This year is kind of a miracle. There’s not a wide list of great films in the year, barely 10 actually. However, inside of those 10? One of the earliest documentaries ever filmed, a great sports movie, a right of passage for children everywhere, and maybe the greatest love story ever filmed.
A Bette Davis melodrama. She stars as a woman pushed to a nervous breakdown. In recovery, she falls for a man who can’t love her back because he’s married. It’s standard forbidden love stuff, but Davis and Paul Henreid make it better than it should be.
The thralls of passion. No one knows what they’re capable of until they hit that point. This movie is an early boundary pusher, about a woman who believes she’s cursed to become a feline fatale when triggered. It’s weird, sometimes scary, but always interesting. Plus, you’ll never take a late night swim in a pool ever again.
Tracy and Hepburn. Need I say more? George Stevens directs the two greats in this lovely romcom about a sports journalist (Spencer Tracy) and a political journalist (Katharine Hepburn) who engage in a war of words in public, while engaging in romance in private. Zing!
James Cagney puts down the booze and guns to play the happy side of America: composer George M. Cohan in this half biopic half propaganda machine. Shades of William Shatner fill Cagney’s signing in this run of the mill biopic; however, the music is all time legendary full blown patriotism, with hits like the title, Grand Old Flag, etc.
War propaganda for the win. The US navy invited John Ford, legendary director, to come in and shoot some footage of their efforts. Ford happened to be there when the Battle of Midway was going on, capturing all sorts of real life battle sequences between the Japanese and American fleets. Those 18 minutes are filled with real bombs, real patriotism, and real heroes.
It’s gotta be hard to follow up one of the best movies of all time, but the great Orson Welles pulls it off here, in spite of studio intervention. Dolores Costello is the Amberson heir, falling in love with Joseph Cotten. However, society pressure forces them apart, forcing Dolores to marry another man, and have a son, Tim Holt, who despises Cotten for his insolence toward his mother. All of this takes place in the backdrop of the automobile revolution, creating a subtle symbolic parallel between past and progress.
Garry Cooper is excellent playing Lou Gehrig, first baseman for the New York Yankees. Gehrig was just like any of us, a dreamer of a boy who wanted to play baseball. He falls in love with Theresa Wright (having a great war time movie run!), and, for those of you who know disease names, meets a tragic end.
While WWII was making adults cry, Bambi was doing so to kids everywhere. A brilliant study of nature, Bambi tells the story of a fawn destined to grow into a stag, learning all the lessons every person has to learn: love, danger, tragedy, bravery, etc.
The Best Picture winner and Oscar big shot is no slouch in its own right. Greer Garson plays the matriarch of a British family during the dark years of WWII, when the Germans were bombing the UK constantly. Garson rises to her patriotic duty, keeping the family together, inspiring people to fight, and even taking on a German paratrooper or 2. The movie’s one of the best love letters to the home front in wartime, those brave normal families rising to the occasion to help their country win the war, sometimes at great personal cost.
Michael Curtiz’s masterpiece is one of the greatest movies ever made, and arguably cinema’s greatest love story. During WWII in Northern Africa, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) walks into a cafe looking for safe passage for her and her husband Victor (Paul Henreid) to America. That cafe happens to be owned by Sam (Humphrey Bogart) a jaded former freedom fighter who shares a past with Ilsa. It’s beautiful, it’s brilliantly written (at least 7 all timer quotes), and it’s heart breakingly poetic.
