1940s

Films from the 1940s

The Woman in the Window (1944)

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I’d watch a movie starring Edward G. Robinson any day. He’s one of my favorite actors, always turning in nuanced, mesmerizing performances.

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The Woman in the Window (1944)

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Pair him with director Fritz Lang, and toss in Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, and Dan Duryea, and you can’t go wrong.

That’s the lineup we get in this week’s club pick, The Woman in the Window (the 1944 version).

There’s little of the Expressionist light and shadows of many of Lang’s other films or of other films noir, but he layers on the genre’s moral ambiguity in The Woman in the Window. It’s a solid thriller.

Robinson plays psychology professor Richard Wanley brilliantly. In one day, Wanley goes from sending his wife and kids off to visit family to hiding the body of a man he’s killed in a mysterious woman’s apartment. And, Bennett is alluring as Alice Reed, the unintentional femme fatale.

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The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

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Movie-going friends often hear me complain about how so many movies these days run close to three hours. I think it’s to justify the increasing price of tickets.

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The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

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Avatar: The Way of Water and superhero movies, I’m thinking of you.

Ninety minutes to two hours is the sweet spot. It keeps the storytelling taut but leaves time to delve into character and background.

That said, there are certainly movies that can break that notion without any padding or filler. We’ve watched several in our film club: Red Beard and Andrei Rublev jump to mind right off.

Add to those The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, this week’s pick.

Without going into a full-blown review, I just want to touch on a few thoughts that came to mind after watching the movie.

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It Happens Every Spring

By / / 1940s, 1949 / Leave a Comment

Film critic Leonard Maltin called It Happens Every Spring “a most enjoyable, unpretentious picture.”

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It Happens Every Spring

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That pretty much sums it up.

Back in my teen years, one of our local TV stations ran old movies on weekday afternoons, just in time for me to tune in after school. I watched a lot of second-tier movies, particularly when the weather wasn’t conducive to being outside. This week’s pick was one of those movies.

I hadn’t watched it since and turned it on this time as background while I cleaned up the house. But after about 15 or 20 minutes, it pulled in me. I sat and watched the rest of the film, mostly because of Paul Douglas.

Douglas plays Monk Lanigan, a (somewhat old) baseball catcher, who’s tasked with keeping an eye on his team’s new and mysterious pitcher, King Kelly (played by Ray Milland).

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Double Indemnity

By / / 1940s, 1944 / 2 Comments

Double Indemnity is one of those movies that I’ve seen countless times, and will happily watch again.

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Double Indemnity

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For many of us, Fred MacMurray was the easygoing father, Steve Douglas, in the long-running TV show My Three Sons. In Double Indemnity, he’s the fast-talking, unsmiling insurance salesman Walter Neff, who is easily pulled into a scheme with a woman he’s fallen for, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), to murder her husband for the insurance money.

Visually and plot-wise, Double Indemnity is a film noir, but the dialog is straight out of hard-boiled detective fiction. It makes sense since the script was co-written by Raymond Chandler.

Chandler was one of the “Black Mask Boys,” a group of crime-fiction authors lured by editor Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw to the pulp magazine. Black Mask introduced readers to hard-boiled detective fiction with the short novel “Three Gun Terry,” by Carroll John Daly, in its May 15, 1923, issue. The main character, Terry Mack, was a smart-alecky private detective who talked tough and in the vernacular of the streets, unlike the drawing-room detectives that had been familiar to readers.

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