This Land Is Mine (Jean Renoir, 1943)

Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, Walter Slezak, Kent Smith, Una O'Connor, Philip Merivale, Thurston Hall, George Coulouris, Nancy Gates, Ivan F. Simpson, John Donat. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Production design: Eugène Lourié. Film editing: Frederick Knudtson. Music: Lothar Perl.

Charles Laughton plays a cowardly mama's boy schoolteacher in a Nazi-occupied country not unlike director Jean Renoir's native France. Albert Lory is secretly in love with his fellow teacher, Louise (Maureen O'Hara), but she's engaged to George Lambert (George Sanders), the administrator of the local railway yard who thinks the best way to proceed under the occupation is to submit to the Nazis under the command of Major von Keller (Walter Slezak). But Louise's brother, Paul (Kent Smith), is a member of the Resistance who tries to assassinate von Keller, provoking reprisals -- and a good deal of plot complications -- when he fails. Some dubious casting -- Sanders and O'Hara make an odd couple -- and a too-heavy reliance on melodramatic posing undermine a film that seems aimed more at Renoir's compatriots than at American audiences, though it was a box office success. 

Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

Lucille Ball, Maureen O'Hara, and Virginia Field in Dance, Girl, Dance

Cast: Maureen O'Hara, Louis Hayward, Lucille Ball, Virginia Field, Ralph Bellamy, Maria Ouspenskaya, Mary Carlisle, Katharine Alexander, Edward Brophy, Walter Abel. Screenplay: Tess Slesinger, Frank Davis, based on a story by Vicki Baum. Cinematography: Russell Metty. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Alfred Herman. Film editing: Robert Wise. Music: Edward Ward.

Dorothy Arzner's film about chorus girls struggling to make lives for themselves in a milieu dominated by males and their gaze earned its place in the National Film Registry by being one of the few movies of the era to take the women's point of view seriously. It has its melodramatic excesses, but it steadily keeps its focus on the characters played by Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara instead of yielding time to its male leads, Louis Hayward and Ralph Bellamy. 

Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959)

Noël Coward and Alec Guinness in Our Man in Havana

Cast: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Jo Morrow. Screenplay: Graham Greene, based on his novel. Cinematography: Oswald Morris. Art direction: John Box. Film editing: Bert Bates. Music: Frank Deniz, Laurence Deniz.

Given its cast, its director, and its screenwriter, Our Man in Havana has always seemed to me that it should be a little bit better than it is. I think director Carol Reed may be mostly at fault: His best films, like Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949), have just the right mixture of gravitas and wit. Here there's a little too much gravitas weighing down what could have a more pronounced satiric edge: a tale of bumbling British espionage. It's possible, too, that a little uncertainty of tone lingers over the movie because it was filmed on location in Cuba just after the fall of Batista -- Fidel Castro himself visited the shoot -- and the subsequent course of the revolution lends a queasiness to the subject matter. Nevertheless, we are in the hands of masters like Alec Guinness, Noël Coward, and Ralph Richardson here, so there's enough to enjoy. 

Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939)

According to Stephen Whitty's excellent The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, the director thought Jamaica Inn "completely absurd" and didn't even bother to make his familiar cameo appearance in it. Hitchcock was right: It's a ridiculously plotted and often amateurishly staged film -- although Hitchcock must take some of the blame for the scenes in which characters sneak around talking in stage whispers and pretending they're hidden from their pursuers when they're in plain sight for anyone with average peripheral vision. Much of Hitchcock's attitude toward the film has been ascribed to his clashes with Charles Laughton, who was an uncredited co-producer and resisted any attempts by the director to rein in one of his more ridiculous performances. As Sir Humphrey Pengallan, the county squire and justice of the peace who is secretly raking in a fortune by collaborating with smugglers who loot shipwrecked vessels after murdering their crew, Laughton wears a fake nose and oddly placed eyebrows and hams it up mercilessly. Maureen O'Hara, in her first major film role, struggles with a confusingly written character who sometimes displays fire and initiative and at other times seems alarmingly obtuse. The rest of the cast includes such stalwarts of the British film and stage as Leslie Banks, Emlyn Williams, and Basil Radford, with a surprising performance by Robert Newton as the movie's romantic lead, Jem Traherne, an agent working undercover to expose the smugglers. You look in vain at the young Newton for traces of his terrifying Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948) or his Long John Silver in Treasure Island (Byron Haskin, 1950). The production design is handsome, and the film begins with an exciting storm at sea, but the screenplay, based on a Daphne Du Maurier novel and written by the usually capable Sidney Gilliat and Joan Harrison, quickly falls apart. Hitchcock's last film in England, Jamaica Inn was a critical flop but a commercial success.