Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal, 1941)

Robert Newton, Wendy Hiller, Robert Morley, Rex Harrison, and Emlyn Williams in Major Barbara

Cast: Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, Robert Newton, Sybil Thorndike, Emlyn Williams, Marie Lohr, Penelope Dudley-Ward, Walter Hudd, David Tree, Deborah Kerr, Donald Calthrop, Marie Ault, Cathleen Cordell, Torin Thatcher, Miles Malleson, Felix Aylmer, Stanley Holloway. Screenplay: George Bernard Shaw, based on his play. Cinematography: Ronald Neame. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: Charles Frend, David Lean. Music: William Walton.

George Bernard Shaw's plays often seem to me as if they're about to collapse underneath their own cleverness: so many paradoxes, so much witty dialogue, such tantalizingly heretical ideas. Major Barbara is a prime example of this, a duel between faith and realism, between rich and poor, between capitalism and Fabian socialism, between men and women, all treated with the would-be drawing-room-comedy lightness of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, down to the climactic revelation that the play's ostensible hero is a "foundling" (a euphemism for "bastard"). But the film version slumps down into tedium because Shaw can't resist trying to make his characters, especially Barbara (wonderfully played by Wendy Hiller), into something like real people whenever he wants the audience to feel something instead of just laughing at the bright repartee. The film remains a three-act play, despite attempts to provide some scenes -- the initial meeting of Barbara and Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison being archly ardent), the fight between Bill Walker (Robert Newton) and Todger Fairmile (Torin Thatcher), Barbara's tossing her Salvation Army bonnet (and almost herself) into the Thames, and the tour of the hellish munitions factory and its heavenly benevolent-capitalist planned community -- in between the ones we would ordinarily see on stage. We are supposed to continue the dialogue of ideas among ourselves after the movie's over, but the effect of the two-hour-plus barrage of wit is to make me want to be stupid again. The film was rightly celebrated for the skill of its performers and for the tenacity with which it was filmed during the Blitz, but as a whole it's an achievement that hasn't stood the test of time.

Jungle Book (Zoltan Korda, 1942)

Sabu in Jungle Book

Cast: Sabu, Joseph Calleia, John Qualen, Frank Puglia, Rosemary DeCamp, Patricia O'Rourke, Ralph Byrd, John Mather, Faith Brook, Noble Johnson. Screenplay: Laurence Stallings, based on a novel by Rudyard Kipling. Cinematography: Lee Garmes, W. Howard Greene. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: William Hornbeck. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

If you can ignore the childish anthropomorphism that labels elephants "gentle" and tigers "evil," and tolerate the Anglo actors in brownface playing Indians, there's some fun to be had in Jungle Book. Sabu is a lively Mowgli, swinging on vines through the jungle and interacting well with the animal characters, both live and puppet. The sets and Technicolor cinematography are appropriately lush and vivid, and there's a spectacular forest fire at the film's end. But something in me prefers both the cel-animated Disney version of 1967 directed by Wolfgang Reitherman and its 2016 live/CGI remake by Jon Favreau. Is it just that in the fight between Shere Khan and Mowgli I found myself rooting for the beautiful tiger?

The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli in The Third Man

Holly Martins: Joseph Cotten
Anna Schmidt: Alida Valli
Harry Lime: Orson Welles
Maj. Calloway: Trevor Howard
Sgt. Paine: Bernard Lee
Porter: Paul Hörbiger
Kurtz: Ernst Deutsch
Popescu: Siegfried Breuer
Dr. Winkel: Erich Ponto
Cribbin: Wilfrid Hyde-White
Anna's Landlady: Hedwig Bleibtreu

Director: Carol Reed
Screenplay: Graham Greene
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Art direction: Vincent Korda
Film editing: Oswald Hafenrichter
Music: Anton Karas

It's my contention that the mark of a great film is the density of its texture, its ability to let you find something new or different, or simply to remember a forgotten moment, each time you watch it. I have to admit that I wasn't much looking forward to rewatching The Third Man, but I felt obliged since I hadn't seen it for some time and I do have it on my list of great movies. I knew what was coming: the great doorway revelation, the ferris wheel conversation, the chase through the sewers, and Anna walking toward and past Holly along an allée of pollarded trees. But Carol Reed's film is full of so many incidentals that bring even familiar scenes to life. For example, when Anna is picked up by the international police -- a force made up of members of each of Vienna's occupying forces -- she's allowed to pack a bag. It's the Frenchman who reminds her that she has forgotten her lipstick. Touches like this, or Anna's landlady protesting in German that needs no subtitles to get its point across, are essential to the film's greatness. I had forgotten the demon child who fingers Holly as a murderer after the porter's death. I hadn't realized how Robert Krasker's expressionistically tilted camera in much of the film is counterpointed by his concluding shot, the long, foursquare, devastatingly symmetrical take of Anna's walk along the allée. To be sure, there are things that don't quite make sense: Why is a man selling balloons at night in the deserted Vienna streets? And the light that reveals Harry Lime in the doorway comes from no plausible source. But these are moments for quibblers, not for those who luxuriate in cinematic poetry.

To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)

Carole Lombard and Jack Benny in To Be or Not to Be

Maria Tura: Carole Lombard
Joseph Tura: Jack Benny
Lt. Stanislav Sobinski: Robert Stack
Col. Ehrhardt: Sig Ruman
Greenberg: Felix Bressart
Rawitch: Lionel Atwill
Prof. Siletsky: Stanley Ridges

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Melchior Lengyel, Edwin Justus Mayer
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Production design: Vincent Korda
Film editing: Dorothy Spencer
Music: Werner R. Heymann

Topical humor and satire has always been a risky business, as Kathy Griffin learned recently with her gag involving a severed Trump head. When a joke about current events offends rather than amuses an audience, producing stunned silence or at best nervous laughter, comedians usually try to defuse the situation by asking, "Too soon?" For Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, it was "too soon" for a very long time. Begun before Pearl Harbor and completed after the United States had declared war on Nazi Germany, To Be or Not to Be had the further misfortune to be released shortly after the death of its star, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash while on a tour selling war bonds. The unavoidable bad timing resulted in a critical and commercial failure, with many critics echoing the reaction of the New York Times's Bosley Crowther, admittedly a man not known for his lively sense of humor, that To Be or Not to Be was a "callous and macabre" treatment of "a subject which is far from the realm of fun." Even the father of the film's star, Jack Benny, walked out of the picture when he saw his son wearing a Nazi uniform. (He was later persuaded to sit through the movie and liked it.) Critical nervousness about To Be or Not to Be lingered for a very long time, especially among the generation that fought in or grew up during the war. Andrew Sarris, who placed Lubitsch in his "Pantheon" of great directors in his 1968 book The American Cinema, took notice of the film's reputation as "an inappropriately farcical treatment of Nazi terror," and rather oddly commented, "For Lubitsch, it was sufficient to say that Hitler had bad manners, and no evil was then inconceivable." As late as 1982, in her collection of short reviews, 5001 Night at the Movies, Pauline Kael said that "the burlesque of the Nazis ... is so crudely gleeful that we don't find it funny." That last is, incidentally, a prime example of the Kaelian "we," her tendency to include the reader in her own experience of films. As Sam Goldwyn reportedly said, "Include me out." I'll admit that the first time I saw To Be or Not to Be, I was a little shocked by its tone, and especially its portrayal of the Gestapo as a gaggle of brainless schnooks, epitomized by Sig Ruman's easily duped Col. Ehrhardt. Yes, the Gestapo was a formidable instrument of terror, to the point that they remain emblematic of the utmost viciousness of Nazism, especially when countless movies made after the entrance into the war freed Hollywood filmmakers from their obligation to remain neutral. On the other hand, the Spanish Inquisition was an equally formidable instrument of terror, and is anyone really offended when they turn up as a gag line -- "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" -- in Monty Python sketches? Time allows us to distance ourselves from horror, so today most people acknowledge and admire the skill and wit of Lubitsch's satiric farce, which is also a pretty good spy thriller, with genuinely suspenseful moments. Lombard is at her most poised and glamorous, as well as a surprisingly effective foil for Benny, who as the "great, great Polish actor Joseph Tura" for once in his rather undistinguished career in movies -- which never showcased him as well as radio or TV did -- has a chance to display his perfect comic timing. Tura's reaction -- an indignant slow burn -- when the start of his "To be or not to be" soliloquy cues Lt. Sobinski to leave his seat for an assignation with Mrs. Tura is Benny at his best. But the film is also laced with moments of real awareness of the horrors beneath, an awareness that is not really compromised by being made part of a comedy. The most famous line of the film is probably Ehrhardt's observation, in response to the disguised Tura's request for an evaluation of his work on the stage, "What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland." How this double entendre made it past the Production Code censors, I don't know, but it's evidence that Lubitsch was certainly aware of the reality and not just being "inappropriately farcical."

Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936)

Works of fiction that pretend to depict things as they will be in a specific place and year tend to look a little foolish when that year actually comes. The years 1984 and 2001 didn't turn out to be precisely as George Orwell and Arthur C. Clarke envisioned them. But neither Orwell nor Clarke expected them to: Both were extrapolating from what they saw about the times in which they were writing. Orwell was viewing with alarm the struggle for power in 1949, and Clarke was elaborating on thoughts he had about the relationship of man, technology, and nature -- for good or ill -- in a series of stories beginning with "The Sentinel" in 1948. It's significant that both of these writers were working from a post-World War II point of view. But Things to Come starts from a very different place: England just before the second World War. H.G. Wells's 1933 The Shape of Things to Come was a meditation on a utopia founded on science, replacing religions, and a world government, replacing nationalism. The adaptation of these ideas in Wells's screenplay involves a world on the brink of war at Christmas, 1936 -- less than three years before the world actually went to war. Wells didn't have to wait long to see the ideas in the film superseded by reality. In the film the conflict lasts 40 years, and is devastating to the old order of things. There arises a kind of technotopia, which then has to battle with (and triumph over) reactionary, anti-science forces. We no longer have the kind of faith in technology to solve all problems that Wells possessed -- in fact, if the atomic outcome of World War II is any indicator, technology presents as many problems as it solves for humankind. Things to Come is muddled but fascinating: It raises the right questions while providing unsatisfactory answers. The best things in the film are the ones closest to home. For example, Ralph Richardson's performance as the dictator known as "The Boss" -- a slangy translation of Il Duce. Richardson was one of the three greatest English actors of the mid-century, but unlike Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud he rarely got a chance to show his stuff in movies. Here, his eccentric manner is the key to the role, and he plays it to the hilt. Unfortunately, Menzies, a gifted designer, wasn't much of a director, and he surrounds Richardson with inferior performers: Margaretta Scott, who had a long career once she grew accustomed to film acting, here recites her lines as if reading them for the first time and assumes poses copied from silent film vamps. For contemporary viewers, the most interesting things about the film are the set designs by Vincent Korda and the fantasias about what people will be wearing in 2036 -- which in Wells's scheme of things is the year of the first voyage around the moon. The costumes are credited to John Armstrong, René Hubert, and the Marchioness of Queensberry. (Her given name was Cathleen Mann; a portrait painter and costumer, she was married to the 11th Marquess of Queensberry from 1926 to 1946.)

H.G. Wells, Pearl Argyle, and Raymond Massey on the set of Things to Come