When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1943, it gave its Best Picture award to Casablanca—a great movie but a peculiar choice, since it actually debuted in 1942. Yes, I put it in my top 10 list for that year. No, I won't repeat it in this one.
1. Shadow of a Doubt
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, from a story by Gordon McDonell
Few film experiences are as enjoyably odd as watching Thornton Wilder's sensibility collide with Hitchcock's. Wilder's screenplay is an ode to conformity, and Hitch's picture drily undercuts the script at every turn.
2. Meshes of the Afternoon
Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid
Written by Deren
The most contemporary-feeling entry on this list: It's easy to imagine a giffable fragment of the film flickering in a tweet, a Facebook status, or an Instagram story, lending its uncanniness to an internet that itself feels awfully uncanny already.
3. Le Corbeau
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Written by Clouzot and Louis Chavance, from a story by Chavance
The Resistance denounced this Vichy-era story of small-town paranoia as an attack on the French people, but in retrospect it looks more like a critique of the culture of collaboration.
4. Red Hot Riding Hood
Written and directed by Tex Avery
The Male Gaze: A Comedy.
5. Ossessione
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Written by Visconti, Mario Alicata, Giuseppe De Santis, and Gianni Puccinim, from a novel by James M. Cain
The first and best of the pictures based on The Postman Always Rings Twice.
6. The Ox-Bow Incident
Directed by William A. Wellman
Written by Lamar Trotti, from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Ideologically I have mixed feelings about this noir western: I like its defense of due process, but I don't care for the implication—common in pictures from this period—that lynching was just a matter of mobs' passions getting out of control, rather than something a power structure did to keep people in line. Cinematically, on the other hand, this is practically perfect.
7. I Walked with a Zombie
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, from a novel by Charlotte Brontë
Long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this movie gave us Jane Eyre and Zombies.
8. Five Graves to Cairo
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Charles Brackett, from a play by Lajos Bíró
Like I said, Casablanca isn't on this list. But this sure feels a lot like Casablanca.
9. Day of Wrath
Directed by Carl Dreyer
Written by Dreyer, Poul Knudsen, and Mogens Skot-Hansen, from a play by Hans Wiers-Jenssen
This tale of a witch hunt would make an interesting triple bill with Ox-Bow and Le Corbeau.
10. The Eternal Return
Directed by Jean Delannoy
Written by Jean Cocteau
A fairy-tale romance. Remember, real fairy tales are cruel and weird.
Honorable mentions:
11. Tortoise Wins by a Hare (Bob Clampett)
12. Journey Into Fear (Norman Foster, Orson Welles)
13. Lumière D'Été (Jean Grémillon)
14. Dumb-Hounded (Tex Avery)
15. Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone)
16. The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
17. The Fallen Sparrow (Richard Wallace)
18. Tin Pan Alley Cats (Bob Clampett)
19. Falling Hare (Bob Clampett)
20. Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (Bob Clampett)
I'll spare you the trouble of counting: 6 of those 20 films are cartoon shorts, all from either Tex Avery or Bob Clampett. I've said before that if I allowed individual TV episodes onto these lists, there are years in the '90s that would be overwhelmed by installments of The Simpsons. I suppose this is the equivalent for World War II.
Of the films of 1943 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Phantom Baron.