There's a kind of legend attached to the movies of some of the '30s and '40s years. Obviously we think first of 1939, but I'm inclined to think that other years about that time also offered some real delights. The motion picture often cited as the greatest of all time came out in '41, winning only one Academy Award. And there were others that year, 60 years ago, the year that would end with Pearl Harbor and the country at war.
"Citizen Kane" was, of course, the year's best. It mystified some of us hicks, and it angered the powerful media organization of William Randolph Hearst. For "Kane" was loaded with parallels to the life of Hearst. Orson Welles was the boy genius who gave us that movie. You knew that.
"How Green Was My Valley" was the picture that won the Oscar as the year's best, a beautiful, eloquent, sometimes somber portrait of a Welsh coal mining family. John Ford was the director. My candidate for the '41 movie I liked best, and still like best, is John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon," that Sam Spade tale about the black bird that starred Humphrey Bogart. Earlier in the year Bogart had shown, in "High Sierra," that he was no longer just the thug to be shot in the last reel by Cagney or Robinson.
"Sergeant York," a sentimental but beautifully made picture about the famous hero of World War I, came in 1941. Gary Cooper was splendidly cast. And two that were of 1941 but that won awards for 1940 should be on my list, "Kitty Foyle," a well-made soap opera with Ginger Rogers, and that brilliant sophisticated comedy "The Philadelphia Story," which co-starred Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart.
Every time I see that "The Little Foxes" is on AMC I'm tempted to see it again. This was the Lillian Hellman play about an avaricious southern family, and Bette Davis was at her meanest. See her let Herbert Marshall collapse as he begs her for the medicine he needs. And Alfred Hitchcock's "Suspicion" has its devotees, a good but unconvincing picture that helped Joan Fontaine win an Oscar.
How that Oscar made Olivia de Havilland, Joan's sister, boil. Olivia thought she should win for "Hold Back the Dawn," a movie that looks better to me than it looked 60 years ago. Nice and soapy. Charles Boyer as a cad who gets Olivia to marry him so he can enter the United States.
Very influential has been "Here Comes Mr. Jordan," a fine comedy about a boxer who dies before the big list is ready for him and is thus transplanted into another body. Robert Montgomery was wonderful. You may have seen "Mr. Jordan" done up as "Heaven Can Wait."
1941 was a fine year for Barbara Stanwyck. In a matter of weeks we saw her in two good ones, Frank Capra's "Meet John Doe," a sometimes uneven one with Gary Cooper, and "The Lady Eve," a Preston Sturges comedy that costarred Barbara with Henry Fonda. And look for a '41 picture, "The Strawberry Blonde," which has James Cagney as a nice turn-of-the-century guy who yearns for Rita Hayworth but winds up with de Havilland.
I have good memories of "The Devil and Miss Jones," which has the always able Jean Arthur in a department store owned by Charles Coburn. The big problem was having Robert Cummings as leading man. And '41 offered one of the best attempts to make a movie from George Bernard Shaw, "Major Barbara," with Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison. Some good things, too, in "Tom, Dick and Harry," which has Ginger Rogers pursued by three likable young men.
In 1941 we got a movie badly titled "All That Money Can Buy." It has since been known as "The Devil and Daniel Webster," the title of the Stephen Vincent Benet story that inspired the movie. See Edward Arnold, as Webster, trying to save a young farmer who has sold his soul to the devil, Walter Huston. And I recommend a terrific thriller, "Man Hunt," which has Walter Pidgeon pursued by Nazis after he shows he could have put a bullet into Hitler.
Walt Disney's "Dumbo" came in '41. This one has really held up. See Jack Benny racing all over the Oxford campus in "Charley's Aunt." See W.C. Fields in "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break." I even recommend "Sun Valley Serenade," in which you can see and hear the Glenn Miller orchestra playing some of their best.
Well, that's about enough. Oh, yes, "I Wake Up Screaming." Laird Cregar, Betty Grable. But avoid "Men of Boys' Town," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and Garbo in "Two-Faced Woman."
Calder Pickett is a professor emeritus of journalism at Kansas University. His column appears Sundays in the Journal-World.
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