The Paradine Case (1947)

I wanted Hitchcock's The Paradine Case to be an intriguing curiosity and, well, I guess it is that; it's just not very interesting. There was lots of behind-the-scenes drama with this film. Hitchcock and David O. Selznick did not get along, and Hitchcock didn't want to cast Gregory Peck or Louis Jordan or Valli. (Incidentally, only Louis Jordan really works for the movie; Peck is definitely miscast.) But the trouble is that this screenplay just isn't that good. What should be an intriguing and tense mystery film with high stakes in the present becomes a kind of melodrama about the main lawyer and his wife and their relationship. It's not even interesting, although that gets most of the screen time.

The other very strange thing about the film is its runtime, which, once upon a time was 3 hours, was apparently cut down to 2 hours and 20 minutes, and then later 2 hours and 5 minutes and finally 1 hour and 55 minutes. Now, I'm not saying the whole thing wouldn't have been better at a longer runtime, because I seriously have a lot of doubts, but, well, maybe I am. I trust Hitchcock more than I trust Selznick, but with Peck in the lead...? I think the reason I would like to watch a longer cut (which, apparently, will now be impossible because the negatives have been destroyed) is that Ethel Barrymore got the film's lone Oscar nomination in 1948 for a supporting performance that lasts all of about 3 minutes in the current cut. Apparently much of this performance has been cut (and, I would imagine, much of Charles Laughton's work as well), and it definitely feels as though it's missing from this trimmed version.

Nightmare Alley #1

A classic that's actually in need of a remake, Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley (1947) stars the charismatic Tyrone Power (against type!) and the excellent Joan Blondell, but the rest of the cast can't manage the power of its stars. Worse yet, Goulding's film accelerates its antihero's downfall so that it makes almost no sense that he manages to fail so badly so quickly. All of a sudden, the man's helpless and out of his mind.

And then... it actually pulls its final punches.

In any case, I was with this for a long while. It's great to see Power in something other than a swashbuckling movie (although I love him in those too), and this is very different territory from the usual noir. It's too bad that the movie's last 40 minutes or so didn't hold up to its first 70.

I admit to being skeptical of the new Guillermo Del Toro film. It just looks so glossy – but I feel pretty certain that Del Toro will give us a better ending than the one for which Goulding opted.

Body and Soul (1947)

Body and Soul is not a groundbreaking boxing movie by any means, but it's done well. John Garfield is a great lead, and Lilli Palmer, as his girlfriend, is much, much better than she has any right to be in a regular old boxing movie. Body and Soul also boasts good performances by Anne Revere, Hazel Brooks, Joseph Pevney (who I don't recall seeing in anything else), and Canada Lee! That's a lot of good performances.

And then there is the extraordinary cinematography of James Wong Howe. His work really elevates this movie to an entirely other level.

Like many movies about pugilism in the late 1940s, this one is about the corruption of the boxing racket – the gambling, the fixed fights, the lack of care for the men who are actually doing the fighting. I am thinking, especially of Champion, which boasts a brilliant Kirk Douglas performance, and also The Harder They Fall from 1956, which turns its attention to corruption directly. Body and Soul is about the choices the fighter makes and how he deals with corruption personally. It's a liberal tack that asks how we personally behave when confronted with corruption. This isn't the (much smarter) institutional critique that The Harder They Fall takes, but Body and Soul works all the same.

Mother Wore Tights (1947)

Mother Wore Tights is cute. It's pretty standard fare, though, and the conflict – of which there is very little – involves one of the characters learning not to be such an asshole snob and accept that her parents are awesome even though they're vaudevillians. Still, Betty Grable is fun, and the whole thing works quite well.

Possessed (1947)

Ooo Joan is crazy in this one. Possessed, if you will. Some descriptions of this film describe it as a rare unglamorous performance for Crawford. Umm... no. She is unglamorous in exactly one scene. The rest of the time she looks her usual, perfectly put together self.

Crawford was nominated for an Oscar for this film (her second nomination), but I don't know. These Crawford movies sort of feel all the same to me. Glamorous woman, jealousy, men who can't help but love her or don't know how to quit her or desperately want to hurt her. They just all sort of have this pot-boiler quality to them, and she seems to me rather the same in them all. (I mean, I guess that's what it is to be a movie star, but it does feel rather repetitive.)

To be fair to Possessed, this particular movie has a frame of mental illness and schizophrenia. Crawford is picked up in a catatonic state in Los Angeles, barely able to speak. She's lost her mind. Then from there we go into flashback to find out what happened. The frame is trying to tell a story of a kind of love madness and deal with psychiatry as a profession that might do some good – in this way it's in conversation with films like Private Worlds (1935), Lady in the Dark (1944), and Spellbound (1945). This frame is rather interesting; it's the flashbacks that are all typical Crawford melodrama. Nothing new to see there.

The Bachelor and the Bobby-soxer (1947)

The Bachelor and the Bobby-soxer is hilarious and sexy and completely delightful. I laughed out loud several times, and Myrna Loy is just brilliant. She is the most underrated actress of Hollywood's Golden Age for sure. This is effortless comedy on her part. She's a gem, and this movie is exquisitely scripted.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

Gene Tierney is a delight in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and even Rex Harrison's usual masculine bravado is sort of charming. Charming, incidentally, is the correct word for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, a strange, pleasurable fantasy of a film that is impeccably directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, as he moves deftly between romance, comedy, and drama. This is really lovely, and its photography is gorgeous.

Black Narcissus

Powell and Pressburger have treated the usual 1940s subject matter – which ought to have had a moral lesson and ended in Christian triumph – into a psychological thriller. The film has amazing lighting, beautiful technicolor, and some wonderful performances, particularly by Flora Robson and Deborah Kerr. The third act really is thrillingly exciting, an astounding thing for me to be saying about a movie about nuns, if you think about it.  

Black Narcissus seems like it's going to do something akin to The Inn of the Sixth Happiness or Come to the Stable but the film takes a deliciously, sickly weird turn, and that makes it very enjoyable.

And while we're talking about very weird turns this movie takes, normally Sabu would be the chief sexual force in a film like this, but instead it is David Farrar who appears as a sexual object throughout the movie. He shows up with a shirt half opened about mid-way through the picture, and then he shows up completely shirtless for an extended period of time. He's even shirtless on the poster! This is a very steamy Powell/Pressburger movie.

T-Men (1947)

T-Men is a surprisingly great film from Anthony Mann. I've only seen his westerns (fine) and his terrible epics (El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire), but this one is a sleek film noir that follows some upstanding law enforcement agents (improbably enough) from the Treasury department. T-Men is gorgeously shot, totally suspenseful and engrossing, and beautifully performed by Dennis O'Keefe and Alfred Ryder. There are all of these very strange sequences in Los Angeles steam rooms, and the photographer, John Alton, makes the most of his stark whites and stark blacks. This movie is filled with haunting silhouettes and shady corners. I was really into this.