MoMA | press | Releases | 2000 | Peace and Its Discontents ...press.moma.org/wp-content/press-archives/PRESS_RELEASE_ARCHI… · Cinematography by Milton Krasner. With Edward G. Robinson,

PEACE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: POSTWAR FILMS FROM THE ARCHIVES

For Immediate Release

July 2000

Peace and Its Discontents: Postwar Films from the Archives, 1945—1949

July 7—September 10, 2000

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters 1 and 2

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PRESENTS SELECTION OF

INTERNATIONAL POSTWAR FILMS FROM 1945—49

Cinema from the Period Reflects a Time of Great Social Unease

The international films collected by The Museum of Modern Art from the mid-1940s to 1949 reflect a short-lived victory celebration at the end of World War II, marking a time of great unease as domestic and social readjustment was made. From July 7 through September 10, 2000, MoMA presents a selection of postwar films from the collection in Peace and Its Discontents: Postwar Film from the Archives, 1945-1949. Featuring some 32 feature films and shorts, the exhibition is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film and Video.

"If popular cinema is a measure of the public spirit, then American audiences of the late 40’s, preferring their entertainment unhappy, dark and roiling, suffered a communal dread," notes Mr. Kardish.

At the same time that the ‘femme fatale’ emerged as a prevalent subject in cinema, personal betrayal became a common theme in works by émigré filmmakers Max Ophüls, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, and Robert Siodmak. Renoir’s Woman on the Beach, the final film made by Renoir during his American exile, is a curious and affecting ‘noir’ about a strong wife, a blind husband, and a shell-shocked Coast Guard officer, while Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) is about a woman coerced into intimacy with a Nazi. Other films include Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), which begins with a serious contemplation of suicide, and Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a mordant comedy about a serial killer.

Filmmakers such as Leo Hurwitz began to focus on the problem of America’s endemic racism. Strange Victory (1948) was a provocative questioning of

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the discrepancies between the ideals of the allied victory and the lingering aspects of fascism in American society. In Europe, England’s Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made some of the cinema’s most memorably dark films, such as The Small Back Room (1949), while Italy’s "neo-realism," as practiced by Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, gave searing first hand accounts of the ravages of war. Rossellini’s emblematic film Rome, Open City (1945) is set during the German occupation of Rome, while De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) looks at two young shoeshine boys trying to survive in the war-scarred city.

The only note of optimism came from the American avant-garde, namely from the filmmaker Sidney Peterson who made short and rambunctious films in San Francisco. Four films made by Peterson with students while teaching at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts will be shown, including The Cage (1946), about the adventures of a deranged artist.

Peace and Its Discontents: Postwar Films from the Archives

Schedule

Monday, July 10, 2:30 p.m.; Sunday, July 16, 5:00 p.m.

The Killers

. 1946. USA. Directed by Robert Siodmak. Screenplay by Anthony Veiller, based on the short story by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography by Woody Bredell. With Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene. Fatalism permeates this tense biography of a small-time gangster (Lancaster is his first starring role) who takes a hit. 102 min.

Monday, July 10, 6:00 p.m.; Sunday, July 16 2:00 p.m.

The Spiral Staircase

. 1946. USA. Directed by Robert Siodmak. Screenplay by Mel Dinelli, based on the novel Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White. Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca. With Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, Ethel Barrymore, Kent Smith, and Rhonda Fleming. This shadow-inflected ‘Grand Guignol,’ set in a small turn-of-the-century New England town terrorized by a killer of physically challenged women. 83 min.

Tuesday, July 11, 3:00 p.m.; Saturday, July 15, 5:00 p.m.

It’s a Wonderful Life

. 1947. USA. Directed by Frank Capra. Screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, Jo Swerling, and Michael Wilson, based on the short story "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern. With James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, and Beulah Bondi. The now-popular Frank Capra classic, originally a commercial failure, opens with an attempted suicide and ends with an affirmation of life in Bedford Falls, Small Town, USA. Cinematography by Joseph Walker. 129 min.

Tuesday, July 11, 6:00 p.m.; Thursday, July 13, 3:00 p.m.



Sidney Peterson at the California School of Fine Arts

. Four films Sidney Peterson made with students as Workshop 20 projects while teaching at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts:

The Cage

. 1947. Camera by Hy Hirsh. According to Peterson he "uses every trick in the book and a few that weren’t" to describe the adventures of a deranged artist. Silent. 28 min.

Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur

. 1948. Based on Balzac. 21 min.

The Petrified Dog

. 1948. An abstract and disjunctive narrative that Brakhage described as "articulate chaos." 19 min.

The Lead Shoes

. 1949. Two ballads (at least) are scrambled to create a highly disjointed Oedipal narrative about a mother and son. 18 min.

Total running time 76 min.

Friday, July 14, 3:00 p.m.; Monday, July 17, 6:00 p.m.

Letter from an Unknown Woman

. 1948. USA. Directed by Max Ophüls. Screenplay by Howard Koch, based on the novel Brief einer unbekannten by Stefan Zweig. Cinematography by Franz Planer. With Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Marcel Journet, Art Smith, and Erskine Sanford. A young woman loves a concert pianist; he is not aware of her. Working not too happily in Hollywood, Max Ophüls fashions a valedictory to the lost Imperial City of Vienna. 87 min.

Monday, July 17, 3:00 p.m.; Friday, July 21, 6:00 p.m.

Strange Victory

. 1948. USA. Directed, written and edited by Leo Hurwitz. Produced by Barent L. Rossett, Jr. Camera by Peter Glushanok and George Jacobson. Music by David Diamond. Narration written by Saul Levitt and spoken by Alfred Drake, Gary Merrill, and Muriel Smith. Strange Victory is a strong indictment on racism. Amidst the high hopes of postwar frenzy and baby boom, this film was a provocative questioning of the discrepancies between the ideals of the allied victory and the lingering aspects of fascism in American society. 75 min.


Berliner Ballade



(The Berliner). 1949. Germany. Directed by Robert A. Stemmle. Screenplay by Günther Neumann, Bruno Michael, Martin Sternberg, based on the story by Günther Neumann. Cinematography by George Kraus. With Gert Fröbe, Aribert Wascher, Tatjana Sais, Ute Sielisch, and O.E. Hasse. A satiric comedy about postwar Berlin. From the year 2048 an audience watching television sees Berlin of 1948. Modeled on traditional German cabaret material, the film uses songs and skits to follow Otto Averageman adjusting to peace in a city reduced to rubble. In German with English subtitles. 77 min.

Thursday, July 20, 3:00 p.m.; Friday, July 28, 6:00 p.m.; Sunday, September 10, 2:00 p.m.

Dreams That Money Can Buy

. 1947. USA. Directed by Hans Richter in collaboration with Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Alexander Calder. Screenplay by Hans Richter, Dave Vern, Hans Rehfisch, Joseph Freeman, John Latouche, Richard Hulbeck. Cinematography by Arnold Eagle, Werner Brandes, Meyer Rosenblum, Herman Shulman, George Lubalin. With Joe-Jack Bittner and Dorothy Griffith. Probably the first feature-length avant-garde film produced in America, this is an omnibus work in which seven dreams are offered for sale by a poor young poet with a rich imagination. 83 min.

Saturday, July 22, 5:00 p.m.; Monday, July 25, 3:00 p.m.

Laura

. 1944. USA. Directed by Otto Preminger. Written by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Betty Reinhardt from the novel by Vera Caspary. Camera by Joseph LaShelle. Music by David Raskin. With Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Judith Anderson, and Vincent Price. Although Laura is not a postwar film, its spirit of nastiness and its recognition of deliciously bad behavior certainly are. A brightly lit but still claustrophobic film noir, Laura sports a perverse cast of characters, an ingenious plot and one of the genre’s most elegant sets. 85 min.

Sunday, July 23, 2:00 p.m.; Monday, July 24, 6:00 p.m.

Woman on the Beach

. 1947. USA. Directed by Jean Renoir. Screenplay by Frank Davis, Jean Renoir, Michael Hogan, based on the novel None So Blind by Mitchell Wilson. Cinematography by Leo Tover. With Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, Charles Bickford, Nan Leslie, and Walter Sande. The final film made by Renoir during his American exile is a curious and affecting ‘noir’ about a strong wife, a blind husband and a shell-shocked coast guard officer; it was made all the more baffling by having been cut drastically before its release. 71 min.

Friday, July 21, 2:30 p.m.; Sunday, July 23, 5:00 p.m.

House of Strangers

. 1949. USA. Directed by Jospeh L. Mankiewicz. Screenplay by Philip Yordan, Mankiewicz, based on the novel I’ll Never Go There Anymore by Jerome Weidman. Cinematography by Milton R. Krasner. With Edward G.



Robinson, Susan Hayward, Richard Conte, Luther Adler, and Paul Valentine. A ruthless financier sets his sons against one another. Mankiewicz paints in chiaroscuro an unusually jaundiced view of the nuclear family. 101 min.

Monday, July 24, 3:00 p.m.; Tuesday, July 25, 6:00 p.m.

Woman in the Window

. 1944. USA. Directed by Fritz Lang. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson based on the novel Once Off Guard by J. H. Wallis. Cinematography by Milton Krasner. With Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, Dan Duryea, and Iris Adrian. Fritz Lang traces a decent man’s descent through a series of circumstances that, in his innocence, he initiated: the fatalism of Lang’s vision followed the artist into exile. 99 min.

Thursday, July 27, 3:00 p.m.; Sunday, September 10, 5:00 p.m.

Pinky

. 1949. USA. Directed by Elia Kazan. Screenplay by Philip Dunne, Dudley Nichols, Jane White, Elia Kazan, based on the novel Quality by Cid Ricketts Sumner. Cinematography by Joe MacDonald. With Jeanne Crain, Ethel Barrymore, Ethel Waters, William Lundigan, and Basil Ruysdael. As postwar America began to address, ever so meekly, issues of race, Kazan made Pinky about a light-skinned African-American woman who, having passed for white in Boston, returns to the South.

102 min.

Sunday, August 20, 2:00 p.m.; Monday, August 21, 6:00 p.m.

The Small Back Room

. 1949. Great Britain. Directed by Michael Powell. Screenplay by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, based on the novel by Nigel Balchin. Cinematography by Christopher Challis. With David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Jack Hawkins, Leslie Banks, and Cyril Cusack. This postwar adult thriller is a very dark and tense melodrama about a handicapped, alcoholic munitions expert in London who redeems himself when confronted with an unexploded German bomb that he must defuse. 108 min.


The Big Sleep

. 1946. USA. Directed by Howard Hawks. Screenplay by William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler. Cinematography by Sidney Hickox. With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, and Dorothy Malone. One of the great film noirs, which James Agee describes as, "a violent, smoky cocktail shaken together from most of the printable misdemeanors and some that aren’t." 113 min.

Tuesday, August 22, 2:30 p.m.; Sunday, August 27, 5:00 p.m.



Notorious

. 1946. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Ben Hecht. Cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff. With Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern, and Madame Konstantin. Hitchcock’s most mature film is about betrayal. A man who is a villain marries a woman he loves: she shares his bed only to get at his secrets. The audience’s sympathies become divided, which is but one effect of the claustrophobic narrative. 101 min.

Tuesday, August 22, 6:00 p.m.; Friday, August 25, 2:30 p.m.

Ostatni etap

(The Last Stop). 1948. Poland. Directed by Wanda Jakubowska. Screenplay by Wanda Jakubowska, Gerda Schneider. Cinematography by Boris Monastyrasky. With Wanda Bertona, Tatiana Gorecka, Barbara Drapinska, Antonina Gorecka, and Alina Janowska. A film about Auschwitz in which the characters of the SS men and women are played by Polish actors and survivors of the extermination camp. In Polish with English subtitles. 130 min.

Thursday, August 24, 1:30 p.m.; Saturday, August 26, 4:30 p.m.

The Best Years of Our Lives

. 1946. USA. Directed by William Wyler. Screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood, based on the novel Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor. Cinematography by Gregg Toland. With Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, and Harold Russell. An enormous popular and critical success at the time of its release, this superbly crafted drama follows the tribulations of three veterans, one an amputee, in their difficult adjustment to life in postwar America. 172 min.

Thursday, August 24, 6:00 p.m.; Monday, August 28, 2:30 p.m.

Monsieur Verdoux

. 1947. USA. Directed by Charles Chaplin. Screenplay by Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles. Cinematography by Roland Totheroh. With Chaplin, Martha Raye, Isobel Elsom, Marilyn Nash, Robert Lewis. Chaplin’s most grotesque comedy, based on Monsieur Landru, an actual wife killer, caught the morbidity of spirit of the late 1940s and anticipated the black humor that would define popular culture a generation later. 123 min.

Friday, August 25, 6:00 p.m.; Sunday, August 27, 2:00 p.m.

Torst

(Three Strange Loves). 1949. Sweden. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Screenplay by Herbert Grevenius, based on the novel by Birgit Tengroth. Cinematography by Gunnar Fischer. With Eva Henning, Birger Malmsten, Birgit Tengroth, Hasse Ekman, and Mimi Nelson. Ingmar Bergman, using layers of flashback, describes the disappointments that three women, once hopeful former ballerinas, experienced in their lives. In Swedish with English subtitles. 84 min.



Friday, August 25, 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, August 26, 2:00 p.m.

O Meguru Gonin No Onna

(Utamaro and His Five Women). 1946. Japan. Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Screenplay by Yoshikata Yoda, based on the novel by Kanji Kunieda. Cinematography by Shigeto Miki. With Minosuke Bando, Kohtaro Bando, Shotaro Nakamura, Kinnosuke Takamatsu, and Junnosuke Hayama. One of the first Japanese films to be approved for production by the American Occupation Forces after the war, Mizoguchi’s Edo period film is both a meditation on being an artist and a drama about the social vulnerability of women in the late 18th century. In Japanese with English subtitles. 95 min.

Monday, August 28, 6:00 p.m.; Tuesday, September 5, 6:00 p.m.

Les parents terribles

(The Storm Within). 1948. France. Directed by Jean Cocteau. Screenplay by Jean Cocteau. Cinematography by Michel Kelber. With Yvonne de Bray, Gabrielle Dorziat, Josette Day, Jean Marais, and Marcel André. Cocteau maintains theatrical claustrophobic artifice in the cinema version of his stage play in which parents behave abominably and the children not much better. An appalling, funny view about domestic relations. In French with English subtitles. 100 min.

Tuesday, August 29, 2:30 p.m.; Saturday, September 2, 5:00 p.m.

Sciuscià

(Shoeshine). 1946. Italy. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. Screenplay by De Sica, Cesare Zavattini, Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci, and Cesare Giulio Viola. Cinematography by Anchise Brizzi. With Rinaldo Smordoni, Franco Interlenghi, Aniello Mele and Bruno Ortensi. Using two youngsters, non-professionals, to play shoeshine boys trying to survive in war-scarred Rome, De Sica made a beautiful and despairing film. Arrested for black market activities the two friends are sent to a reformatory where each is betrayed. For Orson Welles this was the film in which camera and screen disappeared, observing "it was just life." In Italian with English subtitles. 90 min.


Ladri di biciclette

(Bicycle Thief). 1948. Italy. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. Screenplay by Cesare Zavattini, based on the novel by Luigi Bartolini. Cinematography by Carlo Montuori. With Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Cavell, Gino Saltamerenda, and Vittorio Antonucci. A heartbreaking film about a long-unemployed father who, with his young son, crosses Rome looking for his stolen bicycle, essential for a new job. De Sica’s simple neo-realist film becomes a postwar metaphor for the human condition, and as such it packs an emotional punch. In Italian with English subtitles.



91 min.

Thursday, August 31, 2:30 p.m.; Sunday, September 3, 5:00 p.m.

Roma, città aperta

(Rome, Open City). 1945. Italy. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. Screenplay by Federico Fellini, Sergio Amidei. With Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero, Maria Michi, and Harry Feist. Set during the German occupation of Rome, this emblematic Rossellini film defines "neo-realist" cinema with its reliance on non-professional actors, its collectively conceived script, and its hand-held camerawork. In Italian with English subtitles. 101 min.

Thursday, August 31, 6:00 p.m.

Paisà

(Paisan). 1946. Italy. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. Screenplay by Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, and Sergio Amidei. Cinematography by Otello Martelli. With Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Carlo Pisacane, Dots M. Johnson, and Alfonsino Pasca. In six episodes Rossellini retraces the battle for Italy in 1943 and 1944. Shot in an immediate style with an Italian and American cast of non-professional and professional actors, the film may be ambiguous about its realism but not about the confusion of armed liberation. In Italian and English, English subtitles. 124 min.

Friday, September 1, 2:30 p.m.; Monday, September 5, 5:00 p.m.

Macbeth

. 1948. USA. Directed by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Orson Welles from Shakespeare. Cinematography by John Russell. Edited by Louis Lindsay. Music by Jacques Ibert. With Orson Welles, Jeanette Noland, Dan O’Herlihy, Roddy McDowell, Keene Curtis. Having directed himself in The Stranger as a craven Nazi, Welles continued playing an evil person directing himself as literature’s most famous villain, Macbeth. Welles’s budget was low, his sets flimsy but stark, and some of his cast were not very good. Nevertheless Welles brought an imaginative spookiness and a gloomy verve to Shakespeare’s spellbinding tragedy of ambition and betrayal. MoMA’s print is the 1980 version restored by Bob Gitt of UCLA to its original length and soundtrack. (Welles’s Macbeth had been cut by about twenty minutes after its first preview and its Scottish accents were ‘Americanized’). 89min.

Friday, September 1, 6:00 p.m.; Tuesday, September 5, 2:30 p.m.

The Stranger

. 1946. USA. Directed by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Anthony Veiller from a story by Victor Trivas and Decia Dunning. Cinematography by Russell Wetty. Edited by Ernest Nims. Music by Bronislau Kaper. With Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Philip Merivale, Richard Long, Konstantin Shayne. As Hitchcock imagined evil seeping into a picture perfect small town three years earlier in Shadow of a Doubt, so did Orson Welles the director when he had Orson Welles the actor impersonate a genocidal Nazi impersonating a timid prep school teacher in quaint



Harper, Connecticut. Again a virtuous young woman, in this case Loretta Young, a new bride, has her innocence shattered, when an agent of the Allied War Crimes Commission (Edward G. Robinson) turns up in Harper hot on her husband’s trail. Life, for a very good reason, becomes threatening for the new couple. 95 min.


The Third Man

. 1949. Great Britain. Directed by Carol Reed. Screenplay by Graham Greene. Cinematography by Robert Krasker. Edited by Oswald Hafenrichter. Music by Anton Karas. With Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Paul Hoerbiger, Ernest Deutsch, Erich Ponto, Siegfried Brever, Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White. Orson Welles essays Harry Lime, who although absent for most of the film, remains one of cinema’s most memorable villains. Although it is photographed by an ex-Australian in war-ravaged Vienna, produced by an ex-Hungarian, and stars two American actors, Joseph Cotton and Welles, and one Italian actress, Alida Valli, many English critics consider The Third Man, directed and written by Carol Reed and Graham Greene respectively, one of the best British films ever made–and it is hard to argue with them. The opening zither solo produces a shiver that grows into high anxiety as one bad postwar revelation leads to even worse. 104 min.

Friday, September 8, 6:00 p.m.; Thursday, September 14, 3:00 p.m.

The Strange Woman

. 1946. USA. Directed by Edgar Ulmer. Screenplay by Herb Meadows from a book by Ben Ames Williams. Cinematography by Lucien Andriot. Edited by James E. Newcom. Music by Carmen Dragon. With Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders, Louis Hayward, Gene Lockhart, Hillary Brooke, Rhys Williams, June Storey, Moroni Olsen. Hedy Lamarr plays a sagaciously scheming, passionate and viscious ‘femme fatale’ in Bangor, Maine over a century ago. Ulmer, who was proud of this low-budget feature and the performance of Hedy Lamarr he directed, thought this one of his most beautiful films. Lamaar plays Jenny Hager, a ‘suave sinner’ who realizes how predatory she is when she hears a preacher quote from the Bible, "the lips of the strange woman drip honey, but her end is as bitter as wormwood." 101 min.


Caught

. 1949. USA. Directed by Max Ophuls. Screenplay by Arthur Laurents from the novel, Wild Calendar by Libbie Block. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. Edited by Robert Parrish. Music by Frederick Hollander. With James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, Frank Ferguson, Curt Bois, Ruth Brady. 88 mins. Paul Taylor, writing in the Time Out Film Guide, "a key American melodrama" and a ‘noir classic.’ To spite his psychiatrist, a pampered and mature young millionaire marries a woman who is trying to better herself. Her life becomes an emotional misery, and when she attempts to leave him she learns she is pregnant. There is a "happy ending" but it is rather perverse. Both Ophuls and Laurents present a jaundiced view of the American Dream. 88 mins.



Saturday, September 9, 5:00 p.m.; Tuesday, September 12, 3:00 p.m.

A program of short films from the West Coast Avant-Garde:

The Potted Psalm

. 1946. U.S.A. By Sidney Peterson and James Broughton. With Beatrix Perry, Harry Honig. Made in collaboration with James Broughton, The Potted Psalm, Sidney Peterson’s first 16mm film, was inspired by works of the European avant-garde cinema which Peterson had seen in Paris. Silent. 18 mins.

Clinic of Stumble

. 1947. U.S.A. By Marian Van Tuyl, Sidney Peterson, Hy Hirsh. Choreographed by Marian Van Tuyl. Decorator: Arch Lauterer. Music by Gregory Tucker. Dancers: Beth Osgood, Barbara Bennion, Edith Wiener. 13 min.

Mother’s Day

. 1948. U.S.A. By James Broughton. Assisted by Kermit Sheets. Photographed by Frank Stauffacher. With Marion Cunningham, Donald Pidgeon, Jack Stauffacher. Broughton creates a world of recollected childhood, a "country of emotional memory" in which the adult recalls his youth. 23 min.

Sausalito

. 1948. U.S.A. By Frank and Barbara Stauffacher. This film is part "city symphony" and part "outtakes for an experimental film." Sausalito is the picturesque waterfront town across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and has functioned, during times of low rent, as an artists’ colony. 10 mins.


Monday, September 11, 3:00 p.m.; Tuesday, September 12, 6:00 p.m.

Whisky Galore (Tight Little Island)

. 1948. Great Britain. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Witten by Compton Mackenzie and Angus Macphail from the novel by Mackenzie. Cinematography by Gerald Gibbs. Music by Ernest Irving. One of the Ealing Studios finest comedies, modest, character driven and thoroughly batty, Whisky Galore is about what happens to the feisty population of a small Hebridean island, suffering a wartime alcohol deprivation, when a shiwrecked cargo of whisky is washed ashore. The Scots scotch British Customs by keeping the scotch Scots. With Basil Radford, Joan Greenwood, Jean Cadell, Gordon Jackson, James Robertson Justice, John Gregson,Compton Mackenzie. 82 min.

Page 10 of 50MoMA | press | Releases | 2000 | Peace and Its Discontents: Postwar Films from the Ar...


Note: All programs are subject to change without notice. The public may call

212/708-9480 to confirm schedule.

No. 71

©1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York


July 2000







The international films collected by The Museum of Modern Art from the mid-1940s to 1949 reflect a



short-lived victory celebration at the end of World War II, marking a time of great unease as domestic and social readjustment was made. From July 7 through September 10, 2000, MoMA presents a selection of postwar films from the collection in Peace and Its Discontents: Postwar Film from the Archives, 1945-1949. Featuring some 32 feature films and shorts, the exhibition is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film and Video.



Filmmakers such as Leo Hurwitz began to focus on the problem of America’s endemic racism. Strange Victory (1948) was a provocative questioning of the discrepancies between the ideals of the allied victory and the lingering aspects of fascism in American society. In Europe, England’s Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made some of the cinema’s most memorably dark films, such as The Small Back Room (1949), while Italy’s "neo-realism," as practiced by Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, gave searing first hand accounts of the ravages of war. Rossellini’s emblematic film Rome, Open City (1945) is set during the German occupation of Rome, while De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) looks at two young shoeshine boys trying to survive in the war-scarred city.



Schedule


The Killers













The Cage




The Petrified Dog


The Lead Shoes





. 1948. USA. Directed by Max Ophüls. Screenplay by Howard Koch, based on the novel Brief einer unbekannten by Stefan Zweig. Cinematography by Franz Planer. With Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan,



Mady Christians, Marcel Journet, Art Smith, and Erskine Sanford. A young woman loves a concert pianist; he is not aware of her. Working not too happily in Hollywood, Max Ophüls fashions a valedictory to the lost Imperial City of Vienna. 87 min.


Strange Victory



Berliner Ballade






Laura





Woman on the Beach



House of Strangers

. 1949. USA. Directed by Jospeh L. Mankiewicz. Screenplay by Philip Yordan, Mankiewicz, based on the novel I’ll Never Go There Anymore by Jerome Weidman. Cinematography by Milton R. Krasner. With Edward G. Robinson, Susan Hayward, Richard Conte, Luther Adler, and Paul Valentine. A ruthless financier sets his sons against one another. Mankiewicz paints in chiaroscuro an unusually jaundiced view of the nuclear family. 101 min.


Woman in the Window



Pinky


102 min.


The Small Back Room





The Big Sleep



Notorious



Ostatni etap






Monsieur Verdoux





Torst









Sciuscià



Ladri di biciclette



(Bicycle Thief). 1948. Italy. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. Screenplay by Cesare Zavattini, based on the novel by Luigi Bartolini. Cinematography by Carlo Montuori. With Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Cavell, Gino Saltamerenda, and Vittorio Antonucci. A heartbreaking film about a long-unemployed father who, with his young son, crosses Rome looking for his stolen bicycle, essential for a new job. De Sica’s simple neo-realist film becomes a postwar metaphor for the human condition, and as such it packs an emotional punch. In Italian with English subtitles. 91 min.


Roma, città aperta



Paisà



Macbeth



The Stranger

. 1946. USA. Directed by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Anthony Veiller from a story by Victor Trivas and Decia Dunning. Cinematography by Russell Wetty. Edited by Ernest Nims. Music by Bronislau Kaper. With Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Philip Merivale, Richard Long, Konstantin Shayne. As Hitchcock imagined evil seeping into a picture perfect small town three years



earlier in Shadow of a Doubt, so did Orson Welles the director when he had Orson Welles the actor impersonate a genocidal Nazi impersonating a timid prep school teacher in quaint Harper, Connecticut. Again a virtuous young woman, in this case Loretta Young, a new bride, has her innocence shattered, when an agent of the Allied War Crimes Commission (Edward G. Robinson) turns up in Harper hot on her husband’s trail. Life, for a very good reason, becomes threatening for the new couple. 95 min.


The Third Man



The Strange Woman



Caught






The Potted Psalm


Clinic of Stumble


Mother’s Day


Sausalito










No. 71


July 2000









At the same time that the ‘femme fatale’ emerged as a prevalent subject in cinema, personal betrayal became a common theme in works by émigré filmmakers Max Ophüls, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, and Robert Siodmak. Renoir’s Woman on the Beach, the final film made by Renoir during his American exile, is a curious and affecting ‘noir’ about a strong wife, a blind husband, and a shell-shocked Coast



Guard officer, while Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) is about a woman coerced into intimacy with a Nazi. Other films include Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), which begins with a serious contemplation of suicide, and Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a mordant comedy about a serial killer.




Schedule


The Killers







. 1947. USA. Directed by Frank Capra. Screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, Jo Swerling, and Michael Wilson, based on the short story "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren



Stern. With James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, and Beulah Bondi. The now-popular Frank Capra classic, originally a commercial failure, opens with an attempted suicide and ends with an affirmation of life in Bedford Falls, Small Town, USA. Cinematography by Joseph Walker. 129 min.




The Cage




The Petrified Dog


The Lead Shoes







Strange Victory

. 1948. USA. Directed, written and edited by Leo Hurwitz. Produced by Barent L. Rossett, Jr. Camera by Peter Glushanok and George Jacobson. Music by David Diamond. Narration written by Saul Levitt and spoken by Alfred Drake, Gary Merrill, and Muriel Smith. Strange Victory is a strong indictment on racism. Amidst the high hopes of postwar frenzy and baby boom, this film was a provocative



questioning of the discrepancies between the ideals of the allied victory and the lingering aspects of fascism in American society. 75 min.


Berliner Ballade






Laura



Woman on the Beach



House of Strangers





Woman in the Window



Pinky


102 min.


The Small Back Room



The Big Sleep





Notorious



Ostatni etap






Monsieur Verdoux



Torst











Sciuscià



Ladri di biciclette



Roma, città aperta





Paisà



Macbeth



The Stranger

. 1946. USA. Directed by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Anthony Veiller from a story by Victor Trivas and Decia Dunning. Cinematography by Russell Wetty. Edited by Ernest Nims. Music by Bronislau Kaper. With Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Philip Merivale, Richard Long, Konstantin Shayne. As Hitchcock imagined evil seeping into a picture perfect small town three years earlier in Shadow of a Doubt, so did Orson Welles the director when he had Orson Welles the actor impersonate a genocidal Nazi impersonating a timid prep school teacher in quaint Harper, Connecticut. Again a virtuous young woman, in this case Loretta Young, a new bride, has her innocence shattered, when an agent of the Allied War Crimes Commission (Edward G. Robinson) turns up in Harper hot on her husband’s trail. Life, for a very good reason, becomes threatening for the new couple. 95 min.


The Third Man

. 1949. Great Britain. Directed by Carol Reed. Screenplay by Graham Greene. Cinematography by



Robert Krasker. Edited by Oswald Hafenrichter. Music by Anton Karas. With Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Paul Hoerbiger, Ernest Deutsch, Erich Ponto, Siegfried Brever, Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White. Orson Welles essays Harry Lime, who although absent for most of the film, remains one of cinema’s most memorable villains. Although it is photographed by an ex-Australian in war-ravaged Vienna, produced by an ex-Hungarian, and stars two American actors, Joseph Cotton and Welles, and one Italian actress, Alida Valli, many English critics consider The Third Man, directed and written by Carol Reed and Graham Greene respectively, one of the best British films ever made–and it is hard to argue with them. The opening zither solo produces a shiver that grows into high anxiety as one bad postwar revelation leads to even worse. 104 min.


The Strange Woman



Caught




The Potted Psalm


Clinic of Stumble

. 1947. U.S.A. By Marian Van Tuyl, Sidney Peterson, Hy Hirsh. Choreographed by Marian Van Tuyl. Decorator: Arch Lauterer. Music by Gregory Tucker. Dancers: Beth Osgood, Barbara Bennion, Edith



Wiener. 13 min.

Mother’s Day


Sausalito










No. 71


July 2000










Filmmakers such as Leo Hurwitz began to focus on the problem of America’s endemic racism. Strange Victory (1948) was a provocative questioning of the discrepancies between the ideals of the allied victory and the lingering aspects of fascism in American society. In Europe, England’s Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made some of the cinema’s most memorably dark films, such as The Small Back Room (1949), while Italy’s "neo-realism," as practiced by Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini,



gave searing first hand accounts of the ravages of war. Rossellini’s emblematic film Rome, Open City (1945) is set during the German occupation of Rome, while De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) looks at two young shoeshine boys trying to survive in the war-scarred city.



Schedule


The Killers










. Four films Sidney Peterson made with students as Workshop 20 projects while teaching at San



Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts:

The Cage




The Petrified Dog


The Lead Shoes







Strange Victory



Berliner Ballade

(The Berliner). 1949. Germany. Directed by Robert A. Stemmle. Screenplay by Günther Neumann, Bruno Michael, Martin Sternberg, based on the story by Günther Neumann. Cinematography by George Kraus. With Gert Fröbe, Aribert Wascher, Tatjana Sais, Ute Sielisch, and O.E. Hasse. A satiric comedy



about postwar Berlin. From the year 2048 an audience watching television sees Berlin of 1948. Modeled on traditional German cabaret material, the film uses songs and skits to follow Otto Averageman adjusting to peace in a city reduced to rubble. In German with English subtitles. 77 min.





Laura



Woman on the Beach



House of Strangers



Woman in the Window





Pinky


102 min.


The Small Back Room



The Big Sleep



Notorious





Ostatni etap






Monsieur Verdoux



Torst




(Utamaro and His Five Women). 1946. Japan. Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Screenplay by Yoshikata Yoda, based on the novel by Kanji Kunieda. Cinematography by Shigeto Miki. With Minosuke Bando, Kohtaro Bando, Shotaro Nakamura, Kinnosuke Takamatsu, and Junnosuke Hayama. One of the first Japanese films to be approved for production by the American Occupation Forces after the war,



Mizoguchi’s Edo period film is both a meditation on being an artist and a drama about the social vulnerability of women in the late 18th century. In Japanese with English subtitles. 95 min.





Sciuscià



Ladri di biciclette



Roma, città aperta



Paisà





Macbeth



The Stranger



The Third Man





The Strange Woman



Caught




The Potted Psalm


Clinic of Stumble


Mother’s Day


Sausalito










No. 71


July 2000

















Schedule


The Killers











The Cage






The Petrified Dog


The Lead Shoes







Strange Victory



Berliner Ballade




. 1947. USA. Directed by Hans Richter in collaboration with Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Alexander Calder. Screenplay by Hans Richter, Dave Vern, Hans Rehfisch, Joseph Freeman, John Latouche, Richard Hulbeck. Cinematography by Arnold Eagle, Werner Brandes,



Meyer Rosenblum, Herman Shulman, George Lubalin. With Joe-Jack Bittner and Dorothy Griffith. Probably the first feature-length avant-garde film produced in America, this is an omnibus work in which seven dreams are offered for sale by a poor young poet with a rich imagination. 83 min.


Laura



Woman on the Beach



House of Strangers



Woman in the Window



Pinky




102 min.


The Small Back Room



The Big Sleep



Notorious



Ostatni etap








Monsieur Verdoux



Torst







(The Storm Within). 1948. France. Directed by Jean Cocteau. Screenplay by Jean Cocteau. Cinematography by Michel Kelber. With Yvonne de Bray, Gabrielle Dorziat, Josette Day, Jean Marais, and Marcel André. Cocteau maintains theatrical claustrophobic artifice in the cinema version of his



stage play in which parents behave abominably and the children not much better. An appalling, funny view about domestic relations. In French with English subtitles. 100 min.


Sciuscià



Ladri di biciclette



Roma, città aperta



Paisà



Macbeth





The Stranger



The Third Man



The Strange Woman

. 1946. USA. Directed by Edgar Ulmer. Screenplay by Herb Meadows from a book by Ben Ames Williams. Cinematography by Lucien Andriot. Edited by James E. Newcom. Music by Carmen Dragon. With Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders, Louis Hayward, Gene Lockhart, Hillary Brooke, Rhys Williams, June Storey, Moroni Olsen. Hedy Lamarr plays a sagaciously scheming, passionate and viscious ‘femme fatale’ in Bangor, Maine over a century ago. Ulmer, who was proud of this low-budget feature and the performance of Hedy Lamarr he directed, thought this one of his most beautiful films. Lamaar plays Jenny Hager, a ‘suave sinner’ who realizes how predatory she is when she hears a preacher quote from



the Bible, "the lips of the strange woman drip honey, but her end is as bitter as wormwood." 101 min.


Caught




The Potted Psalm


Clinic of Stumble


Mother’s Day


Sausalito










No. 71



Documents

MoMA | press | Releases | 2000 | Peace and Its Discontents ...press.moma.org/wp-content/press-archives/PRESS_RELEASE_ARCHI… · Cinematography by Milton Krasner. With Edward G. Robinson,