The Hairy Ape (1944, USA) – Two egos collide on a steamboat: A spoiled, rich girl and a grunt from the engine room. This is an odd movie in many ways, some good and some bad. The best way to watch it is as a non-fantasy version of King Kong. Watched it all.

Cobra Woman (1944, USA) – Some guy goes to Cobra Island, where the cobra people live, to find his cobra woman, who has been kidnapped by her evil cobra twin. In glorious cobra color. Watched: 18 minutes.

Since You Went Away (1944, USA) – Claudette Colbert in a Serious Role, further proof of the evils of war. And who decided that 3 hour movies needed overtures? Watched: 12 minutes.

Pin Up Girl (1944, USA) – Betty Grable sings and dances, and there’s a sort of plot here too. Light and fun. Watched it all.

The Conspirators (1944, USA) – Spy vs Spy in Lisbon. This sort of movie works better with Cold War communists. Watched: 23 minutes.

Buffalo Bill (1944, USA) – Joel McCrea is a simple man out of the West who sympathizes with Indians and feels bad about all those buffalos he helps slaughter. Watched: 49 minutes, which is the time it took for McCrea’s unceasing earnestness to grind me down.

Phantom Lady (1944, USA) – A man’s wife is murdered while he’s out with an inconvenient alibi. I feel a hunt for the real killer coming on. Watched: 11 minutes.

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944, USA) – Betty Hutton gets drunk, married and pregnant with a soldier – and wakes up not remembering who with. This being a Preston Sturges movie, it’s all quite cheerful and noisy. Favorite line: “This is the greatest thing to happen to our state since we stole it from the Indians!” Watched it all. Contains an early version of the Hitler YouTube meme.

Summer Storm (1944, USA) – The old tsarist aristocracy was silly and decadent and out of touch with the people. Watched: 27 minutes.

Till We Meet Again (1944, USA) – Nazi schweinhunds bother French nuns. Watched: 9 minutes.

Know Your Ally: Britain (1944, USA) – Why Americans should trust the British. “There’s nothing wrong with Britain that couldn’t be cured with a correspondence course in showmanship.” What I found most interesting were a couple of map details: Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain, Vichy France is not ruled by the Nazis, and the British Empire is quite small and insignificant, hardly any evil empire at all. Watched it all. First in a series – I wonder how they presented the Soviet Union.

Follow the Boys (1944, USA) – Vaudeville stars pat themselves on their backs over how bloody patriotic they are. Watched: 8 minutes.

The Fighting Lady (1944, USA) – Life on the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, with battle footage from the Pacific. It’s odd to see World War II actually being fought. Watched it all.

Dark Waters (1944, USA) – A traumatized shipwreck survivor moves in with her relatives, whose insensitive behavior, bordering on the sadistic, drives her towards a nervous breakdown. Probably the scariest movie in the marathon so far, (admittedly with little competition). Everyday events are made to seem evil, without apparent reason. Watched it all.

The Keys of the Kingdom (1944, USA) – Gregory Peck has had a suspiciously tragic life: His father was beaten to death for being a Catholic, and his mother drowned, both on the same day. Watched: 11 minutes.

The Princess and the Pirate (1944, USA) – Bob Hope is a humorous humor person on the Seven Seas. Watched: 9 minutes.

Hets (1944, Sweden) – A latin teacher makes life hell for his students, but at least they have their adult life to look forward to. He must continue to live in the dark world he’s created for himself, alone, forever. Watched it all. Written, but not directed, by Ingmar Bergman, his first.

Mr. Skeffington (1944, USA) – Bette Davis trying to look dumb and pretty is just creepy. Watched: 18 minutes.

A Canterbury Tale (1944, UK) – Cheeky city youngsters get in touch with their cultural roots in the countryside. I love the attitude here, cheerful and solemn. Favorite line: “We get a much better view of the cathedral now”, said by a woman in a bombed out area of Canterbury. Watched it all.

Christmas Holiday (1944, USA) – Heartbroken lieutenant ends up in brothel, finds love! Watched: 19 minutes.

Jane Eyre (1944, USA) – A series of unfortunate events. It’s all quite ridiculous, but I love the style: Almost a horror movie, set in an alternate England of fog, shadows and sadists. I haven’t read the novel, is it the same or meant to be taken seriously? Watched it all.

The Suspect (1944, USA) – Kind middle-aged Charles Laughton gets a lover and murders his wife. I can understand why. Watched: 16 minutes. In one scene, (this is set in 1902), his girlfriend walks into a London tobacco store. The shopkeeper says, “we don’t sell cigarettes to women”, and she says, “no, of course not.” What?!

Jungle Woman (1944, USA) – Animals turned into people. People turned into animals. Watched: 13 minutes.

The Canterville Ghost (1944, USA) – American soldiers ain’t afraid of no ghosts, but one of them is afraid of battle, and freezes when he’s supposed to shoot at Germans. It takes the help of a six year old girl and the Canterville ghost to teach him bravery. Watched it all. (Btw, the “well-known fact” that most WWII soldiers never fired at the enemy is probably untrue.)

It Happened Tomorrow (1944, USA) – A journalist gets hold of tomorrow’s newspaper. Nobody believes him, and no wonder, when he’s so annoying about it. Watched: 24 minutes.

Frenchman’s Creek (1944, USA) – Joan Fontaine, a 17th century lady, leaves her fool of a husband to seek quiet at the coast, where she is kidnapped by Romantic Pirates. Bosom-heaving and sword-fights follow. Watched: 24 minutes.

Ministry of Fear (1944, USA) – Fritz Lang imitates Hitchcock. It’s all there: The regular guy running away across the country, suspected of a crime he didn’t commit. The sinister spy ring with tentacles into all the best circles. Also the sense that it would all have been simpler if he’d just come clean with the police from the start. But what would be the fun of that? Watched it all.

Cry of the Werewolf (1944, USA) – Begins with a werewolf princess living in hiding among gypsies, (yay!), but then there’s the same old story where a couple of normal people struggle with how to fit the strange things they’ve experienced into their boring rational worldviews. Yes yes, werewolves and vampires and voodoo rituals are real, now get on with the movie. Watched: 17 minutes.

On Approval (1944, UK) – Two aristocrats and their friends move out onto an island for a month to see if they could stand being married to each other. Watched it all. I love how the introduction tries to show the contrast between the modern 40′s and the naughty 90′s.

Bathing Beauty (1944, USA) – Apparently an excuse to show off beautiful swimsuit models in Technicolor. Unfortunately I hate the music. Watched: 8 minutes, then fast forwarded to see if there was any good music at all. There was, and also a man in a tutu, and a message at the end about how this movie will be shown to soldiers overseas, which I think they appreciated.

Some pictures from Victory Through Air Power, the 1943 Disney movie I mentioned earlier, a crazy stunt pulled by Walt Disney to change the Allied war strategy.

Victory Through Air Power (1943, USA) – Not propaganda as such, but an argument made by Disney and an ex-Russian pilot, aimed in part at the Allied governments, about how air power should be used to win the war. It’s informative, awe-inducing, and quirky in that Disney way. Opens with a history of flight, and ends with scenes of the fiery hell Allied bombers will rain on Japan’s industrial areas once they learn how to overcome the great distances. Can you believe the magnificent arrogance of Walt Disney, to use his own army of animators to convince Roosevelt of some idea he’s just picked up from a book? Unbelievable. Fantastic. Watched it all.

The White Cliffs of Dover (1944, USA) – An American nurse waits for casualties to arrive from the front, and goes into flashback mode to tell us why she loves America’s dear cousins, the English. Watched: 13 minutes.

The Lodger (1944, USA) – I don’t see how Jack the Ripper could have escaped the police all that time if he’d seemed so shifty and shadowy as this lodger does. Watched: 12 minutes.

Double Exposure (1944, USA) – A magazine where photographers fake their pictures and the owner is a health freak hires a Woman Photographer, causing shock and confusion. I’m not sure what to make of the intro text: “New York – Where half the girls are working girls .. and the other half are working men.” What? Watched: 13 minutes.

Le Corbeau (1943, France) – An anonymous letter writer spreads dark accusations in a small town. The town is so full of depraved people that practically everyone could be the culprit, or at least are so unlikeable that you don’t mind them being falsely accused of it. Watched it all.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943, USA) – By the undead eyebrows of Bela Lugosi, how many are there of these? Watched: 10 minutes.

Watch on the Rhine (1943, USA) – European exiles from both sides meet in the US. Pretty dull considering the screenplay is written by Dashiell Hammett. Watched: 32 minutes.

Lady of Burlesque (1943, USA) – Life at a burlesque theatre, with relatively little clothes for a ’43 movie, and a good sense of fun, including a fistfight between a room full of dancing girls and cops. Watched: 24 minutes.

Stormy Weather (1943, USA) – Jazz musical with an all-black cast. Is that progress or segregation? Watched the musical numbers, skipped everything between. One singer looked and sounded oddly familiar: Turns out he’s Cab Calloway, who I remembered from The Blues Brothers, 37 years later.

The Mysterious Doctor (1943, USA) – This isn’t The Doctor at all, just some medical doctor who wanders by accident into one of those isolated, evil villages England is so full of. Watched: 7 minutes.

Bataan (1943, USA) – Soldiers hold a bridge in the Philippines. Big explosions and men staring somberly out into the jungle follows. Watched: 28 minutes.

Old Acquaintance (1943, USA) – Bette Davis writes thoughtful books that critics love but readers don’t. Miriam Hopkins writes romantic trash that sells well. They’re the greatest of friends, but you just know that a Bette Davis movie is going to turn out bitter, and so it does. Watched it all. Based on a play by John Van Druten, who apparently saw nothing odd in writing a play about a critically acclaimed playwright who happens to be a wonderful person, and her stupid friend who makes tons of money.

Ladies’ Day (1943, USA) – Meet a team of baseball players and their loud, nasally voiced dames. Watched: 14 minutes.

Ghost on the Loose (1943, USA) – The East Side Kids and Bela Lugosi have certainly fallen far since the 30′s. Watched: 4 minutes.

Millions Like Us (1943, UK) – An ordinary family in wartime London. Perhaps a little too ordinary. Watched: 19 minutes.

The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (1943, USA) – Life in Nazi Austria, as imagined by someone who has vaguely heard about it in the news. Watched: 6 minutes, then fast forwarded to see the strange death, in which a Mel Brooks lookalike dressed as a Hitler double is shot.

Corvette K-225 (1943, USA) – Sailors on the Atlantic etc. No chance of seeing car chases, the Corvette in question is a ship. Watched: 5 minutes.

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943, USA) – Spy infiltrates France, after a miraculous escape from the laws of bullet physics. Watched: 6 minutes.