Sinatra and Kelly. Even if this particular musical is ho hum, they’re not, solidifying the fact that these two would team up multiple times in the future. If you want to watch Gene Kelly dance with a mouse, this is your film…
A flimsier romcom than most, but helped by the Christmas setting. And Barbara Stanwyck, a fraud of a magazine housekeeping expert who tries to impress war hero Dennis Morgan with her housewife skills.
The amazing thing is Marcel Carne making this movie in the first place (France was, um, occupied at the time). It’s still a great film in spite of the circumstances, set during Parisian theater in the 1840s with that age old lesson: nice guys finish last.
Oscar Wilde’s great story brought to life by Albert Lewin. Hurd Hatfield plays Mr. Gray, a man who gets a self portrait, and wishes he stay as virile and young as the picture of himself. From there, the twisted fantasy comes alive, as the painting houses the cost of Gray’s pleasure seeking, as it grows viler and grosser by the day.
Billy Wilder never shies away from a touchy subject. Here he takes on alcoholism, with Ray Milland playing a novelist who can’t keep away from the bottle, despite the urging of his love Jane Wyman. It’s pretty straightforward for Wilder, but that’s the right move, as he shows the tragedy of the disease to great effect.
A movie that time has changed the meaning of, mostly for the better. At the time Joan Crawford was seen as a femme fatale, doing what she wanted, when she wanted. Today? She’s the tragic hero of the story, a self-made woman living life with agency but constantly beaten down by systemic, and crappy movie trope, oppression.
Normally David Lean is the epic guy, but this one, about half his normal runtime, is just as epic, emotionally at least. Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, both happily married to other people, meet randomly at a railway station cafe, and continue to meet there for short times every Thursday, falling in love, but knowing it cannot be this way permanently. It’s beautiful in its British ordinariness, and equally beautiful in its Shakespearean like tragically poetic tale.
Filmed in the contemporary WWII Rome, Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece is about Nazi occupation and the freedom fighters against them. It’s got that Italian “neorealist” feel with handheld camera action and documentary like shooting that makes you know what Rome was like at the time. On top of all that, the story is a complex, well constructed tale of Italians dealing with occupation by the Nazis, with a host of characters who might be more well constructed than the story.
