The second of back to back movies dealing with anti-semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement is the serious message movie version, and, unsurprisingly by Academy Award standards, the winner of the two. But is it the best?
Year Eligible: 1947 (Won)
Additional audio from Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
(Explicit language, as always)
Contrary to our hosts’ expectation, Crossfire is not the obvious inspiration for the 90’s tabletop board game, but is both an enjoyable film noir and a compelling message movie— an unusual combination that nevertheless works really well, even as it has some obvious and glaring flaws.
Year Eligible: 1947 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Crossfire (1947)
(Explicit language, as always)
Believe it or not, Miracle on 34th Street was released just a couple of weeks later in the year in 1947 than this episode’s release date in 2021, despite being 100% about Santa Claus. The second Christmas movie our hosts have had to watch recently and entirely out of season, this one didn’t sit as well with David in an 80+ degree Los Angeles April as It’s A Wonderful Life a few weeks ago. Suzan seems to have an easier time with it, but realizes she’s seen very few Christmas movies to which she can compare it.
Year Eligible: 1947 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Miracle on 34th Street (1946)
(Explicit language, as always)
The Razor’s Edge starring Gene Tierney, Tyrone Power, and Anne Baxter is a film so uneven as to be whip-lash inducing. A bizarre and meandering first 90 minutes eventually lead to a tight, hour long thriller that barrels forward at lightning speed. But how good can a movie possibly be when almost half of it should have been cut?
Year Eligible: 1946 (Nominated)
Additional audio from The Razor’s Edge (1946)
(Explicit language, as always)
It’s A Wonderful Life is best known as the movie everyone watches on television at Christmas time, but Suzan has never seen it before, and David’s never seen it outside of the month of December, so how does it hold up when our hosts watch it in the middle of spring?
Year Eligible: 1946 (Nominated)
Additional audio from It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)
(Explicit language, as always)
Who would have thought that a Saturday afternoon kid’s matinee of a movie would cause such controversy? Suzan thinks The Yearling is a well made movie for which she is absolutely not the audience, while David’s childhood experience with the genre makes his criteria for a good “boy adventurer” movie quite strict. Will his argument bring down Suzan’s opinion, or will hers raise David’s estimation of this movie about a little boy and his pet deer?
Year Eligible: 1946 (Nominated)
Additional audio from The Yearling (1946)
(Explicit language, as always)
The winner of the 1946 nominees, The Best Years of Our Lives is a well intentioned story of three men returning home to their very different families after World War II that set the bar for confronting the challenges facing returning military veterans. While there are two or three solidly acted and moving scenes, Best Years tends seems to think shutting up, getting a good job, and marrying a nice wife are the best cures for war trauma and PTSD— unfortunate for a generation of 1940s moviegoers that probably could have used some talk therapy.
Year Eligible: 1946 (Won)
Additional audio from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
(Explicit language, as always)
From time to time, a Best Picture nominee feels as if it were an intentional attack across the decades to specifically dispirit and infuriate David and Suzan. Laurence Olivier’s turn as director and star of Henry V, released in 1944 but confusingly nominated for the 1946 Oscars, is one of those acts of future aggression.
Year Eligible: 1946 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Henry V (1946)
(Explicit language, as always)
The last Hitchcock film to be nominated for Best Picture shows the iconic director going out with a fizzle rather than a bang. Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck star in this confusing muddle of a psychological thriller that not even a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí can save. And our hosts make a surprising choice for the should have won film from this year.
Year Eligible: 1945 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Spellbound (1945)
(Explicit language, as always)
While Suzan did not take David’s suggestion and just cut in a few key words and phrases to the previous episode for 1944’s Going My Way, the sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s, is so similar that it was a half-way legitimate suggestion. Bing Crosby returns to the screen as Father Chuck O’Malley, here to save yet another church and yet another late teen girl, this time with a trusty sidekick nun played by Ingrid Bergman. While the movie is worth skipping, there’s one fantastic scene you should definitely hear about and watch, but it unfortunately is not Crosby and Bergman making out, despite their electrifying, if confusing, chemistry.
Year Eligible: 1945 (Nominated)
Additional audio from The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)
(Explicit language, as always)
The winner of 1945, The Lost Weekend, is a melodramatic and at times embarrassing addiction drama, confoundingly soundtracked by eerie theremin music, with a clownish performance by lead actor Ray Milland, and neither of our hosts are impressed.
Year Eligible: 1945 (Won)
Additional audio from The Lost Weekend (1945)
(Explicit language, as always)
The best thing Suzan and David can say about the Joan Crawford vehicle Mildred Pierce, a movie full of terrible characters being terrible to one another, is at least it’s not very long.
Year Eligible: 1945 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Mildred Pierce (1945)
(Explicit language, as always)
The 1945 nominees have kicked off with a doozy of a musical comedy. Anchors Aweigh stars Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly as two sailors just trying to find a couple of girls to hook up with while on leave from the Navy for a few days, that is, until they are somehow drawn into babysitting, the Hollywood studio business, and a Tom and Jerry cartoon (no, that’s not a metaphor for anything). It’s a wild ride, but is it a movie?
Year Eligible: 1945 (Nominated)
Additional audio: Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra from Anchors Aweigh (1945)
(Explicit language, as always)
Ostensibly a biopic of President Woodrow Wilson, Wilson is a confusing muddle of unnecessary special effects, retconned history, and a characterization of the man that is so completely divergent from historical fact as to be infuriating. Also, David and Suzan determine who the real winner of 1944 should have been, and it’s not Going My Way.
Year Eligible: 1944 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Wilson (1944)
(Explicit language, as always)
Not to be confused with the Kelly Clarkson banger, “Since U Been Gone,” Since You Went Away is a nearly 3 hour film about the WWII home front starring Claudette Colbert, Joseph Cotton, Hattie McDaniel, and Jennifer Jones about which our hosts have very different opinions.
Year Eligible: 1944 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Since You Went Away (1944)
(Explicit language, as always)
Double Indemnity is a sexy, fast paced look at the dangerous world of... insurance? Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck star in this hard-boiled noir about life insurance fraud and murder, with Edward G. Robinson as the grizzled old claims investigator that takes them down.
Year Eligible: 1944 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Double Indemnity (1944)
(Explicit language, as always)
The film for which the term “gaslighting” is named, Gaslight is actually better than the myriad references to it in articles about psychological torment would have you believe. Ingrid Bergman gives a tour de force performance as the naive wife whose husband, played by Charles Boyer, tortures her into questioning her own reality, with Joseph Cotton and Angela Lansbury turning in memorable supporting roles.
Year Eligible: 1944 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Gaslight (1944)
(Explicit language, as always)
Bing Crosby stars as a hip, crooning priest brought in to pull a New York City church out of financial straits. At least, that’s the proposed arc of Going My Way for the first 20 minutes of this year’s Best Picture winner, but this over long movie careens from one dangling plot thread to another. Despite that, it’s rather pleasant, if you don’t look at it too hard… which, of course, is the whole idea of Screen Test of Time.
Year Eligible: 1944 (Won)
Additional audio from Going My Way (1944)
(Explicit language, as always)
Our hosts weren’t thrilled with The Song of Bernadette, a largely fictionalized biopic about a saint, but their main complaint is that it’s longer, even, than the Left Behind movies. Also, Suzan thinks it’s not Catholic enough, while David is really annoyed at what watching it has done to his YouTube recommendation algorithm.
Year Eligible: 1943 (Nominated)
Additional audio from The Song of Bernadette (1943)
(Explicit language, as always)
Ostensibly a biopic about one of the most important scientists of all time, Madame Curie is more a love letter to her husband, Pierre, than the story of the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in not one but two different categories. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon do their usual comfortable romance thing, and their personal chemistry is fine, while the movie seems entirely disinterested in the chemistry going on in their lab… or her life, at all, in the 28 years she lived after he died.
Year Eligible: 1943 (Nominated)
Additional audio from Madame Curie (1943)
(Explicit language, as always)