Is there a more warmhearted celebration of Christmas cheer amid the urban world of post-war America than this classic with Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle, and little Natalie Wood? I think not.
Tag: 1947
Voyage of ‘The Damned’ on Kanopy
The Damned (aka Les maudits) (France, 1947) is a superb title for this noir-tinged 1947 French war thriller from René Clément. In the final days of World War II, as the Third Reich falls under the Allied advance, the Nazis send a special team on a secret mission to South America by submarine to prepare […]
Humphrey Bogart in ‘Dead Reckoning’ on Amazon Prime Video
Any resemblance between Dead Reckoning (1947) and classic hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart classics The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep is anything but coincidental (“A guy’s buddy gets killed, he oughta do something about it,” Bogie explains in an line from the Sam Spade playbook) in this murder mystery of deception and double crosses. Narrating in […]
Blu-ray: ‘Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy’ on The Criterion Collection
Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy (Criterion). Roberto Rossellini had been a journeyman director working within Mussolini’s Italian film industry when he redefined his career and all but inaugurated the neo-realist movement with this trio of films made at the end of World War II. Though he was no partisan, he started working on Rome Open City […]