La belle et la bete (Beauty and the beast) 1946 - A visually stunning fantasy

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Jean Cocteau
Main Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day

"Jean Cocteau's most popular film, this 1946 masterpiece is perhaps the most faithful of the many film versions of the 1756 fairy tale written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Though the ending is a bit on the strange side - the Beast morphs into a prince who looks exactly like Belle's hapless suitor, and her disappointment is unmistakable -- the film features tight, economical storytelling and enough visual fireworks (including many stunningly executed optical effects) to enrapture viewers from beginning to end. The actors are uniformly wonderful; Josette Day makes a stunning Belle, and Cocteau regular Jean Marais excels in a triple role that includes the magnificent Beast. The real stars of the film, though, are Cocteau himself, who gives the film a shimmering, romantic look, and the brilliant costume and set design. The Beast's makeup, in particular, works beautifully; it's just realistic enough to be convincing, while allowing Marais to emote through his eyes and subtle facial tics. The unforgettable sets, which include human-arm candelabras and moving statues, are a marvel of impressionistic romanticism, filled with symbolism that hints at the story's darker implications." - www.allmovie.com

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The postman always rings twice 1946 - Garfield and Turner are terrific

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IMDB rating: 7,6

Director: Tay Garnett
Main Cast: Lana Turner, John Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn, Leon Ames

"A classic 1940s film noir, The Postman Always Rings Twice is shot through with an overwhelming sense of the inevitability of fate. In the tradition of Greek tragedy, characters who appear to be in control of their fates turn out to be trapped and compelled by urges beyond their control. They are attractive but flawed, and corrupt at a level so basic that no amount of absolution can cleanse them of their sins. Lana Turner is so magnetically attractive that it is easy to see why John Garfield's character is so quick to fall under her charms and into her arms. Garfield does a capable job of portraying his character's basic moral neutrality: he will do what has to be done, not because it is right or wrong, but simply because it is what must be done. The Macbeth-like plotting of the lovers leads to the predictable recriminations and double-crosses. Even in noir, evil is punished. Eventually. Sort of. The passions that drive the couple to murder are the same fates that manipulated Macbeth, but, in both cases, the characters must pay a price for their weaknesses. The relentless intensity of the Turner-Garfield relationship has rarely been matched on screen. The taut script by Harry Ruskin was based on the novel by noir-meister James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce), and director Tay Garnett carefully evokes all the conventions of the genre without expanding them." - www.allmovie.com

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Green for danger 1946 - Atmospheric British medical thriller

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: Sidney Gilliat
Main Cast: Leo Genn, Trevor Howard, Alastair Sim

"Sidney Gilliat's Green for Danger was the most inventive murder mystery to come out of England in the eight years since Alfred Hitchcock left the country - and in a sense, it's no surprise that this would be the case as it was co-written, produced, and directed by the team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the two authors of the screenplay for Hitchcock's last great English thriller, The Lady Vanishes. Based on Christianna Brand's novel, the 1946 movie is a fascinating variation on that venerable English creation, the drawing room thriller - in this case, the drawing room is replaced by a hospital operating theater, and instead of family members, the suspects are comprised of the surgical team, doctors and surgeons (two separate professional classes in England), and the nurses with whom they may (or may not) be involved. The movie featured one of the niftiest murders seen in a movie in years: the victim is killed on an operating table, in front of two doctors and a team of nurses who are unable to discern what has happened or why. World War II and Germany's V-1 bombings of England also figure into the plot and add to the atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense surrounding the events taking place in the hospital." - www.allmovie.com

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Gilda 1946 - Put the blame on Mame

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Charles Vidor
Main Cast: Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready, Joseph Calleia

"There never was a noir woman like Rita Hayworth in the title role of Charles Vidor's stylish Gilda, the film that sealed her reputation as the leading 1940s love goddess. As the hair-tossing female caught between Glenn Ford's Johnny and George Macready's Ballen, Hayworth's Gilda is as much put-upon victim as temptress, an interloper in the relationship between Ballen and Johnny. Their initial meeting and master-servant relationship, sprinkled with significant glances, imply that Johnny is as much Ballen's object of desire as is Gilda, plumbing the literally shadowy depths of film noir's sexual perversity as much as the Production Code allowed, and adding an extra twist to the tortured Johnny-Gilda union after Ballen's faked death. Still, it is Gilda who suffers most for exuding the sexuality that entices Johnny and Ballen, lending a knowing edge to her famed performance of 'Put the Blame on Mame' clad in lustrous black satin, suggesting a full striptease by removing a glove. That sequence became a signature star moment for Hayworth, and established Gilda as a noteworthy work of erotically charged film noir, despite the Code-friendly, good-girl ending." - www.allmovie.com

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Or:

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My darling Clementine 1946 - One of the greatest classic Westerns, but an idealized version of the shootout at OK Corral

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: John Ford
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt

"One of the greatest movie Westerns, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is hardly the most accurate film version of the Wyatt Earp legend, but it is still one of the most entertaining. Shot on location in Monument Valley in crisp, deep-focus black-and-white, the film opens as Henry Fonda's upstanding yet slightly (and humorously) awkward Wyatt Earp arrives in Tombstone to settle a family score with the murderous Clantons, staying long enough to make the untamed town safe for the new church and schoolmarm-to-be Clementine and enable corrupt, tubercular Easterner Doc Holliday to find a bit of redemption. Yet even as Ford celebrates the possibilities of the new West, he also engages the post-war tendency for Westerns to examine their own myths: for instance, in the expressionistic photography and in Earp's contradictory place between civilization and the wilderness. He knows the way Tombstone ought to be, but he can't settle there himself; the final shootout begins as an orderly ritual but becomes a chaotic montage of death. The 'director's cut' discovered in 1994 contains several minutes of excised footage; the ending was reportedly changed due to the reaction of a 1946 preview audience." - www.allmovie.com

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The killers 1946 - A complex film noir tale of obsessive love and multiple double-crosses

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IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: Robert Siodmak
Main Cast: Burt Lancasteer, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Albert Dekker

"The Killers uses Ernest Hemingway's short story as a springboard for a complex film noir. Two mysterious men (William Conrad and Charles McGraw) muscle their way into a small town and kill an aging boxer (Burt Lancaster, making his screen debut), who offers no resistance and seems to be welcoming his death. An insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) is hired to locate the beneficiary to Lancaster's policy, and in the course of his investigation reopens a long-dormant robbery case. In a series of flashbacks, O'Brien makes the connection between Lancaster and the robbery and tracks down the 'brains' behind the operation. He also comes in contact with Lancaster's former girlfriend (Ava Gardner), whose duplicity played a big part in Lancaster's demise - and his indifferent reaction to it.
Siodmak's hard-edged, moody direction of the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Anthony Veiller, makes The Killers one of the definitive films noirs, including what is considered to be one of the greatest opening sequences in movie history. Stylishly shot, particularly in the opening night-for-night and sustained heist sequences, the film builds suspense through the deliberate accretion of details about a foregone conclusion. Lancaster's film debut as the physically imposing but psychologically devastated Swede made him a star, while Gardner's poisonously beautiful siren turned her into a love goddess on a par with Rita Hayworth. A critical and box office success, The Killers received Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay." - www.allmovie.com

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Great expectations 1946 - Excellent adaptation of the classic Dickens novel

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: David Niven
Main Cast: John Mills,Valerie Hobson, Jean Simmons, Alec Guinness, Bernard Miles, Finlay Currie, Martita Hunt

"Immediately grabbing the audience's attention with a heart-stopping opening scene in a dark graveyard, acclaimed British director David Lean realizes the cinematic potential of Charles Dickens' classic 1861 novel, and the result is considered by many to be one of the finest literary adaptations ever made as well as one of the greatest British films of all time. Crystallized into a tight 118-minute running time by Lean, Ronald Neame, and a corps of uncredited contributors, this is the story of young Pip, a lad of humble means whose training as a gentleman is bankrolled by a mysterious benefactor. Along the way, Pip falls in love with the fickle Estella, befriends the cheerfully insouciant Herbert Pocket, has memorable encounters with the escaped convict Magwitch and the lunatic dowager Miss Havisham, and almost (but not quite) forgets his modest origins as the foster son of kindhearted blacksmith Joe Gargery. The role of Pip is evenly divided between Anthony Wager as a child and John Mills as an adult; Alec Guinness makes his starring film debut as the jaunty Pocket; Jean Simmons and Valerie Hobson are costarred as the younger and older Estella; and Martita Hunt is unforgettable as the mad Miss Havisham.
Remade several times, Great Expectations resurfaced in 1989 as a TV miniseries, with Jean Simmons, originally the young Estella, tearing a passion to tatters as Miss Havisham; and in 1998 it was remade again, in a contemporary version, with Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert DeNiro, and Anne Bancroft in the Miss Havisham role." - www.allmovie.com

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A matter of life and death 1946 - Very imaginative, deeply romantic fantasy-comedy

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Main Cast: David Niven, Kim Hunter, Robert Coote, Kathleen Byron, Richard Attenborough

"A matter of life and death could easily be the most complex movie to come out of World War II. The film is a comedy that often leaves its viewers in tears; a romantic drama that makes audiences laugh; a literate movie with a multi-layered script that gives nods to Shakespeare and Schiller; yet, a film so dazzling in its visuals that it requires more than one viewing to absorb fully. Also known as Stairway to Heaven, the movie is a remarkable British fantasy film that became the surprise hit of 1946. David Niven stars as Peter Carter, a World War II RAF pilot who is forced to bail out of his crippled plane without a parachute. He wakes up to find he has landed on Earth utterly unharmed...which wasn't supposed to happen according to the rules of Heaven. A celestial court argues over whether or not to claim Carter's life or to let him survive to wed his American sweetheart (Kim Hunter). During an operation, in which Carter hovers between life and death, he dreams that his spirit is on trial, with God (Abraham Sofaer) as judge and Carter's recently deceased best friend (Roger Livesey) as defense counsel. The film tries to have it both ways by suggesting that the heavenly scenes are all a product of Carter's imagination, but the audience knows better. Among the curious but effective artistic choices in A Matter of Life and Death was the decision to film the earthbound scenes in Technicolor and the Heaven sequences in black-and-white. The film was a product of the adventuresome team known as 'The Archers': Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger." - www.allmovie.com

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The big sleep 1946 - One of the most influential detective movies

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: Howard Hawks
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone

"The definitive Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall vehicle, The Big Sleep casts Bogart as Raymond Chandler's cynical private eye Philip Marlowe. Summoned to the home of the fabulously wealthy General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), Marlowe is hired to deal with a blackmailer shaking down the General's sensuous, thumb-sucking daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers). This earns Marlowe the displeasure of Carmen's sloe-eyed, seemingly straight-laced older sister Vivian (Bacall), who is fiercely protective of her somewhat addled sibling. As he pursues the case at hand, Marlowe gets mixed up in the murder of Arthur Geiger (Theodore von Eltz), a dealer in pornography. He also runs afoul of gambling-house proprietor Eddie Mars (John Ridgely), who seems to have some sort of hold over the enigmatic Vivian. Any further attempts to outline the plot would be futile: the storyline becomes so complicated and convoluted that even screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthmann were forced to consult Raymond Chandler for advice (he was as confused by the plot as the screenwriters). When originally prepared for release in 1945, The Big Sleep featured a long exposition scene featuring police detective Bernie Ohls (Regis Toomey) explaining the more obscure plot details. This expository scene was ultimately sacrificed, along with several others, in favor of building up Bacall's part; for instance, a climactic sequence was reshot to emphasize sexual electricity between Bogart and Bacall, obliging Warners to replace a supporting player who'd gone on to another project. The end result was one of the most famously baffling film noirs but also one of the most successful in sheer star power." - www.allmovie.com

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Notorious 1946 - Hitchcock's visual masterpiece

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Main Cast: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern

"One of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest films, Notorious features the director at his devilishly elegant, self-assured best. The film's smooth veneer largely creates its visceral impact; lurking beneath the gloss are dealings of the most grotesque sort, their execution made all the more insidious by their sophisticated guise. Aside from containing one of Hitchcock's most famous MacGuffins, the uranium ore, Notorious boasts some of his most famous camerawork, most notably the gorgeous tracking shot during Sebastian's party that takes the viewer from the top of a staircase to Alicia's hand, clenched around the key that will lead her to the uranium ore. The camera moves with the quiet intimacy of an unobserved party guest, almost serpentine in its journey. Similarly ingenious is Hitchcock's use of point-of-view shots, particularly that of Alicia's waking up with a hangover and watching Devlin walk toward her as the camera spins 180 degrees. Seeing through Alicia's eyes, the audience sympathizes with her, making the character one of Hitchcock's most full-blooded and enduring heroines. It goes without saying that the success of Alicia's characterization is in no small part due to Ingrid Bergman's performance; tragic, lovelorn, and marked by logical cynicism, her portrayal of Alicia was one of the best of Bergman's career. She was ably supported by Cary Grant and Claude Rains, the former going against his likeable, effortlessly charismatic persona to play an initially charmless man with morals as questionable as the heroine's are supposed to be. Rains, paired with Bergman again after Casablanca, makes Sebastian into one of the film's more sympathetic characters; it is a mark of Rains' ability that when Sebastian turns to climb the stairs in the film's closing scene, we feel real terror for him. That Sebastian's fate is the result of both his own manipulations of others and his heart's manipulations of himself is at the center of the film's true MacGuffin: masquerading as a Cold War thriller, Notorious is one of the screen's classic black romances." - www.allmovie.com

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The best years of our lives 1946 - The postwar classic

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IMDB rating: 8,2

Director: William Wyler
Main Cast: Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, Cathy O'Donnell, Hoagy Carmichael

"When Samuel Goldwyn decided to make The Best Years of Our Lives, Hollywood was running away from World War II-related scripts as though the subject itself had the plague -- movies about men in uniform had been box-office poison since early 1945. The assumption was that returning veterans would be even less willing than those who'd stayed on the home front to shell out money to be reminded of their service. Goldwyn, director William Wyler, and screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood (working from MacKinlay Kantor's blank verse novel Glory for Me), and a cast from heaven (some of them, like Dana Andrews and Virginia Mayo, giving the greatest performances of their careers) proved the industry wrong, and they opened up a whole new subject area by focusing on the men giving up their uniforms, the women and children around them, and even the men who hadn't served. They ended up with a 170-minute movie whose every shot was dramatically and psychically spellbinding, embracing the relief, anxiety, pain, joy, and doubts that Americans could now express. The setting of the movie in a small city somewhere in the middle of the country gave it a Norman Rockwell veneer, while the script melded that background with some healthy cynicism and emotional honesty borne out of the movie world's new awareness of modern psychology. Thus, the film had its feet in both pre-war and post-war consciousness, appealing to two generations of filmgoers (or even three, as the World War I-era audience was still around and had hardly been served well in its own time).
Profoundly relevant in 1946, the film still offers a surprisingly intricate and ambivalent exploration of American daily life; and it features landmark deep-focus cinematography from Gregg Toland, who also shot Citizen Kane. The film won Oscars for, among others, Best Picture, Best Director for the legendary William Wyler, Best Actor for March, and Best Supporting Actor for Harold Russell, a real-life double amputee whose hands had been blown off in a training accident." - www.allmovie.com

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It's a wonderful life 1946 - The most loved Christmas classic of all time

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IMDB rating: 8,7

Director: Frank Capra
Main Cast: James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Beulah Bondi, Gloria Grahame

"The image of It's a Wonderful Life has undergone a complete transformation since its 1946 release. In its own time, Frank Capra's comedy-drama about the dark side of human nature was a modest failure, neither a box-office success nor a critical favorite, though it garnered some recognition in the form of 5 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. For the next 28 years, the movie remained a cult favorite among movie buffs and Capra fans. Then the movie's copyright was allowed to lapse and suddenly, during the early 1980s around Christmas (the season in which the film is set), it seemed possible to flip on the TV at random some nights and find the movie playing somewhere on the dial, and that went double for Christmas Day, Christmas Eve, and New Year's. The public came out regarding the film as a lost classic; Capra lived just long enough to reap some of the belated acclaim, and his estate later benefitted from the sales of the films that he owned outright, such as Broadway Bill and Lady For a Day. The movie is in fact a dark, disturbing look at small-town American life between the two world wars, rife with class envy and fears of modernity, and featuring a before-its-time portrayal of George Bailey's middle-aged sense of failure that seems more appropriate for an American film of the Seventies." - www.allmovie.com

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