Man With A Movie List

Directors: William Hanna and Joseph Barbera Year: 1947 I'm sure it's no coincidence that music plays such a strong role in many of the animated films featured on the list. By this point, there's nothing especially novel about this Tom and Jerry  short by another great animation studio led by Hanna and Barbera, except that the execution is so spot-on. This is eight minutes of pure delight. 

Director: Roberto Rossellini Year: 1946 The greatest innovation in cinema around this period is the emergence of mainstream films that are anchored so specifically in contemporary life, that were deliberately not timeless. Rossellini went further than anyone else in this direction - Paisan  deliberately interweaves stock war footage with staged settings, real actors with non-professionals, to create something that deliberately skirts the line between fiction and documentary. Paisan  is also the first great bilingual film on the list, not only featuring English and Italian but many different dialects, making the film extremely difficult for a native Italian to understand. The performances are often extremely stilted, and there are glaring editing mistakes, but many of the stories are extremely compelling. 

Director: David Lean Year: 1946  - We're getting a few new classic directors entering the list this year (although both Lean and Ford and been working for a while by this point). Great Expectations  wouldn't seem to have much in common with Lawrence of Arabia  for a David Lean neophyte, but it is an excellent film. Lean seems to dial directly into the right level of melodrama for a Charles Dickens classic, and the film veers between Gothic horror and mannered period drama in just the right ways to make for a really fun movie, especially if like me you didn't know much about the source material. Look out for a young Alec Guiness (with ridiculous curled up hair). I was struck by many plot similarities between this and Les Miserables, which were published within a year of each other on both sides of the pond.  

Director: John Ford Year: 1946 - This film is perhaps the strongest example (at least in America) of a film where directorial vision determines the film much more than script or performances. On the surface, this is a bog-standard early Western - as this film and Destry Rides Again  would seem to reveal, before the genre took itself more seriously in the 50's the standard template was something close to self-parody. (Something similar seemed to happen with secret agent films in the early 60's.) This film is full of ridiculous and fun Western cliches. However, the long, languid takes, where characters are frequently displayed with their faces in complete darkness, uplifts the film into a ponderous and fascinating study of violence. It might be my favorite Western. It is dragged down by some unnecessary racism, although it's much less of an offender than Stagecoach  or The Searchers , which had been removed from the list for just that.

  The Killers  uses up every noir cliche that had developed by this time - the detective story with flashbacks from Laura , the insurance investigator from Double Indemnity, the seductive femme fatale from Gilda - but somehow manages to feel wholly original. I thought that I'd grow weary of noirs by this point, but they are getting better, and there's no doubt that it's a fun genre, if there's not always much going under the pristine surface. There's some tremendous acting, and I unabashedly love the opening scene with the titular killers - the only part that seems to have been actually adapted from the Hemingway short story (Ernest himself was nevertheless a fan) - but the ending doesn't really work. It's a bit easier to follow than The Big Sleep, but it has a few too many twists for what is ultimately a pretty straightforward story without any real morals. Still, I have to recommend it, and it would definitely be up there in my list of best noirs.

Director: Charles Vidor Year: 1946 Is there any other two-second shot as iconic as Rita Hayworth's introduction in this film? She certainly dominates any scene that she's in, but Glenn Ford also deserves a lot of credit, and I wish this film did a little more with the strange homoerotic love triangle that he forms with George McReady. The film has a strange and interesting tone until its bizarrely unearned happy ending. I still quite like the film - it's a noir in which the nebulous crimes committed are the least interesting aspect, and it's certainly very unique (with good music to boot, although I don't really need to hear "Put the Blame on Mame" twice).