The Fallen Sparrow (1943)

I persist in my fascination regarding WWII films made during WWII. The Fallen Sparrow, edited by Robert Wise (!) and directed by Richard Wallace, ​is well plotted and moves quickly. So much had happened by the end of the first 10 minutes, I was astounded by the amount of information we’d already gotten and had to look at my watch.

The best thing about this minor piece of anti-Nazi propaganda, though, is John Garfield. Despite the fact that The Fallen Sparrow was made as a vehicle for Maureen O’Hara, he’s just so good!  The camera loves him, and he’s a completely dynamic performer, immediately lovable despite his tough exterior. This film gives him some beautiful material to work through, including an intense monologue about torture in act one (of all places)! The monologue needs to be in act one because it needs to set up the psychological tension of the plot's twists and turns as well as the traumatic residue for the character.

Anyway, this is great. It's on the Criterion Channel until January 31st as part of a series celebrating Garfield's mostly underappreciated work as a performer.

Action in the North Atlantic (1943)

Yet another contemporary WWII movie, Action in the North Atlantic boast some cool sea fights. This follows a big tanker taking supplies from the U.S. to the Soviets while being chased by a fleet of submarines. It stars Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey, with a very important supporting part played by the instantly recognizable Dane Clark. It's criminal that he didn't become a huge star. I really don't know how that happened. He's wonderful.

In any case, one very strange thing Action in the North Atlantic does is have the Germans in their submarine speak only German. The film does not subtitle their speech, so we actually spend a lot of time in this film listening to German without any translation. It's a very strange move for a 1943 film.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

Man oh man. I love a World War II movie made during World War II, and Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! comes from an idea Lang came up with alongside Bertolt Brecht. This movie was banned for a while in the U.S. (I presume) because of Brecht's involvement and possible pro-Communist sentiments. (U.S. American fascism is fascinating, honestly. We rant and rave about the Nazis burning books and then we ban films like this.) In any case, Hangmen Also Die! is a thriller, and it's excellent. The cast is great – Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee, and Gene Lockhart especially, but really everyone.

This movie is about an assassin who has killed one of the worst men during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. But the film starts after "the Hangman" has been assassinated, and what we watch instead is his attempts to escape – to find a place to hide in the immediate aftermath and to avoid detection once the Nazis begin to crack down on finding the Hangman's executioner.

What's so great about this is the plotting of the Czech resistance to fight the Nazi occupation. I can see why the U.S. American fascists opposed this. It's a film about choosing community over the individual. It's about resisting coercion and working as a group to do what's right. This is honestly a great film, and as I said, it's a thriller. I was honestly on the edge of my seat the whole time. I'm glad we can watch it in full now – and free – on Amazon Prime.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Creepy as hell and actually downright troubling, Shadow of a Doubt is a solid Hitchcock thriller from 1943 based on an original story by Thornton Wilder, author of Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

This film is leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, so I wanted to watch it before I missed the opportunity.

Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942)

It's always great to see Paul Muni, and I am totally invested in WWII movies that were made during the war. But this movie just isn't that interesting. It's about a Norwegian dude who is living a peaceable life but is driven to rebellion when the Nazis arrive in Norway and start killing people. Some of the battle scenes are good, but I think I was expecting something a bit more emotionally engaging considering Paul Muni was the lead.

The Seventh Victim (1943)

In this very strange horror film from 1943, a young woman discovers a... satanic cult? This is bananas, and it's actually very scary, even though there's nothing at all satanic on screen. I enjoyed this. It's shot beautifully. And goddammit is it weird.

Air Force (1943)

Air Force is a gorgeous film. James Wong Howe really outdid himself here. The photography is breathtaking. At one point I just stopped and cheered for how gorgeous it looks.

This film has some pretty great performances, too, including Gig Young, John Garfield, and Harry Carey. James Brown is in this, too – handsome as all get out but a terrible performance.

Air Force is unfortunately but truly marred by its propagandistic lies. It's a beautiful movie that hates the Japanese, a fact which, perhaps can be forgiven since the country was at war, but the lies that this movie spreads about attacks at Pearl Harbor by Japanese Americans? Inexcusable. And those lies had severe consequences for so many of our countrymen.

Sahara (1943)

Sahara is an expertly made war film from 1943 that is designed to build up pro-Allied sentiment (and even pro-Italian sentiment!). The Germans in the film, however, are uniformly ungentlemanly, untrustworthy, and false. It's easy to make fun of Sahara's obviously propagandistic aims, but this is an excellently made war picture shot in the middle of the desert. It's wonderfully acted and beautifully shot, and it even kinda choked me up at the end.

Hi Diddle Diddle (1943)

This would be a totally forgettable romantic comedy caper if it weren't for the fabulous intertextuality that pervades the film. There is animated Wagnerian wallpaper, a running meta-cinematic gag about an actress who plays multiple parts in the movie, and an actress who sings a duet with a Panoram (look it up) of herself. This is a delight. As for the title Hi Diddle Diddle, I have no idea why this movie is called this, but I guess it must be somewhere in:

...the cat and the fiddle

the cow jumped over the moon

the little dog laughed

to see such sport

and the dish ran away with the spoon.

Maybe Martha Scott is supposed to be the dish?

The Ox-Bow Incident

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) is a movie about lynching, by which I mean another movie about lynching from this period of time.
Of course the victims of this lynching were two white men and a Latino and not a black man from the Jim Crow south, but it seems like Hollywood did try in its oblique way to tell lynching stories.

Other lynching movies from the period, see Fury (1936) and Barbary Coast (1935).

The North Star

I am not sure why this film is called The North Star. I think there might have been something about it during the movie, but if there was I missed it or I've forgotten.

In any case, Lewis Milestone's film is the worst kind of sentimental pro-war propaganda pretending to be an anti-war commentary. There were a lot of propaganda films in the early 1940s, and this one is slightly different in that it is about Soviet villagers who are invaded by the Germans – no Americans in sight in this movie. No Americans, that is, unless you count Anne Baxter and Walter Huston and Farley Granger and Dana Andrews and Dean Jagger and Walter Brennan. Okay, everyone is either American or German in this film, except that the Americans in The North Star have names like Kolya and Olga and Boris.

The movie is so clichéd that there are literally scenes of Russian folk-dancing in act one and about five different "Russian folk songs", which are really just Aaron Copland tunes with lyrics by Ira Gershwin.

Yes: Copland and Gershwin worked on this movie, and the script is by playwright Lillian Hellman. The cinematography is by the great James Wong Howe, and the excellent cast also includes Erich von Stroheim as a Nazi doctor. The special effects in this movie are also pretty fabulous, and they include a great number of awesome explosions and several fires. Exciting stuff. At least, it could be...

This poster is totally unrelated to the film

But this movie is awful. There are so many tearful goodbyes that I lost count. And the scenarios where people sacrifice themselves in order to help the village or "do something greater than themselves" are so plentiful that one wonders who is left alive to benefit from so many sacrifices.

Worse yet are all the ridiculous platitudes about how this will be the last war we ever fight, and we owe our lives to this great nation and we ought to do anything to preserve it.

And then there is the blatant propaganda of The North Star. Now, I know the Nazis were bad people (they still are!) but they did enough real bad things for us to talk about without us making up stories about them. The North Star seems to think it prudent to tell the world that the Nazis are bleeding Slavic children to death in order to use their blood for transfusions on German soldiers. Really?!?! Aside from this being the most sentimental crime an evil Nazi could ever commit, it is also a totally undocumented phenomenon and was, in all likelihood, invented for the purposes of propaganda only.

The North Star, I'm afraid, is a wartime curiosity and not much more than that.