When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1947, it gave its Best Picture award to Gentlemen's Agreement, arguably the worst movie ever to win the prize. It stars Gregory Peck, dripping with even more sanctimony than usual, as a gentile journalist who goes undercover as a Jew so he can describe how anti-Semitism feels first-hand. (Presumably no actual Jews were available to write the article.) It's a sign of how careless the screenwriters are that so much of the anti-Semitism he encounters isn't first-hand; he just hears about it from other people. Still more of it consists of someone not realizing that Peck is supposed to be Jewish and saying something bigoted in his presence, an experience he had surely already endured before he started his research. The only difference is that now he can respond by claiming to be Jewish himself, and then everyone feels a little awkward, and then it's on to another adventure.
Peck's character has a young son who disappears for long stretches of the narrative, appearing only when the story requires it. His absences may be hard to explain but his constant presence would be worse, since the boy turns in one of the most grating child-actor performances in Hollywood history. The reporter himself is supposed to be a brilliant wordsmith, but for most of the picture we never actually hear any of his work—a wise choice, since there obviously weren't any good writers on hand to produce it. When we finally do hear a passage, it's completely banal, though it's supposed to be searing and heartfelt.
The sad thing is that there really was an effective indictment of anti-Jewish prejudice in theaters that year: Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire, a solid film noir about an anti-Semitic murder. It isn't quite good enough to make it into my top 20—a few scenes are too heavy-handed for my taste—but it's thousands of times better than the picture that beat it at the Oscars.
End rant. Begin list:
1. Out of the Past
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Written by Geoffrey Homes, from his novel
Peak Robert Mitchum.
2. The Lady from Shanghai
Directed by Orson Welles
Written by Welles, from a novel by Sherwood King
"George, that's the first time anyone ever thought enough of you to call you a shark. If you were a good lawyer, you'd be flattered."
3. It Always Rains on Sunday
Directed by Robert Hamer
Written by Hamer, Angus MacPhail, and Henry Cornelius, from a novel by Arthur La Bern
"I give you my word I haven't got it. By my life. By Sadie's life. The baby's life." "Your life will do."
4. Nightmare Alley
Directed by Edmund Goulding
Written by Jules Furthman, from a novel by William Lindsay Gresham
One of the seediest noirs of the '40s, full of phony psychics, carnival cons, and marrow-deep corruption.
5. Odd Man Out
Directed by Carol Reed
Written by F.L. Green and R.C. Sherriff, from a novel by Green
If the IRA Movie qualifies as a genre, then this dark thriller is the standard by which every other effort, from The Informer to The Crying Game, should be measured.
6. Black Narcissus
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Written by Powell and Pressburger, from a novel by Rumer Godden
Like many of the Archers' movies, this one finds something pagan and inexplicable at both the edge of the world and the core of the self.
7. The Red House
Directed by Delmar Daves
Written by Daves, from a novel by George Agnew Chamberlain
I was home from college one Christmas break, mildly annoyed at a professor's habit of finding Freudian symbols in virtually everything we read. "I'll bet I can 'discover' a Freudian meaning in anything," I told myself. "Why, I'll bet I can impose one on this random movie I've never heard of that's about to come on TV." And then I watched this tale of a man whose daughter is just entering puberty, a man who becomes enraged at the thought that she and her boyfriend will start to explore the deep dark woods near his farm. He's afraid, he says, that she'll discover the red house in the middle of the deep dark woods, and oh how he's haunted by the screams from the red house in the middle of the deep dark woods. Just to top it off, in the end we learn— but no, I won't give away the ending. I'll just say I came away with new respect for my prof.
8. Daisy Kenyon
Directed by Otto Preminger
Written by David Hertz, from a novel by Elizabeth Janeway
This turns the stuff of pure soap opera into an intricately nuanced story about three-dimensional people.
9. Hue and Cry
Directed by Charles Crichton
Written by T.E.B. Clarke
In the streets and bombed-out ruins of post–World War II London, kids create their own secret culture.
10. Dreams That Money Can Buy
Directed by Hans Richter
Written by Richter, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Josh White, Hans Rehfisch, and David Vern
A surrealist anthology.
Honorable mentions:
11. Quai des Orfèvres (Henri-Georges Clouzot)
12. King-Size Canary (Tex Avery)
13. The Woman on the Beach (Jean Renoir)
14. Motion Painting No. One (Oskar Fishchinger)
15. Body and Soul (Robert Rossen)
16. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (Preston Sturges)
17. The Unsuspected (Michael Curtiz)
18. Fireworks (Kenneth Anger)
19. A Double Life (George Cukor)
20. The Cage (Sidney Peterson)
Of the films of 1947 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Gran Casino and They Made Me a Fugitive.