Shadow of a Doubt (1943, USA) – Nice uncle Charlie comes to visit his small-town relatives. He brings large wads of cash, jewelry with other people’s names on it, and a nihilistic philosophy of life. Watched it all.

Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943, USA) – Self-congratulatory musical about Hollywood actors. Watched: 10 minutes, then fast-forwarded through the rest to see if it’s also a patriotic war musical. Doesn’t seem to be, but one can never be too sure.

Destination Tokyo (1943, USA) – Whenever I see Cary Grant I expect him to crack a joke and offer a drink. Which makes it hard to take him seriously as a submarine captain. Watched: 11 minutes.

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943, UK) – Opens with a raven with a taste for blood. How cool is that? But the rest isn’t so impressive. Watched: 15 minutes.

Son of Dracula (1943, USA) – The 1943 idea of horror was to play ghostly music while a bat flies across the screen. Watched: 11 minutes.

Whistling in Brooklyn (1943, USA) – A serial killer story, the first in this marathon. I hate serial killer stories. Watched: 4 minutes.

Private SNAFU (1943-45, USA) – A series of educational cartoons for soldiers, made by Frank Capra, Dr. Seuss, Fritz Freleng, Chuck Jones – and Mel Blanc. Which means they’re also hilarious. Here’s my favorite, which explains that even if you are a super-awesome super-soldier with super-powers, you still maybe ought to read the field manual. “The Americans are on our side, you know.”

Ossessione (1943, Italy) – A hobo arrives at a café, and starts seducing the wife of the owner. He succeeds, and now there’s a fat, opera-loving husband to get rid off. Based on The Postman Always Rings Twice. Watched it all.

The More the Merrier (1943, USA) – The Odd Couple, wartime edition, with Jean Arthur as Jack Lemmon, Charles Coburn as Walter Matthau, and Washington D.C. as New York. Also starring Joel McCrea as Sir Destined-to-hook-up-with-Jean-Arthur. Not bad, but the farce gets a little too goofy. Watched: 34 minutes.

Our Enemy the Japanese (1943, USA) – It turns out that Japan isn’t awesome after all. They’re fanatical murderers, whose minds are completely alien to a Westerner. Watched it all.

Hangmen Also Die (1943, USA) – Reinhard Heydrich, a cartoonish Nazi villain, wants the Czechs to respect his authoritah. Watched: 6 minutes.

Phantom of the Opera (1943, USA) – A Romantically disfigured violinist spreads terror and music at the opera house. Not a great movie, but the music is good, and it’s not by Andrew Llllloyd Webber. Somewhat different from the original by Terry Pratchett. Watched it all. The opening credits say Fritz Leiber has a role, and throughout the movie I tried to guess who he was. Turns out he’s playing Franz Liszt as an old man, and that the Leiber in question is Leiber Sr., the actor, not his son Leiber Jr., the author. Makes sense.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, UK) – Follows the life of an English soldier, a veteran of the Boer war. As the decades pass, he grows more and more out of touch with his country, until, at the time of the Second World War, he’s seen as a stuffy remnant of the past. His old German friend explains why: He’s a gentleman, but “this isn’t a gentleman’s war”. There’s no room for fair play when you’re fighting for your existence. Bittersweet comedy that sees both sides: Britain has learned a lesson, and has become bolder and quicker on its feet, but it has also lost something. Watched it all.

Submarine Alert (1943, USA) – All expenses were spared: The Japanese voices are made by running the audio track backwards. Watched: 7 minutes.

Crazy House (1943, USA) – Olsen and Johnson wants to make a followup to Hellzapoppin, their nonsensical 1941 comedy. And that’s the plot of their followup, which is just as nonsensical, and pretty funny. The real star here is Cass Daley, pictured above. Watched it all.

Around the World (1943, USA) – A patriotic war musical. I hate patriotic war musicals. Watched: 6 minutes.

The Ox Bow Incident (1943, USA) – A real western, at last: A dark tale from the borderland between law and anarchy. A man is murdered, and a lynch mob is formed. It starts roaming around the countryside in the middle of the night, looking for someone to hang. Watched it all.

The Fallen Sparrow (1943, USA) – A veteran of the Spanish civil war tries to solve his friend’s murder. He meets a creepy Norwegian history professor whose stories about ancient torture techniques causes memories from his own torture in a Spanish prison to resurface, slowly driving him insane. Watched it all.

War of the Wildcats (1943, USA) – Ah, the good old days, when men were assholes. Watched: 11 minutes.

The Mad Ghoul (1943, USA) – A mad scientist has invented a method whereby you can make a person undead, and then, simply by transplanting a new heart into their body, make them alive again. God knows why. Watched: 12 minutes, then fast forwarded to see the ghoul, a drowsy student.

San Demetrio, London (1943, UK) – Cheerful sailors cross the Atlantic. Watched: 10 minutes.

The Heavenly Body (1943, USA) – William Powell is an uninteresting astronomer surrounded by stupid women and stupid black subordinates. Watched: 7 minutes.

Flesh and Fantasy (1943, USA) – Moderately spooky stories, told badly. Watched: 8 minutes.

Tender Comrade (1943, USA) – Makes coming home on leave to Ginger Rogers seem dull. Watched: 6 minutes.

The Cross of Lorraine (1943, USA) – French prisoners of war are sent to a Nazi labor camp, where they’re guarded by Peter Lorre. Watched: 23 minutes.

Hello Frisco, Hello (1943, USA) – The good thing about this musical is that it isn’t about the war. Watched: 6 minutes.

Gung Ho! (1943, USA) – We follow the 2nd Marine Raiders from training to their first combat on Makin Island. Their motivations for signing up are fairly unbowdlerized: One wants to impress a girl, another “just don’t like Japs”. When they’re transported by submarine, some of them panic, and the movie makes that seem okay, because submarines are scary. And when the fighting starts, it’s random and brutal. Watched it all. IMDB reviewers call it jingoistic propaganda, which is true but not relevant, and cliched, which is silly. This is a movie that defines what later becomes cliches. But it’s not realistic: The real battle of Makin Island was a near-failure, and I doubt that Japanese soldiers went into combat with an evil sneer on their face.

Mr Lucky (1943, USA) – This war is going too far. Now they’re drafting gangsters. Also, the gangster world is going too far. They’ve allowed themselves to be taken over by Cary Grant. Watched: 18 minutes.

Madame Curie (1943, USA) – “She was poor .. she was beautiful.” Science is hard, let’s look dramatically into the camera instead, while violins play in the background to underscore what an extremely Historical Person this is. Watched: 7 minutes.

The Outlaw (1943, USA) – Doc Holliday falls in love with Billy the Kid, which makes his former lover Pat Garrett jealous. I think. Watched: 14 minutes. Wikipedia says Howard Hughes invented a special bra to emphasize the breasts of the female lead, Jane Russell, so this movie swings both ways.

Yellow Canary (1943, UK) – An English woman makes everyone uncomfortable by being pro-Nazi, and possibly a traitor. She’s exiled to Canada(?!), and spies and eye-patch-wearing Nazis follow along on the trip. Best line, spoken by a rich old woman to her husband, while their boat is being boarded by Germans: “Wouldn’t it be nice to do something violent?” Watched it all.

Air Force (1943, USA) – Wholesome pilots set out for the Pacific. Watched: 8 minutes.

Thousands Cheer (1943, USA) – The patriotic war musical is a repulsive concept. Patriotic war movies can be good. So can musicals. But mix them together, and the result is quite demonic. Watched: 8 minutes, then fast-forwarded through the musical numbers, which were all spawned in the hell-pit of Satan.

The Man from Down Under (1943, USA) – An Australian soldier adopts two orphans after the Great War, because one of them is good at boxing. That seems like a unbelievable thing to do. Watched: 11 minutes.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943, USA) – I can’t figure out these old zombie movies, where the zombies are just reanimated corpses without a will of their own. This one aims for a classy feel, as if there’s a message here, possibly about slavery. Watched: 17 minutes.

Stage Door Canteen (1943, USA) – I have a horrible suspicion that those troops on the train are headed into a patriotic war musical. Dear God no! Watched: 6 minutes.

Mission to Moscow (1943, USA) – Contrary to what you have been told, Russia is nothing at all like brainwashed leader-worshipping Germany. German soldiers are buffoons, Soviet soldiers are exotic. German leaders are fanatics, Soviet leaders are kind old men with grandfather beards, honest men of integrity who want nothing but peace for the world. And the Moscow trials were fair! Based on the book by ambassador Joseph Davies, a Soviet apologist. Watched it all, because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Somebody ought to .. er, do something about these Communists infiltrating Hollywood.

No Time for Love (1943, USA) – Claudette Colbert is an educated woman with a promising career in photography. But what she really needs in her life is a macho blue-collar worker who knows what he wants and is not afraid to take it. Watched: 24 minutes.

It’s That Man Again (1943, UK) – I suspect this may be funny in a Spike Milligan sort of way if you’re able to follow along. It’s too quick for me. Watched: 4 minutes.

Background to Danger (1943, USA) – As the announcer breathlessly informs us, the fate of the war lies not in actual battles fought by actual soldiers but in silly spy games among diplomats in neutral Turkey. Watched: 6 minutes.

Corregidor (1943, USA) – Just dreadful, but it begins Dramatically on the Philippines on December 6 1941, so I guess that makes it all okay. Watched: 3 minutes.

Sahara (1943, USA) – The wounded tank alone in the desert is an interesting movie theme. This is the second to use it. The desert here becomes a microcosmos of the war, with individual soldiers from the US, England, France, Germany and Italy meeting and fighting their own small battle in the shadow of El Alamein. Watched it all.

So Proudly We Hail (1943, USA) – Judging from the titles, at least half of the movies I have lined up for 1943 are about the war. This time some army nurses have escaped the Japanese, and one of them is depressed about it. We go into flashback mode to learn why. I don’t care. Watched: 9 minutes.

His Butler’s Sister (1943, USA) – What the butler saw only 6 minutes of.

Sugata Sanshiro (1943, Japan) – The schools of jujutsu and judo fight it out, proving that Japan was awesome even when it wasn’t. Kurosawa’s first movie. Watched it all.

Spy Train (1943, USA) – Well how good do you expect a B-movie called Spy Train to be? Watched: 6 minutes.

The Silver Fleet (1943, USA) – The brave Dutch resistance resists bravely, etc. etc. Watched: 9 minutes.

Revenge of the Zombies (1943, USA) – Zombies sure were boring back when they were just enslaved corpses. Watched: 5 minutes, then fast forwarded to see the great zombie apocalypse, but instead of ending the world the zombies become good guys and turn on their master. I strongly object.