Tag Archives: 1940s

In a hill city of war-torn China, the American mission hospital is run by Dr. Gray Thompson and Dr. Sara Durand, who secretly loves him. Then Gray comes back from the USA with new equipment …and new wife Louise, who is jealous of Sara, shows herself a coward in the first Japanese air raid, and wants to take Gray back to the States. Others have similar troubles; and Japanese prisoner Colonel Yasuda manipulates them for his own ends.
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Veronica Lake casts a seductive spell as a charmingly vengeful sorceress in this supernatural screwball classic. Many centuries after cursing the male descendants of the Salem puritan who sent her to the stake, this blonde bombshell with a broomstick finds herself drawn to one of them – a prospective governor (Fredric March) about to marry a spoiled socialite (Susan Hayward). The most delightful of the films the innovative French director René Clair made in Hollywood, I Married a Witch is a comic confection bursting with playful special effects and sparkling witticisms.
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Headline serves as a vehicle for handsome David Farrar, who in 1943 was Britain’s fastest-rising leading man. Farrar is cast as Broogle, a crime reporter who’ll do anything-ANYTHING-for a story. When the wife of the publisher disappears after witnessing a murder, Broogle ignores Scotland Yard’s warnings to “lay off” and endeavors to solve the mystery himself. The film’s best performance is rendered by BBC radio favorite Richard Goolden, cast as a self-styled “psychological” detective. While genuine journalists howled at the innacuracies in Headline, audiences ate it up.
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Pepe Le Moko leads a gang of jewel thieves in the Casbah of Algiers, where he has exiled himself to escape imprisonment in his native France. Inez, his girl friend, is infuriated when Pepe flirts with Gaby, a French visitor, but Pepe tells her to mind her own business. Detective Slimane is trying to lure Pepe out of the Casbah so he can be jailed. Against Slimane’s advice, Police Chief Louvain capture Pepe in a dragnet, but his followers free him. Inez realizes that Pepe has fallen in love with Gaby and intends to follow her to Europe. Slimane knows the same and uses her as the bait to lure Pepe out of the Casbah.
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On May 27, 1942 the Nazi Reichsprotector of Bohemia/Moravia, the “Hangman” Reinhard Heydrich, died from the bullets of unidentified resistance fighters. Hangmen Also Die is the story of Heydrich’s assassination in fictionalized form. It was Bertolt Brecht’s only comparatively successful Hollywood project; the money he received allowed him to write “The Visions of Simone Marchand”, “Schwyk in the Second World War” and his adaptation of Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi”. Hanns Eisler won an Academy Award for his musical score.
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A win on the football pools in postwar Britain changes lives. A happy family is turned into an unhappy argumentative lot until it is discovered the coupon apparently didn’t get posted. A mild-mannered clerk worries about how to tell his overbearing boss he is quitting. A double-bass player finds life without the orchestra lacks something. The lure of the big money even turns some people into criminals, as when a coupon checker is tempted by his night-club singer girlfriend to cheat the company.
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This adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel ‘Farewell, My Lovely’, renamed for the American market to prevent filmgoers mistaking it for a musical (for which Powell was already famous) has private eye Philip Marlowe hired by Moose Malloy, a petty crook just out of prison after a seven year stretch, to look for his former girlfriend, Velma, who has not been seen for the last six years. The case is tougher than Marlowe expected as his initially promising enquiries lead to a complex web of deceit involving bribery, perjury and theft, and where no one’s motivation is obvious, least of all Marlowe’s.
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Sassy Dixie Daisy is the hot new attraction at a former opera house that’s been turned into a burlesque theater. She’s popular with the customers, although not with Lolita La Verne, a stuck-up diva who was hoping she’d get the top spot. Also complicating matters is the return of the Princess Nirvena, the show’s former star who once had a fling with the boss. When the Princess blackmails her way into the top spot, Dixie is none too pleased. When both Lolita and the Princess are murdered, Dixie becomes a prime suspect. She then sets up a trap to nail the real killer.
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Swedish-American farmer’s daughter Katrin ‘Katie’ Holstrom leaves the farm to study nursing in the big, wicked city. Thanks to a chiseling acquaintance, her tuition and expense money disappears the first day, and she’s forced to get a job…as a domestic for congressman Glenn Morley. Impressed by her political awareness as well as her many charms and capabilities, Glenn is soon infatuated with Katie, and she with him, but their feelings remain unspoken…until Katie speaks up at a party rally and is abruptly thrust into politics herself.
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After Custer and the 7th Cavalry are wiped out by Indians, everyone expects the worst. Capt. Nathan Brittles is ordered out on patrol but he’s also required to take along Abby Allshard, wife of the Fort’s commanding officer, and her niece, the pretty Olivia Dandridge, who are being evacuated for their own safety. Brittles is only a few days away from retirement and Olivia has caught the eye of two of the young officers in the Company, Lt. Flint Cohill and 2nd Lt. Ross Pennell. She’s taken to wearing a yellow ribbon in her hair, a sign that she has a beau in the Cavalry, but refuses to say for whom she is wearing it.
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