still catching up, here are some of my highlights for 1947 movies:

The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer - the main thing I remember liking about this one is the onscreen chemistry between Myrna Loy and Cary Grant. I like them both a lot separately and it was gratifying to see how well they worked together.

Body and Soul - one of the best boxing movies and one of the best John Garfield movies, so this one has a lot going for it.

Born to Kill - I might recommend this as the movie to see for anyone curious about Lawrence Tierney as it is maybe the best example of his menacing screen persona, I think even more than The Devil Thumbs a Ride, which is also worth a look (and what a title). Claire Trevor is really good too as a complex, conflicted femme fatale.

Down to Earth - this is a piece of fluff and apparently Rita Hayworth didn't like it much but I thought she was excellent in this. If ever anyone was born to play a goddess, she was. Of the three colour movies I've seen of hers, this is the one that best captured her look, for me, though I don't know if the photography was actually better or if I just happened to have a better copy of this one.

The Lady from Shanghai - this is a really good movie that probably should have been a great one, a genre-defining masterpiece. It's hard to judge it fairly since, as Slam<Bradley pointed out earlier, the studio interfered so thoroughy with Welles's vision and artistic control. Hayworth is amazing, though I do think it was a mistake to change her signature look so drastically (she didn't think so herself, reportedly, and liked that Welles was trying something different with her). But anyway, the performance is one of her best, as far as her delivery of her lines goes. It's strange to watch her in this her while knowing she and Welles were married and that he wrote the part and directed her. Hayworth was a complicated character and this might be one of the few parts where that comes through (Gilda would be another).

My Favourite Brunette - I've been seeing a few Bob Hope movies lately and this might be my favourite of them: really funny detective-story parody, with Bob Hope as a wannabe PI. Just so much fun for any fan of the hard-boiled detective genre and/or of Hope's schtick.

Out of the Past - one of the all-time great noirs and maybe Mitchum's best. Kirk Douglas is awesome too in one of his earliest big parts. I'm not a huge fan of Jane Greer's so for me she doesn't quite fit the role here - I'd rather have seen her and Rhonda Fleming switch their characters, as I think Fleming's looks would have made for a more convincing femme fatale. But perhaps that's just down to personal taste.

Quai des Orfèvres - French crime story and another all-time great. The characters are all so well-conceived and well-cast and performed it feels unfair to pick a favourite but for me Simone Renant was especially outstanding as the lesbian photographer - this must be one of the earliest sympathetic homosexual characters in film history, I imagine - and I'll be looking for more of her films.

Road to Rio - part of the famous "Road to" series and a good one. I'm more a fan of Crosby as a singer than as an actor, but he is more than competent as Hope's straight man. Still, I can imagine their films being just as good with someone else in Crosby's part, because for me it's Hop who carries the show. Regardless, this is great fun.



Tough call this year: I'd be hard put to choose from amongst Body and Soul, Out of the Past, and Quai des Orfèvres as the best I've seen of 1947. But since we're talking favourites rather than best, I have to be honest and say that right now, My Favourite Brunette gets the nod from me.

A little off the beaten path, but also from 1952, a British production of Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers:



I adore this book (my favorite from Dickens actually), and this production features several great British comedic talents of the time. In my opinion, the casting is wonderful, and they very successfully compress the story (out of considerable necessity as the book is quite long!) without sacrificing the key moments and overall qualities that make it so charming.

I liked them when I was a kid, then for a long time I seemed to lose my taste for them, but now I've regained it once more after having seen a bunch of them over the last few months. It was the two Astaire/Hayworth movies that got me back into them, You'll Never be Rich and You Were Never Lovelier.

I even like the musical interludes in comedy series like the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello. They are quite often highlights of those films for me.

I grew up with musicals. My parents were into them - from Nelson Eddy & Jeanette McDonald thru Rodgers & Hammerstein to Lerner & Loewe and beyond.

Decades ago I realized that for many of my contemporaries, their image of traditional masculinity was embodied by John Wayne, while for me it was Howard Keel.

Musicals have "followed" me most of my life for various reasons, and while the format itself is one of my least favorite, I can definitely cite aspects I've enjoyed.

My parents grew up in NYC when the theater scene was still particularly vibrant, my mom in particular spent her early childhood in Manhattan and she would tell me stories of waiting after shows to meet the performers. Hearing how she met folks like say Robert Preston after a Music Man performance I thought was just amazing since I only knew him from the film version (which is a musical I definitely do like). So once there was the advent of VCR's when I was little, my parents rented a fair amount of musicals.

Candidly, a number of them I thought were fairly silly, but it must have been the budding student of music in me that started to take note of some things that stood out to me beyond the spectacle. West Side Story made an impression on me right out of the gate, and not just the giggle many a youngster makes during the opening number when the first dance move is made by the "tough" street gang. There was an extra level of catchiness to the music itself, and of course I eventually learned how legit Bernstein was as a composer and conducter, and heavily so in the classical world as well where I have a number of his recorded pieces on media.

Another aspect of musicals to me is where they accompany great dance (similarly in the classical world, I have a huge love of ballet for this same reason). Fred Astaire has always been a delight to watch for me, and there are magic moments in particular for me like in Blue Skies when he does his famous take on Puttin' On the Ritz. Or dancing the Carioca with the equally talented Ginger Rogers in their debut performance together in Flying Down to Rio.

When I met my future wife in college, she was/is a huge Gene Kelly fan, so we've watched all of his films many times over the years as well. I'm not a big fan of his overall, but with musical moments like Bernstein again composing the music for On the Town, I've again found aspects to enjoy.

I think classic musicals overall tend to be light wholesome fun though, and I'd still put a lot of those classic era ones up against most modern movies.