Hot Date with Dan and Vicky

There were so many variables in bringing the nearly two hour Marx Brothers classic A Day At The Races to the screen -- translating tried and tested vaudevillian acts while maintaining a satisfying st…

Ernst Lubitsch left his native Germany in 1922 as an ambitious 30 year old looking to make his mark in American movies.  With the help of Hollywood royalty like Mary Pickford, he was soon embarking o…

Young actress Royalty Hightower had never acted before being cast in director Anna Rose Holmer's drama The Fits.  She was, however, an experienced dancer; a skill she then had to unlearn to play the …

1951's The Strange Door had the talents of Charles Laughton in the lead but Universal hung their hopes on Boris Karloff to bring audiences in despite Karloff's smaller supporting role.  His name and …

Re-imagined to the American South during the post war era, the film version of Oscar Hammerstein's Broadway musical Carmen Jones was revolutionary to audiences, particularly white audiences, who had …

From the fertile imagination of Terry Gilliam comes The Adventures of Baron Munchausen from 1989 but it wasn't without it's share of near catastrophes. A Ballooning budget, dangerous working situatio…

Robert Bresson, director of this week's Pickpocket and numerous films that helped define the French New Wave, was known to be a task master on set.  In his search for absolute separation of art from …

Director Walter Hill had his hands full on the set of his 1975 directorial debut Hard Times.  He had cast Charles Bronson in the lead role of Chaney, a boxer who says little but can knock a man out w…

Hot Date has reached episode 90 and that means hosts Dan and Vicky come up with another Top Ten movie list.  This time, the topic is psychological thrillers and it's scary how many great films your h…

Even before director George Sidney and stars Judy Garland, John Hodiak and Angela Lansbury finished shooting 1946's The Harvey Girls, it's signature song, On The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, wa…

When director Peter Medak (The Changeling, Romeo Is Bleeding) cast twins brothers Martin and Gary Kemp to play the infamous British gangster siblings Ronnie and Reggie Kray he had no idea that the Ke…

After the success of his 1958 film The Defiant Ones, which confronted issues of racial division, director Stanley Kramer continued on a path of making films that were socially relevant and examined t…

Director Dick Maas can be arguably credited for putting The Netherlands on the horror map with his 1983 film Der Lift.  The film, about a high rise plagued with strange elevator accidents and deaths,…

For episode 85 of Hot Date, Dan and Vicky take us to Scandinavia for the comedy Elling, starring Per Christian Ellefsen as the title character and Sven Nordin as his best frenemy Kjell.  Initially wa…

The plot of 1939's Lady of the Tropics strangely mirrored the life of it's star Hedy Lamarr.  In the film Lamarr is a woman of mixed race living in pre-war Saigon trying to flee the advances of an oi…

1991's Defending Your Life is the fourth film Albert Brooks' wrote, directed and starred in.  He would eventually serve in those capacities on a total of seven films, all bearing his distinctive gent…

To get an authentic pool hall feel for his second to last feature The Hustler (he would only make 1964's Lilith before passing away in 1966), director Robert Rossen shot in two actual pool halls in N…

A documentary film gets the Hot Date treatment for the first time in the show's history.  And not just any documentary.  Dan and Vicky take a look at director Barry Shils' chronicle of the NY drag ce…

Dan and Vicky have reached their 80th Hot Date episode and that means more top tens!  This time your hosts discuss their favorite on- screen pairings.  Those movie couples you love, love to hate, or …

Karel Reisz had never directed a feature before and was committed to capturing the gritty reality of living in working class Nottingham, England.  Not only did he shoot the film Saturday Night and Su…