The Window (1949)

The Window is great! A truly scary and thrilling noir based on a boy who cries wolf one too many times and then sees a murder but then no one believes his lying ass. For me, Bobby Driscoll’s annoying performance is the only drawback in this tense film with very good acting, a great score, and excellent photography and editing. This should be available on YouTube to watch. I’m pretty sure it’s in the public domain. (I watched it because I was in a cabin in the woods in Virginia with spotty wifi but I had downloaded The Window to my hard drive for some reason so I could watch it without interruption.)

Paisan (1946)

Roberto Rossellini's Paisa' is six vignettes about US Americans in Italy as everybody (including Italian resistance fighters) continues to fight the Germans. Rossellini's camera scours the ruins of the peninsula, and Paisa' is a legitimately heartbreaking film. I don't know why it took me this long to see this movie – perhaps it was the total bleakness of Rossellini's previous film, Rome, Open City – but I'm glad I finally saw it. I completely loved this.

(I'm not really sure what year to classify this under. IMDb says it was released in the US in March of 1948, but I know it was nominated for a Story & Screenplay Oscar during the 1949 season. I'm gonna do '49 just because the whole point of these years is to keep track of awards seasons. 

And another thing: the original title, seemingly everywhere, is rendered as Paisà. But it's Paisa' on the title card of the film, and that's what it is on the poster, too. I'm not sure I understand the confusion here.)

War Wore a Yellow Ribbon

This bullshit. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a jingoistic, nonsensical film that is beautifully shot but terribly scripted and annoyingly directed. It's a film that pretends to be about wanting peace and making peace, about an old man, about to retire, who has seen that war is not the answer. This sexagenarian is played by John Wayne who, at the time, was barely 41 years old. (Listening him croak about how he's given forty years of his life to the cavalry is very silly.) But worse, it's a young man's movie. It's not a film about regret or wisdom or any such thing. Old men should stop wars, he tells his friend Pony That Walks, but the film doesn't believe that at all, and neither does the main character. 

This movie gives us numerous scenes of the carnage wreaked by the Arapaho and the Cheyenne but very little action. There is almost no fighting in this movie – a couple of great chase sequences – but battle sequences are nowhere to be found. In this way, the film is able to create the Indian alliance as a vicious and terrible enemy (complete with the orphaned children they've left crying and alone), but avoid any question of the violence and greed of the U.S. Even worse, the film seems to love, not the United States, but the Confederate States... it's a film from 1949, but the movie tips its hat to Robert E. Lee, and when one soldier dies the unmistakable sound of "Dixie" blends into the score.

Honestly, though, the worst thing about this movie is that it is mostly unclear what is going on for a majority of its running time. It's almost impossible to figure out why anyone does anything they do, and then in the film's third act, before the big (non-battle) finale, which involves hundreds of horses that appear out of thin air, there is an extended – I'm talking 15-minute – comic sequence involving pratfalls, comic punches, and drunk soldiers that's straight out of vaudeville. One might ask how a sequence like this fits in what is primarily a warmongering melodrama, but of course melodramas all need comic relief, and what this film takes seriously are its dumb sentiments like "bravery" and "trusting your gut" and the love of the military, so the fraternal silliness in act three is really just this same silly masculine posturing in a different key. (Ford movies frequently have dumb comic sequences like this – think of the extended comic bit with Arthur Kennedy and Jimmy Stewart in the middle of Cheyenne Autumn.)

Anyway, fuck this movie. I hated it.

Adam's Rib (1949)

Adam's Rib is mostly charming and mostly politically intriguing. Katharine Hepburn is very, very good. But the movie falls apart by the end. It ties itself up in just a few too many knots and it doesn't know how to pull itself loose reasonably. 

I also feel like it attempted to undermine its own political positions – it didn't manage this successfully, but it sure felt like it made an effort.

I watched this on HBOmax.

The Quiet One (1948)

Despite being nominated for Best Documentary Feature, The Quiet One is not a documentary; it's a docudrama that's been performed by actors. (The poster above is attempting to make it very clear (to Oscar voters?) that Donald Thompson is an actor.) At the very least this pushes the boundaries of what can be called documentary. The Quiet One is purportedly a true story, and it is reported here in a documentary style very like Navajo from 1952. This is interesting for its discussions of mental illness among young people. It's unfortunate that the film quality is no longer so great.

You can watch this on YouTube, but the quality is rough.

They Live by Night

Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night is a different kind of crime film, or, rather, it feels different because Cathy O'Donnell and Farley Granger are so young. They're sweet and kind and sad, and the whole thing is very good.

I saw They Live by Night on the Criterion Channel. It's leaving on April 30th, so I needed to get it in before the end of the month. I need to remember to check out some more Farley Granger movies. He's a legendary midcentury gay actor, but I hadn't realized he'd been in quite so many movies!

Stray Dog (1949)

Stray Dog (野良犬) is an analysis of postwar Japan and the disaffection and poverty experienced by many veterans and their families. It is a generational analysis of urban life like the kind Mizoguchi and Ozu were making in this period. I hadn't seen this movie before, so I hadn't known Kurosawa was making movies like this too. But Stray Dog blew me away. It's all of this hidden inside a detective movie. This film is atmospheric and rich – the entire film is sweat soaked, and you can feel the heat. It's easily comparable to postwar American films noirs. But Stray Dog has so much humanity! The ending is just devastating. It absolutely broke my heart. I loved this film. 

Also... Toshiro Mifune was, like, really handsome in the late 1940s.

Siodmak Double Feature

Robert Siodmak is a king. As you probably know, The Killers is my absolute favorite film noir, and Criterion has been showing some other Siodmak films this month, including Criss Cross, which is only ok, and Phantom Lady, which is absolutely excellent. It's chilling and troubling, and it's masterfully shot. The photography is just breathtakingly good. This is a very, very good film – sexy and psychologically thrilling, while also being a good mystery – it's a total pleasure to watch.

Criss Cross is just a serviceable noir. Siodmak paired up with Burt Lancaster again after The Killers. Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo both bring the smolder, but this film just isn't plotted that interestingly. It's structured in such a way that I had forgotten all that I needed to remember by the time we jumped back forward in time. I understand why Daniel Fuchs wrote the screenplay the way he did, but it distinctly lessened the kind of tension any crime film like this is trying to build. Also, Dan Duryea is a smarmy looking actor, sure, but he's not really menacing.

I watched these movies on the Criterion channel. They had three Siodmak films and I had only seen The Killers, so I was really delighted to see that they were showing these others.

My Foolish Heart (1949)

No thank you. My Foolish Heart is a real mess. It starts off by giving us a portrait of a young woman as a spoiled bitch – this is the kind of part Susan Hayward would excel at playing forever – but then we are supposed, somehow, to see her as an innocent kid falling in love and all that jazz. Didn't work for a second. You set up a thing like that and it's difficult to break. 

Even worse, this part could've been played by any actress from the period and we would've gotten a similar performance. It's just not that great a part. It's a version of Olivia De Havilland's part in To Each His Own (a movie I also disliked, for the record). 

Incidentally, was 1949 the worst year for Best Actress nominees ever? No wonder De Havilland won her second Oscar for The Heiress. It's easily the best performance among these 5 nominees. 

Worse yet, Dana Andrews, who is top billed in My Foolish Heart, phones his performance in! A mess from start to finish. I never even got around to liking any of the characters! Except Robert Keith. He's at least having fun in all of his scenes.

Jolson Sings Again (1949)

You know, I actually thought that we were going to get through Jolson Sings Again without having to see Larry Parks in blackface playing Al Jolson in blackface. Nope. Jolson Sings Again takes a really weird turn and for act three takes us into the making of the film The Jolson Story, which, like this movie, starred Larry Parks lipsynching to Al Jolson. It's a strange meta-movie third act. Jolson Sings Again is the sequel to that 1946 film, and we watch the effect of the film's smash success on the real Jolson... played by Larry Parks. It's kind of cool but also strange. Parks is excellent, as he was in the original film, and actually Jolson sounds wonderful. He's in great voice. I even liked the script for the first two acts of the film. But Jolson Sings Again stumbles in its final sequences, especially when we just watch Jolson watching clips of The Jolson Story for at least ten minutes – maybe more!

White Heat

White Heat is great. Cagney... well Cagney is Cagney, but I love Edmond O'Brien. I feel like I could watch him in anything. But he is especially excellent in crime films.

Saraband for Dead Lovers

This movie is so much better than I thought it would be, and Flora Robson is pretty extraordinary; she gives a brave, fierce performance that elevates the film far above the usual period fare that the studios were cranking out in the late 1940s.

Basil Dearden's filmmaking is also super interesting, which is surprising because the film itself is the kind of sudsy big-budget period romance to which we have all become accustomed in the post-war period. But Saraband for Dead Lovers has lots to recommend it. The editing is intriguing, the tale is told with startling economy, and the politics – a set of moves in Hanover that landed the German George I on the English throne – are not without interest.

As usual with the stuff I'm watching lately, Saraband for Dead Lovers is very hard to get ahold of. If you want to watch it you will have to find yourself a (legally questionable) DVD of it.