This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.
My Favorite Blonde - Bob Hope's brand of zany slapstick comedy took me a little while to get into, but this team-up with Madeleine Carroll is irresistible. The espionage hijinks, the staged fight scene, and the performing penguin are all highlights, but the rapport between Hope and Carroll is what really makes this screwball picture work. Hope subsequently made two other "My Favorite" comedies, alas neither with Carroll.
Yankee Doodle Dandy - James Cagney has a reputation as the ultimate screen tough guy, but my favorite of his roles is as songwriter and entertainer George M. Cohan. Watch Cagney sing and dance and charm the pants off of everyone he meets in this patriotic biopic of the guy who wrote "You're a Grand Old Flag" and many other familiar tunes. Watch Cagney act with unerring skill, tugging the heartstrings as deftly as he raises our spirits.
Now, Voyager - One of the best Bette Davis films is a romance about a shy, unconfident woman who finally gets the opportunity to pursue life on her own terms. Unfortunately, she falls in love with a man who isn't free to love her back. It's a small scale, tender story about very adult characters and concerns, with a resolution that is beautifully bittersweet. It also features one of the best final lines of dialogue to be found in any movie.
The Pied Piper - I adore Monty Woolley as an aging grump who doesn't like children, but somehow ends up shepherding a passel of small children through wartime Europe to safety in the UK. Otto Preminger plays a Nazi officer who thinks our hero is a spy in disguise, but he isn't all that he appears to be. Then Anne Baxter shows up in France to lend a hand. All in all, this is one of the most unexpectedly charming war movies ever made.
Casablanca - You must remember this. Bogart and Bergman. A murderer's row of great character actors in supporting roles, including Rains, Veidt, Hereid, Greenstreet, and even Lorre. Some of the most quotable dialogue ever written. The rousind Marseillaise sequence. The oft parodied final farewell sequence on the runway. Sam playing "As Time Goes By," which still serves as the Warner Bros. theme eighty years later. Play it again, Sam.
Mrs. Miniver - One of the most effective WWII propaganda films ever made, making the conflict more personal as it depicts the effects of the war on British civilians. Greer Garson plays the title character, the steadfast matriarch of a British family surviving the Blitz, serving as a stand-in for all victims of Nazi aggression. The film was a smash hit and unapologetically used by the U.S. government to make their own case for entering the war.
Bambi - The last of Disney's first wave of animated classics gives us the circle of life in a lovely paean to the natural world. It's easy to forget that this is the film that both charmed audiences with the adorable baby animals, ice skating sequence, and April shower song, and then traumatized a generation of children with the death of Bambi's mother. Actually, considering how well the film has held up, it's multiple generations of children now.
To Be or Not To Be - Everyone in WWII had to do their part, even a troupe of Polish theater actors who happen to include Jack Benny and Carole Lomabrd. I keep forgetting that this is an Ernst Lubitsch film and not a Billy Wilder one, because this is about as satirical and political as Lubitch ever got. However, the farce is excellent, the performances are a delight - especially Benny as the hammy leading man - and the Nazis got exactly what was coming to them.
Went the Day Well? - More WWII propaganda - this time an extremely tense thriller that depicts a fictional infiltration of a British village by the Nazis. The villagers are smart and resourceful, but so are the enemy, leading to multiple dashed plans to alert the authorities, slowly escalating hostilities, and eventually violent clashes. The heroes are so ordinary, the losses hit very close to home, and the relative lack of melodrama makes it all the more sobering.
Random Harvest - However, I'm not one to turn down a good melodrama. They really don't make enough of them these days. Two of the brightest, and often forgotten stars of this era, Greer Garson and Ronald Colman, play a loving couple whose lives are upended due to amnesia - not once, but twice. It's a ridiculous premise, but a sublime piece of cinema.
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