Category Archives: 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Stairway to Heaven (AKA A Matter of Life and Death)
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Written by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1946/UK
The Archers
First viewing/The Collector’s Choice DVD
#202 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Conductor 71: One is starved for Technicolor up there.[/box]

Parts of this fantasy were just magical. I was almost embarrassed for the film in other parts.   I need to give this one another chance since I have found that Powell and Pressburger films tend to grow on me.

RAF bomber pilot Peter Carter is bringing his battered plane back to England in a thick fog.  All of the crew has bailed out or died save him.  He is preparing to jump without a parachute from the burning hulk.  During his last minutes on board he talks to June (Kim Hunter), an American air traffic controller.  They immediately bond and fall in love.

After bailing out, Peter finds himself inexplicably alive on a beach.  He meets up with the grief-stricken June who is bicycling home from work.    They begin their romance. Meanwhile, the other world has noticed that it is one soul short.  Conductor 71 (Marius Goering) made a mistake in the fog.  The wry victim of the French Revolution is sent to convince Peter to do his duty and die.

Peter refuses, saying that he has superior rights to those of heaven since he fell in love due to their error.  Peter’s strange behavior causes June to contact her friend Dr. Reeves (Roger Livesey), a neuroscientist.  Dr. Reeves believes Peter to be suffering from a brain injury causing visual and auditory hallucinations.  He equally believes that to Peter these hallucinations are real and it is vital that Peter win in his dispute with heaven.  The story culminates in Peter having brain surgery while simultaneously arguing in his case in the heavenly court.  With Raymond Massey as heavenly Prosecutor and Kathleen Byron as an angel.

This is one instance in which my practice of listening to the commentary before watching the film may have really let me down.  The commentator goes into great detail about how this film was intended to mend fences between Britain and America, where people were questioning the value of an alliance with a holder of colonies, after the war.  The union of Peter and June symbolizes this. This is not made overt in the film but knowing this may have made the trial scene more painful that necessary.

On the other hand, this has some really special effects and innovative cinematography, particularly in the transitions between the Technicolor of earth and the black-and-white of heaven, and some beautiful images and good acting.  This was Jack Cardiff’s (Black Narcissus) debut as a Director of Photography.

Clip

Beauty and the Beast (La belle et la bête)
Directed by Jean Cocteau
Written by Jean Cocteau from a story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
1946/France
DisCina
Repeat viewing/Criterion Collection DVD
#197 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] The Beast:  Love can turn a man into a Beast.[/box]

This is one of the few “art” films I can really get behind.

A merchant has three daughters and a son.  Son Ludovic is a wastrel and two of the daughters are vain and arrogant.  But daughter Belle (Josette Day) adores her father and uncomplainingly acts as servant girl to him and her horrible sisters.  The household is completed by the seemingly ever-present Avenant (Jean Marais), Ludovic’s companion and suitor for Belle’s hand.  But Belle rejects all of Avenant’s proposals, preferring to care for her father.

The merchant has been waiting in vain for one of his ships to come in.  He gets the glad tidings that the last has indeed arrived and sets off to the port.  But when he gets there, his creditors have seized the contents and he is penniless once more.  He is sent off into the night to return home.  On the road, he chances upon a very strange and magical estate.  As he leaves the grounds, he plucks a rose, the only gift requested by Belle.  As soon as he does so, he is confronted by a Beast (also Jean Marais) who tells him the penalty for rose theft is death and that the merchant will die in three days unless he can convince one of his daughters to take his place.

The merchant returns home and tells his tale.  Belle secretly steals away to take her father’s place.  The Beast treats her as kindly as possible and says he will trouble her only at the dinner hour when he will continue to ask her to be his wife.  This arrangement does not last long as Belle gradually gets used to his bestial ways and begins to have pity for him.  But she continues to long for home and he finally agrees to allow her to return for one week.  He informs her that if she does not come back to him he will die of grief.  As a sign of his trust in her, he gives her the key to his treasure.

Belle is pure of heart.  The same cannot be said about her siblings or Avenant who proceed to steal the key and falsely persuade her to delay her return.  Anyone familiar with the fairy tale already knows the ending.

Cocteau creates a complete and beautiful fantasy world without computers or much money in a France still reeling from WWII. Indeed the cinematography, art direction, and special effects are the highlight of the film.

Each time I see it, I forget how much humor there is.  I just love those rotten sisters!  I also love that there is an underlying Freudian coming of age story without any psychiatry.  I see the tale of Belle as a young girl’s eventual surrender to the Beast (sex) in men and herself. She resists Avenant and can only accept him by going through the ordeal with the Beast.  Far-fetched?  Seems more obvious to me each time I see it.  All those scenes with the out-of-control Beast in Belle’s bedroom seem to bear me out.  Absolutely a classic.

Trailer

My Darling Clementine
Directed by John Ford
Written by Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller from a story by Sam Hellman based on a book by Stuart N. Lake
1945/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#204 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box]Wyatt Earp: Mac, you ever been in love?
Mac: No, I’ve been a bartender all me life.[/box]

If you are not looking for action, this is about as close to perfection as a Western comes.

Although Ford claimed that Wyatt Earp explained the whole thing to him, this is a highly fictionalized account of the events leading up to the Gunfight at the OK Corral.  Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and his brothers are driving a herd of cattle to California when they meet up with Old Man Clanton (a truly scary Walter Brennan) and his sons.  Clanton offers to buy the herd at rock-bottom prices.  Earp refuses to sell.  That night, while Wyatt and two of his brothers go to nearby Tombstone to get cleaned up, the Clantons help themselves to the herd and kill the youngest Earp boy.

Wyatt has no proof and accepts the very dangerous job as Marshall of Tombstone to get it and his revenge.  He makes friends with legendary gunslinger Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), a big deal around town.  His relations are not so good with Holliday’s girl, the fiery Chihuahua (Linda Darnell).

Then Clementine, Holliday’s lady love from older, better times comes looking for him.  Doc cannot bear to have her see what has become of him.  Wyatt takes an instantaneous liking to the pretty, refined Easterner.  The rest of the movie follows the love triangle, or is that quadrangle?, and the events leading up to the final confrontation with the Clantons.  With Ward Bond as an Earp and Alan Mowbray as a boozy itinerant actor.

Take away the plot and leave only the characters and scenery and you still have one fantastic movie.  With Ford it’s the little things that count.  I love the shots of Mature’s face as he listens to Hamlet’s soliloquy, Fonda’s stiff-legged dancing, and so much more.  The whole thing has a lonely, elegiac feeling befitting another time when the good guys won but at a terrible cost.

Ford always brought out the very best in Fonda and I find Mature to be such a sadly underrated actor.  Darnell is in her fake “Jane Russell” mode and not at her best.  Brennan reportedly hated working with Ford so much that he never did it again.  Despite or because of the animosity, he gives one of his best performances.  Highly recommended.

The Criterion DVD has an excellent commentary by a Ford biographer.

Trailer

Great Expectations
Directed by David Lean
Written by David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allen, etc. from the novel by Charles Dickens
1946/UK
Cineguild
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#203 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Mr. Jaggers: Take nothing on its looks, take everything on evidence. There is no better rule.[/box]

The first half of this film is one of the great Dickens adaptations and it is visually gorgeous throughout.

Young orphan Pip (Tony Wager) is being raised by his mean sister and her kind blacksmith husband Jo Gargery (Bernard Miles).  One day, as he is visiting his parents’ grave in a cemetery near the river, he chances upon a convict, Magwich (Finlay Curry) who scares the daylights out of him.  The convict demands a file and some food on threat that a “young man” will eat Pip’s liver.  More out of pity than fear, Pip comes through with the goods.

A little later, Pip is summoned by the rich, eccentric Miss Havesham (Martita Hunt) to come to her house and play.  On arrival, Pip is greeted by the dismissive and insulting but beautiful Estella (Jean Simmons).  It is lifelong love at first sight for Pip, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Estella vocally looks down upon the boy as “common”.  Miss Havesham, an aged bride who has not seen the light of day since her jilting, encourages Pip’s longing.  Pip continues to visit the house until he needs to start his apprenticeship with Jo.  Thereafter, he returns each year to collect a generous birthday present.  Estella, by this time, has been sent to finishing school in France.

The pivotal event in Pip’s life occurs when he is in his late teens.  An anonymous benefactor has established a fund to allow him to go to London and become a gentleman. Pip, who has been dreaming of finally winning Estella, jumps at the opportunity.  In London, he is taken in hand by lawyer Jaggers (Francis L. Sullivan) and is given over to share rooms with one Herbert Pocket (Alec Guinness, in his first credited performance), who teaches him social graces.

Pip is reacquainted with Estella (Valerie Hobson) when she returns from France.  She refuses to flirt with him, as she does with all others, and tells him she has no heart.  Pip persists in his infatuation.  Then a second earthquake turns all Pip’s expectations upside down.

I’m a bit of a Dickens nut and I love the source novel about a boy who has to learn the hard way to take life at face value.  Its story about how we need to learn to be grateful for  what we have resonates with me.

This film is a feast for the eyes.  I especially like the early scenes in the graveyard, which convey so perfectly the terrors of a child but the whole thing is beautiful. As story telling, I find the second half dealing with Pip’s adulthood falls short of the first.  This is a fault shared with the novel but the casting didn’t help.  For one thing, John Mills is too old for the part and, for another, there is no way Jean Simmons could grow up to be Valerie Hobson and, if she had, Hopkins’s Estella was far too compassionate to be the same person.  Still, I looked forward to seeing this and look forward to seeing it again and again.

Great Expectations won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White.  It was nominated in the following categories:  Best Picture; Best Director; and Best Writing, Screenplay.

Clip – Opening sequence

I Know Where I’m Going!
Written and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1945/UK
The Archers
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#188 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Joan Webster: People around here are very poor I suppose.

Torquil MacNeil: Not poor, they just haven’t got money.[/box]

I think that there is room in movies for clueless heroes and heroines who are redeemed by love. This romance has some of the greatest scenery ever and a kind of magical aura that I find irresistible.

Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), daughter of a middle-class banker, is pretty and smart and has always gotten her own way.  She has her eyes on the prize at all times and that prize is a life with the monied elite.  As the story begins, she announces to her father that she will wed Consolidated Chemical Industries the next day.  She ignores her father’s objections that its principal, the actual bridegroom, is as old as he.  She is thrilled with the customized itinerary that will take her to the island in the Western Hebrides that her fiance, a Lord, has leased for the duration of the war.

All goes well until she reaches the port where a launch from the island is to meet her. There, as is common, the weather deteriorates to the point where it looks likely that there will be no passage out for several days.  The locals extend a hospitable welcome but Joan does not understand the land poor real Scottish aristocracy or why she cannot simply buy her way to her destination.  Furthermore, she is developing a dangerous attraction to the real laird of the island Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey).  Something in the air of the surroundings is also being to instill pixie dust into her dreams.  The threat that this may divert her from her life-long ambition leads her to take dangerous risks for herself and others in order to escape.

Some people find Wendy Hiller’s character to be unsympathetic.  I contend that it is the unsympathetic that need to be rescued from their predicament.  The fact is that Joan, in fact, has no idea where her heart wants to go and the film provides a place for it to rest. The very ending where Livesey reads the “curse” had tears in my eyes yet again.  And I think no one could fail to see the beauty of Erwin Hiller’s gorgeous cinematography or the Scottish music.

As I started out on my journey through films I was kind of a Powell and Pressburger agnostic.  As I age and revisit their work I find myself becoming an enthusiast.

Clip

Spellbound
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Ben Hecht and Angus McPhail (adaptation) suggested by the novel “The House of Dr. Edwardes” by Francis Beeding
1945/USA
Selznick International Pictures/Vanguard Films
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#193 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Dr. Alex Brulov: What is there for you to see? We both know that the mind of a woman in love is operating on the lowest level of the intellect![/box]

I’d be happier if Hitchcock stayed entirely away from Freud. Not one of my favorites.

Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) is an all-business psychoanalyst at the Green Manors asylum run by Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll).  We know this by the way she brushes off advances by her all-male colleagues.  The management has determined that Murchison is past his prime and is replacing him with the renowned Dr. Edwardes, whom nobody has met.  When “Edwardes” (Gregory Peck) arrives, all are amazed to see how young he is.  What Dr. Peterson can’t get over, however, are his matinee idol looks.  Her heart is lost immediately.

But Dr. Edwardes has mysterious panic attacks every time he sees dark lines on a white background.  Petersen and “Edwardes” are soon in agreement that he is an imposter. Problem is that “Edwardes” can’t remember who he actually is. The real Dr. Edwardes has disappeared and is now thought murdered.  Our “Edwardes” is convinced he is the murderer and flees.  Dr. Petersen follows since love and her professional training tell her the man is suffering from a “guilt complex”.

Petersen tracks her man down to New York City where she finds him registered as John Brown.  They start posing as a married couple while Petersen tries, and fails, to maintain her professional ethics as his psychiatrist.  After a couple of close shaves, Petersen and “Brown” take refuge in the home of her mentor Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov).  “Brown” is almost psychotically ill by this point, but Brulov reluctantly agrees to hide the couple and help to treat him for a few days.  And that’s all it takes to cure his amnesia and “guilt complex”.  It takes a bit longer to solve the murder mystery.  With Rhonda Fleming in a very early role as a psych patient.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if our dreams did hold the key to all our repressed history and inner turmoil?  And if each dream symbol had an obvious correlate in the real world? What if a few conversations could unbury childhood trauma and restore us to some better adult self?  Sadly, it doesn’t work that way.  I find this a really irritating and simplistic story.  I just can’t help it.

Taking allowances for the time period in which it was made and my perhaps exaggerated reaction, there is nothing really wrong with the film.  The suspense is built by a Master after all.  The famous Dali dream sets are evocative.   And Ingrid Bergman looks exceptionally beautiful to me here.  She is allowed to have her hair kind of natural and tousled in soft curls and it makes her look like an angel.  What I could perhaps believe is that her love could go some way in curing any man.

Miklos Rózsa won an Academy Award for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.  Spellbound was nominated for Academy Awards in the following categories:  Best Picture; Best Supporting Actor (Michael Chekov); Best Director; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (George Barnes); and Best Effects, Special Effects.

Trailer

The Lost Weekend
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett from the novel by Charles R. Jackson
1945/USA
Paramount Pictures
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
188 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Don Birnam: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I can’t take quiet desperation![/box]

If this film did not have all the portentous theremin music, it might be perfect.

Don Birman (Ray Milland) has it all going for him.  He is young, handsome and witty, with a gift for writing and monied family.  He is also in the late stages of alcoholism.

On this particular weekend, Don has been sober for 10 days.  His faithful brother Wick has planned a long weekend at the family country house.  Beautiful, intelligent girlfriend Helen (Jane Wyman) must work and stay behind.  But a bottle of rye Don has hidden dangling outside the window keeps calling his name.  Witt once again spots Don’s excuses for lies and takes off it a huff by himself.  After drinking down the bottle, Don learns of $10 Witt left in the sugar bowl for the housecleaner, steals it, and goes on a four-day bender.

During Don’s lost weekend, he gets caught stealing from a woman’s purse at a club, cozies up to a girl he doesn’t love for money, pathetically attempts to hock his typewriter, and falls down some stairs, winding up in the alkie ward, all in worship of his God alcohol.  Wilder masterfully shows the obsessive devotion of the addict to his drug of choice to the exclusion of his own dignity or love for other people.  Finally, Don has had enough and is about to opt for the easy way out.  Fortunately, Helen stubbornly refuses to give up on him.  With Howard Da Silva as Don’s favorite bartender and Frank Faylen as a sarcastic truth-telling orderly.

I don’t know why but the Oscar-nominated score really got on my nerves this time.  The theremin music gives the proceedings a campy flavor reminiscent of horror or science fiction movies.  It is also ramped up to maximum volume and drama every time Don is going to make one of his frequent slips.  I hate being manipulated by screen music.

In general, though, this is an excellent film.  Wilder certainly captured the selfishness, self-loathing, and despair of the addict perfectly.  And who was to know that the urbane, light-hearted Milland had such depths in him?  It deserved the Oscars it got and should certainly be seen.

The Lost Weekend won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Writing, Screenplay.  It was nominated for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (John F. Seitz); Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Miklós Rósca)

Trailer

Brief Encounter
Directed by David Lean
Written by Anthony Havelock-Allen, David Lean, and Ronald Neame from the play “Still Life” by Noel Coward (all uncredited)
1945/UK
Cineguild
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#191 of 1001 Film You Must See Before You Die

[box] Laura Jesson: I’ve fallen in love. I didn’t think such violent things happened to ordinary people.[/box]

I didn’t realize how brief the encounter really was until I watched this small masterpiece for the umpteenth time.

The story mainly takes place in flashback as Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) sits in her living room and thinks about the man she just said goodbye to while her husband does the crossword.  A recording of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is playing in the background.

It’s a simple story.  Laura goes to the nearest town every Thursday to do errands and watch a movie.  Laura meets Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard)  when he removes a piece of grit in her eye in a railway station tearoom.    The next Thursday she gives him a seat at her table in a crowded restaurant and they go to the movies together.  He asks her to meet him the following week.

After vowing not meet him, Laura is there.  The movie is bad so they take an outing on the river instead.  It is then that Alec confesses his love and Laura cannot deny hers.  The following week Alec has borrowed a friend’s car and they go driving.  At the end of the day, Alec says he is going to skip the train and wait for Laura in his friend’s empty apartment.  Laura cannot stay away.  But the guilt and shame is too much for her and she needs to find the strength to call things quits.  With Stanley Holloway as the station master who is flirting with Joyce Carey’s tearoom operator.

Why can’t love be simple?  Lean and the actors make you care about these people so much that the very British and restrained sexual tension is palpable.  We can understand every move they make and root for their love while at the same time understanding why it is all wrong.  The cinematography and frame composition is as beautiful as the story.  Most highly recommended.

Brief Encounter was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Writing, Screenplay.

Re-release trailer