Top 10 Films of 1944

1. "A Canterbury Tale" (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, UK)

2. "Meet Me In St.Louis" (Vincente Minnelli, USA)

3. "Laura" (Otto Preminger, USA)

4. "Double Indemnity" (Billy Wilder, USA)

5. "The Uninvited" (Lewis Allen, USA)

6. "Ivan The Terrible Part I" (Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union)

7. "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" (Preston Sturges, USA)

8. "Hail The Conquering Hero" (Preston Sturges, USA)

9. "To Have And Have Not" (Howard Hawks, USA)

10. "Resisting Enemy Interrogation" (Bernard Vorhaus, USA)

Other great films:

Arsenic And Old Lace
Bathing Beauty
The Battle Of China
Boys On The River (Böhmen und Mähren)
Brazil
The Canterville Ghost
Cover Girl

Felicie Nanteuil (France)
The Fighting Lady

La Fornarina (Italy)

Going My Way
Henry V (UK)
Higher And Higher
Miyamoto Musashi (Japan)
Murder, My Sweet
On Approval (UK)

Opfergang (Germany)

Step Lively
The Scarlet Claw
Up In Arms
Warszawa walczy (Poland)

Short Top 3:

1. "Jammin' The Blues" (Gjon Mili, USA)

2. "At Land" (Maya Deren, USA)

3. "Majdanek cmentarzysko Europy" (Aleksander Ford, Poland)

Other great shorts:

Belles Of The South Seas

Filmavisen 5 juni 1944 (Norway)

Movie Pests

Scener fra Kalundborg og Koebenhavn (Denmark)
Target Japan
With The Marines At Tarawa

Top Commercial:

"Hell-Bent For Election" (Chuck Jones, United Auto Workers)

Cartoon Top 10

1. "The Silly Goose" (Hans Fischerkoesen, Germany)

2. "Fish Fry" (James Culhane, Universal)

3. "The Barber Of Seville" (James Culhane, Universal)

4. "Goldilocks And The Jivin' Bears" (Friz Freleng, Warner)

5. "Screwball Squirrel" (Tex Avery, MGM)

6. "Donald Duck And The Gorilla" (Jack King, Disney)

7. "And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street" (George Pal, Paramount)

8. "Ski For Two" (James Culhane, Universal)

9. "Bugs Bunny And The Three Bears" (Chuck Jones, Warner)

10. "Duck Soup To Nuts" (Friz Freleng, Warner)

Other great cartoons:

Batty Baseball
Big Heel-Watha
Birdy And The Beast
The Bodyguard
Brother Brat
Bugs Bunny Nips The Nips
Censored

C'est l'aviron (Canada)
The Chow Hound
Commando Duck
Dog Cat And Canary
Donald's Off Day
First Aiders
From Hand To Mouse
Gas
Going Home
The Gray Old Hare
Happy-Go-Nutty
How To Play Football
How To Play Golf
Innertube Antics

A Lecture On Camouflage

Little Red Riding Rabbit
Lost And Foundling
Mouse Trouble
My Boy Johnny
Outpost
Pay Day
Plane Daffy
Polar Pest

Private Snafu Vs Malaria Mike

Puttin' On The Dog
Russian Rhapsody
The Snowman (Germany)
Springtime For Pluto
Swooner Crooner

Target Snafu

The Tree Surgeon
What's Cookin' Doc ?
Wolf! Wolf!
The Zoot Cat

Weak films of 1944:

Delinquent Daughters

Excursao as nascentes do Xingu (Brazil)
Gaslight
Kato Hayabusa sento-tai (Japan)
Mist On The Moors (Czechoslovakia)
The Most Beautiful (Japan)
The Rainbow (Soviet Union)
Since You Went Away
The Thin Man Goes Home
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
Wilson

Weak shorts:

A Few Quick Facts
Hawaiian Jungle Training
P-47's Come To Town
Stop That Dancin' Up There

Weak cartoons:

Angel Puss
The Beach Nut
Bear Raid Warden
Booby Hatched
Booby Traps
Buckaroo Bugs
Contrary Condor
A Few Quick Facts About Inflation
Hare Force
Hare Ribbin'
How To Be A Sailor
I Got Plenty Of Mutton
Jungle Jive
Lulu's Indoor Outing
Meatless Flyday
Million Dollar Cat
The Pelican And The Snipe
Snafuperman
Stage Door Cartoon
Stupid Cupid
Three Brothers
Tom Turk And Daffy
Trombone Trouble
The Weakly Reporter
We're On Our Way To Rio
The Wreck Of The Hesperus

Top 3 Musicals of 1944

1. "Meet Me In St Louis" (Vincente Minnelli, MGM)

2. "Cover Girl" (Charles Vidor, Columbia)

3. "Step Lively" (Tim Whelan, RKO)

Laura (1944) *****

A hauntingly beautiful film noir, expertly mixing melodrama and crime movie genres.

Meet Me In St.Louis (1944) *****

Resisting Enemy Interrogation (1944) ****

Fascinating wartime film, nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary, but actually a suspensful fiction film about American POWs interrogated by the Nazis. Very clever and very exciting.

Boys On The River (1944) ***

Ivan The Terrible Part I (1944) ****

Visually magnificent film about the notorious 16th century Russian tsar.

Henry V (1944) ***

Patriotic adaptation of William Shakespeare's play about the great English victory at Agincourt.

Opfergang (1944) ***

Miyamoto Musashi (1944) ***

Far superior to Hiroshi Inagaki's "Samurai" trilogy, made 10 years later, on the same subject. Superbly directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.

Felicie Nanteuil (1944) ***

A sort of dry run before "Les Enfants du paradis" (1945).

Warszawa walczy (1944) ***

A unique historical document - three short documentaries filmed during the Warsaw Insurrection in August 1944 by the insurgents themselves, publicly presented at the Palladium Theatre in Warsaw during the insurrection, preserved intact, but suppressed by the Communists after the war, and finally edited together in 1989 after the fall of the Communist government.

La Fornarina (1944) ***

The Fighting Lady (1944) ***

Oscar-winning documentary that follows the exploits of the aircraft carrier USS "Yorktown" (unidentified in the film), from July 1943 to June 1944, from Marcus Island to Kwajalein, Truk and Tinian, and culminating with the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

Kato Hayabusa sento-tai (1944) **

Japanese propaganda movie movie about their brave fighter pilots during the early conquests of Malaysia, Singapore, Burma and Indonesia in the late 1941 and early 1942.

Since You Went Away (1944) **

World War II as seen from the point of view of the women at home. Ambitious melodrama, often touching, but nowhere near as good as other similar films from that period, like "Mrs Miniver" (1942) or "The Best Years Of Our Lives" (1946).

Mist On The Moors (1944) *

Czech drama.

Excursao as nascentes do Xingu (1944) *

A Brazilian documentary.

The Rainbow (1944) *

Dreadful Soviet wartime propaganda film, extremely crude and manipulative (thanks to a screenplay by Wanda Wasilewska, not exactly known for subtlety or nuance). Directed by Mark Donskoi ("The Childhood of Maxim Gorky", "My Universities").

Gaslight (1944) *

Angela Lansbury steals the movie from Ingrid Bergman.

Delinquent Daughters (1944) *

Campy B (or Z) movie about wild youth. Bad dialogue. Example: a woman pulls a gun on a man. The man says, "What have you got there." She answers, "Something that goes boom, boom, boom!".

The Most Beautiful (1944) *

Probably Akira Kurosawa's worst film, a dreadful piece of wartime propaganda about female factory workers.

Jammin' The Blues (1944) ****

Pure jazz. Pure delight.

Movie Pests (1944) ***

Amusing Oscar-nominated satire about rude behavior in a movie theatre.

With The Marines At Tarawa (1944) ***

Classic, Oscar-winning, documentary short in color, about the storming of the beaches of a stategic Pacific island.

Filmavisen 5 juni 1944 (1944) ***

Belles Of The South Seas (1944) ***

Target Japan (1944) ***

This documentary film deals with the middle phase of the War in the Pacific (1943-1944). It presents, among others, the capture of Saipan.

Scener fra Kalundborg og Koebenhavn (1944) ***

The film is available here.

Majdanek cmentarzysko Europy (1944) ***

Polish documentary about a Nazi concentration camp. The first film about the Holocaust.

At Land (1944) ***

A trance film about a woman crawling through beaches, tables and trees.

Stop That Dancin' Up There (1944) **

Directed by J.Berne for RCM. Musical short about a noisy neigbour.

Double Indemnity (1944) *****

One of the best of all American "film noirs" of the 1940's, a tense and suspenseful tale of duplicity and betrayal. Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray are outstanding, but it's Edward G. Robinson who steals the movie in what is probably the greatest performance of his entire career.

A Few Quick Facts (1944) **

A segment of the "Film Communique, Fifth Issue", presenting a few amusing facts about the war.

P-47's Come To Town (1944) *

A segment of the "Film Communique, Fifth Issue", showing "Thunderbolt" airplanes being transported across the Atlantic during World War II.

Hawaiian Jungle Training (1944) *

A segment of the "Film Communique, Fifth Issue", presenting US troops training in Hawaii.

To Have And Have Not (1944) ****

The first pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. It's the only film ever made that is based on a novel by one Nobel Prize-winning author (Ernest Hemingway), and adapted for the screen by another Nobel Prize-winning author (William Faulkner). Consequently, it has enough memorable lines of dialogues for a dozens of films. The classic lines:

Slim: Who was the girl, Steve?
Steve: Who was what girl?
Slim: The one who left you with such a high opinion of women.

Slim: I'm hard to get, Steve. All you have to do is ask me.

Slim: You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow.

Murder, My Sweet (1944) ***

Dick Powell is excellent as Philippe Marlowe in this fine detective movie directed by Edward Dmytryk.