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London's East End in the aftermath of World War II was not an easy place to live in. In addition to physical damage to structures from the war there was also a persisting scarcity of resources. The 1948 film noir It Always Rains On Sunday captures some of this world in an almost incidental way, featuring some real location footage but even more extraordinary backlot scenes populated by diverse characters, shot by the great cinematographer Douglas Slocombe. Featuring several curious subplots, the main story surprisingly focuses on women dealing with sexual frustration. The end abruptly crashes into a set of solutions to meet moral imperatives but the film is fascinating in the lead up to these especially since a few of the subplots, uniquely for films of the time, remain unresolved.



Googie Withers stars as Rose Sandigate, a young working class wife married to a man, as the dialogue pointedly draws attention to, twelve years her senior, George (Edward Chapman). Rose is constantly frustrated and argumentative but seems glumly settled down to life caring for the basically amiable George and his three children from a previous marriage--two beautiful teenage daughters, Vi (Susan Shaw) and Doris (Patricia Plunkett), and a little boy named Alfie (David Lines).



Like most teenage girls, Vi and Doris have their dramas involving boys, but Vi's trouble is slightly unusual. She's been going out with an older, married man--a band leader and owner of a music shop named Morry Hyams (Sydney Tafler).



The film features several unambiguously Jewish characters, unusual for the time, especially striking given the film's tangential relationship to World War II. We meet Morry's wife, Sadie (Betty Ann Davies), and his brother, Lou (John Slater), who runs a local arcade and seems to be something of a mild gang boss, though he never comes off as especially sinister or foolish. Three would-be gangsters who try to associate with him are played more for laughs. In one amusing scene, they show up at a store owner's home and try to force him to pay exorbitant rates for possibly stolen goods but the store owner manages to intimidate them a bit into lowering prices and securing a deal for paying on delivery. The three young men leave with slumped shoulders, like three Charlie Browns who've failed to start a protection racket.



The film's main plot starts when George casually mentions one of the guys who escaped from prison the night before is someone named Tommy Swann (John McCallum). Rose struggles to maintain composure, doesn't quite succeed, but the blissfully oblivious George doesn't notice. Tommy is a former lover of Rose's, from before she met George. When she discovers him hiding in the yard, we discover that Tommy is a lot younger a lot better looking than George.



She stashes the dirty, wide eyed, desperate hulk of a man in her upstairs bedroom, a walking and talking metaphor for her own repressed passion and sexuality. With the affable and stable but soft and sexless George as her husband, it's easy to draw comparisons to Madame Bovary, especially as Rose finds it more and more difficult to resist her attraction to Tommy.



Vi and Doris both resent having to call Rose mother--one wonders how far apart in age the girls are from Rose--and the tension between Rose and Vi starts to boil over when Vi tries to get into the room where Rose has hid Tommy in order to get a mirror Rose borrowed. There's a lot you could unpack there if you wanted to analyse--Vi intruding on the territory of Rose's hidden sexual desire and shame, the younger girl's mirror as a sign of self-reflection and a tool of beautifying oneself in the effort to attain sexual satisfaction. As Vi struggles with the locked door, the two get into an argument that turns into a slightly bizarre, more than slightly kinky fight where Rose rips Vi's dress in half.



Of course the film can't say much directly about sex but it's visually communicated in a lot of ways. Googie Withers never seems to be wearing a bra in the film, for one thing. With the vivid realism of the neighbourhood and the relationships between family members, and the realistic overlapping of frequently unresolved subplots, the film manages to make what it's not saying come across very distinctly.

One woman bears witness to a disintegrating male society in 1953's Anatahan, Josef von Sternberg's final film. Filmed years before the publication of Lord of the Flies, this brilliant film about a small group of people stranded on an island shows the destructive potential in a breakdown of social order. There's also an implicit discussion of how sexuality operates in the human mind that has frustrated attempts to categorise Sternberg's artistic impulses for decades. On top of that, the film is unique as a work by an American filmmaker in the 1950s for having an entirely Japanese cast, a story told from the perspective of people who were enemies of the United States during the war just a few years earlier.



Opening with this title card, the first time viewer might well expect a film designed to emphasise the common humanity shared by American and Japanese people. The film does this, of course, but it's not so shallow as to think that's sufficient to be the point of a whole film. Like all great storytellers, Sternberg knew that to say something universal about humanity you have to talk about a specific human experience.



Based loosely on a true story, the film begins when a Japanese Navy ship is wrecked during World War II and its handful of survivors winding up on the small island of Anatahan. There are two civilians on the island who've been out of contact with civilisation for years, a man named Kusakabe (Tadashi Suganuma) and a woman named Keiko (Akemi Negishi).



The sailors assume the two are husband and wife and the couple initially do nothing to disabuse them of the idea. Sternberg, who narrates the film in English, explains how the two had formed a bond over the years due to being the only two people in the world. But now that there are other men available, Keiko's mind starts to wander to new potentials while Kusakabe starts to become violently jealous.



Sternberg's narration, though in English, uses words like "We" and "Our" as though the speaker were one of the sailors though he significantly refrains from identifying with any specific sailor. He talks about how the sailors came to regard themselves as "drones" and Keiko as the "Queen Bee" but this simile becomes increasingly ironic as Keiko suffers more abuse and her wishes are frequently disregarded. When two of the men acquire guns from a crashed American fighter plane, Sternberg speaks in an ironic tone of how the weapons become the only determinate of authority.



The typical interpretive line might be to see the guns as an ultimate phallic symbol and the fact that, in all the violent encounters where the guns change hands, neither ever ends up in Keiko's hands. She even refrains from taking one when given the opportunity. This would fit in with one feminist line of film criticism that sees women in films shot by men as defined by their castration and corresponding need to castrate men in revenge or be completed by the male body. Such critics would also likely subscribe to the concept of the Male Gaze and would point to the several nude scenes as confirmation that Keiko exists only as an object of male pleasure.



I've written extensively already about the Male Gaze and I've argued that it's an illegitimate concept--I stand by everything I argued in this 2012 entry except I'm less certain now that a society without any kind of hierarchy would be advantageous. As Anatahan demonstrates, many of the problems that occur might have been prevented if the commander of the group of officers had been able to maintain his position. He loses face when one of his men beats him in a fight and after that there's implicitly a free for all. By the end of the film, he too has succumbed to the general madness in a mockery of democracy where the men draw straws for Keiko. The breakdown of military discipline, like the ambiguity of Keiko's marriage status, creates fissures through which chaos and violence intrude.



There are a lot of ways in which Sternberg's films defy the perspective which reduces portrayals of women by male directors to invariable manifestations of oppressive patriarchy. Sternberg is best known for his collaborations with Marlene Dietrich in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Images of Dietrich in his films are iconic as some of the most beautifully photographed images in film history. In a famous quote, Sternberg, discussing the place Dietrich had in his films, said, "I am Marlene-Marlene is me." It's a quote with which Dietrich herself agreed when asked about it. A nice quote from Dietrich I've been seeing lately is, "I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men." To my mind, this is the ideal attitude of the artist, a person who should give priority to art over all other motives, be they personal or political. In her work for Sternberg, she recognised that she was inhabiting an aspect of himself, her beauty a reflection of his worldview rather than an alien territory to be conquered or avoided.



Anatahan was Akemi Negishi's first film, she would go on to star in films by Naruse and Kurosawa--she has a memorable role as the prostitute in Kurosawa's version of The Lower Depths. Sternberg apparently discovered her working in cabaret and his eye for casting proves keen in Anatahan as it's largely her performance that anchors the film. Despite the narration coming from one of the sailors and the beliefs of some of the radical film analyses from the 60s and 70s that have become dogma in many circles, the film's story mainly seems to come from her perspective.



There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the narrator's voice not being attached to any specific sailor has the effect of diluting and distancing it. In addition to describing the feelings of the sailors and the basics of the situation, the narrator also takes time to explain aspects of Japanese culture and make observations about human nature that are sometimes curiously contradicted in subtle ways by what occurs on screen. He describes Keiko has having been brought up to be obedient to men, naturally falling into step behind her man when the two move about, but again and again Keiko exercises her own will independently. She disobeys Kusakabe and sleeps with other men, not because she's coerced by them but because she wants to. She is raped and beaten over the course of the film but this is another thing that anchors the film with her perspective--committing rape or other physical assault on her person are unpleasant, irrational acts and she stands as rational by contrast.



The viewer is also compelled to identify with her more because she's beautiful. If you remove the cynical, false intellectualism that casts portrayals of female beauty, sexual or chaste, as manifestations of an inherently destructive male impulse, you see the simple truth that what attracts the eye is a reflection of our most basic values, our heart. Add to this Negishi's excellent performance--her face credibly conveys emotional responses--and her reactions to the increasingly unstable men harmonise with our own reactions. This is emphasised further when she's the only one who doesn't consider leaflets dropped on the island informing them of the war's end to be mere enemy propaganda. She sees the reality we know is true, World War II is over, while the men, despite the disintegration of their military discipline, still cling to the idea that Japan will never surrender, even if they must continue fighting for a thousand years.



The film has a deliberately artificial look, shot almost entirely on sound stages, and, despite everyone's clothes disintegrating, Keiko's hair always looks like she has ready access to a salon. This emphasises that the essential truth presented by the film is in beauty and is the higher status to which humanity may aspire contrasted with the increasingly animalistic behaviour of the sailors. Keiko's lack of interest in ruling by violence, choosing instead not to take one of the guns, reflects this too. Keiko, while crucially not being portrayed as saintly or perfect, represents the best of humanity while the sailors represent a natural savagery to be overcome.

A small group of soldiers from different nations and cultures work together to survive against Nazis in 1943's Sahara. Some of the soldiers have family or lovers back home but they're led by Humphrey Bogart who says only about himself that he has no-one back home and he's therefore less important. Of course that makes him a symbol of the whole team in this wonderful action adventure war film.



An American tank lost in the desert comes upon a small group of British troops as well as a French corporal (Louis Mercier) and takes them aboard. Since it's an American tank, the ranking British officer, Captain Halliday (Richard Nugent), cedes authority to Bogart's character, Master Sergeant Joe Gunn. The Frenchman agrees to come along because, he says to Joe, "I like your cigarettes."



In addition to Bogart, the film also has noir great Dan Duryea as the tank's operator who in this film presents the casual, down to earth guy from Brooklyn as a counterpoint to the scale of the war and the situation. The tank crew is also eventually joined by a Sudanese officer, Sergeant Major Tambul (Rex Ingram) and his Italian prisoner, Giuseppe (J. Carrol Naish).



The film was directed by the Hungarian born Zoltan Korda who, like his brother Alexander Korda, had a career in England until the second World War compelled them to relocate to Hollywood. Zoltan had an executive producer credit on his brother's great 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad. Also in common with The Thief of Bagdad, Sahara has a score by Miklos Rozsa and features Rex Ingram, who played the genie in the fantasy film.



The American actor is never convincingly Sudanese but he gives just as assured a performance as he does in Thief of Bagdad but with the casual air of a human soldier rather than a mischievous godlike being. In a nice scene with one of the American soldiers, Waco (Bruce Bennett), the two express appreciation at the opportunity to learn more about the world in finding each other far more recognisably human than their seemingly disparate cultures might have led them to suppose. This is presented in opposition to the perspective of a Nazi pilot captured after an effective action scene where his plane crashes after strafing the tank.



He, of course, is disgusted by being in proximity to a black man, something Joe mocks him for. Yet Joe's capacity for empathy extends even to the captives as the Italian soldier, despite being concerned for his wife and child back home, finds his sympathies going decidedly over to the Allied side due to the treatment he receives from Joe.



The film's climax pulls no punches, being effectively directed action and stirring storytelling, helped immensely by the lack of sound stages. Shot entirely in California's Imperial County, the heat of the desert is constantly in evidence from the beams of light on sweat and threadbare uniforms in Rudolph Mate's beautiful cinematography.

I'm often surprised by the light-hearted attitude 1940s British comedies take towards World War II. A vivid example being 1946's I See a Dark Stranger, a comedy spy thriller about a naive Irishwoman who becomes a spy for Germany during the war. The film is a finely crafted enough comedy by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder and I couldn't help feeling affection for the characters even as I felt its treatment might be a bit too breezy. On other hand, maybe something like this wasn't wholly a bad idea at a time when Britain, Ireland, and Germany were trying to find a way of being at peace with each other after bitter conflict.



The film's opening scene is really remarkable for its context. Set in a pub in an Irish village, an old man tells a story of fighting in the Irish Revolution and stirringly describes killing English soldiers. Mind you, this is a British film. If the Irish characters here seem a bit buffoonish, they're no worse than the English characters shown later on. In fact, they're a bit less buffoonish.



Deborah Kerr, whose Irish accent sounds a lot more natural than her American accent, plays Bridie Quilty who's been raised on the stories of the revolution, her father having fought in it. It being her twenty first birthday, she decides to go to Dublin and meet with her father's old comrade, Michael O'Callaghan (Brefni O'Rorke), to join the IRA. To her disappointment, O'Callaghan has come to accept peace with Britain and tries to convince her to do likewise. O'Rorke plays the character as calm and wise in contrast to Bridie's youthful rashness and I suspect part of the motive with this film was to reassure British audiences that Ireland was an ally and dissenters were sentimental old men and adorable young fools. On the one hand, it's a nice idea to put everyone at ease with each other, on the other, it's a bit patronising. Still, O'Callaghan comes across as easily the wisest character in the film.



Spotted in a bookshop buying books on learning the German language, Bridie's recruited by a German spy who goes by the name of Miller (Raymond Huntley). Of all places, he puts her on assignment in an English town with a statue of Oliver Cromwell, whom Bridie takes every opportunity throughout the film to curse.



And, wouldn't you know, Miller has her seduce a British officer named David Baynes (Trevor Howard) who says he's there because he's working on a thesis on Cromwell. As with the explicit details of World War II and the Irish Revolution, Bridie never manages to say precisely why she and everyone back home hate Cromwell so much. Discussing slaughter at the hands of Cromwell and his men at Drogheda would risk making Bridie not seem so foolish.



Because the German agent is a buffoon, his assumption that David is an intelligence officer based on the fact that David says he's not in town to fish turns out to be utterly wrong. This puts Bridie into a rage after she's wasted a whole afternoon falling in love with David. Miller's not nearly as buffoonish, though, as the leader of the German spies in England we meet later played by a portly Norman Shelley in a ridiculous check sport coat and boater hat.



Witnessing his interrogation technique of slapping someone in the face a few times can only seem insultingly trite at this point.

But meanwhile, the British COs in the Isle of Man, where Bridie and David end up, are a strange pair of philandering big men with matching moustaches and bald heads who routinely fumble in their jobs.



The film actually shows some British military police getting shot so I wonder how comfortable war veterans were laughing at this movie. But many of the gags are very good and the leads are charming.