BEST FILMS OF 1945
by Mike Lorefice

The Body Snatcher
Robert Wise

***

Brief Encounter
David Lean

***

Children of Paradise
Marcel Carne

***

Detour
Edgar G. Ulmer

***

The Enchanted Cottage
John Cromwell

***

Fallen Angel
Otto Premenger

***

Ivan The Terrible Part 1
Sergei M. Eisenstein

***

Leave Her To Heaven
John M. Stall

***

The Lost Weekend
Billy Wilder

***1/2

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My Name is Julia Ross
Joseph H. Lewis

A low budget combination of two recent hits sounds like the recipe for cashing in on more derivative garbage, but this melding of Alfred Hitchcock's excellent Rebecca and George Cukor's hokey Gaslight yields a high quality gothic noir thanks to the stylish direction of Joseph H. Lewis. Though certainly more toward Hitchcock of the two, Lewis shoots his tense, paranoid film with his own feel for evoking and masking the surroundings. Though sadly unknown and unavailable today, My Name is Julia Ross was actually Lewis' breakout film, largely due to strong advance notices. The overly contrived, coincidence ridden plot has familyless Julia Ross (Nina Foch) out of work and behind on her bills due to an appendectomy thrilled to land a private secretary job through a new employment agency only to wake up a married woman named Marion Hughes, trapped in her room by her employers turned family because she's not sane enough to roam free. Doting enabler Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Whitty from Gaslight and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes & Suspicion) is going to cover the misfortunes of her suave but psychotic knife fetishist son Ralph (George Macready) - he slices and dices underwear to loosen up - in every possible way, and finding a temporary replacement is her gamble. Lewis' body of work regularly equates established truths to blindness, perhaps never more scathingly than in My Name is Julia Ross where none of the conformists even pause for a second to notice Marion is suddenly a different woman. Julia is more of a modern feminist hero (novelist Anthony Gilbert is actually a pseudonym for Lucy Malleson) who quickly learns the score and regularly attempts to remedy it in as cold and calculating a manner as her captors. This is the kind of ridiculous plot that can work when it's not the focus, and Lewis does an excellent job of conjuring visual illusions to play on the mind of the audience. Employing several expressionist lighting and shadow effects, cinematographer Burnett Guffey renders the sets claustrophobic and imprisoning, yet his regular camera movement is more notable for its ability to unite the sets early on then reveal their secrets at the end. The gated manor on an isolated British seacoast can seem expansive with winding diagonal staircases and walkways, but that's largely a testament to Guffey's choice of camera angles; the largely studio bound film shot predominantly in closeup because they couldn't afford set design. The economy of Lewis' storytelling is such that he can use a few closeups to signify a series of events, and he's willing to simply jump forward and allow the audience to catch up, which is certainly helpful in a mystery. [11/26/07] ***

Open City
Roberto Rossellini

***1/2

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The Picture of Dorian Gray
Albert Lewin

A cautionary tale against the desire to stay young and beautiful forever and our readiness to judge people by their appearance. Influenced by the amoral word master Lord Botton (George Sanders), Dorian (Hurd Hatfield) offers his soul to stay 22 forever and let the picture that was just painted of him age instead. One problem with this story is either no explanation is offered or the event is so improbable the explanation would be better left out (a character looking for someone called "Sir Tristan" for eight years suddenly finds him 5 seconds after we find out he's spent all this time looking). Sanders gives perhaps his best performance, his mannered outspokenly cynical character a perfect lively contrast to Hatfield's self-contained portrayal. Though it's Sanders typical role mixing droll humor with a sinister streak, he's provided with lines that are very convincing for once. It's easy to see how someone would be seduced into believing him. Though unconventional, often ugly, and of questionable morality, his character is keenly perceptive of human nature. This character is the stand in for Oscar Wilde and one simply can't dismiss the sharp insight he offers, if anything we're inclined to agree with most of it. When Sanders is on the screen providing witty ironies this is quite an interesting film, but the story itself is a bit tedious when it's focusing on the main character. Dorian's evil deeds are so obscured, at least partially because of censorship, that the audience is unclear of what he's done beyond be a blank representation of superficiality (these days he tends to look like everyone else on TV, except he's less annoying than most because he's not an obnoxious braggart). I normally support not showing anything, but too much of the time Dorian is just kind of there and the narrator is reading about him in a somewhat righteous manner that alternates between boring and condescending to the audience. I really enjoyed Hurd Hatfield's performance as the lifeless narcissist though. Usually Hollywood drives me crazy with the overacting and mugging, but here's a performance so restrained it could almost have been out of a Bresson film. If Dorian would have narrated the film, telling us about what he was doing either to sub for the action or to contrast the exterior to the interior, the lack of activity would have been a plus. Instead we largely don't know or see the real story, though the film is often extremely entertaining. Dorian may be shallow dud, but shallow duds of the Victorian age were at least cultured, and he gives us a nice recital of Chopin's Prelude. The film has some terrific set pieces, including an impressive shadowy murder, so there's plenty more to spice things up, even marionettes. Harry Stradling's cinematography is highly impressive; it even took the films only bogus award. The real star might be artist Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, who painted four pictures to show Dorian's decay. The latter of these grotesques (which seem inspired by Lon Chaney in Phantom) are revealed to us in brilliant Technicolor, which is notably starting since the rest of the film is in black and white. [11/25/05] ***

Scarlet Street
Fritz Lang

***1/2

The Southerner
Jean Renoir

Believable for Hollywood drama about man's quest to retain his dignity supporting himself in the country rather than become a slave to the automated city. Renoir refuses to glamorize country life or make it seem at all easy, yet his sensitive and respectful camera allows us to fully understand the humanity of the characters and the reason behind the struggle to maintain their way of life for better, and often worse. Ignoring the typical plot arch of good year then bad year and refusing to succumb to the cowardly racism that forces the black man to be a pitiable inferiors who says "yes um", Renoir dares to present sharecroppers as equals who are smart enough to know they could use a little help from their neighbor. Though Renoir does concede a catastrophe, he largely populates the film with people who could actually be living off the land (rare for Hollyplastic), consolidating their struggle to day to day realism. The location shooting Renoir was largely prohibited from for his "swamp" film is a tremendous aid to what's certainly a strong visual film, but the writing and acting are sometimes a bit shaky. [9/22/05] ***

Spellbound
Alfred Hitchcock

***

Strange Illusion
Edgar G. Ulmer

***

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Elia Kazan

I'll take sentimental and melodramatic old Hollywood over heartless and condescending new Hollywood any day. This film makes you want to try to help others and be a nicer person rather than buy some expensive crap and give yourself over to the beauty snatchers. In these days Hollywood still made movies about what it was like to live in America instead of just spreading consumerist propaganda, and Kazan's first film is a fine example of the good side of Hollywood sentiment. We get a real family (since Kazan did his best to avoid presenting the usual mannequins) struggling and scrapping but still failing to make enough to get by (like much of the now hidden world). Kazan isn't a big fan of this film aside from the performances of the little girl (Peggy Ann Garner) and the loving but drunken father (James Dunn, whose career faltered in the mid 30's due to drinking). They are the real deal, standing apart from the more "professional" members of the cast, who of course are really more like posers. Most of Kazan's later films are better, largely because he had more control of the production, but this is one of the better family and Christmas films, and a lot more honest than most Hollywood even if it's a different brand of manipulation (the ultimate tear jerker). [9/22/05] ***

A Walk in the Sun
Lewis Milestone

***1/2

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