Man With A Movie List

Director: Preston Sturges Year: 1942 Run-time: 1 hr 28 min - Like The Lady Eve , this is another left field spin on the screwball comedy formula, with the story centering on the lead couple getting a divorce. Class plays a big role as always, but this time around both of the leads are lower class, with the range of characters they meet along the journey being all upper echelon. So far, Sturges' films have great, wily female leads (I think the screwball genre as a whole was a tremendous one for great early actresses), with male leads forced to play catch-up as much as they can. - The class struggle edge here is certainly pretty blunt, with the rich suitor being clueless but entirely well-meaning. We're actually led to feel pretty bad about how he's been duped (the film takes a "no harm, no foul" stance). If I have a complaint about this film (which I enjoyed all the way through), I do wish the film was willing to make fun of the millionaires a bit more.

Director: David Hand Year: 1942 Run-time: 1 hr 10 min - Bambi is the last of the original Disney feature run to be on the list. I like the film, but I admit it's a bit of an anomaly in this line-up. Only rarely is it very funny, it doesn't contain much animated whimsy of the previous films, and it doesn't really have a clear moral through-line. But it is a beautiful film, perhaps the most beautiful since Fantasia , with which it shares the most in common, and it's a heartbreaking film at times. - My wife likes the fact that the animals behave like animals in their broad strokes - thus there are no deer fathers (including Bambi himself), and the motivations are pretty immediate and short-term (all of the animals fall immediately in love in one of the film's laziest sequences). I don't mind the idea of that, but it creates a real clash with their anthromorphic design and dialogue that makes the film a bit unsettling, and as I've said above, there is no real mo...

 Director: Michael Curtiz Year: 1942 Run-time: 1 hr 42 min - This is perhaps the most beloved American film that I hadn't seen prior to going through the list. If I had seen it out of chronological context, I would have assumed that it hadn't been written at the height of the war that it was set during. To echo the opinions of Eco, it's hard not to wonder if our love for it isn't closely entwined with America's sense of these few years as the greatest in our history - even before D-Day we had a sense of our own destiny. - That said, the power of the film is in the depths of Ingrid Bergman's face, and that despite the excellent cast around her all playing their roles superbly, she carries the story.

Director: Hiroshi Shimizu Year: 1941 Run-time: 1 hr 15 min - Like The Masseurs And A Woman , this takes place in a mountain spa, and is centered on the characters' drive for escapism. From hindsight, this would seem to be the director's desire to escape the war - one of the characters is apparently a soldier (who is injured by the titular object and kept from returning), although it's barely mentioned. It probably isn't far to read too much historicity into this film. Like its predecessor, it's a short and light glimpse into a few lives meeting in this setting defined by transience. It's less than 80 minutes, but takes a glacial pace in which our thoughts will naturally wander. That's not a criticism - in a way, it helps us relate to the characters, whose thoughts are also returning to the "real world", no matter how much they may wish otherwise.

Director: Orson Welles Year: 1941 Run-time: 1 hr 59 min - What came to mind upon seeing Citizen Kane  for the third time is that its director wants us to stay a little detached. He wanted us to question everything about the film, from its time-jumping structure to its cinematography decisions. It's a film that tells us its plot ahead of time so that we can get the upper hand on it. The film's real subject is the idea of biography itself.  It's heady stuff, but ultimately, it's so well put together that none of this stops us from investing ourselves wholly, even on the third viewing. - The idea of Citizen Kane  as the very model of a medium achieving "maturity" is something that has been derided many times (usually by annoyed video game critics). Is this the moment where cinema broke through some important barrier. Of course not. But it is a damn good film, and it certainly holds up.

Director: Preston Sturges Year: 1941 Run-time: 1 hr 34 min - Sturges was one of the masters of the screwball, and in this early film of his, we already see an inversion of the classic roles. In this one, it's the blank-faced (but excellent) Henry Fonda who's the out-of-touch rich socialite, while Barbara Stanwyck is the fast-talking working-class go-getter (as a con woman, but still). I don't think Stanwyck is quite  as good as Hepburn was in Bringing up Baby, but she's close, and Sturges gives her some excellent lines. (In fact, Sturges was one of the first prominent director/screenwriters.)

Director: John Huston Year: 1941 Run-time: 1 hr 41 min - The Maltese Falcon  is a great film, a new high watermark for meticulous plotting in films. Although sometimes called the first film noir, the history of this list should disprove that moniker, nor would I even call it the best of the early noirs. But it's fun and engaging, even if the intricate yarn being spun has an ultimately pretty banal explanation. - Bogart is pretty great, and the energy he pulls off in every scene without losing his cool is pretty remarkable. But dang, is Peter Lorre's character great - I wish that he had more to do in this.

Director: Ben Sharpsteen Year: 1941 Run-time: 1 hr 4 min - This is an anomaly in Disney's early catalog (Fantasia excepted) for being a film in which plot is almost secondary. In fact, the plot doesn't do much to sell the film, but the high quality of the animation really makes it up for it. In fact, if it wasn't for the blatant racist elements (much more so than Pinocchio), this might have ranked up there with Fantasia as my favorite early Disney film. That said, those elements are pretty hard to ignore, considering they make up so much of the short run-time of the film.

Director: Michael Powell and others Year: 1940 Run-time: 1 hr 46 min - This was a pretty fun one, a Technicolor special effects spectacular similar in tone to Robin Hood .  Staying close to an Arabian Nights theme, it mostly sidesteps outright racism, although it's just as orientalist as its source material.  It's pretty fun to explore how they did most of the effects - Ebert claims there's almost no effect in Star Wars that wasn't seen (in less advanced form) here. - The other striking thing that almost all of the plot ingredients in Disney's Aladdin  would originate here, to such a degree that I'm surprised no lawsuit was involved.