1946 Poll 2.0

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Choose your favourite films from 1946 (according to IMDB).

Each person can vote for up to 20 films. Do not feel compelled to fill the maximum allowable number.

Twenty-film ballots can be formatted as follows:
- Five tiers of four films each, 4/4/4/4/4; scored 5-4-3-2-1 pts/film/tier
- Four tiers of five films each, 5/5/5/5; scored 4.5-3.5-2.5-1.5 pts/film/tier
- Two tiers of ten films each, 10/10; scored 4-2 pts/film/tier
- No tiers, unranked; scored 3 pts/film
- A 20-film three-tier ballot is not possible

A tiered ballot can include less than 20 films, but in that case the total number of films must still be able to be factored by the number of tiers, so:
- A five tier ballot can include only 20, 15, 10, or 5 films
- A four tier ballot can include only 20, 16, 12, 8, or 4 films
- A three tier ballot (scored 5-3-1) can include only 18, 15, 12, 9, 6, or 3 films
- A two tier ballot can include only 20, 18, 16, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, or 2 films
- Ballots that are 19, 17, 13, 11, 7 or 1 films must be no tiers

Users are urged to post their provisional lists as soon as possible, so that others can use them for recommendations. You may revise your lists at any point prior to the deadline.

Deadline for 1946 lists will be Saturday, April 30th at around midnight EDT.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Amazing, I figured out the work around to expand the text box, thank you therouxxx!

[sally]

1940's are my worst decade - i've only seen 50 for 46...

if anyone wants to 'double' their viewing - the 1946 ones on the DtC ballot are:
the strange love of martha ivers - lewis milestone
a friend will come tonight / un ami viendra ce soir... - raymond bernard
sylvie et le fantôme - claude autant-lara
sunshine follows rain / driver dagg faller regn - gustaf edgren (found on european netflix minus sweden)

and my prelim ballot (not even a full 20!):

midvinterblot - gösta werner
a scandal in paris - douglas sirk ♥♥♥
restless blood / levoton veri - teuvo tulio
the testimony / il testimone - pietro germi
enamorada - emilio fernández
canyon passage - jacques tourneur
la otra - roberto gavaldón
specter of the rose - ben hecht
birds of the village - james fisher
farrebique ou les quatre saisons - georges rouquier
the locket - john brahm
panique - julien duvivier
paisà - roberto rossellini
duel in the sun - whoever
cluny brown - lubtisch
my darling clementine - john ford

to watch:

5 strong mini swedish fest courtesy netflix inc hasse ekman, a few french & italian ones, one spanish, one greek, one korean, a kinoshita and theirs is the glory which got survivors from a wwii battle to reenact it, screw ptsd. also a ton of uk short docs from bfi eg coal industry

but not a great deal that is mega exciting, if anyone has anything marvellous, please shout!

[sally]

oh and one i'd really like to see is vávra's the adventurous bachelor / nezbedný bakalář - does anyone know if this is available? there's a dvd with eng sub flag on cover (not always true) but it's wildly expensive & i'm not risking it for it not to have subs....

[karl]

Right now it'd look sumpin like this, but may get around to some more this time since this yr has more appeal than the last.

Notorious
The Best Years of Our Lives
Enamorada
Iris and the Lieutenant
Shoeshine
Paisan
My Darling Clementine
Diary of a Chambermaid
Canyon Passage
Let There Be Light
A Day in the Country
The Big Sleep
Panique
The Girl I Loved
Cluny Brown
Under the Bridges
Farrebique
Ditte Menneskebarn
Utamaro and His Five Women
Il testimone
The Killers

[greennui]

Panique (Julien Duvivier)
Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch)
Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock)
Unter den Brücken (Helmut Käutner)
Fragment of Seeking (Curtis Harrington)
Enamorada (Emilio Fernandez)
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks)
Black Angel (Roy William Neill)
While the Door Was Locked (Hasse Ekman)
Cross of Love (Teuvo Tulio)

Restless Blood (Teuvo Tulio)
Duel in the Sun (King Vidor)
Specter of the Rose (Ben Hecht)
Nocturne (Edwin L. Marin)
Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford)
Cherry Blossom: Spring Fantasy (Kenzô Masaoka)
A Girl At Dojo Temple (Kon Ichikawa)
Spring Melodies (Dmitriy Babichenko)
The Private Life of a Cat (Maya Deren)

The Diary of a Chambermaid (Jean Renoir)
Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur)
Midwinter Sacrifice (Gösta Werner)
Three Dances (Gerd Osten/Alf Sjöberg)


Watchlist:

A Matter of Life and Death REWATCH
Gilda (Charles Vidor) REWATCH
Iris And The Lieutenant
Henri Decoin - La Fille du diable
Gianni Franciolini - Notte di tempesta (1946)
Sunshine Follows Rain
Die Fledermaus 1946 Directed by Géza von Bolváry
The Man I Love 1946 Directed by Raoul Walsh
A Lover’s Return 1946 ‘Un revenant’ Directed by Christian-Jaque
Bedlam

[flip]

i had to cut ten films i really like (i cut mostly famous ones, figuring they don't need the support), so this seems like a really deep year

Nocturne (Edwin Marin)
Black Angel (Roy William Neill)
Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur)
Crack-Up (Irving Reis)

Enamorada (Emilio Fernandez)
The Locket (John Brahm)
Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery)
Decoy (Jack Bernhard)

Gilda (Charles Vidor)
Green for Danger (Sidney Gilliat)
13 Rue Madeleine (Henry Hathaway)
Night Editor (Henry Levin)

The Killers (Robert Siodmak)
The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford)
The Dark Corner (Henry Hathaway)

The Beast With Five Fingers (Robert Florey)
The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak)
Nobody Lives Forever (Jean Negulesco)
Criminal Court (Robert Wise)

[sally]

first official viewing - suita warszawska - tadeusz makarczyński

viewable here: https://35mm.online/en/vod/documentary/warsaw-suite

short sweet doc showing life resilient re-emerging from bombed out mariupol, sorry, warsaw...

[Lencho of the Apes]

1946, the year of Rondo Hatton! I'll start with these:

Beauty And The Beast - Cocteau
Bel Ami - Antonio Momplet
The Big Sleep - Hawks
Campeon Sin Corona - Alejandro Galindo
Cantaclaro - Julio Bracho
Cluny Brown - Lubitsch
Cross Of Love - Tuliio
Diary f A Chambermaid - Renoir
Enamorada - Fernandez
El Hijo De Nadie - M. Contreras Torres
La Mujer De Todos - Bracho
Notorious - Hitchcock
La Otra - Gavaldon
Paisan - Rossellini
Specter Of The Rose - Hecht
The Strange Woman - Ulmer
Three Strangers - Negulesco

Pushing hard for Cantaclaro, but it doesn't have subs...

[St. Gloede]

My list, though it has been a very long time since I saw the majority:

1. La belle et la bête / Beauty and the Beast (1946, Jean Cocteau)
2. A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
3. Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
4. Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna / Five Women Around Utamaro (1946, Kenji Mizoguchi)

5. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)
6. Great Expectations (1946, David Lean)
7. Green for Danger (1946, Sidney Gilliat)
8. Det regnar på vår kärlek / It Rains on Our Love (1946, Ingmar Bergman)

9. It's a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)
10. My Darling Clementine (1946, John Ford)
11. Waga seishun ni kuinashi / No Regrets for Our Youth (1946, Akira Kurosawa)
12. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946, Lewis Milestone)

13. The Killers (1946, Robert Siodmak)
14. Panique (1946, Julien Duvivier)
15. The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles)
16. Sylvie et le fantôme (1946, Claude Autant-Lara)

17. Kamennyy tsvetok / The Stone Flower (1946, Aleksandr Ptushko)
18. Ditte menneskebarn / Ditte, Child of Man (1946, Bjarne Henning-Jensen)
19. Les portes de la nuit / Gates of the Night (1946, Marcel Carné)
20. Sciuscià / Shoe-Shine (1946, Vittorio De Sica)

[rischka]

i'm gonna do a rewatch wartime double feature, two films that didn't do a lot for me in days of yore. but now they're on bluray

the best years of our lives
a matter of life and death (stairway to heaven)

[rischka]

then i promise i'll do something more exciting

[Angel]

Black Angel
Child of Divorce
Cluny Brown
Ditte menneskebarn (Ditte, Child of Man)
Driver dagg faller regn (Sunshine Follows Rain)
Duel in the Sun
Il bandito (The Bandit)
La bataille du rail (The Battle of the Rails)
La otra (The Other One)
Les portes de la nuit (Gates of the Night)
Margie
O Ébrio (The Drunkard)
Piccadilly Incident
So Dark the Night
The Captive Heart
The Chase
The Killers
To Each His Own
Unter den Brücken (Under the Bridges)
Waga koi seshi otome (The Girl I Loved)

Deliberately excluded (IMDb/TSPDT/S&S top 500):
A Matter of Life and Death
It's a Wonderful Life
La belle et la bête
My Darling Clementine
Notorious
Paisà
Partie de campagne
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Big Sleep

Wanted:
Jericho
Loviisa, Niskavuoren nuori emäntä
Un ladrón de guante blanco

[sally]

watched l'herbier's l'affaire du collier de la reine last night, and whilst it's unlikely to make my final ballot, was perplexed enough at what l'herbier was trying to do that i'll at least probably remember it by the time we get to poll 3.0

film is for the most part a mildly diverting, sumptuous (very wide-ass period dresses) costume drama in versailles/marie antoinette setting (with walk-on part for buffoon cagliostro) whose sympathies very much lie with a woman of illegitimate aristocratic birth (played by viviane romance! i love her name) as she sets about trying to steal some mega-bling amidst the power-plays at court

and this is all nice and amusing and restrained until at the end where she gets caught and punished & it goes full on exploitation movie with heaving, naked flesh (sure i saw a full boob at one point), brutal close-ups of teary face and torture and screaming! so much screaming! too much screaming. have i seen, or more importantly, heard, anything like it before 1946? i don't know...

first thought was huh, typical misogyny, can't have a woman getting away with independent actions, 2nd thought was no, the change in film style is too extreme, too excessive for this, unless l'herbier is a full on psycho and besides there are no other heroes in this film to switch sympathy to....so maybe he's eliciting sympathy for her against the actions of undemocratic power....but the actress is SO degraded & humiliated in this (did he know rossellini?) that it doesn't make sense to portray sympathy with one fictional woman at the cost of a real one....

so mulled it over a bit more and realised that in this final scene the action in the film has gradually transitioned from focus on palace intrigues to the wider populace. first you hear 'the people'.....then finally, they appear: ugly, grotesque, behind the bars of a fence, baying for pain, definitely not noble....and i just wonder if maybe the ending is intentionally uncomfortable, enough to implicate/accuse the viewer as participating in the unthinking bloodlust of the spectators...

anyway i'm still not sure, but it is a remarkable ending regardless...(although not of course as remarkable as if she had been portrayed by eg a stuffed mongoose, viz another thread, which is the lens thru which i'll see all costume dramas from now on)

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

By sheer luck, the movie I'm watching for the Old Hollywood club this week is a 1946, Jean Negulesco's Three Strangers starring as the headliners (!) Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. David Bordwell wrote a book I haven't read about how 1940s Hollywood saw a sea change in storytelling, where the narration becomes much more complicated and creative. This a good example of that. Not a very good movie, but diverting and features perhaps Sydney Greenstreet's finest performance as a sympathetic desperately indebted solicitor.

[Lencho of the Apes]

I'm feeling an urge to revisit Three Strangers, just cuz I don't have much confidence in my 1990s impression. I remember not liking it especially *except* for the Peter Lorre subplot, where it seemed obvious to me that he was deeeply crushed out on the Wallace Beeryish character, that wrestler or whatever he was.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Yes, I agree with that, the Lorre subplot really holds this back. I just finished the movie this morning and the ending is very good indeed, so maybe a very good movie after all, or at least confidently recommended. Wonderful showcase for Greenstreet.

[nrh]

haven't read the bordwell book either, but back on his blog he used this year's the locket as one of the primary examples, and it's definitely one of the most baroquely structured hollywood movies i've seen from that period, and highly recommended.

[rischka]

want to make a list but letterboxd is fucked rn

[sally]

haven't read the bordwell book either, but back on his blog he used this year's the locket as one of the primary examples, and it's definitely one of the most baroquely structured hollywood movies i've seen from that period, and highly recommended.

oh cool, it's one of the hollywood ones i really liked too!


i watched sunshine follows rain / driver dagg faller regn

incredibly well shot but i think i reached my limit of scandi rural drama about 40 iterations ago

it had a moose

[greennui]

Thought about watching that one but not sure if I can stomach two Alf Kjellin films in a month.

[sally]

[greennui]

Mai Zetterling tho <3

[rischka]

la fille du diable (decoin)



bizarre gothic thriller almost saved by pierre fresnay giving off great trevor howard vibes. this doesn't stand a chance next to panique in my list. post-war france, home of weird cinema.

[karl]

I also watched Devil's Daughter last night and quite liked it.

[rischka]

Cool, I think we talked before about France trying to exorcise its demons of the occupation and I think it fits that pattern. We've done bad but can redeem ourselves. I liked the doctor character especially in this regard

[niminy-piminy]

self-quoting from the "story behind your avatar" thread...

i was using this avatar in various corners of the interweb for ages.
it's from "House of Horrors" (Jean Yarbrough, 1946) also known as "Joan Medford is Missing"...
https://letterboxd.com/film/house-of-horrors/

An unsuccessful sculptor saves a madman named “The Creeper” from drowning. Seeing an opportunity for revenge, he tricks the psycho into murdering his critics. (Feeling empowered by the friendship of the acromegalic sociopath, De Lange tasks him with murdering the critics who have pilloried him in print.)

plus adding a few extra tidbits...

murder as revenge for bad reviews!
https://youtu.be/pcQ6ysfQAJg

spoiler!
https://youtu.be/rUXZkKo0bj0

I call it tripe, pure unadulterated tripe with an overtone of sheer lunacy.

[rischka]

and i need to watch this too

[sally]

so this iconic film is from 46???? i guess we all gotta watch it now just to search in all the corners of the sets for where jiri's secret self might be lurking. what's that peeping out from behind a lampshade? that reflection in the much too black windowpane? aaaaaaaaaaaaargh fun

[niminy-piminy]

but remember i picked that avatar pic prior to watching the film!
i just liked the picture (made it a display of my own identity) without having a clue about the film and its narrative.
only much later, i watched it and figured out it is a "revenge for the bad reviews murder story."