my favorite movies of 1948:
(2) Bicycle Thieves
(3) Rope
(4) The Big Clock
(5) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(6) Road House
(7) Pitfall
favorite of 1948:
Unfaithfully Yours(Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee. Directed by Preston Sturges.)
The conductor of a symphony orchestra (Rex Harrison) becomes filled with barely pent-up rage when he assumes his wife (Linda Darnell) is cheating on him based on unclear circumstantial evidence. Where that story will end up might be predictable, but how it gets there — through the eyes and ears of the conductor, into a whirlwind of his music-driven fantasies, conflicting notions, and grandiose folly — is delightful and insightful.
The Criterion DVD commentary talks about how this movie not only flopped at the time, but turned out to be the beginning of the end of writer/director Preston Sturges’s career. His string of successful comedies earlier in the ’40s (including my second choice for 1941) had made him the third highest paid American (!) … but after Unfaithfully Yours, he never had another hit. The world might not have been ready for this movie’s unconventional mix of screwball comedy and film noir in 1948, but Unfaithfully Yours is ripe for being rediscovered.
Eddie Muller, TCM’s noir expert, has a series called “Noir or Not?” where he briefly discusses whether a certain movie should be called a “noir.” Here’s his 20-second segment about Unfaithfully Yours, which he calls “the greatest satire of film noir ever”:Stream Unfaithfully Yours on the Criterion Channel (try a free trial if you don’t subscribe), or these sites.
2nd favorite of 1948:
Bicycle Thieves[Italian: Ladri di Biciclette] (Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell. Directed by Vittorio De Sica.)Bicycle Thieves is the literal translation used by Criterion, but this movie is often called The Bicycle Thief.
From that New York Times video about the movie:
At the end of the Second World War, Italy was a traumatized country, wracked by poverty and political turmoil, and Italian filmmakers responded to these conditions by inventing a new and vital style of filmmaking. It was called neo-realism. It involved the use of non-professional actors, real-life locations, documentary footage, and it told simple stories about the harshness of life. One of the masterpieces of neo-realism is The Bicycle Thief, directed by Vittorio De Sica. … Somehow, this film seems more relevant, more powerful, maybe more real than ever. The Bicycle Thief tells the story of Antonio Ricci, a poor man living in Rome, played, in what is really an extraordinary performance, by Lamberto Maggiorani, who was not a trained actor, but a steel worker. … At the beginning of the film, Antonio finds a job — not an easy thing to find in Rome in those days. The only requirement is that he has to have a bicycle. And on the very first day of work, his bicycle is stolen. So he and [his son] Bruno travel through the city trying to get it back. The city of Rome plays a very important role in this film — not the picture-postcard-tourist Rome, but a harsh, strange, unsettling place. One of the things that neo-realism does, and that De Sica is brilliant at, is taking you on a tour of the city and showing, in very simple scenes, how a whole society works. This society seems organized, almost as a conspiracy, to strip its members, in particular its poorest citizens, of their very dignity.
3rd favorite of 1948:
Rope(James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.)
Hitchcock’s first color movie centers on one object. It all takes place in one apartment in real time. And it largely feels as if it’s done in one take, though that’s an illusion. It isn’t Hitchcock’s best: some of the acting is wooden or over the top, and the story is perhaps disappointingly straightforward. But the experiment is fascinating to watch.
There’s an inside joke when two characters try and fail to remember the name of a movie that starred Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. At that point, they had been in only one movie together, and it was also directed by Hitchcock — my top choice for 1946. This was a wink at the fact that Cary Grant turned down the role that went to Jimmy Stewart in Rope: a professor whose two former students strangle a man at the beginning of the movie, then throw a party in the room where they’ve hidden the body.
4th favorite of 1948:
(Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan, George Macready, Elsa Lanchester. Directed by John Farrow.)
This is film noir with an anti-corporate angle, where working for a company feels like a nightmare. Earl Janoth is the tyrannical head of a New York City media conglomerate called Janoth Publications, which puts out magazines that seemingly cover every aspect of modern life, with names like Sportways, Artways, and Futureways. George Stroud is the editor of Crimeways, but he keeps trying to escape from the burdens of that job and the city, while he fears he’ll be framed for murder — the same murder he’s been put in charge of investigating.
Stroud feels increasingly trapped in the imposing Janoth headquarters building. The building becomes a character, similar to a two-faced, menacing villain, with slick conference rooms and magazine logos that feel like a front for ominously dark areas deeper into the building. One of the cinematographers who shot those shadowy spaces was John F. Seitz, who also worked on the seminal noir Double Indemnity (my favorite movie of 1944).
To get a sense of The Big Clock’s dark visual quality, look at this shot, where one of Janoth’s toadies (on the left) searches for Stroud, who’s hiding against a wall on the right. (The toady is chillingly played by Harry Morgan — credited as “Henry Morgan” in an early role, long before he starred on the TV show M*A*S*H in the ’70s and ’80s.)
But The Big Clock isn’t all dark and foreboding; it’s livened up by comical moments and a host of supporting characters such as a kooky painter, delightfully played by Elsa Lanchester. In real life she was married to Charles Laughton, who plays Janoth. A blu-ray extra says that Ray Milland, who plays Stroud, was repulsed by Laughton’s bisexuality, possibly adding to the tension between the two men in the movie. The novel on which the movie was based has Laughton’s character in an affair with a male subordinate (played by George Macready); that angle had to be left out of the movie because of the strict censorship of the 1940s, but it’s interesting to think about as a subtext to The Big Clock.
The director (John Farrow) and the actress who plays Stroud’s wife (Maureen O’Sullivan) were married, and one of their kids was Mia Farrow. That real-life mother and daughter eventually played a mother and daughter in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (one of my favorite movies of 1986).
The Big Clock was remade as a political thriller: No Way Out, one of my favorite movies of 1987, with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman in the roles originally played by Ray Milland and Charles Laughton.
(How to stream The Big Clock.)
5th favorite of 1948:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt. Directed by John Huston.)
This Slant review says:
There lies a certain irony in the fact that Humphrey Bogart, the most highly paid star of his era, would use his hard-earned creative freedom to play against type as a down-on-his-luck loser blinded by greed in a movie about gold digging that would, in turn, prove a box office dud. But where there is irony, there is truth, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre remains one of the most insightful films ever made about greed and the thorny effects of temptation on human nature. … The Treasure of the Sierra Madre bears witness to mankind’s contemptible willingness — nay, eagerness — to subjugate his brother in the name of short-term material advancement.
Stream The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on these sites.
6th favorite of 1948:
(Ida Lupino, Richard Widmark, Cornel Wilde, Celeste Holm. Directed by Jean Negulesco.)
Road House starts out as a campy melodrama about two old friends who are the owner (Richard Widmark) and manager (Cornel Wilde) of a “road house,” which includes a cocktail lounge … and a bowling alley (!) … in a small town near the Canadian border. A woman (Ida Lupino) who shows up as the lounge’s new jazz singer/pianist comes between the two men. The movie transforms into a film noir when one of the men becomes so jealous that he starts taking desperate measures to control both of the other two.
Ida Lupino was one of the great actresses of this time period, and she has moments of subtlety that hint at an unspoken meaning to this overlooked movie. She sings a couple songs in a low-key style — here’s her first performance at the lounge (yes, it’s really Lupino singing):
I don’t know anywhere to stream Road House, but I recommend the Kino blu-ray.
7th favorite of 1948:
Pitfall(Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Raymond Burr, Jane Wyatt. Directed by André de Toth.)This is the movie to watch if you like film noir, but get tired of the usual trope of the “femme fatale” who lures a sympathetic but weak man into a downward spiral. Pitfall turns that formula on its head. (More analysis here, with spoilers.)
In these scenes the male protagonist (Dick Powell), who’s gotten bored of his predictable domestic life with his wife (Jane Wyatt) and kid, meets the woman he’s investigating (Lizabeth Scott):
The streaming versions I’ve seen have a washed-out picture that saps Pitfall of its darkness, which is particularly unfortunate for a noir. Instead I recommend the Kino blu-ray, which includes commentary by noir expert Eddie Muller, with insights such as why it matters when the married couple has a confrontational conversation in a room of their house with wildly patterned wallpaper that we haven’t seen before.
In short, Pitfall is an uncommonly subtle and adult noir.
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