Dennis Seuling

Robert E. Sherwood won the Pulitzer prize for his allegory satire Idiot’s Delight. MGM purchased the film rights and hired Sherwood to adapt it for the screen. The film was released in 1939, the year World War II began in Europe and before the United States entered the war. At the time, it was impossible to know how long the war would last, whether America would send troops, or that millions would die, including innocent civilians targeted by Hitler.

The Shining Hour is a 1930s melodrama, based on a play by Keith Winter, that boasts a roster of stars and a sumptuous production. The film is an example of how MGM, in its heyday, assembled its vast resources to turn a soap opera into a major release.

Northwest Passage is based on the actual events as recounted by Kenneth Roberts in the first part of his 1936 novel of that name. Set during the French and Indian Wars in Colonial America, the film focuses on a 1759 event, when the British ordered an American unit known as Rogers’ Rangers to destroy the Abenaki Indian settlement of Saint-Francis in Quebec that had been the base for raids on British settlements.

Bob Hope, already a star on radio, took to the silver screen in the 1940s and early 1950s with a series of light comedies, most notably his Road pictures with Bing Crosby. Typically, he played a wise-cracking, one-liner spouting character with a spine of jelly. In My Favorite Spy, Hope is a vaudevillian with an uncanny resemblance to a violent spy.

Mister Lonely, directed by Harmony Korine, is an unusual film about celebrity impersonators. With its often bizarre images, awkward transitions, challenging logic, and melange of ideas, it’s not easy to understand. It’s an independent film with an identity crisis, structured like a documentary and appearing spontaneous but scripted and professionally acted.

Botany Bay is set in the era when England, under King George III, was transporting convicts to New South Wales, in what’s now Australia. With England’s population having doubled in only a few years, hordes of impoverished people living in hunger and filth, and long prison sentences or execution the punishment for even petty crimes, the country’s prisons were overflowing. The American colonies were now the independent United States of America and would no longer be a dumping ground for England’s undesirables. The solution was to send shiploads of convicts to Botany Bay, so named for its brilliant and varied plant life. There, they will establish New South Wales as the first penal colony in Australia, ensuring a supply of unpaid labor to exploit the continent’s resources.

Movies deal with all kinds of relationships, some of them subtly destructive (Gaslight), horrifically abusive (What’s Love Got to Do with It), homicidal (Badlands), or socially difficult (Brokeback Mountain). In Secretary, an employer and employee find in each other a bizarre yet fulfilling connection.

The film I Remember Mama is based on the play by John Van Druten which, in turn, was based on Kathryn Forbes’ novel Mama’s Bank Account. A TV show called simply Mama ran on CBS in the early 50s and a musical of the story ran on Broadway in 1979. Directed by George Stevens in 1948, the film features an outstanding cast and was nominated for five Academy Awards.

Conflict, a psychological drama with film noir elements, focuses on a man who commits a murder and is subsequently consumed by self-doubt, guilt and fear. With a suspenseful script and an expressionistic style, it’s an unusual crime drama.

Boxing movies have the benefit of built-in action sequences along with their dramatic stories. In 1947, Body and Soul established the template for future boxing movies, such as Requiem for a Heavyweight, Rocky, Raging Bull, and Cinderella Man. A young man from modest beginnings, lured into professional boxing by the promise of fame and fortune, finds his morality coming into conflict with his ambition.