Damn Good Movie Memories

Damn Good Movie Memories is a one-host, one-movie-a-week show with a format you can set your watch by. Brian Davis introduces the title, then the essentials: studio, release date, running time, black and white or colour, rating, sometimes budget and box office. The numbers come first because they anchor everything after. Leonard Maltin's classic movie guide supplies a star rating and a short capsule, quoted straight. Then the episode opens up. Most of the running time goes to how the film got made, who was in it, and what the industry looked like at the moment it arrived. The 1949 Warner Brothers picture White Heat is treated as the natural progression from The Public Enemy in 1931, with Cody Jarrett described as an older Tom Powers carrying the same psychosis. That episode also covers James Cagney reaching the point of stardom where he could choose his own roles, inside a studio system compared to an athlete locked to one team. The Stranger, from RKO in 1946, becomes an entry point into Orson Welles, one of the few Welles films that actually made money. Davis notes he came to Welles as a kid through old-time radio, The Shadow and War of the Worlds, well before the films. Citizen Kane gets flagged as a future episode, along with the argument that a monumental debut at twenty-six shaped the rest of a career that never fully recovered. Personal collecting history threads through the show. Box sets bought at Costco in the early 2000s, cheaper than Best Buy or Tower Records, are where a lot of the gangster titles came from. The selection is not confined to one era or genre. Disney's Peter Pan from 1953 sits next to Robert Redford in The Natural, an Eve Arden comedy from 1956, and The Expendables 3. Episodes often open with the original trailer or clips, so the film speaks first. Then the host steps in and starts explaining. The tone is unhurried and unpretentious, closer to a friend who owns the box set than a critic filing copy. Hundreds of episodes deep, the archive works like a browsable shelf. Listeners are pointed toward Podbean, Facebook and a limited run of episodes on YouTube. The stated purpose is plain and repeated at the top of every episode: something to fill a long commute and a boring workday.