I got myself a laserdisc player a few years ago to stream and preserve some interactive disks, then I started collecting anime on it, then I decided to use it to check out some of those old films I'd always heard I'm supposed to watch, but never did. I was legitimately surprised by how much I got out of this, to the point where it's starting to make me angry that it's hard to find films this old on mainstream streaming services. In any case, I'm far from a film scholar, and what I've seen isn't close to exhaustive (for instance, I haven't yet gotten around to The Magnificent Ambersons, though I have a copy coming in the mail), but over the next day or two, I want to share which movies of that decade I think are worth seeing and why.

So the back of the LD sleeve opens its description of the film with "When you double cross a double-crosser, it's a CRISS CROSS," which is exactly the kind of cheese that got me interested. What I found was a damn well constructed, well directed heist film. Burt Lancaster stars as an armored truck driver who decides its a good idea to team up with a mob boss to rob his own truck in order to win back his ex-wife, who's now married to said mob boss. Do I need to tell you it goes poorly? This sort of silly plotline played straight enough that it becomes a tragedy is one of the things that makes classic noir so compelling to me.

Three homeless men try to turn their lives around through setting up an illegal gold panning operation in Mexico, doing their best to avoid attention from the authorities, criminals, and other wannabe prospectors, only to find their greatest threat is each other. A cynical, often tense non-traditional Western starring one of the greatest actors of his day at his peak. Watching Humphrey Bogart become increasingly unhinged is just great.

Making a film about people coming back from the war in 1946 was a pretty obvious way to cash in on the zeitgeist, both in terms of box office draw and Oscar wins (and it sounds like work on it started before the war even ended), but when they pull it off this well, who cares? The story follows three men, one a wealthy banker who was a low rank soldier, a poor man who became a decorated war hero, and a man who lost his hands, but has worked through his disability enough that he doesn't really think it's a big deal anymore, but is afraid everyone else might. Over the course of the film, the banker has trouble adjusting back to the mindset of a capitalist, the war hero spirals into despair as the government and society fail to do anything to get him out of the hole he thought he escaped, and the last man pitied by his friends and family and treated as if he can't do anything by himself. It shouldn't surprise you at this point that the title of this movie is ironic, and while a big Hollywood film was never going to really question the military-industrial complex or capitalism in an real, in-depth way, nor would it let a film like this have anything other than a happy ending, this film still pulls off a lot.

Fun fact: Harold Russell had actually lost his hands in a dynamite accident on a military base. Despite the fact that he had no training as an actor, he won wide praise for his performance in this film. To the point where he got nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars. Possibly because they knew that no one in Hollywood was going to hire a guy with no hands in a major, non-gimmicky roll again, and he had seemingly no chance of winning against professionals, they also gave him an honorary Oscar for "bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures." After he was awarded this pity Oscar, he then won Best Supporting Actor and got a standing ovation. It's still the only time anyone has been awarded two Oscars for the same role in one film.

An insurance salesman falls in love with one of his potential clients and decides to help her murder her husband for the insurance money. Billy Wilder films tend to have stylized, cheesy dialogue, but somehow, once one of his films pulls you in, it somehow flows. Like seriously, lines like:

“It's just like the first time I came here, isn't it? We were talking about automobile insurance, only you were thinking about murder. And I was thinking about that anklet.”

or

“They may think it's twice as safe because there are two of them. But it isn't twice as safe. It's ten times twice as dangerous. They've committed a murder.”

just work in context. Maybe it's because everyone tries so hard to sell it that you can't help yourself from buying. In any case, this is often considered one of the best examples of film noir, and I don't disagree.

I feel like this is probably my most normy, unsophisticated pick on this list. And maybe it wouldn't have clicked with me if I had only seen it more recently after seeing other classics of the era. But I can't deny that this is a film I can go to when I'm down and feel better, and it's held up after repeat viewings over the years. It's the antidote to Ayn Rand, and about the most anti-capitalist a film could get at the time, and that has to count for something.

One key to a good mystery is to make it complicated enough that the audience has to put some effort into figuring it out, but not so convoluted that you have trouble figuring what the plot was after the fact (a problem with Bogarts other big detective film, The Big Sleep). The Maltese Falcon threads that needle perfectly. Combine that with Humphrey Bogart making the total asshole that is Sam Spade somehow likable and compelling, everyone else doing a great acting job, and director John Huston knowing how to keep tension up to just the right level, and you have a classic. This film may be a bit archetypal, but that's what you get with a film this foundational to a whole genre. And it's a damn good foundation.

So after seeing a bunch of mostly American classics, I'd realized that I'd never watched a French film, and I felt like I should at least give one a shot to expand my horizons. I found out that at some point, French film critics voted this the best French film of all time. Looking it up, I found out that it was a 3 hour long, black and white melodrama that was largely about a mime. Definitely not something I'd otherwise have gone out of my way to watch, to say the least. But it was one I could get cheap on LD. And it's not like I couldn't just stop if I hated it like an hour in. And after it was done, I thought something I never would have expected:

I fucking loved watching that mime.

And everything else, too, of course. The directing is brilliant, the acting perfect, the sets amazing, and this might be the best script in the history of cinema. And they did all this under Nazi occupation, using the production to move around members of the resistance as they hid the Jewish composer and and set designer from the authorities. They even had to reshoot scenes when they found out one of their actors was a Nazi spy.

I feel like it's hard to convey to Americans why they should care about this long film about French theater where everyone is constantly feeling extreme emotions, but you really should. It is legitimately one of the best films ever made.

It's the Metroid Prime of film.

Seriously though, it's hard to say much that people haven't already heard. Yes, it is brilliant. Yes, it's hugely influential and changed how film looks (I'd recommend watching some other films from the 1930s and 40s before this just to see how much Kane broke their rules). And yes, it pissed off William Randolph Hearst. But I feel like people on the internet sometimes talk about it as if it was specifically designed from the ground off to say fuck you to that one specific guy. That's not exactly true. In F for Fake, Welles noted that they were originally going to base Kane more on Howard Hughes. The film is really more like an elaboration of this tweet:

Charles Foster Kane is Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Donald Trump as much as he is anyone who was alive when the film was made. Decades before the internet laid bare all the lies the wealthy tell us about themselves to anyone who hadn't yet figured it out, Welles already saw through it all. And he gave us a complex portrait that's simultaneously sympathetic and damning.

Is this still a normy pick? I feel like it at least used to be. But in any case, this one isn't a nostalgia thing for me. I hadn't seen it until I picked up the LD a year or two ago. It had a lot of hype, and it lived up to all of it. Both the greatest love story in film and a call to not be complacent in the face of fascism. It is a near perfect film, and I wish I could come up with more to say about it.

A hack writer goes to Vienna shortly after the war to visit a friend only to find out that he died just before his arrival. He asks around for more information on what happened, seemingly just to get some closure for himself, but the details don't seem to be adding up, and from there, we get our mystery.

One interpretation of the prevalence of what would later be called film noir in the 1940s was that it was a response to the war. Films about a world that seems broken, where terrible things hide under the surface of society, where people feel trapped where they are and their chances to escape their situation are doomed. It's easy to see why someone who just came back from a war before widespread access to therapists would feel connection to media that expressed what they were feeling, even if these films weren't normally about the war in any direct way. The Third Man makes this link explicit, using the still ruined city as its stage and the war an explicit reason for the state of things. When the protagonist expresses disgust at the fact that the police think his old friend was involved in "some sort of a racket," he's told "Everyone in Vienna is... I’ve done things that would have seemed unthinkable before the war."

Holly Martins is an unusual protagonist for a noir film. He's basically a baffoon bumbling around a mystery. A man whose simplistic cowboy stories represent a worldview that doesn't hold up to the harsh reality of what the war brought. And it's because of him that this is the funniest noir film I've ever seen. I'm not sure I'd say it's a full on black comedy, but it's a film that knows there's a thin line between farce and tragedy, and it likes playing with it.

And of course we have one of Orson Welles' greatest performances. I don't want to spoil too much about it, but he absolutely steals the show, and people are often surprised to later find out he's in less than 10 full minutes of the film.

I don't know what more to say than "see this film." It's a masterpiece.

...

I liked getting my thoughts out there on these films, and I could easily do a similar list for the 1950s as well. Let me know if any of you are interested in that.