Bangers, All: 1945, Part Seven

August and September 1945. This is the end of the War. In August, the atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Emperor Hirohito steps down in acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. That same month, the British government is lobbied by the Zionist World Congress regarding the creation of Israel, while in Vietnam, the Viet Minh takes over Hanoi, sparking the August Revolution. The French are driven to the South by September, dividing the country in two. September also sees this happening in Korea, where in the North, the Soviets begin trumpeting Kim Il Sung as a war hero, while in the South, an American Military Government is established. The stage is now set for the next century of conflicts. War, it never ends...

Stateside at the movies, meanwhile...: 

Good and Bad Propaganda: 1945, Part Five

May and June 1945. The War in Europe is over. The enemies have surrendered, high-ranking Nazi officials have killed themselves, prisoners are taken...some, like the rocket scientists, are adopted, their skills being of use to the Allies. But the War in the Pacific is still going, though by June 21, the US scores a victory at Okinawa. It will take some time before the production of war films slows down, and they'll never really go away, not for this war. Still, you can sense that Hollywood saw the end was near, for even considering when things must have filmed before their release dates, only five of the thirteen films below deal with the war, even ephemerally...

The Horse and His Girl: 1945, Part Two

January 1945. Seven months after Allied forces land on the beaches of Normandy, the War continues, but the end is nigh. The Nazis are running. France hasn't been overrun by the Vichy collaborators since the previous August. MacArthur's returned to the Phillippines. And halfway through the month, Hitler's in the bunker.

And Hollywood? The entertainment continued, as did the war films, as did the not-war-but-totally-wink-wink-The War films. As you can see:

The Long Game: 1944, Part Seven

The final three Best Picture nominees are briefly glanced herein, and one of them, tragically, lost every single one of its nominations. But when I tell you that, and then when I tell you the five nominees were Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Going My Way, Since You Went Away, and Wilson, I bet you won't correctly guess who the sole "loser" was...

First of the Best: 1944, Part Four

January saw our first Best Director nominee, and now May has our first Best Picture nominee!

Embattled Broads: 1944, Part Two

Whether stationed abroad, entertaining the attentions of the troops, going to therapy, or committing MURDER, the films of 1944 truly believed women could play it all. I'm reminded that a frequent frustration of Old Hollywood fans is the dismissal of women’s roles at the time, despite there being so many varied, complex parts - in this lineup alone! As in:

1940: And That Makes 82

The last ten films in my 1940 viewings, only two of which did not get Oscar nominations - December, then as now, is The Season, after all. Here we go:

1940: The #1 Film of the Year (and others)

OK, a day late, so we're gonna make up for it by having ten capsules today. Today's offerings include yet another Charlie Chan picture, a musical adaptation of Shakespeare, and the #1 moneymaker of 1940...

1940: The Last of the First Week

Wrapping things up for the week with five summertime films from 1940:

1940: The Rest of Winter

Yesterday, we began our look into the cinema of 1940 with nine films released at the end of 1939 and January of 1940. Today we have six films, four of which came out in February. Here you will see, among others: one of the best musicals of the year (but with no Oscar nominations), a mystery, a couple histories, and the earliest release to end up an Oscar winner. Shall we?:

1948: Between Summer and Fall...

We now go into the end of Summer and beginning of Autumn - a lineup that includes a Best Picture nominee! Actually, there are a lot of nominees here: of these 13 films, only three of them weren't recognized by either the Academy or the WGA. One is a Poverty Row Charlie Chan film, one os a documentary, and the other is...Rope! Read on...

1948: Summer Songs

Summer is upon us, and what do you suppose the folks in 1948 were watching? By the looks of this lineup: musicals. Not just because four of the films below are musicals, but because two of them ended up among the highest-grossing films of the year - though, naturally, the two I prefer are neither of them.  Sprinkled among those songs of the summer: Charlie Chan (not a season goes by without him!), a lot of noirs, and the greatest crossover any Cinematic Universe ever thought to put out...

1948: An Auspicious Start

Of the hundreds of films that qualified for the 21st Academy Awards, I watched 75. Over the next few days - indeed, starting yesterday - I'm going to talk about those films and my reactions to them, thirteen a day, in order of release - excepting, of course, the five nominees for Best Picture, which I'll get into when I discuss that category on July 20th.

I will mention, though, an interesting fact. Much has been made of Everything Everywhere All At Once sustaining its buzz from its debut at South By Southwest on March 11, 2022, through its theatrical release 14 days later, all the way to being named Best Picture on March 12, 2023, a year and a day later. It is impressive, if only because the Academy tends to be biased in favor of later releases. The year 1948 was no exception - three of the five Best Picture nominees, including the winner, came out in the last quarter. Still, it's impressive that one of those other two nominees came out right at the beginning of the year.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre had its Los Angeles premiere January 14th, 1948, before receiving general release ten days later. In the Los Angeles Times review dated January 15th, Edwin Schallert called it "curiously powerful" and predicted that Walter Huston's performance as an old prospector "would be on the next nominations list, were it not for the fact that [the film] belongs to 1948 rather than 1947." Schallert was right, though: not only did Huston père receive one of the film's four Oscar nominations, he also accounts for one of its three wins. And this was a year when the Awards were held in late March (in fact, a year and two months to the day following its general release)! Director-screenwriter John Huston also found himself up for two WGA Awards: Best Western (a win!) and Best Drama (a loss, to The Snake Pit).

That's how the film year of 1948 started. Here's what came after:

1948: Shakespeare, Writers, and the Year Before

This month we focus on the films of 1948. 

Why the films of 1948? If you've been reading for a while, you may recall that last year, I wanted to watch all the Best Picture nominees adapted from William Shakespeare. 1948 is an exceptional year in that regard - not only was a Shakespeare film nominated, but it was also the winner.

Further research and current events convinced me this was a good time to bring back 1948: this was the inaugural year of the Writers Guild Awards. Nowadays, it's a fairly standard Oscar precursor, awarding Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Documentary Screenplay. In its first year, however, the WGA Awards sought to honor every major genre and its unique position as an American Union with five categories: Drama, Comedy, Western, Musical, and the Robert Meltzer Award for Screenplay Dealing Most Ably With Problems of the American Scene. Television honors would be added later.

The Meltzer Award, by the way, is named for a screenwriter who died fighting the Nazis in 1944 only to be posthumously censured by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. In between, the WGA established an award in his honor, as a hat-tip to those writers whose work addresses what's happening in America now. When he was named by HUAC, the award was suspended.

So, there we are: Shakespeare and Writers Guild Awards. Let's hop right to it, shall we?

The journey begins before 1948. Back then, as now, a film qualified for the Oscars when it played Los Angeles for a week. I've tried to go by LA release dates where available, but sometimes all I can find is a general US release date. The following five films had their releases before 1948, but did not play Los Angeles until the next year (or, in one case, two years later). Still, they qualify for our purposes, and so here they are.

Girl of the Canal (aka Painted Boats)

release date: January 12, 1946

(recommended by Juan Carlos Ojano)

See, here's a perfect example: Released in the UK in 1945, it received its "general" release in the United States on October 6, 1947; more than a year previously, however, it made its debut Stateside in January 1946...on New York television. TV was still new-ish, so there weren't yet rules in place regarding a strictly theatrical exhibition in order to qualify for the Academy Awards. 

At just 48 minutes, it is a coming-of-age romance; a family drama; a documentary about a disappearing way of life. We've two families of canal workers - one with a motor, one being pulled by a horse on the shore - I question the efficiency of the latter but, then, so much of this film is about chipping away at the old ways of doing things in favor of modernity...and literacy. There's an intelligent son in the former, an intelligent daughter in the latter, they're attracted to each other, they've hopes and dreams, one kind of hankers for a life beyond, the other can't imagine a better way of life. It's just an interesting flick to watch unfold, especially since one gets to learn so much about a bygone way of life. Why canals? How did this become a way of life? Watch the film and find out for yourself!

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome

release date: September 26, 1947

The final of four Dick Tracy films first hit US cinemas in 1947. I love this series of films: while they don't consistently maintain the wink at German Expressionism in their sets and costumes, they sustain a straight-faced camp in their dialogue and storylines. Dick's almost a non-entity, but they know that. The draw is Boris Karloff as a villain using special nerve gas to rob banks, a villain so terrifying, even the cops are comparing him to...Boris Karloff. The man never phoned a performance in, and here he demonstrates a gift for deadpan comedy that makes one wonder what he could have done with the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker contingent. A good time.

Panic

release date: November 26, 1947

(recommended by Juan Carlos Ojano)

Adapted from a story by Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret. In the aftermath of a woman's murder, suspicion falls on a loner who is largely disliked socially but, otherwise, has nothing against him. No matter, the fact that people don't like him is enough to hang him in the court of public opinion. The film follows that tightening noose, even as the doomed man himself discovers the identity of the true killer, which he hides for the sake of the woman he loves. An allegory for the collaboration of French citizens during the Vichy period, it's a damning portrayal of mob mentality. Brilliant flick.

The Chinese Ring

release date: December 6, 1947

Our first Charlie Chan of the year! At this point, the barely-passable Sidney Toler had died, the reigns going to the not-even-trying Roland Winters, in his first of six appearances as the great detective. Here, a beautiful Chinese princess comes to Chan for help but, before he can even meet her, she is assassinated while waiting for him in his own study. The titular ring refers to the one she wears on her hand, announcing her status. The solution seems divined out of thin air. Ends with a horrifying misogynist joke that feels very out of character for Charlie Chan. Apparently a word-for-word remake of the Boris Karloff flick Mr. Wong in Chinatown. DIRE.

Beauty and the Beast

release date: December 23, 1947

(recommended by Juan Carlos Ojano and Joe Leydon)

You know the old story of the beauty who frees her father from an enchanted palace by taking his place; this version includes Belle's jealous siblings. Clever production design, jaw-dropping makeup effects, ingenious casting/role-doubling, sparkling cinematography: this is a masterpiece, magic to behold.

Tomorrow, the first 13 films released in 1948 - plus a look at the first Best Picture nominee of the year.

You May Also Enjoy:

ZergNet

Like us on Facebook

1946: Some Spring, Some Summer

It's Spring now in 1946, and with the new season came the first nominee for Best Picture - Henry V.

Produced in Britain in 1944 as a way to rally the fighting spirit of the UK, Henry V is Laurence Olivier's directorial debut, adapted from the Shakespeare play of the same name. For the uninitiated, it's the story of a once-frivolous prince who's now King of England and finds himself in conflict with France over that country's throne. The nations go to war, though the invading English are ridiculously, hilariously outnumbered, and don't stand a chance. Oh, ho-ho, so you think! This is the play from which come the lines "Once more unto the breach" and "We band of brothers" and "O God, thy arm was here," so it's a compelling drama about war, about overcoming odds, about the uncertainty of leadership. 

Olivier's approach is a true adaptation. He opens at the Globe Theatre, with audience members laughing and talking throughout, actors going in late for cues, a thunderstorm interrupting proceedings, performers in obvious wigs and wardrobe acting on a bare stage. But as the narrative unfolds, the setting changes, becomes more cinematic - we see them land at the beach, we see the battle play out with horses thundering and spears impaling, we see Henry wander a campsite lit only by fires and the moon. This is not just a practical choice to give us spectacle where cinema demands, but an illustration of the transportive power of the Theatre, and that is a timeless thing.

Many European films did not receive a US release until after the War, for obvious reasons. And so Henry V came to our shores in 1946. IMDb puts its first American screening on April 3 in Boston, Variety's review ran April 24, the New York Times' June 16, and Manny Farber's review for The New Republic is dated July 8. Somewhere in there is its Oscar-qualifying date, surely. We'll discuss it more in two weeks' time, but we just wanted to note that it came out among these films:

1946: Winter Into Spring

Isn't this something? Yesterday, we talked about 1945 films that somehow qualified for the 1946 Oscars; today, we talk about the first three months of 1946 cinema. And I say "isn't this something" because, between the two, they give us nine of the 36 nominees eventually up for Academy Awards, a full 1/4 of the whole lineup. With few exceptions, these days we rarely discuss films released before October!

January through mid-March, here are a baker's dozen of 1946 flicks:

1936: Thrills and Chills

Mysteries and horrors, after the jump....

1935: Charlie Chan and Co.

A final round-up of twelve films, all released in the United States in 1935, qualifying for Academy Awards consideration but, alas (or maybe not alas!), unnominated: