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American cinema took a sudden, gritty turn with director Billy Wilder’s terrifying The Lost Weekend. Whereas earlier films kept some distance from their subjects, Weekend zooms in and puts one man’s obsession under a microscope.
How come filmmakers 50 years ago could do sentiment without going all sappy, and we can’t do that now? If Going My Way, a delightful movie confection, were remade today, it would end up as a sticky Hallmark Hall of Fame thing.
I’d never seen Casablanca before — sure, bits and pieces here and there while channel surfing, but not as much as I thought I’d seen. And watching it at last was like a revelation. This is the ultimate movie. This is the purpose for which Hollywood invented itself. This is how good a film can be.
Mrs. Miniver is a strikingly unsentimental account of the theft of England’s innocence in the early days of WWII. Kay and Clem Miniver (Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon) head up a stalwart middle-class family in the small town of Belham. It is the summer of 1939, and village life plods along as idyllically as it always has.
With heartbreaking clarity and honesty, 50-year-old Huw (pronounced Hugh) Morgan looks back at his childhood in a Welsh valley, describing in simple terms his witnessing of the loss of a way of life. How Green Was My Valley, directed by John Ford, is his story.
Atmospheric and moody, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca is a masterpiece of style and substance, an extended meditation on how the dead haunt the living. Photographed in somber shadows, few movies before or since have taken such glorious advantage of black-and-white film.
If you love Gone with the Wind, you must see the restored version that’s new to video. The remastered soundtrack is crisp and clear, and Max Steiner’s lavish score sounds wonderful, but it’s the cleaned-up film stock that astounds: Victor Fleming’s 60-year-old movie looks like it was shot this year.
You Can’t Take It with You, an adaptation of the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, is Frank Capra’s loving and wacky paean to nonconformity. The comedy is over the top but the moral of the story is a serious one: Find in yourself the courage to do with your life what you really want to do.
The Life of Emile Zola is a curiously uninvolving biopic — curious because the second half of the film operates at a distance from its professed subject, exchanging his for another man’s story.
Get past the set pieces that date the movie and make it twice as long as it might be, and The Great Ziegfeld — a biopic of theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. — is a moving story of how the weaknesses and obsessions that ironically made one man a powerful entertainment mogul inevitably brought about his downfall.
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