Man With A Movie List

Director: Orson Welles Year: 1942 Run-time: 1 hr 28 min - I'm not as taken by this one as many other critics, it seems. There's no doubt that it contains flashes of the brilliance of Citizen Kane , and the acting in many scenes is sublime. But the pacing is all over the place - almost certainly a consequence of the great swatch of material that was removed by the studio and will probably never be recovered - with rapid dialogue often overriding our ability to identify the characters' motivations and intent. There was potential for this to be a powerful tragedy, but it doesn't build to the level it needs to - again, because the studio replaced the ending. I'd love to know what Welles intended the film to look like, but we likely never will, and what's left just isn't quite compelling in my opinion. 

Director: Ernst Lubitsch Year: 1942 Run-time: 1 hr 39 min - This movie feels separate from any earlier or later genre in film. It's first and foremost a comedy, but in a harrowing setting pulled from an ongoing tragedy in another part of the world. The characters are Poles - including a prominent Jewish character - that speak with American accents and deal with relatable and often petty trifles pulled from any screwball comedy of the era, set in the emerging context of Nazi invasion. Lubitsch had the daring intent to humanize an urgent contemporary event in human history, and did so in a way that would be novel to his audiences, and a little uncomfortable to those of our time, given that there's no sense of actual Polish culture or heritage here. But our time has not been able to produce popular mainstream films that deal with international conflict - where are the great popular films about the Syrian crisis for example? It's not as daring as The Great Dictator , or as good...