In The Seats With...Alan K Rode and 'Doctor X' at the TCM Classic Film Festival

It's important to discover films before our time... On this episode we go to something that is near and dear our bosses heart; old movies. With the TCM Classic Film Festival kicking off online today until May 9th. It's running at two virtual venues at the TCM Network and the Classics Curated by TCM Hub over at HBO Max in the States. 'Doctor X' and the horror films of Michael Curtiz is helping kick off the fest in style. This 1932 recently restored version premiered recently on TCM. The new two-color Technicolor master was restored by UCLA Film and Television Archive and The Film Foundation in association with Warner Bros. Entertainment. In 'Doctor X' New York City reporter Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy) is doing a piece on a series of grisly, cannibalistic murders that have all been committed under a full moon. Police soon begin to suspect that the murderer works at the lab of Dr. Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill), a mysterious Long Island researcher who is doing an investigation of his own. Antsy for an inside story, Taylor breaks into the lab, where he meets and falls in love with Dr. Xavier's daughter Joan (Fay Wray). Academy Award—winning director Michael Curtiz (1886—1962) — whose best-known films include Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945) and White Christmas (1954) — was in many ways the anti-auteur. During his unprecedented twenty-seven year tenure at Warner Bros., he directed swashbuckling adventures, westerns, musicals, war epics, romances, historical dramas, horror films, tearjerkers, melodramas, comedies, and film noir masterpieces. The director's staggering output of 180 films surpasses that of the legendary John Ford and exceeds the combined total of films directed by George Cukor, Victor Fleming, and Howard Hawks. Classic cinema is Alan's DNA and a particular expert since he wrote a comprehensive biography on the career of Curtiz and serves as a producer and programmer in his own right on several festivals. In advance of the TCM Classic Film Festival we got to talk with Alan about 'Doctor X' why this was such a unique period in cinema history and why so many noted filmmakers have gotten to use horror as a proving ground for the work they are doing.