20 Great Years of Movies, Part 9: 1946

1. It's a Wonderful Life (director: Frank Capra): This film looms large in my family, where it's one of the few movies we try to watch together every Christmas. I appreciate that James Stewart's character is presented with admirable traits and a few flaws The film's fundamental message of how one person's life can affect so many others is expressed perfectly.
2. The Best Years of Our Lives (director: William Wyler): This is the filim which ensured It's a Wonderful Life would be a flop, but it's an immensely worthy film as well. The examination of veterans trying to adjust to the end of the war is deftly handled but it was the decision to cast an actual amputee as an amputee which really helps this film stand out. Utterly engrossing.
3. Notorious (director: Alfred Hitchcock): A terrific Hitchcock thriller with Ingrid Bergman as a woman who goes undercover to ferret out escaped Nazis and the cruel lengths the caddish Cary Grant is willing to push her to get what he needs.
4. The Killers (director: Robert Siodmak): An excellent crime film starting from the opening assassination scene, continuing through the many flashbacks, and then picking up speed near the end when the titular characters suddenly return.
5. The Postman Always Rings Twice (director: Tay Garnett): Another great James M. Cain title. Like Double Indemnity it concerns a wife plotting to kill her husband with her lover and all the ways in which it goes wrong.
6. The Spiral Staircase (director: Robert Siodmak): This gothic thriller feels like it was made to exploit Dorothy McGuire as the mute servant - but boy, it's a huge improvement over the original book! A murderer is loose and it seems to be someone inside the home with the titular staircase. It plays out very neatly.
7. The Stranger (director: Orson Welles): A pretty good film with Welles as a Nazi war criminal trying to keep a low profile in a small town and Edward G. Robinson as the detective who figures him out.
8. The Big Sleep (director: Howard Hawks): The plot of this film becomes so murky that I lose track of what exactly one scene had to do with its predecessor, but this Philip Marlowe story is acted out with such compelling performances by Bogart and Lauren Bacall that it doesn't really matter.
9. Black Angel (director: Roy William Neill): A very good adaptation of the Cornell Woolrich novel with some interesting changes. A woman wants to clear her husband of a murder charge. The dead woman's husband eventually volunteers to help find the killer.
10. Green for Danger (director: Sidney Gilliat): A great murder mystery surrounding a death in a hospital during wartime, mostly memorable because Alastair Sim steals and elevates every scene he's in as the detective.