Paisan (1946)

Paisa’, Italy, 126 minutes

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Writers: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Klaus Mann, Marcello Pagliero, Alfred Hayes, Roberto Rossellini, Rod E. Geiger, Vasco Pratolini

Photography: Otello Martelli

Music: Renzo Rossellini

Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

Cast: Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Dots Johnson, Alfonsino Pasca, Gar Moore, Maria Michi, Harriet White, Renzo Avanzo, William Tubbs, Dale Edmonds, John Whaling Allen, Dan, Roberto Van Loel, Cigolani

Film critics and historians appear prone to grouping director and cowriter Roberto Rossellini’s pictures into trilogies, even if they were not exactly intended that way. Paisan is thus the second in his so-called Neorealist trilogy, with Rome, Open City (1945) and Germany, Year Zero (1948). But not only is Paisan a genuinely standalone picture on its own, it is also composed of six separate episodes with six separate stories and casts. As the trilogy’s name suggests, the pictures are united mainly by the formal aesthetic, which in turn was imposed in the first place by conditions of low-budget financing and a country literally in ruins from war. From Rossellini to Bicycle Thieves to Jack Webb and beyond I come to the aesthetics of neorealism already in favor: shooting on the fly, casting amateurs, studying the underclasses—better without agenda, as Rossellini generally did it (though also implicitly pointing ways toward social reform).

I like the structure of Paisan almost as much as the little separate stories. The larger arc is the liberation of Italy by Allied forces, which started in 1943 and continued until it helped bring the end of the war in 1945. Just so, Paisan starts with the invasion of Sicily and advances north. The stories are not specifically about the progress of the war but rather just wartime stories involving ordinary soldiers and civilians caught in extraordinary situations. In the first a young woman whose father and brother have been missing for days, Carmela (Carmela Sazio), is drafted by invading US forces who are trying to root out dangerous nests of Nazis in a contest of urban warfare conducted at night. The movements of the US soldiers and the Nazis are complicated, information is lacking, mistakes are made, there’s no time to think, and the entire episode is all done in maybe 25 minutes. All the tales here are approximately the size of a Twilight Zone episode. The rhythms are formative but familiar.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Stairway to Heaven, UK, 104 minutes

Directors/writers: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Photography: Jack Cardiff

Music: Allan Gray

Editor: Reginald Mills

Cast: David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Marius Goring, Raymond Massey, Robert Coote, Joan Maude, Abraham Sofaer

I must have been in a bad mood the first time I saw this war picture cum extravagant fantasy romance by the Archers, who are collaborating coproducers, codirectors, and cowriters Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I know I was put off by the romance they give us between Peter Carter (David Niven) and June (Kim Hunter)—rhymes with “moon” and “swoon,” no last name necessary because it’s obviously going to be “Carter” before they’re through (later she will go on to a career as a country singer). It’s wartime—4:11 p.m. London time, May 2, 1945, to be specific. Carter’s plane is going down over open ocean and his parachute has been destroyed. He spends his last minutes in radio contact with Boston babe June. He asks her if she’s pretty. “Not bad,” she blurts. This is approximately the moment they fall in love but, realistically, the whole experience has to be accounted a trauma, for both of them, and arguably the rest of the story is mutual PTSD. Carter jumps out of the burning plane and somehow survives. The story is based on an actual incident, so I don’t want to hear any complaints about suspension of disbelief.

I’ll take care of all that, though I must say I enjoyed the picture much more the second time around. A Matter of Life and Death (released as Stairway to Heaven in the US, which reportedly had an aversion to the word “death” so soon after the war) is a fantasy show, featuring a place they call heaven and a pouty French angel, “Conductor 71” (Marius Goring), who couldn’t find Carter at the appointed hour in the thick fog. That’s the explanation for Carter’s unlikely survival. Now the conductor is supposed to collect him, but for some reason Carter and June falling in love is a basis for arguing an extension of life. Ultimately the issue turns into a trial and a courtroom drama and I’m pretty sure you know where it’s headed. It’s by the numbers as a romance, but Powell and Pressburger are interesting moviemakers and they find a number of ways to save it and make the case for it as one of their greatest pictures, which is saying something from the team that gave us The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and many others.

The Horizontal Man (1946)

This somewhat awkwardly written suspense novel by Helen Eustis was slow going for me, but it had some interesting ideas. It’s a standard murder mystery in many ways. The murder occurs on the first page without revealing the killer and then a number of likely suspects start showing up. In the end, we learn who did it. All’s fair. The setting is an upscale college for women. The victim is a philandering poetry professor. The novel flashes across points of view in the short sections advancing the investigation. Two characters probably qualify as the main characters—a young journalist and a student who edits the college paper, Kate Innes. Kate is overweight, or big, and there is an untoward amount of fat-shaming here, one of the most obvious ways this novel is dated but not the only one. The journalist thinks of Kate as “Fatty” although at least he keeps that to himself. His strategy with her is shaming her when they eat. These two fall in love. The journalist is given as more or less normal and otherwise without malice. At least two other professors have strong potential to be gay (and no, it’s not a good thing) while a woman professor is considered over the hill and a slut. She’s 42. So lots of problems here, forgivable enough maybe “for the times,” but that’s compounded with a sluggish and overly busy plotline and a leaden style of writing. The action is pitched at hysterical levels but even so I was often bored with it and/or losing the thread from all the POV jumping around. It does have a surprise or twist ending that I did not see coming, a bizarre explanation that fits with the general pseudo-Freudian air here—hysteria, mental institutions, various transparent emotional complexes. This one’s got it all, or too much, which is to say it’s inevitably flawed. I think I could handle even the psychological mumbo jumbo at the end if the whole thing had a stronger through line. It’s a first novel for Eustis and won an Edgar in the first-novel category. Lots of people seem to like it a lot. I like the supercharged atmosphere, but it often bogs down even as a very short novel. It comes at a strange juncture for feminism. By 1946 women had won the vote and shown they could shoulder the labor of a nation during war. But this novel focuses on continuing preoccupations with femininity and marriage with men. Freda Cramm, the 42-year-old oversexed crone, is recognizably a feminist but her life is quite evidently unenviable even with her independence and self-reliance. Does Eustis the author buy into these views? That’s hard to say. She doesn’t seem to care much for any of her characters, male or female. As a sendup of life at a women’s college, The Horizontal Man might be pretty good, but unfortunately women’s colleges are more a thing of the past now too.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

"The Million-Year Picnic" (1946)

Even though this story by Ray Bradbury appears last in The Martian Chronicles it is the first he published of that whole cycle of stories (in all their various permutations), beating the next by two years. "The Million-Year Picnic" has to count as another very early story of nuclear anxiety, published within about a year of the blasts in Japan. It must be noted with Bradbury that his science fiction can be quite soft. As soft as the dew falling in an Indiana cornfield in June, as he might say (or is it Illinois?). He's too glib about the technology and with little sense of the conditions on Mars and all the impossible time and precision required to get there. In fairness, a lot of scientists in the 1940s were in approximately the same boat about Mars. People had mostly given up on the canals idea but not entirely. For all that, Bradbury has a mood down cold here, mulling the profound sadness of our self-destructive species doing all the wrong things as usual. He tells it by showing the father and husband in a family of five (and a half) quietly shepherding them from where they landed on Mars to a safer place. The year is maybe 2026 and people in this story are able to nab rockets on Earth and head out. The man is taking pains to leave no traces behind them, even destroying the rocket they came in on, as nuclear war has virtually wiped out life on Earth but more people may be coming to Mars on these handy if dangerous rockets. This guy has some insight into human psychology but he has also allied with another family in hopes of starting a new civilization, slightly Noah style. The hubris is almost as astonishing as the finality. One of the best tricks in this story—which I've also seen elsewhere but never done quite this poignantly—is taking the idea of "Martians" and applying it to humans now living on the red planet. It's apt, but still has the power to surprise and affect. This story is before the Martian aborigines Bradbury developed for the cycle later and it benefits from that. "Elegiac" is not a term I toss around often as compliment, certainly in genre literature, but Bradbury was capable of it and could be very good at it. This is not a bad example and bears interest as an early canary in the nuclear era.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
Read story online.

Illustration, Alexander Leydenfrost, from Planet Stories, Summer 1946

A Day in the Country (1946)

Partie de campagne, France, 40 minutes

Director: Jean Renoir

Writers: Jean Renoir, Guy de Maupassant

Photography: Claude Renoir

Music: Joseph Kosma

Editors: Marinette Cadix, Marguerite Renoir

Cast: Sylvia Bataille, Georges D'Arnoux, Jane Marken, Paul Temps, Jean Renoir

Here's another one of those highly touted masterpieces of cinema with a confusing origin story and various uncertainties of provenance. It was shot in 1936, interrupted for unspecified reasons (something to do with the weather is the best I've been able to figure), and then assembled from the parts in 1946 by producer Pierre Braunberger for release in 1950. Sources like Wikipedia and IMDb treat it specifically as unfinished. Director and screenwriter Jean Renoir was working in the US in 1946 and apparently had nothing to do with it at that point, nor seemed to have any objections to its being finished or to the result. I have to say it doesn't feel particularly unfinished to me—maybe that's some happy accident of circumstances. A Day in the Country is based on a short story by Maupassant and it's true that some crucial scenes near the end are not in the film or at best are arguably undeveloped in a picture otherwise faithful to the story. But I'm not sure how much longer you could make this movie from here. A good deal of its charm is its brevity and its high-spirited freedom to dart among the characters, landing on them like butterflies and flying away again, sketching with quick sure strokes. It's the story of a middle-class Parisian shopkeeper who takes his family on a picnic outing to the French countryside on a summer day. His wife is a bit of a flirtatious goose. Their teenage daughter appears wise beyond her years. They meet a couple of men who attempt to seduce them, in a frothy lighthearted French sort of way. Later it turns out to be a moment of shared separate epiphany for the daughter and her beau of that day, one they can never return to, as the daughter by then has made a safe and conventional but likely unpassionate marriage. It's true the picture is a bit abrupt at the finish, where scenes are most felt to be missing, though it can easily be taken as 1930s decorum on sexual matters. Certainly the encounter at the very end is more ridiculously convenient than not. But Maupassant's story is also abrupt and convenient, and it's easy to lay off any complaints on him and his story. The movie thus manages to have it both ways, faithful to the defects in a way yet delivering all the pleasures of a good story well done, with pungent detail, memorable glimpses into characters at crossroads, a sense of peering in at secret lives momentarily revealed, and epiphanies arriving on the regular. I'm not always that sure myself about either Maupassant or Renoir, maybe I have some complex about French culture, but this short piece glows with charm, confidence, humanity, beauty, foolishness, and plain fun. It is itself a little picnic on a summer day.

The Big Sleep (1946)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, Raymond Chandler
Photography: Sidney Hickox
Music: Max Steiner
Editor: Christian Nyby
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, John Ridgely, Dorothy Malone, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Charles D. Brown, Elisha Cook Jr., Louis Jean Heydt, Bob Steele, Peggy Knudsen, Sonia Darrin, Joy Barlow, Tommy Rafferty

In my period of infatuation with Humphrey Bogart, late teens or so, The Big Sleep always gave me a bad case of cognitive dissonance. I could see that Bogart's turn at the Philip Marlowe private detective created by Raymond Chandler belongs with his best, his best being Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, probably The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, probably High Sierra, and maybe The African Queen (still too young for In a Lonely Place, which was not even in my sights). The Big Sleep also benefits from palpable chemistry between Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Rutledge, the quasi-femme fatale and romantic interest. Bogart and Bacall were single when the picture started shooting but married to each other for the rest of their lives by the time it came out. They had been good in director Howard Hawks's 1944 cover of Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, which was Bacall's first picture. They were even better here.

But The Big Sleep so completely confounds clarity that I resented it, even if Bogart was in every damn scene. The fact that no one, including Chandler, could say who committed one of its murders outraged me. Not that I was noticing specific plot holes—I wasn't even sure I was tracking basic through-lines half the time, especially with new characters still arriving even into the last third. Also, it never helped that anyone discussing the picture always cheerfully mentioned its incomprehensibility. The point of the mystery genre is to create narratives that are not a mystery any longer at the end, I insisted. The Big Sleep was breaking these rules and what was worse everyone seemed to admire that as much as anything else about it.

Notorious (1946)

USA, 101 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Ben Hecht, Alfred Hitchcock, John Taintor Foote, Clifford Odets
Photography: Ted Tetzlaff
Music: Roy Webb
Editor: Theron Warth
Cast: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern, Leopoldine Konstantin, Reinhold Schunzel, Ivan Triesault, E.A. Krumschmidt

I count Notorious as one of director and cowriter Alfred Hitchcock's best, though time has marred it some for rancid attitudes. It's another movie from 1946 that is not entirely sure World War II is over, and still measuring the effects. It's a spy story but full of Hitchcock's ingenious tricks, with a nicely matched pair of glamorous performances in Ingrid Bergman as Alicia Huberman, the disgraced daughter of a German-American Nazi given a chance to redeem herself on an undercover assignment—she is this movie's alarming drunk—and Cary Grant as Devlin, her handler. They are on the track of Nazis who are hiding out in South America and unnaturally fascinated with uranium. (As a matter of historical interest, the American CIA did not exist until 1948, when it was created under the direction of former Nazis by President Truman.)

But this movie and the US spy agency in it are from 1946, and if things are murky in terms of the ongoing perceived threat from German Nazis, they are perfectly clear in terms of doing right things. Alicia Huberman drinks like a fish and pretends to be cynical about everything, but secret recordings reveal that she despised her father's Nazi sympathies and treasonous actions and she actually loves America—loves it fiercely. Devlin shows up shortly after her father is found guilty and sentenced to prison, at the beginning of the picture, and recruits her for the assignment. At first all they know is that it is in Rio de Janeiro. While they wait for the specific details, of course they have a beautiful romance. But then comes the assignment.

My Darling Clementine (1946)

USA, 97 minutes
Director: John Ford
Writers: Samuel G. Engel, Winston Miller, Sam Hellman, Stuart N. Lake
Photography: Joseph MacDonald
Music: Cyril J. Mockridge
Editor: Dorothy Spencer
Cast: Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Walter Brennan, Linda Darnell, Cathy Downs, Ward Bond, Tim Holt, Alan Mowbray, John Ireland, Jane Darwell

By force of will, director John Ford turned Monument Valley into the very image of pioneer America, but really it's practically the harshest environment most of them ever could have faced, let alone tried to settle. Unlike the Great Plains which were mistaken for the "Great American Desert" until well beyond the Civil War, Monument Valley, occupying the Arizona and Utah border regions, is really desert land—perhaps not as intense as Death Valley, but desert: dry, hot, forbidding, mostly barren, with sand and rocks and ancient outcroppings left over from when it was an inland sea. Plus skilled and hostile natives. Into this hell Ford regularly sent his pilgrims, who faithfully sing "Shall We Gather at the River" every chance they get, which isn't that often, only maybe once per movie, because they are otherwise busy trying to survive by their wits and their unrelenting Puritan work ethic.

I suspect the reason My Darling Clementine is my favorite John Ford picture is because it is so much more obviously made-up fictional legend instead of the manly midcentury hard reality Ford more often essays. The Wyatt Earp story and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral are concoctions mostly dreamed up by Earp himself after he moved to Hollywood in the 20th century. There's some historical veracity to pull out of this movie if you are so inclined—Doc Holliday really had tuberculosis, for example—but when you get into the details of the main events it was actually a lot of grubbing around and low behavior. The shootout, such as it was, didn't even happen at the O.K. Corral. Mostly the story as we understand it now, from this movie and many others based on Stuart N. Lake's version, more properly belongs with tales of Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, Tinker Bell and Peter Pan—stories that comfort and encourage us to be our best.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

USA, 170 minutes
Director: William Wyler
Writers: Robert E. Sherwood, MacKinlay Kantor
Photography: Gregg Toland
Music: Hugo Friedhofer
Editor: Daniel Mandell
Cast: Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews, Virginia Mayo, Harold Russell, Cathy O'Donnell, Hoagy Carmichael, Gladys George, Roman Bohnen, Ray Collins, Ray Teal, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Gene Krupa, Michael Hall

At nearly three hours and with a large and impressive ensemble cast and three or more narrative threads intertwining and going simultaneously, The Best Years of Our Lives is ambitious, setting out to make a monumentally large statement in real time about the fallout and aftereffects of the end of World War II on the American home front. It might be the best American movie about World War II. It's set in a fictional medium-sized city named Boone City, which suggests the near-Midwest or border South region, Kentucky, Ohio, or Tennessee. But really it is Anytown. And the movie starts within months or weeks of the war's end, as three servicemen make their ways home: airman Fred Derry (Dana Andrews, one of the most familiar faces in '40s movies), disabled sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), and middle-aged soldier Al Stephenson (Fredric March).

Not one of them is owner of a neat and tidy life. Fred is in a quickie wartime marriage fast going bad, Homer, whose hands were lost in the war and replaced by hooks, struggles with his disability, and Al is the most confusing character of all. He's a swank banker, a family man married 20 years with two nearly grown children. But he finds his identity more in his status as an army sergeant than in his big comfortable life, which he gave up to fight. He's also an alarming drunk by today's standards, and probably even then—regularly humiliating himself in what often appear to be blackout episodes. It gets even messier when the women are brought in. In short order Fred falls for Al's daughter Peggy (a brilliant Teresa Wright), Homer can't believe his girlfriend Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell) still wants to marry him so he avoids her, leaving her hanging, and Al drinks at every opportunity, maundering about soldierly camaraderie. His long-suffering wife Milly (a perfectly cast Myrna Loy) seems to have faith he will dry out on his own sooner or later. Maybe most amazing, The Best Years of Our Lives is a feel-good movie that actually makes you feel good.

Nothing But Murder (1946)

This collection came late in the career of the amateur criminalist and essayist William Roughead, who lived and worked in Scotland as an attorney. Scads of his crime case studies were published for entertainment purposes from 1901 until past his death in 1952. This book came shortly after World War II, but the pieces are older, published for the first time in the US here and intended for an American market. Typically enough they're pretty good. Roughead has an interesting taste for crime, though he indulges a macabre aesthetic that can be too wryly cute by half. So it stumbles out of the gate with the silly overture of an imagined congress of notorious criminals judging one another on just such grounds. It's hollow graveyard laughter, attempting distance from the motivations that drive the project (whatever those motivations are exactly ... I can get a bit coy around the point myself). It's better when he gets down to the details of cases because he picks interesting ones. The first is about a group of stowaway boys who were forced to leave the ship and walk barefoot across an ice sheet back to shore. Two drowned in the process. Roughead's basic strategy is to lay out the facts of the case as brought to trial by the police and used by prosecutors, and then go to the trial transcript. Thus it shifts radically and can take some getting used to, but ultimately it makes these proceedings all the more vivid, reading the words of the witnesses. The longest piece here, "Locusta in Scotland," presents a history of poisoning in Scotland, from the 16th century to the 1920s. The cases become monotonous, but more interesting is the history of the crime, from the earliest determinations that it is indeed a crime through the various advances in detection and understanding symptoms. A separate essay details a case of poisoning in 1613 that peels away layer after layer of court intrigue under King James VI and I (the Bible rewrite guy). Frankly I got lost in that one, but it sounded like a lot of dirty business all the way around. Roughead's work is best approached on literary terms, rather than purely informational, because he has an eccentric vocabulary, he can really take his time getting to the point, and he's capable of paragraphs that run longer than a page (or two). I liked the first half of Nothing But Murder more than the second, but I suspect that's a matter of fatigue as much as anything. He's charming and digressive and often a pleasure. It doesn't matter if the crimes are 20th-century vintage or ancient, it's all still crime—that eternal human impulse. It's weirdly comforting in some way to read these pieces, as if the unflappable Roughead has set out to explain the boogie man once and for all. About time someone did.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Nightingales Sing" (1946)

Story by Elizabeth Parsons not available online.

I've spent a fair amount of time on this short story project characterizing some of the pieces I've encountered as "not a story"—that is, more like memoir, journalism, excerpt from something larger, or experiment of some kind. This story, published originally in the New Yorker, strikes me as more or less exactly what I have in mind as a short story. It's nearly perfect. It recounts a specific event, a visit by a young woman, Joanna, with the older brother of a friend to an eccentric household. She doesn't know the people living in the house at all, and she doesn't know the older brother well either. Her friend is not there because she came down sick at the last minute. The brother, Phil, kindly volunteered to accompany Joanna to a horse event she wanted to attend. That's where he meets his friends Sandy and Chris, who extend the invitation for the visit. Sandy and Chris are involved with one another, but Sandy is also married to another woman, with whom he also shares a house, shuttling between them. It's a small event, this visit, but seen through Joanna's eyes it's like encountering the world of adults for the first time all over again. There's no need to ask what the writer, Elizabeth Parsons, is trying to do. It's evident with every reaction from Joanna. This is what it's like to grow up. Suddenly you find yourself in a situation that changes you forever. The worlds of adults, responsibilities, and pleasures are revealed as infinitely complex, impossible to reduce to black and white platitudes. And more—discoveries like these, illuminating moments like this, may be the best life has to offer. Even after the brief evening visit is concluded and Joanna is home again, she realizes she will never be the same. Something has changed permanently and there is awe and mystery in the understanding. All that is compressed into this remarkable story of 16 pages or so, which stays close to Joanna's point of view but more often just dispassionately reports the events. From the way I'm talking about it I think it's fair to call it an epiphany story. Certainly something like that happens to Joanna. But what is the nature of her epiphany? That's not easily reduced to some didactic point, which is what makes this a great story. Joanna's experience vividly reminded me of some of my own early adventures in my late teens and early 20s, encountering unexpected revelations in my interactions with adults and strangers. There is a point where they shift from people who control you, abstracted authority figures, to flawed human beings a lot like you—peers. That's about as simple as I can make what I think Joanna finds in this wonderful story, and it's way too simplified for everything packed into it. This is one of the best stories in all these anthologies, even though, mysteriously, very little is known about the author.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

The Butterfly (1946)

By what I can glean from James M. Cain's 1946 preface, The Butterfly originated many years earlier as a story of a mostly indigent family from the Big Sandy River country of Appalachia who heads out for a better life in California. Cain abandoned it when he caught wind of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and subsequently ransacked the manuscript for scenes and passages of other novels. But it's not at all like Steinbeck's novel, not least because the central animating plot point is a complicated story of adultery and incest, and not much of anything to do with the noble dignity of poverty. It trucks in broad stereotypes, often cutting over to the lurid chiefly because it can, and thus the only interest it holds is in wondering how far it will go. It's a rush job potboiler in its final, brief form (barely 100 pages), with a lot of complications intended to demarcate the innocent and corrupt in programmatic fashion, which results in everyone being corrupt, though not necessarily by the terms of the story, which is just annoying. All the never-ending mysteries set up here could be resolved credibly, quickly, and without drama by a few judicious DNA tests. I was frankly shocked by the snide way Cain unfailingly assumes his own superiority to the rubes and hayseeds he condescends to put through predictable paces. Corn liquor in fruit jars, grotesque ignorance, depraved behavior, and pride. Guns, humiliations. He probably has many details about the lives of his characters right—as he firmly asserts in the preface. But he clearly never quite sees them as human. One wonders what might have happened if he'd never heard of the Steinbeck book and finished. It's possible there's a good story in this group of characters, though less easy to see how it works as a James M. Cain novel. He seems most effective to me with more money around the place—in insurance companies, opera, suburban Southern California. The Postman Always Rings Twice shows that he could write about poverty convincingly. But he'd have had to get a lot more delicate in The Butterfly a lot quicker, in areas such as incest, and he'd have had to find ways to make it more believable. Two tall orders there.

In case it's not at the library.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

#25: It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

This one kind of sneaked up on me. I don't recall it as ever being much of a holiday staple in my family when I was growing up, and by the time I had started to figure out how much I like Capra movies—Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and especially Meet John Doe did most of the heavy lifting there—I was still suspicious of the Christmas and angels theme. I saw bits and pieces of it over the years, enough to convince myself that it was worth continuing to avoid.

Then, somehow, I ended up watching a TV broadcast from beginning to end at some point in the late '80s. I was surprised by how dark it is, even the photography, which verges on noir in some sequences. It's not just that it's a story about a man who has decided suicide is his best option. It's that it's a portrait so dead-on believable that it's almost painful to watch, telling a story in excruciating detail of lifelong frustration and disappointment. George Bailey keeps seeing his (relatively modest) dreams so systematically denied that his interior life shrivels to the point where, in one of his darkest moments of despair, he can cry out to his wife, "Why do we have to have all these kids?"

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

USA, 130 minutes
Director: Frank Capra
Writers: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, Jo Swerling, Philip Van Doren Stern, Michael Wilson
Photography: Joseph F. Biroc, Joseph Walker, Victor Milner
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: William Hornbeck
Cast: James Stewart, Henry Travers, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Grahame, H.B. Warner, Frank Albertson, Samuel S. Hinds, Mary Treen, Sheldon Leonard

Since coming to terms with how much I like and admire and value the cornball object known as It's a Wonderful Life, I have maintained that it's because the picture is essentially fearless, and not just "for its times," about going right at human depravity. For every saccharine declaration that, "Every time you hear a bell ring, it means that some angel's just got his wings," there's someone mean and surly like Sheldon Leonard standing there saying, "Hey, look, mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don't need any characters around to give the joint atmosphere." It's almost like the call and response in gospel music, these extremes between whitest whites and blackest blacks, and it's one of the best things I know, short of The Wizard of Oz and Blue Velvet, at sharpening such contrasts and making you feel them viscerally.

I came to it late, finally catching a TV broadcast from beginning to end at some point in the late '80s. I was surprised by how dark it is, even the photography, which verges on pure noir in some sequences, and Universal-style horror in others. It's not just that it's a story about a man who has decided suicide is his best option (nor that it's unafraid to use the word "suicide" plain). The fact is it's just good all through, with a screenplay that expertly juggles its many extremities, and top-notch performances. It boldly rears back and lets loose a story in excruciating detail of lifelong frustration and disappointment, the story of George Bailey (played brilliantly by James Stewart in one of his greatest performances), who keeps seeing his dream denied of escaping the small upstate New York town in which he was born and has lived all his life, that dream so systematically denied that his interior life shrivels to the point where, in a moment of uncalculated despair, he can cry out to his wife, "You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids?"

All the King's Men (1946)

Robert Penn Warren was a poet and academic at least as much as he was a novelist, which no doubt accounts for the lovely language and meticulous structuring of what is probably his single best known work. It's arguable that the denseness of it verges on a kind of suffocating quality, in much the same way as, say, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man—worthy works both, very much so, but they can feel as if they have been pruned and worked within an inch of their lives, a good deal of natural energy extruded. All the King's Men is often tagged as the greatest American novel about politics, and since I can't think of a better one I'm happy to go along with that. Based rather self-consciously on the figure of Huey Long, the wildly popular and fanatical governor of Louisiana who went on to become a Depression-era U.S. senator before being assassinated, it tells a number of stories simultaneously: Willie Stark's most obviously, the Long character, but also that of the narrator Jack Burden and his involvement with the Stanton family, whose patriarch preceded Stark in the Louisiana governorship. It's a pretty big novel, running to more than 600 pages in my trade paperback edition, and it addresses with a good deal of veracity the tiny details of confused personal lives as much it does the broad strokes of a public life verging on fascism via the circuitous and flawed routes of populism. Warren's singular achievement is making it clear how well-intentioned and intelligent Stark (and perhaps Long) was from the first, corrupted eventually starting only from the necessities presented by American elections—and probably more accurate to say by the human nature represented by them, on both sides, voters and candidates equally. There's plenty of gray to go around here. Huey Long, for as much as he was a shrewd and calculating propagandist, also managed to implement one of the most effective and far-reaching progressive agendas in the country, making his career attacking the corporate excesses in Louisiana of Standard Oil and going on in his governorship to create far-reaching public works programs. Long's education programs, as just one example, brought literacy to tens of thousands of Louisianans. Warren paints Willie Stark as a man who starts out as an earnest rail-splitter type and learns to grasp the levers of power; that power brings him to ruin. It may or may not be true to Long—I don't know that much about him—but pieces of the basic lessons apply today as much as ever. I can see pieces and elements of Nixon, Carter, the first George Bush, Mitt Romney, and many more in Willie Stark. If there's one novel you're going to read about American politics, I'm with the majority that this is the one to choose.

In case it's not at the library.

The Big Clock (1946)

Kenneth Fearing was a veteran contributor to the pulp magazines of the '30s and '40s but probably considered himself a poet before anything else. Even as he continued to publish collections of verse he eventually branched out to crime novels, of which this short example may be his best known—the movie version starred Ray Milland and Charles Laughton and is something of a minor staple of the noir subgenre (it was remade in the '80s as No Way Out). As with much of the work in Robert Polito's Library of America collections the novel bears intriguing narrative innovations deployed almost casually in otherwise routine tales of mayhem and deceit. In the case of Fearing's work it's a matter of shifting first-person points of view. Various characters step up for a chapter or a handful of chapters at a time to move the story along. It's a bit clunky, as the voices don't change that much from character to character, and it's all too plainly plot-driven, but it nevertheless provides an interesting panorama that serves to keep readers just slightly off balance even as the plot begins to engage full throttle. George Stroud is a cynical executive in a giant faceless corporation in New York City—the model appears to be Henry Luce's mid-century Time, Inc.—who finds himself put in charge by his boss of an investigation into the murder of his (the boss') girlfriend. His boss tells him that a key witness has disappeared and must be found; only Stroud knows that that witness is himself (he had spent the weekend with the victim, and obviously doesn't want his boss to know), which means he must misdirect the investigation even as he makes his own attempt to find out what happened, in order to avoid the blame for the murder that he knows (and that we know, thanks to the first-person tactic) he didn't commit. It's an absurd conceit, but never mind. Fearing keeps events moving quickly even as the twists and convolutions maintain the suspense, and people speak to one another entertainingly in the usual clipped, flinty phrases of hard-boiled fare. Soon enough Stroud and the reader figure out who is actually culpable, and it all comes down to a manhunt in the skyscraper in which Stroud works, a manhunt for himself that Stroud must evade even as he heads it up. The action turns into an exceedingly clever kind of juggling act with even aspects of the New York art world involved, and in the end it's all tidy as hell; along the way, it holds our interest at every point.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)