Vredens dag (Day of wrath) 1943 - Dreyer's second sound film after a decade of silence

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Main Caast: Albert Hoeberg, Lisbeth Movin, Preben Neergaard

"Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag) is set in 1623 Denmark, where Anne Pedersdotter (Lisbeth Movin), the second wife of a Danish pastor, grows to loathe her husband for his self-asceticism and instead falls in love with the minister's son - with whom she spends an inordinate amount of time. Locals overhear her wishing aloud for her husband's death; when he dies of a stroke not long after, she is accused of witchcraft, a charge taken seriously enough to be punishable by death. Eventually, the poor woman is tortured and traumatized to such a point that she actually believes she is a witch - and she gives in to being burned at the stake. Yet Dreyer then shifts the perspective from internalized - illustrating the woman's paralyzing fear - to externalized, a point of view that enables the director to depict his subject's spiritual purification. Even allowing for the aura of raw terror, Dreyer never loses sight of the eroticism inherent in the concept of witchcraft. All of Dreyer's stylistic trademarks are in place: an extreme austerity in the compositions, an emphasis on the contrast between black and white, an abundance of slow tracking shots, and a judicious use of extreme close-ups. The film moves with Dreyer's customary deliberate pace, but nevertheless it's one of his most accessible films. Lead actress Lisbeth Movin's spectacular final moments, as she accepts her fate, bring to mind the legendary Maria Falconetti in Dreyer's early masterpiece, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. Based on a play by Wiers Jensen, Day of Wrath was filmed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and not released abroad until after the war, and the director reportedly had to flee his native country when he angered the government with the film's political content." - www.allmovie.com

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Heaven can wait 1943 - A charming nostalgic comedy from Lubitsch

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IMDB rating: 7,6

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Main Cast: Gene Tierney, Don Ameche, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Laird Cregar, Spring Byington, Allyn Joslyn, Eugene Pallette, Signe Hasso, Louis Calhern

"Based on Birthdays, a play by Laslo Bus-Fekete, Heaven Can Wait was Ernst Lubitsch's last great movie. The enduring classic came at the end of two decades of excellent work, which included such Hollywood masterpieces as Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not to Be. In this era, the 'Lubitsch Touch' became a marketable moniker which characterized his impact on the early sound days of Hollywood. Heaven is typical of the 'Touch': it's a perfect blend of sophistication, romance, wit and bittersweet sentiment. The benevolent story reveals Don Ameche's life to be as average as any man's, but Lubitsch's genuine tenderness elevates the tale to the majestic. Ameche and Gene Tierney deliver mature, convincing performances, appropriate to the subject matter. Heaven was nominated for Oscars for Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography, and was a significant influence on director Frank Capra's beloved It's a Wonderful Life." - www.allmovie.com

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Sahara 1943 - A first-rate war movie, one of Bogart's finest

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: Zoltan Korda
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Bruce Bennett, J. Carroll Naish, Lloyd Bridges, Rex Ingram, Dan Duryea

"Zoltan Korda's Sahara was one of the more exciting action movies to come out of World War II, with a brace of fine performances and a plot - derived, in part, from The Lost Patrol as well as from a Soviet-made documentary entitled The Thirteen - that has been reused at least a dozen times since (most directly in a solid western called Last of the Comanches). But it was also a movie that helped its director find his own 'voice' as a filmmaker, and stands as a uniquely leftist (but not communistic) action film to come out of Hollywood in the middle of World War II. Director Zoltan Korda was the left-leaning brother in the filmmaking family led by Alexander Korda, and throughout the 1930s had been forced to sublimate his own ideological leanings to those of his far more conservative brother.
Sahara, made for Columbia Pictures rather than for Alexander Korda, was the movie where Zoltan's sympathies with colonized and oppressed peoples finally broke out into the open, and his antipathy toward British imperialism finally manifested itself. The hero is American, portrayed in low-key fashion by Humphrey Bogart. He's almost an archetype, a cool, clear-thinking tactician, unencumbered by racial or class prejudice, and immediately takes charge of the contingent of British soldiers on the run from the Germans, telling them how to survive, how to fight and, in many ways, how to live. The British aren't depicted as evil so much as aloof in terms of their officer class, and motivationally out of reasons for fighting the Germans. The movie is a subtly ideological work with a heavy emphasis on action, and it gave Bogart (as well as Bruce Bennett and Dan Duryea) a chance to play uniquely clear and richly heroic roles.
The filmmaker would later bring Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country to the screen at a time when few people outside of South Africa knew or cared about the racial divisions in that country." - www.allmovie.com

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Shadow of a doubt 1943 - Hitchcock's personal favorite

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Main Cast: Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey, Henry Travers, Patricia Collinge, Hume Cronyn

"One of Hitchcock's best films of the 1940s, Shadow of a Doubt is both a fascinating psychological case study and a scathing portrait of the American middle-class family. The film is often considered one of Hitchcock's darkest, and the director himself reportedly claimed it as his favorite. Cynicism underlies all the proceedings, from young Charlie's 'miraculous' summoning of her Uncle Charlie (tantamount to calling up the Angel of Death) to Uncle Charlie's chilling exposition of his view on life, relayed to his niece: 'You live in a dream. Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?' This is one of Hitchcock's most unsettling films, preoccupied like many other Hitchcock works with good vs. evil, and the capacity for evil that lurks within us all; and it is also one of his most stylized, gorgeously shot by Joseph Valentine. Featuring stellar performances from Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten (as well as Hume Cronyn's comical debut as a dim-witted, self-appointed murder 'expert'), Shadow of a Doubt is a memorable experience as both a major Hitchcock film and an enduringly creepy commentary on human nature." - www.allmovie.com

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The life and death of Colonel Blimp 1943 - A British masterpiece from Powell & Pressburger

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Main Cast: Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook, Roland Culver

"By today's standards, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp seems a brilliantly written and executed character study with period overtones - 'the British Citizen Kane', as one critic described it in recent years. But the 163-minute movie was one of the most controversial productions in England during the war, and the disputes over its content and distribution overshadowed the film's virtues for nearly 40 years. Powell and Pressburger, also known as 'The Archers', had already courted controversy in 1941 with their propaganda movie 49th Parallel. Blimp seemed as if it was designed to engender displeasure from the government: Anton Walbrook, who was the leader of the anti-Nazi Germans in 49th Parallel, plays an even more sympathetic expatriate German in this movie; the title character, who represents the epitome of the British officer class of the First World War, is depicted as a well-meaning but doddering old buffoon, incapable of dealing with the Nazi threat; and the hero, Clive Candy (brilliantly played by Roger Livesey), makes his name on a civilian escapade during the Boer War, just as Prime Minister Winston Churchill had. The movie seemed certain to attract official censure, and it did. Powell and Pressburger were denied the use of military equipment or personnel while Blimp was in production, and the government voiced its further strenuous objections to the parties financing the movie. Once it was completed and released, the film was denied an export license to the United States until almost two years after the war, by which time it had been shorn of nearly an hour of material. It took 40 years for the uncut version to reach America in its original Technicolor splendor. After the wait, audiences found a movie that seized upon many of the structural elements found in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, with its back-to-front-to-back narrative path. The Archers took the class satire and social consciousness found in the best work of Noel Coward - as well as in the original David Low cartoon whence the Colonel Blimp character originated - and turned those elements into something uniquely theirs, a film very wry and dry in its tweaking of British sensibilities, universal in its observations on life, love and longevity in the middle of a world war." - www.allmovie.com

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The Ox-Bow incident 1943 - A brilliantry structured classic western-noir about vigilante justice

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: William A. Wellman
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Anthony Quinn, William Eythe, Harry Morgan, Jane Darwell, Matt Briggs, Harry Davenport, Frank Conroy

"This now-classic indictment of mob rule was a pet project of both star Henry Fonda and director William Wellman, both of whom agreed to work on lesser 20th Century-Fox projects in exchange for this film.
The Ox-Bow Incident was an anomaly at the time it was released. Produced in the middle of World War II, when Hollywood was concentrating on movies that either boosted morale or entertained, it did neither: it was a major studio release, with a hot young star (Henry Fonda) in the lead, about an unjustified lynching in the 1870s West. Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel had been kicking around for years, but Hollywood had never had much luck making movies about mob violence and vigilante justice (Fritz Lang's Fury had been a box-office disaster for MGM before the war, despite the presence of Spencer Tracy), and no one was anxious to film it. Twentieth Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck agreed to do the movie only because Fonda and Wellman agreed to do other films for the studio, and the result was a movie that was singularly unpopular during its initial release but which has aged magnificently. It was a labor of love by all concerned, a chilling indictment of American justice and America's past in which there are no heroes, just participants who are less guilty than others. Once the war was over, and the movie made it to television, it began to find an audience; the belated response from critics and viewers, as well his pride in having made it, inspired Fonda's similar effort 14 years later to make 12 Angry Men, a movie built on a similar theme. Ironically, 12 Angry Men also took decades to find its audience and begin recording a profit. For all its lack of recognition at the time, The Ox-Bow Incident has become, along with Otto Preminger's Laura, perhaps the most distinctive and well-remembered film issued by Fox during the first half of the 1940s." - www.allmovie.com

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