tropes of Invitation, with its complicated flashback structure. And in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, we share our first experience of the extraordinarily intense films of Hungarian auteur Márta Mészáros, discussing Nine Months (1976) and The Two of Them (1977).

Time Codes:

0h 00m 45s:      I WANT YOU (1951) [dir. Mark Robson]

0h 37m 18s:      INVITATION (1952) [dir. Gottfried Reinhardt]

1h 07m 01s:      Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – Nine Months (1976) and The Two of Them (1977) by Marta Meszaros

 

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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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