As we leave the 40s, we are presented with the promise of the decade to come: international prowess. Great Japanese and French filmmakers show their talents. In addition, we send off John Ford and John Wayne with spectacular films, letting their legacy influence other filmmakers in the future (though both will show up in later decades as you’ll see).
Jacques Tati channels his inner Chaplin, or Buster Keaton, for something silly and amusingly droll. Nothing really happens here other than a merry go round comes into town, but most of the goings on is around Tati’s cyclist, trying to deliver mail in silly fun ways.
Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin, in a great premise, get 24 hours of freedom from military duty in Manhattan, so, naturally, they find 3 dames Ann Miller, Betty Garrett and Vera-Ellen, and tour the town, singing along the way.
Good natured story from Tokyo Story’s Yasujiro Ozu. It’s about a middle class man who doesn’t want his daughter to become a spinster taking care of him, so he helps her find a passion and dream for herself. Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu are great as the well meaning father and daughter.
Giving us a preview of things to come is Akira Kurosawa, Takashi Shimura, and Toshiro Mifune. Mifune plays a cop who’s gun gets stolen, so he enlists the help of Shimura to help him retrieve, all the while both plunge deep into Japan’s seedy underworld, equally repulsed and tempted by what’s going on in the depths.
Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy have a lot of fun letting loose in this romcom. Husband and wife play dueling attorneys, defending either side of a murder case. The movie has fun with wordplay and pratfalls, with some sly commentary about double standards in the workplace and the justice system.
John Wayne and John Ford team up like usual for their 2nd film in the Cavalry Trilogy. Like all Ford pictures, it’s got rousing vistas and awesome shots of whites and Indians on horseback, fighting each other to the death. The shots wash over you as you stand in awe of Ford’s eye for a great shot.
Wayne pulls double duty in 1949, going to war in the Pacific. He gives the better performance here, as a rigid Marine Sergeant John Stryker, drawing the ire of his younger troops. But as you all guessed, that strict machine like training made them all ready for the horrors of warfare, which inside the movie has some real footage from WWII battles.
A tale as old as Machiavelli, told brilliantly by Robert Rossen. Broderick Crawford plays a Huey Long type of politician, using a wave of populism to ride into office. However, once there, we learn about what Machiavelli told us all along would happen in The Prince.
In a career of playing gangsters, James Cagney gives his best performance in this film. Cagney plays Arthur Cody Jarrett, a loose cannon leader of a gang that robs trains big enough that the FBI gets involved to try and stop him. Cagney’s Jarrett, deeper than a normal gangster usually gets studied is twisted and sinister even underneath the violence, thanks to his great performance. This movie builds nicely too, to an all timer of an ending.
Joseph Cotten plays a writer visiting his friend Harry Lime in Vienna, only to learn that his friend has since died. What follows is a twisty exciting thriller from Graham Greene, which features stunning use of shadow to scare everyone to death and a legendary movie character entrance.
