Ernie Pyle's Story of G.I. Joe (1945)

I dunno. William A. Wellman's Story of G.I. Joe sort of felt generic to me, perhaps because it isn't really a narrative and is more interested in Pyle's own stories. In other words, this is a film much more interested in the men who fight and their experiences of daily agony and exhaustion than it really is in telling any kind of story. Now, I wouldn't normally mind that, but Wellman's film tries to make this into a story anyway. It succeeds somewhat, and I loved all of the main characters. Robert Mitchum is excellent throughout, and is actually the lead actor of this movie despite Burgess Meredith's top billing. 

Meredith, incidentally, is referred to throughout as old, and he sports an almost completely bald head and gray hair while telling everyone he is 43. I'm only 39, but I can tell you right now that I have no intention of looking that old in my early 40s. 

In any case, this has some good moments, but it's not that interesting. I did love the dog.

Wonder Man (1945)

Wonder Man is very stupid and very funny.

And I'm... kinda into Danny Kaye??

He is honestly sexy in this. He's a weirdo, for sure, and his sense of humor actually feels off, but this is a blast and I laughed out loud many times.

Vera-Ellen, who is billed here after Virginia Mayo, for reasons I cannot fathom in the least, is superb in this idiotic movie. Her dancing and singing are both aces, and she does that tap thing where she is able to tap faster than a drum solo with one foot. It's spectacular. She shares a pretty great and totally weird orientalist number with Kaye, but then stars in her own number without him – "So in Love" – and it is the best sequence in the whole film.

A Thousand and One Nights

Alfred E. Green's A Thousand and One Nights is a really fun movie. It's a totally silly romp through the Arabian Nights with Aladdin and a magic lamp but also with anachronistic jokes. Phil Silvers plays Aladdin's friend Abdullah in 1940s glasses as if he just dropped into a fantasy version of the medieval Orient from mid-century Los Angeles. It's quite silly.

 I enjoyed myself a lot, and the costumes are exquisite. I also really loved Cornel Wilde in 1945 – I always forget how handsome he was back then. Sign me up!

This movie is quite obviously what Disney's 1992 Aladdin film is based on. The parallels are too striking for this not to be true. And, coincidentally, I just finished reading Sean Griffin's Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: the Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out, in which he claims that Howard Ashman, who was one of the main creative forces behind Aladdin had imagined the Genie as a giant black man – an image he would have taken directly from A Thousand and One Nights.