To the Shores of Tripoli (1942, USA) – This is neither one of those military training stories where the likeable rebel successfully undermines authority, nor one of those where the immature punk learns to be a man. John Payne stays unlikeable right until the end, where he drops out of the Marine Corps, then decides to rejoin anyway because of Pearl Harbor. Curious. Perhaps the message is that even the worst people are marching to war, so what’s your excuse? Watched it all, and it’s all worth it for this WTF-moment:

In Old California (1942, USA) – Cheerful, clever Bostonian John Wayne arrives in Sacramento, where he challenges the local king, a cross between Elmer Fudd and Frank Burns. The ladies start fighting over him, and the usual showdown approaches. Watched: 39 minutes.

Larceny, Inc. (1942, USA) – Yet another Edward G. Robinson gangster movie. I’m beginning to hate that guy. Watched: 8 minutes.

Pittsburgh (1942, USA) – John Wayne, Randolph Scott and Marlene Dietrich display entrepeneurial spirit in a coal town. Watched: 12 minutes.

The Undying Monster (1942, USA) – The old family Monster threatens the brother and sister in the spooky mansion. Watched: 16 minutes, then fast forwarded to the end, to see the monster, a bewildered werewolf.

The First of the Few (1942, UK) – In a flashback from the time of the Blitz, we learn the story of R. J. Mitchell, the man who designed the Spitfire. It’s the traditional story of genius overcoming opposition. Watched: 45 minutes.

To Be or Not to Be (1942, USA) – Ah, the Allies. To make a comedy about life in Warszaw under Nazi occupation. That’s brilliant, and so is this movie, a farce with your typical duplicate identities, wronged husbands and quick wits. And it also happens to be a good war drama. Favorite line, said by a Nazi about a Polish actor: “What he did to Shakespeare, we’re now doing to Poland.” Watched it all.

For Me and My Gal (1942, USA) – Nah, my musical quota is full at the moment, even for an early Gene Kelly. Watched: 8 minutes.

Went the Day Well (1942, UK) – A group of soldiers arrive in an English village, but they’re all Nazi SPIES! I like how they’re discovered: They’ve clearly spent years in training to learn dialects and cultural nuances, but they way they cross their 7′s arouses suspicion. The message: Be suspicious. Take the initiative. Above all, be outrageously, obsessively, British. And when it comes down to it, any citizen should be prepared to wield an axe, or die on a bayonet. Watched it all.

Now, Voyager (1942, USA) – Bette Davis goes through a late rebellion against her tyrannical mother. It’s interesting how a cigarette becomes the symbol of her independence. The way that she finds to happiness would not hold up today, because it involves simply becoming normal, hosting dinners for the Boston aristocracy and wearing pretty clothes. I don’t buy it. But I buy her initial unhappiness. Watched it all.

Holiday Inn (1942, USA) – Bing Crosby, a down to earth singer, competes for girls with a sleazier-than-usual Fred Astaire. This is the movie Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas for. It also gave the name to a dull hotel chain I stayed at once. I have a quota for musicals, I find. Right now it’s been a while, so it was exactly the right time to watch one. Watched it all. Favorite scene:

Sexlingar (1942, Sweden) – A bad Swedish comedy. Watched: 7 minutes.

Street of Chance (1942, USA) – Another goddamn amnesia movie, and unlike Random Harvest this one isn’t even any good. Watched: 6 minutes.

Wake Island (1942, USA) – American soldiers hold out on Wake Island, for a while. Not a good movie, but the war’s still too fresh for me to be a critical war movie viewer. I’m fascinated by how laid back this movie is, not too different from other Hollywood dramas of the time. Serious, a bit sentimental, but friendly. At what point did movies about World War 2 become pompous? During the war or after? I can’t wait to find out. Watched it all.

Carousel (1942, USA) – They made widescreen movies in 1942?! No, they didn’t. This one’s been mislabeled at my Mysterious Source of Old Movies. It was actually made in 1956. That explains the frequent use of the word “slut”.. And the widescreen. Still, it was a most interesting experiment, to believe for just a few minutes that something impossible might be true.

Kampf um Norwegen – Feldzug 1940 (1942, Germany) – Wow. The battle of Norway, 1940. This is amazing. The movie was never shown, possibly because there are scenes with German casualties and graves. It was thought lost, but was rediscovered in 2005. Watched it all. See stills from the movie here.

Keeper of the Flame (1942, USA) – A great American war hero has died. Worshipped as the embodiment of Americanism, his stirring speeches inspired total devotion from his nation-wide organization of followers. Sound familiar? Never let it be said that Old Hollywood could not be cynical of national heroes. I like these earnest parables about homebred fascism, (see also Meet John Doe and Saboteur), even when they’re not quite subtle. Watched it all.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, USA) – A rich girl marries the wrong guy, and gets a tyrant of a son. Meanwhile the automobile is being invented. Decades pass. Watched it all. Succeeds on style, thanks to Orson Welles, but fails otherwise, also thanks to Orson Welles.

Random Harvest (1942, USA) – A man wakes up on a World War I battlefield without memories, and tries to create a new life. Watched it all, but it becomes worse after the beginning. The plot is full of implausible amnesia cliches, and goes on and on and on. Amnesia works better as farce, as in I Love You Again.

I came across this in my 40′s movies marathon: Kampf um Norwegen, a lost Nazi documentary of the invasion of Norway that was rediscovered in 2005. The video above is full-length, but without subtitles.

Whenever I watch movies I have a finger on the screenshot-button, (improvised with a wireless gamepad), looking for interesting shots. Sometimes I end up with hundreds. Here are some stills from Kampf um Norwegen.

Why Norway had to be conquered – to avoid a British invasion of Germany through Scandinavia:

Long distances:

Oslo:

Kristiansand:

Narvik:

Norwegian prisoners:

Railway to Bergen:

Fighting their way north:

Lillehammer:

Namsos:

“There is peace in South and Central Norway!”

Narvik:

Mo i Rana / the Arctic Circle:

Reinforcements for Narvik:

Victory:

Thunder Birds (1942, USA) – Semi-educational movie about life at a flight school, with a thin layer of story on top. Watched it all, but I’ll probably raise my standards for war movies when I’ve watched some more of them.

Pride of the Yankees (1942, USA) – A heroic sports movie about Lou Gehrig, who plays something called baseball. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in an ironic twist, he ends up dying from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Watched: 7 minutes.

Journey into Fear (1943, USA) – Stupid war intrigues in Istanbul. Strangely made, but not interesting, except for the opening scene, where a man gets dressed while a broken record plays in the background. Watched: 14 minutes. IMDB reviewers praise it somewhat, but their logic is inverted: Movies don’t become great just because they may have been touched by Orson Welles at some point.

Saludos Amigos (1942, USA) – Disney being experimental again. A team of artists go to South America for inspiration, and return with a mix of film and cartoons. I love this old Disney stuff, even the non-classics are memorable. Watched it all.

Arabian Nights (1942, USA) – A poor echo of The Thief of Baghdad. Watched: 7 minutes.

Hitler – Dead or Alive (1942, USA) – A rich American hires three gangsters to go and assasinate Adolf Hitler. Interesting idea, great title, dreadful movie. Someone should remake this. Watched: 17 minutes.

I came across this in my 40′s movies marathon. It’s a 1942 short film that teaches American farmers how to grow hemp, to help the war effort. There are so many things right about this: Getting a contemporary closeup view of a single cog in the war machine of World War 2. The nerdy pleasure of seeing every stage of the process from plant to rope. The machines – oh, the beautiful machines. It always thrills me to see what machines can do without computer technology.

And then there’s this brief image:

Johnny Eager (1942, USA) – Robert Taylor is a gangster on parole, who pretends to be a taxi driver while running his gang in secret. He gets involved with a sociology student who has a thing for bad boys. The gangster movie looked dead there for a while, but this is something new and interesting. The conflict here isn’t between gangsters and the law, but between cynicism and compassion. Watched it all.

Babes on Broadway (1941, USA) – Why do musicals have to be self-refential? When it works it works, but when it doesn’t you’re left wondering why you’re supposed to care about these eager youths who want to “make it big on Broadway”. Go make it big in some other business. Watched: 13 minutes.

Saboteur (1942, USA) – A man is wrongly accused of a crime, escapes, runs all across America, unravels a conspiracy, then confronts the bad guy on top of a national monument. This time the bad guys are American fascists, but they might as well be anarchists. Favourite scene: Robert Cummings trying to convince guests at a party that their hostess is a traitor. Watched it all. IMDB reviewers say this is a “lesser” Hitchcock, a snobbish way of putting it.

The Talk of the Town (1942, USA) – Cary Grant has been innocently convicted of arson, but escapes and seeks help from a friend. There’s a good serious movie in here somewhere, but it’s hidden beneath a lot annoying goofiness that makes me hate every single major character. Watched: 35 minutes.

Meet John Doe (1941, USA) – Journalist Barbara Stanwyck invents John Doe, a man who plans to kill himself as a protest against the state of civilization. She hires Gary Cooper to play the part, and, this being a Frank Capra movie, Cooper’s speeches accidentally create a mass movement based on being nice to your neigbours. Watched it all.

Fiesta (1941, USA) – Fake Techni!Color! Mexicans, singing and dancing. Watched: 4 minutes.

Texas (1941, USA) – Two mischievous gunslingers walk in and out of sticky situations, eventually landing on different sides of the law in a cattle conflict. Contains the funniest boxing scene I’ve seen. Watched it all.

Man Made Monster (1941, USA) – Behold the power of electrical radioactivity! With this mysterious substance I shall create a race of superior men! “Black magic”, they called it. “Meddling with the forces of Creation” – bah! Cowards, my colleagues are all cowards! Watched: 25 minutes.

The Reluctant Dragon (1941, USA) – Robert Benchley gets a tour of the Disney studio, in this part self-promoting documentary, part comedy, and part cartoon. This was back when Disney was the greatest creative force in movies. Being the Disney version of itself, it’s way too idyllic. The real Disney Studio was about to enter a major strike at this time. But I just love it. Watched it all.

The Bad Man of Deadwood (1941, USA) – Not quite HBO. Watched: 2 minutes.

Ziegfeld Girl (1941, USA) – Everybody wants to be a Ziegfeld girl. Why? Watched: 15 minutes.

Suspicion (1941, USA) – Rich girl Joan Fontaine falls in love with Cary Grant to spite her parents, and marries him, but he turns out to be a no-good moneyless slacker. Doesn’t he always? Watched it all.

Manpower (1941, USA) – Macho drama about the brave men who fix power lines. Watched: 15 minutes.

Target for Tonight (1941, UK) – Shows how a bombing raid against Germany is carried out, from the planning stage to the actual bombing. Turns out there’s a lot of dull work behind raining fiery death from the sky. Watched: 5 minutes.

That Uncertain Feeling (1941, USA) – A woman goes to a psychoanalyst to cure her hiccups. That’s funny, but the movie isn’t. Watched: 8 minutes.

Hold Back the Dawn (1941, USA) – Rumanian fortune hunter Charles Boyer seeks some naive American girl to woo and marry, so he can move to America and be with his girlfriend. Takes place in a hotel in Mexico, where everybody is waiting for their entry visa, and everybody has their own plan for getting it. Watched it all.

Horror Island (1941, USA) – There’s a treasure buried on an island. A .. horror island. Boring. Watched: 7 minutes.

They Drive By Night (1940, USA) – Humphrey Bogart is a truck driver for an apple company. He may not make his delivery on time, oh dear. Watched: 9 minutes.

That Night in Rio (1941, USA) – A silly musical in Glorious! Techni! Color!, starring Carmen Miranda, mother of all fruit-hat-wearing Latin-American stereotypes. Watched: 14 minutes.