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: 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.

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). 

Director: William Wyler Year: 1946 Out of the list films so far, this is the one that sounded most like "Oscar bait" (even though Oscar bait as a term wouldn't be coined until the early 80's).  The premise, with 3 returning servicemen each facing their own ordeals, certainly sounds melodramatic. Due to excellent direction and strong performances, it's superb. It's certainly well-attuned to the reality of the situation, with each character embodying a different aspect of Wyler's own experiences when he returned home - however, the film stays true to its unique characters that evolve and grow.  There are many scenes that feel like they were written to elicit our emotions, but in almost all cases, there is significantly more nuance in the direction. It's a historical artifact that has something to say about values are baked into the American experiment. In contrast to so many contemporary noirs, it tells a strong story with characters that feel true and r...

 Director: Frank Capra Year: 1946 - I don't have too much to add to what is probably one of the most over-analyzed films in history, but I can see that seen outside of its usual Christmas context, it's still a remarkably well-made film. There are a few films out there can survive being so hopelessly sentimental, but this is one of them, and that's a testament to just how well each scene works. If you're new to the film, then the slow build-up isn't going to mean much, but for old veterans each scene just works better and better. I still find it remarkable that everything the film is most well-known for (and most parodied for) happens in the last third of the film. But the enduring premise of a man who never got to the live he wanted but still mattered deeply to his community will always hit home for me. This film is just going to keep getting better.

Director: Howard Hawks Year: 1946 While  The Maltese Falcon cares deeply about its plot, which ends up pretty simple if very well-paced, The Big Sleep  revels in its complexity, is extremely difficult to follow, even if it ultimately cares much more about its characters than most "puzzle films". This film clearly had a big influence on  Inherent Vice. I'm not sure I love it - my wife got so confused she couldn't keep watching - but I think there's certainly a lot more to it than most of the noirs we've seen so far. Bacall is excellent, and Bogart is just perfect. I would certainly watch it again to see how it holds up now that I have a better idea of what's going on.

Director: John M. Stahl Year: 1945 - The first thing that struck me about this film is its stark beauty - it's really the first color film on the list to make good use of natural sets. The various wilderness settings (New Mexico, Maine) serve a function as well, highlighting the lead woman's "wildness", and later on, her increasing desperation to have her husband to herself. This film noir, more than most, highlights the sexism inherent in the genre, but for a moment early on, it's easy to be sympathetic towards her, and it's not to the film's credit that we abandon any sympathy for her by the end of the film.

Director: Michael Curtiz Year: 1945 - Putting aside from a moment the context surrounding this film, and Crawford's own (possible) parenting methods, I thought Mildred Pierce  was a solid and well-acted drama that was let down by its potboiler twists. The awful, greedy daughter was too exaggerated and out of the realm of possibility. In a better movie, the character of Mildred Pierce is such a cool, strong female role, but it's let down by the movie she's in. Curtiz' directing does the film quite a few favors, and it has the excellent pacing that we're starting to expect from Hollywood in its fascination with noir, but this one veers too far from verisimilitude to be one of the best.

Director: Otto Preminger Year: 1944 - Laura  continues some of the noir trends of the era, especially with its brick-wall male lead who calls women "dames", but it's probably more worthwhile for being the first fun mystery film on the list. None of the suspects have an ounce of subtlety, but the acting is strong, and it's hard not to like Dana Andrews as the gruff detective who can't stop playing his little baseball marble game. Clare and I had a lot of fun watching this, and it did keep us guessing.

Director: Billy Wilder Year: 1944 - This is the film that cemented the American noir tradition. Unlike the French films that came before it, American noirs seem a little de-fanged. They have great atmosphere, excellent acting (although none of the American leads, even Bogart, are in the same lead as Jean Gabin in my opinion), and exquisite pacing, but so far they're a bit colder and with less pathos. Double Indemnity  is a fun film, and Barbara Stanwyck knows how to underplay her character in the right ways. It's comfort food, despite the sexism baked in to the genre.

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Year: 1943 Run-time: 2 hr 43 min This is a pretty fascinating film that takes an unpredictable turn out the front gate - it takes an unflattering comic book caricature of a pompous English general and spends two hours humanizing him, in the meantime philosophizing about what it will take to win the war. As Patton Oswalt said while praising the film, it's as if someone were to adapt Family Circus into The Ice Storm . There are many unflattering aspects of being British on display here - not the least of which is the colonialism which is unfortunately only indirectly hinted at - but whatever your final verdict on the message of the film, it's a powerful one that deserves to be watched, especially in these uncertain times.

Director: Jacques Torneur Year: 1943 Run-time: 1 hr 9 min - If I were a snarky Youtube reviewer, I would subtitle this movie " Jane Eyre , with added sexism and racism". And there is some truth to that - the "wife in the attic" becomes the titular zombie, but her fate is largely due to her own desires to run away. Also, although Torneur takes a more honest look at the effects of colonialism and slavery than any contemporary film, the needs of the schlock-horror setup means that, yes, the powers of voodoo are actually real. Ultimately, this was a fascinating film, but a deeply flawed one. Torneur has a wide oeuvre, though, so I have rising hopes for the others of his films on the 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.

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.