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.

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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.