Dead of Night (1945, UK) – A group of people share stories about their encounters with the supernatural.  Everything Ealing Studios touches, even horror, turns to gold.  My favourite story is about the ventriloquist’s evil dummy, a cliché today, but this is the earliest use I’ve seen of it in a movie, and it’s wonderfully creepy.  In fact, this is possibly the first really good, scary horror movie.  Watched it all.

The White Gorilla (1945, USA, Fraser) – In deepest, darkest Africa, a white boy commands a savage tribe, and a white gorilla is the most fearsome beast of the jungle.  White traders investigate these strange events.  What could it all mean?  Watched: 9 minutes.

Perfect Strangers (1945, UK, Korda) – Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr are a delicate married couple who gets pushed around by everybody.  The war separates them, forces them to become more wordly and confident, and when they are finally reunited they have been reborn as a new breed of Englishman, ready to rebuild their country – and their own marriage – as a union between equals.  Watched it all.

Yolanda and the Thief (1945, USA, Minnelli) – In the fictional land of Patria, where everything is lovely and technicolorful, naive heiress Lucille Bremer takes control of her family empire.  This movie is proof of what can happen when you uncritically pour a shitload of money into a musical.  Watched: 20 minutes, then fast forwarded through all the bizarre scenes, of which this one is actually pretty good:

Meito bijomaru (1945, Japan, Mizoguchi) – An apprentice blacksmith makes a fragile sword that destroys the lives of everyone he loves.  Crushed, he vows to make the perfect sword, a sword with soul that, in the hands of a vengeful woman (naturally!), will make everything right again.  Watched it all.

A Song to Remember (1945, USA, Vidor) – Frederic Chopin was young once too, and faced adversity etc.  Watched: 6 minutes.

Zoku Sugata Sanshiro (1945, Japan, Kurosawa) – A judo master gets drawn into the seedy world of American boxing, a barbaric sport for a barbaric people.  Watched it all.  This is a terrible movie, (or maybe it’s just the translation, which seems to have gone through Chinese at some point), but it’s fun to see Western stereotypes in a Japanese movie.

Lady on a Train (1945, USA, David) – The lady on the train sees a murder in a house they pass.  I expect she’ll set out to solve it herself because the police won’t listen, or something stupid like that.  Watched: 5 minutes.

Appointment in Tokyo (1945, USA, Hively) – American war propaganda was remarkably restrained, which is not what I expected.  There was plenty of patriotic emotions, (and justifiably so), but little outrageous.  The main exception was their portrayal of the sinister Japs, as in this documentary about the last years of the war in the Pacific.  Watched it all.

Strange Holiday (1945, USA, Oboler) – Some guy rants into the camera about his poor poor children, for at least 9 minutes.  Watched: 9 minutes.

Dillinger (1945, USA, Nosseck) – The legend of John Dillinger.  A hard, brutal B-movie that gets everything right.  Watched it all.

Enfants du Paradis (1945, France, Carné) – Various Frenchmen live and work in a street in Paris.  Watched: 21 minutes, at which point a mime who has witnessed a crime tells the police what he saw by miming.  Incredibly, nobody murders him.

Johnny Frenchman (1945, UK, Frend) – Two Cornish and Breton villages are rivals for fishing grounds, but the war brings them together.  It’s all a bit heavy-handed, but I just love that Ealing feeling.  Watched it all.

Blood on the Sun (1945, USA, Lloyd) – James Cagney gets on the bad side of the pre-war Japanese government by revealing their nefarious plans for world domination.  He’s also, highly improbably, some kind of judo master.  Watched: 17 minutes.  IMDB reviewers claim this movie has an anti-racist message, which just goes to show that people will go to any length to find excuses for a movie they enjoy.

Cornered (1945, USA, Dmytryk) – Dick Powell returns to liberated France to take revenge on the Vichy official who executed his wife.  He goes about it a bit stupidly, especially for the kind of devious noir world he inhabits, but it’s fun to see the birth of the post-war “Nazi in hiding in South America” theme.  Watched it all.

Pride of the Marines (1945, USA, Daves) – If I hear the Marines’ Hymn one more time in a movie, I’ll .. be very tired of it, that’s for sure.  Watched: 12 minutes.

A Bell for Adano (1945, USA, King) – An American major takes over the civil administration of a recently conquered Italian town.  He governs it like Iraq should have been governed 60 years later, and the Americans are treated like they wanted to be treated in Iraq.  There’s an imperial dream hiding beneath the surface here: The dream of the benevolent proconsul who cleans things up.  Watched it all.

The House on 92nd Street (1945, USA, Hathaway) – Rah-rah docudrama about the counter-espionage work of the FBI.  Includes actual footage of people sinisterly walking into and out of Germany’s Washington embassy.  Watched: 8 minutes.

Zombies on Broadway (1945, USA, Douglas) – A gangster wants a real live zombie for the opening show of his new nightclub, and sends two henchmen off to a tropical island to find some.  Old-time zombies are usually pretty lame, but this is actually a perfect little comedy.  Watched it all.

Thrill of a Romance (1945, USA, Thorpe) – A rich guy sees a beautiful woman on the street, and puts all his resources into finding out her name, address and life story.  This being a movie, she doesn’t find this the least bit frightening at all, and they’re practically engaged by the end of the first date.  Watched: 14 minutes.

Place of One’s Own (1945, UK, Knowles) – A boring retired couple moves into a house that has been empty for 40 years, so I guess it’s haunted or something stupid like that.  Watched: 9 minutes.

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945, Japan, Kurosawa) – A group of soldiers who have lost favor with the government try to trick their way past a guard post.  The message is that it’s better to talk your way out of problems than to die gloriously in a futile battle, which sounds like an allegory about defeated Japan.  Watched it all, but they could have done without Jar-Jar.

Pardon My Past (1945, USA, Fenton) – Fresh home from the war, a man stumbles into the old “happens to look like a famous criminal” plot.  Watched: 6 minutes.

Thunderhead, Son of Flicka (1945, USA, King) – Horses are smart and cute and the best thing in the whole world.  Watched: 5 minutes.

A Royal Scandal (1945, USA, Perminger) – Intrigue at the court of Katherine II of Russia.  The lines are almost worthy of the Marx Brothers.  Watched it all.

Bewitched (1945, USA, Oboler) – A girl has two personalities, and the evil one is struggling to gain control over her.  Corny, but moderately scary.  There have been almost no frightening movies in this marathon so far, not even the so-called “horror” movies.  I wonder why.  Is is the same reason why the comedians aren’t funny?  Watched: 14 minutes.

Circumstantial Evidence (1945, USA, Larkin) – This movie was made to warn us against the dangers of circumstantial evidence.  It says so in a long text at the beginning.  Watched: 2 minutes.

Caesar and Cleopatra (1945, UK, Pascal) – Is it time for a new generation of toga epics now?  If so this is a cheerful beginning.  Claude Raines is a sly Caesar, and Vivien Leigh a Cleopatra who approaches learning how to be a queen as a sort of fun game.  Nobody is taking things too seriously here, which is fine by me, and the tight script, based on George Bernard Shaw’s play, keeps the epic excesses at bay.  Watched it all.

God is My Co-Pilot (1945, USA, Florey) – It seems that out of all the millions of victims of World War II, God is going to save the life of Colonel Robert L. Scott.  Because he’s special.  Watched: 9 minutes.

Salome Where She Danced (1945, USA, Lamont) – A newspaperman with little manners has adventures in the world of the 1860′s.  I almost expect him to run into Harry Flashman somewhere, it’s that kind of world, with Bismarckian officers, mysterious Chinamen, Russian aristocrats, and bandits from the Wild West all in one place.  Watched it all.

Without Love (1945, USA, Bucquet) – Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn have another romance.  Watched: 19 minutes, and I think I can guess the rest.

The True Glory (1945, USA, Kanin) – The final year of the war with Germany, told partly in the voice of soldiers, and partly as a sort of epic poem.  Watched it all.

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945, France, Bresson) – Serious people talk seriously about love and have serious affairs.  Lighten up!  Watched: 9 minutes.

Two things I note here:

1) For some reason the narration got me thinking about Reagan’s 1984 Morning in America ad.  Turns out it wasn’t just because the style is similar, with calm, simple statements in the present tense, and an optimistic tone.  The narrator actually is Ronald Reagan. (Btw, I rather like Reagan as an actor, and I don’t understand the mockery about him being a B movie actor.  Possibly a myth that stuck because nobody could be bothered to actually watch those movies.)

2) Notice the way it tip-toes around racial issues.  This movie is clearly intended to give credit to African-American soldiers for their contribution to the the war effort, but it doesn’t actually say so.  Without the pictures, the words would lose their anti-racist meaning.  How odd.  I wonder who the intended audience was.

As I watch all these World War II movies I know that I only see a glamorous reflection of the horrible things that were happening at the time.  I’m not seeing reality, but the fantasy life of the American and British movie audiences.

The image these movies present of the world contains lies and gaps.  They treat China and the Soviet Union in a way that bears no relation to reality.  There are almost no references to European Jews, and then only to “oppression”, not mass murder and genocide.

Wartime movies usually present Germans as authoritarian – and not much more.  Evil authoritarians, naturally, but the “evil” part often feels like a patriotic exaggeration.  Like something you’d say because you’re a war.  The Germans are a dangerous enemy, but they wouldn’t do anything truly inhuman.  Or at least movie goers wouldn’t accept it.  A wartime movie that told the truth about Nazi Europe would have been campy.  It wouldn’t have fit inside the plot structures studios were operating with.

So now it’s 1945, and the first footage from concentration and extermination camps shows up in my marathon. Like this one.  Which is basically 50 minutes of footage of corpses, some of them alive, and of German civilians forced to see, carry and bury the corpses.  As I watched these revolting pictures, I asked myself why I was doing it.  The answer I arrived at is that, after all those Hollywood fantasies, turning off this would have felt like lying to myself.

Spellbound (1945, USA, Hitchcock) – Gregory Peck suffers from a quite incredible psychosis, and gets help from Ingrid Bergman, who is somewhat less insane. I like plots based on psychoanalysis, even if it’s bullshit.  It’s also a good excuse to hire Salvador Dali to design the sets of your movie.  Watched it all.

Along Came Jones (1945, USA, Heisler) – Gary Cooper does his honorable-and-dumb-but-actually-kind-of-smart routine in the Old West.  Watched: 35 minutes.

‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ (1945, UK, Powell & Pressburger) – Mary Poppins goes to get married on the Hebrides, which is full of eccentric Scotsmen.  Watched it all. 

Journey Together (1945, UK, Boulting) – Goddam Edward G. Robinson shows up everywhere, even in RAF docudramas.  I wish he’d stick to gangster movies, then it would be easier to avoid him.  Watched: 22 minutes.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945, USA, Lewin) – Another Victorian morality tale that never goes out of fashion, long after Victorian morality has.  The picture of Evil Dorian, shown suddenly in color in this black and white movie, is the most shocking visual in the marathon yet.  Watched it all.

Woman Who Came Back (1945, USA, Colmes) – Arguably the least spooky way an undead witch can punish the town that murdered her 300 years ago is to confuse people to death by dressing and cackling like a senile old woman.  Also, I firmly believe that any condemned witch who rises from her grave to avenge herself invalidates any claim to her own innocence.  Watched: 6 minutes.