Daily Archives: January 10, 2015

Post-war movie production began to click into full gear.   In movie news, the Cannes Film Festival debuted in France on the French Riviera. Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945) was the first Best Picture Oscar-winning film to also win Cannes’ top prize (known now as the Golden Palm or Palme d’Or). The Motion Pictures Code allowed films to show drug trafficking so long as the scenes did not “stimulate curiosity.”

Screen comedian, actor, writer, and juggler W.C. Fields died at the age of 66.  Supposedly, he despised the holiday of Christmas, the day on which he died, of an alcohol-related stomach hemorrhage. The last pairing of Basil Rathbone (as Sherlock Holmes) and Nigel Bruce (as Dr. John Watson) was in Dressed to Kill – the last of 14 Sherlock Holmes films they were teamed in from 1939 to 1946.

Returning G.I.’s were more than ready to get back to normal.  The baby boom began in the U.S., heralded by the publication of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s childcare classic. Dissatisfaction with employment conditions and opportunities showed itself in the worst work stoppages since 1919, with coal, electrical, and steel industries hit hardest.  The US Atomic Energy Commission was established.

The first automatic electronic digital computer, ENIAC, was dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania.  The average cost of a new house was $5,600 and the average annual wage was $2,500.  The number one song of the year was “Prisoner of Love” sung by Perry Como.  No Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded.

Outside the U.S., the world continued to reel from the effects of the war with wartime shortages in food and materials persisting and shortages of housing and jobs exacerbated by the return of soldiers to the workforce.

In world news,  Emperor Hirohito announced he was not a god on January 1.  The first meeting of United Nations General Assembly was held.  The Philippines gained independence from the United States on July 4.  Twelve Nazi leaders (including 1 tried in absentia) were sentenced to hang, 7 imprisoned, and 3 acquitted in the Nuremberg trials. Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech warned of Soviet expansion. Juan Perón became president of Argentina.

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The list of films I will selectively choose from can be found here and here.  I have already reviewed the following films on this site:  ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; and .  I now see that I was inadvertently cherry-picking some of the great films from the 40’s and 50’s during my Noir Month viewing.  Ah, well, there are plenty more where those came from.

I have already seen 20 of the films released in 1946.  Just for fun, here are my ten favorites as of now in no particular order:  The Best Years of Our Lives; It’s a Wonderful Life; Notorious; The Killers; Beauty and the Beast; The Blue Dahlia; My Darling Clementine; The Big Sleep; Shoeshine; and Great Expectations.  It will be interesting to see where they will stand after I have seen a bunch more.

Montage of stills from Oscar winners

Montage of stills from all films nominated for an Oscar

Cornered
Directed by Edward Dmytryk
Written by John Paxton from a story by John Wesley
1945/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing/Warner Film Noir Classic Collection

[box] Perchon, German Banker: The gun is unnecessary, this is a friendly meeting.

Laurence Gerard: Just want to be sure I’m chairman.[/box]

Dick Powell is at his grimmest in this post-war noir which takes his character deep into a Nazi enclave in Argentina.

Canadian flyer Laurence Gerard (Powell) has just been released from a POW camp.  He is deeply traumatized and his one remaining aim in life is vengeance on the people who murdered his French wife of 20 days.  He returns to France to confront her father and pump him for information on the murderers.  The father, reluctantly out of concern for Gerard’s sanity and safety, says that Vichy official Marcel Jarnac was to blame.

But the father also has papers stating that Jarnac is dead, his life insurance having been paid to wife Madeleine. The father believes the files fell into his hands too conveniently and tells Gerard that he might learn more from Jarnac’s Vichy associate.  Of course, at the exact moment Gerard arrives to confront the man, he finds his office in a smoldering heap. The associate burned all his papers before committing suicide.  But, of course, within about two minutes Gerard finds an unscathed page which is the cover sheet of a dossier the man was keeping on Jarnac. For some reason, Gerard takes this as proof that Jarnac is alive.  He decides to follow the trail of Jarnac’s “widow”.  It takes him to Switzerland and thence to Argentina.

Melchior Incza (Walter Slezak) meets Gerard on arrival.  Incza seems to know way too much about Gerard and offers him his services.  Failing to rid himself of Incza, Gerard finally accepts his offer to attend a party where the widow may be present.  The remainder of the story follows Gerard’s pursuit of Jarnac to its bloody conclusion

I have related perhaps twenty minutes of the more coherent portions of the exceptionally convoluted and improbable plot.  The film keeps playing with the audience’s perception of the true identities of the many players and I still was not quite sure of some of them by the end.  The confusion made the film seem longer than its 110 minute length.  The dialog, on the other hand, is pretty great and certainly the performances cannot be faulted.  Both Powell and Slezak shine.

Trailer