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...

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.