Films I Watched This Week — Apr 21–27, 2025
The Body Snatcher (1945)
Born to Kill (1947)
Brief Encounter (1945)
Brighton Rock (1948)
Brute Force (1947)
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
Call Northside 777 (1948)
A Canterbury Tale (1944)
Casablanca (1942)
Cat People (1942)
Champion (1949)
The Children Are Watching Us (1943)
Children of Paradise (1945)
Never has a film been through so many disruptions or dealt with as many issues as Marcel Carne’s French epic masterpiece Children of Paradise; and it actually getting completed was a miracle of its own. It was described in the American trailer as the French answer to ‘Gone With the Wind’ and was the most expensive French film ever made at its time. It was shot in Paris during the Nazi Occupation and somehow survived several power failures, damaging storms, audacious spending, curfews and a shortage of film stock. During the film-making process the sets had to be moved between two cities and because its designer and composer was Jewish he had to continually work from hiding. While Carne was harassed by the German Occupation he was forced to hire pro-Nazi collaborators as extras for the film, and interestingly throughout the whole production the Nazi collaborators had no idea they were working next to resistance fighters. Carne was also plagued with budgetary woes and was forced to make the film no longer than an hour and thirty minutes, so he simply made two separate films because he was confident he would eventually show them together as one 3 hour film after the war ended. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, the actor Robert le Vigan, who was, ironically, cast in the role of informer-thief Jericho, was sentenced to death by the Resistance for collaborating with the Nazis and had to be replaced at a moment’s notice by Pierre Renoir, older brother of the legendary French director Jean Renoir. After the liberation the film finally opened in Paris for 54 weeks in March of 1945 and it is said that the film plays somewhere in Paris every single day.
Citizen Kane (1941)
Criss Cross (1949)
Crossfire (1947)
D.O.A. (1949)
Dark Passage (1947)
A Day in the Country (1946)
Dead of Night (1945)
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