With a war going on, there’s not a lot of great stuff happening at the movies. Through propaganda in Russia and the US, we do get historical celebrations of famous leaders, epic in scope at least.
Cary Grant is pretty good in everything he does, and Frank Capra makes a couple interesting weirdo side characters to make the romcom watchable. But the material doesn’t fit the director; it’d be better suited for someone capable of a thriller/tragedy style, which Capra’s never had.
George Cukor’s thriller won Ingrid Bergman an Oscar. She plays a woman who marries Charles Boyer, a charming lovely man? Joseph Cotten also stars in this movie about manipulation and preying on the weak.
Vincente Minnelli musical that incorporates the songs into the plot. Judy Garland, consummate performer that she is, is excellent as the daughter of a man who might uproot the family to New York City. Though Garland has a boy next door she might be in love with, this movie is about her family, and the power a strong unit can create. And famous, famous songs about trolleys and Christmas.
Otto Preminger gets credit for directing this spicy thriller. Gene Tierney plays femme fatale Laura Hunt, who’s murdered at the beginning of the movie. Dana Andrews is the detective trying to figure out what happened to her, and whodunit? Standard thriller fare gets elevated by a great twisty story and Tierney’s enigmatic performance, as well as Clifton Webb’s ahole turn.
Howard Hawks took a long look at Casablanca, and was like, let’s run it back! Humphrey Bogart is playing the same character he did there, so you know, he’s awesome. But Hawks found a screen partner for him in the form of Lauren Bacall, who’d be so great with Bogart they’d team up multiple times after this feature, which drives the story’s plot and heat.
Sergei Eisenstein’s Russian propaganda is telling the life story of this famous monarch, played deliciously by Nikolai Cherkasov. Featuring epic battle sequences and fine tuned melodrama, the movie outlives its timely purpose for something artistically more timeless.
And on the British Prop side we have Laurence Olivier, making arguably his finest Shakespeare adaptation. Retelling the story of the young king who fought the French for Normandy, Olivier uses all the propaganda money to make sweeping tracking vistas of epic scope, lavish location shoots, and exciting battle sequences while maintaining the spirit of the bard’s story, weaving into and out of scenes in the Globe Theater then onto to the battlefront.
Billy Wilder has that acid tipped pen doesn’t he? His noir stands tall because of his writing, cynical but potent and observant in the noir genre. Also, when you have Fred MacMurray (the dupe), Barbara Stanwyck (the fatale) and Edward G. Robinson (the investigator), you know the acting will be as superb as Wilder’s writing, and his direction builds the tension even though we know where the movie is going.
