The Killers (1946, USA, Siodmak) – Two Tarantino-awesome professional killers arrive in a small town and murder a guy.  An insurance claims investigator (well, why not?) looks into the death, and puzzles together the life of the victim, a good boy gone bad.  A woman is to blame, though all she seems to do throughout the movie is lie seductively in the background.  Watched it all.

Devil Bat’s Daughter (1946, USA, Wisbar) – Devil Bat’s dead, daughter arrives in town, yada yada.  On a completely unrelated note, I miss MST3K.  Watched: 8 minutes.

Cluny Brown (1946, USA, Lubitsch) – Holly Golightly pretends to be a plumber in pre-war London.  Watched: 14 minutes.

The Verdict (1946, USA, Siegel) – A Scotland Yard superintendent hangs an innocent man in foggy, 1890′s London, loses his job, and falls to pieces.  A locked-room murder mystery gives him the opportunity to play the Holmes to his successor’s Lestrade, while Peter Lorre hangs about being Lorreish.  Watched it all.

Road to Utopia (1946, USA, Walker) – Bob Hope and Bing Crosby tell dirty jokes and parody the movies, none of it funny.  Watched: 9 minutes.

Badman’s Territory (1946, USA, Whelan) – I’m not against voiceover in movies, but two minutes of it is too much, especially when it’s just to inform us that we’re in a lawless town where one lone journalist stands up for the cause of Freedom.  Also I prefer the “absolutely true historical fact!” section of a movie intro not to be completely made up. Watched: 11 minutes.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946, UK, Powell & Pressburger) – David Niven bails from his plane without a parachute, and survives by a miracle.  From this point on, he’s either being visited by agents of Heaven, who accuse him of having cheated death, or he’s a confused veteran who’s cracking up.  Watched it all.  Whatever you do, for Heaven’s sake watch the opening scene:

Duel in the Sun (1946, USA, Vidor) – One sure way for a movie to piss me off is to open with a 9 minute musical prelude, followed by a 2 minute musical overture.  They’re the same thing, you pretentious assholes.  Watched: 12 minutes, only a minute into the titles, so I guess I’ll never know what this movie was actually about.

Suspense (1946, USA, Tuttle) – Some guy is hired right off the street, and quickly climbs his way to the top of the dangerous world of figure skating.  It’s Noir on Ice, (literally, in one scene), and not only does it work very well, it makes figure skating seem cool and daring.  Watched it all.

The DARK Corner (1946, USA, Hathaway) – Who is Bradford Galt?  He’s a private investigator, with a standard P. I. office, a standard secretary, and a standard William Bendix on his tail.  Watched: 6 minutes.

Inside Job (1946, USA, Yarbrough) – Say, did they make anything other than noir in 1946, or are the dice I use to select these movies loaded?  Watched: 4 minutes.

House of Horrors (1946, USA, Yarbrough) – An artist finds inspiration in the deformed face of a killer, and uses him to act out his rage against the critics who mock him.  Beauty is virtue: The bad guy looks creepy and makes grotesque statues.  The good guy is good looking and paints pretty pictures of pretty pin-up girls.  I, for one, cheer for the bad guy.  Watched it all.

The Hoodlum Saint (1946, USA, Taurog) – William Powell returns from the war, (the previous one), and finds he’s got no job or money.  But he has friends, and a wise neighbourhood priest, so he’ll be allright.  Watched: 11 minutes.

Kris (1946, Sweden, Bergman) – A girl who’s been adopted by a respectable small town family is visited by her fun-loving biological mother and a no-good dandy, who teach her to boogie woogie.  It’s a clash of small-town and big-town values, with a little of good and bad in both, but the small-town values come out ahead.  Watched it all.

California (1946, USA, Farrow) – The scourge of state-named movies continues.  There’s been maybe ten so far, so I guess there are fourty left.  This one shows how California was founded by Barbara Stanwyck, a prostitute with a heart of gold.  Watched: 12 minutes.

Beauty and the Beast (1946, France, Cocteau) – The French insist on making these odd, unappealing dramedies.  There must be a reason for this.  Watched: 11 minutes.  IMDB reviewers argue that “Cocteau’s attempt to socialize his female viewers and alleviate their fear of sex is clear through textual analysis”.

Somewhere in the Night (1946, USA, Mankiewicz) – A soldier wakes up after the war with amnesia, and goes looking for his old self.  Seems nobody liked his old self much, and the search takes him through the usual web of thugs and shady women in the noir underworld.  Watched it all.

Jungle Captive (1945, USA, Young) – A man who looks so much like a thug that it’s a wonder he’s allowed to walk about freely steals the body of the Ape Woman, (who must have been killed in some earlier monster movie), and plans to ressurect her with the Power of Electricity.  Watched: 13 minutes.

Ziegfeld Follies (1945, USA) – I have high hopes for you, post-war technicolor musicals.  This isn’t a good start.  Watched: 15 minutes.

A Thousand and One Nights (1945, USA, Green) – Another failed attempt to walk in the footprints of The Thief of Bagdad.  This one is unusually bad, some sort of parody.  Watched: 7 minutes.  IMDB says it contains an early use of “groovy” as a slang term.  Groovy.

Love Letters (1945, USA, Dieterle) – A love story by Ayn Rand.  No really.  Watched: 9 minutes.

Mom and Dad (1945, USA, Beaudine) – Teenagers all across the nation are getting into all sorts of trouble because their parents never taught them about Hygiene, Social Diseases and the Facts of Life.  But before we get into any of that: hey audience, let’s sing the national anthem!  Watched: 11 minutes. The story behind the movie is a lot more interesting: It was the original exploitation blockbuster.

Isle of the Dead (1945, USA, Robson) – Quarantined on a cemetary island during an outbreak of plague, Boris Karloff and others, one of whom may be possessed by an evil spirit, sit down and wait to die.  Watched it all.  Another genuinely good 1945 horror movie, this time of the Poeish persuasion.  It’s almost as if something happened that year that made people more appreciative of the horrible and the macabre.

Dick Tracy (1945, USA, Berke) – Bad comic book movies have a long tradition.  But at least nowadays you can expect them to be bad in an inventively annoying way.  Watched: 8 minutes.

West of the Pecos (1945, USA, Killy) – A rich eastern family goes to Texas to get some fresh air and physical exercise, and meets bandits etc.  I think this is one of those westerns they show on the TV in the background in other movies.  Watched: 7 minutes.

Wonder Man (1945, USA, Humberstone) – Danne Kaye is being very silly, in color.  Even death can’t stop his antics.  Watched it all.  In the clip above he’s trying to tell the district attorney about a murder by, er, infiltrating an opera performance.

Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945, USA, Rowland) – Life in a Norwegian farming community in Wisconsin, where some people are good, and some bad, but mostly they’re good.  Watched: 23 minutes.

Blithe Spirit (1945, UK, Lean) – An ironically detached couple gets visited by the ghost of the husband’s first wife, and go through the usual ghost farce stuff.  Watched: 28 minutes.

!

I know it doesn’t seem like it from what I’ve been posting for the last couple of months, but I’m not particularly interested in the Second World War.  I don’t normally watch WWII battle documentaries.  I don’t read history books that search desperately for yet another angle from which to see the same old gallery of characters.

With documentaries like this, it’s more a matter of not being able to look away.

Scarlet Street (1945, USA, Lang) – Wouldn’t it be nice if Edward G. Robinson saved a young woman on the street and it turned into a romance and an opportunity to live out all those dreams about being an artist that he buried decades ago?  Yes, it would!  But the woman he saves is Joan Bennett, who steals his money and destroys his dreams.  Watched it all.

Hotel Berlin (1945, USA, Godfrey) – ‘Schnuppi’ and other blond Germans prepare for the end of the Reich in a hotel in Berlin.  Some of them want to escape and start the Nazi movement all over again .. IN AMERICA!!!!!  Watched: 19 minutes.

The Atom Strikes (1945, USA) – A look at the terrible structural damage caused to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Not so much look at the human damage.  There are hardly any humans around at all.  Watched it all.  You know, they shouldn’t have done that.  It wasn’t right.  They could have tried some other way first to demonstrate the power of their fully operational battle station.

Back to Bataan (1945, USA, Dmytryk) – Oh, enough with the war movies now.  Watched: 7 minutes.

Confidential Agent (1945, USA, Shumlin) – Charles Boyer comes out of the Spanish civil war with the idea that he’s being pursued by fascist agents.  Lauren Bacall finds this highly amusing, and laughs mockingly all throughout their thrilling fascist agent-related adventures.  Watched it all.

Kitty (1945, USA, Leisen) – Poor thief Paulette Goddard is dressed up as a lady, in order to say something or other about Class Boundaries.  Watched: 15 minutes.

Captain Kidd (1945, USA, Lee) – Charles Laughton commands a crew of pardoned pirates through the dangerous waters of the Madagascar.  There’s a mad gleam in his eyes that is especially unsettling because it’s not over the top, movie pirate style.  Unfortunately Laughton is the only good thing about this movie, and the end is disappointingly ordinary, with a lost heir, a silly romance, and a happy ending.  Kidd is so deliciously evil that he deserves to win, goddammit!  Watched it all.

Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945, USA, Thorpe) – An honest bellboy with an honest girlfriend tries to make an honest living in the big city, along with his retarded thug friend.  But temptations lurk everywhere.  Watched: 13 minutes.

A Walk in the Sun (1945, USA, Milestone) – I’m getting pretty tired of war movies, but this is one of the best ones yet, maybe even better than The Story of G. I. Joe.  Watched it all.  I have a theory about World War II movies: Despite the lack of blood, swearing, etc., they were at their most realistic when they were made by people who had actually been there.  Today you expect a WW2 movie to be epic, because Hitler was teh evil and all that.  There’s nothing epic about these contemporary movies.

Tonight and Every Night (1945, USA, Saville) – A music hall stays open every night during the London Blitz.  And no wonder, for what damage can bombs possibly do against such an abundance of vibrant technicolors and short skirts?  Watched: 13 minutes.

Le Retour (1945, France/USA, Cartier-Bresson) – The prisoners are coming home.  Millions of prisoners, by foot, by train, and by plane.  When some of them look into the camera, you see a small reflection of Hell in their eyes.  Others look so ordinary, like it was all a horrible misunderstanding.  I wonder what became of them.  Watched it all.

My Name is Julia Ross (1945, USA, Lewis) – A girl is kidnapped by evil Cornwallians, for use in a plot that is so complicated that it might take the whole movie to resolve.  Watched: 20 minutes.

The Corn is Green (1945, USA, Rapper) – Bette Davis moves to Hollywood Wales, and upsets the local Hollywood Welshmen.  Watched: 8 minutes.

Betrayal From the East (1945, USA, Berke) – The Japanese-American community is full of insidious fifth columnists.  And they all look alike, so I guess we should, I don’t know, lock them all up or something.  Watched: 14 minutes.

Objective Burma! (1945, USA, Walsh) – On principle, I never watch Errol Flynn movies.  The principle is that I hates him I hates him I hates him.  Watched: 9 seconds.

Brewster’s Millions (1945, USA, Dwan) – A soldier returns home to find that he has inherited a fortune.  What an incredible stroke of luck!  And there’s a Moral too!  Watched: 18 minutes.

Flame of Barbary Coast (1945, USA, Kane) – John Wayne wanders into the fun-loving world of gambling.  They let him win lots of money just because they like him, and he’ll probably get the girl too.  Watched: 20 minutes.