In 1948,
Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated;
The Kinsey Report was released;
Sri Lanka and Israel became independent nations;
NASCAR was founded;
The US Supreme Court ruled religious instruction in public schools was unconstitutional;
ABC began broadcasting;
William Shockley filed a patent for the first transistor;
Alger Hiss was accused of being a Communist spy;
Harry Truman dramatically won reelection as President of the United States;
The Philadelphia Eagles won the NFL Championship;
Kenny Loggins, T-Bone Burnett, Carl Weathers, M.C. Gainey, Rick James, Alice Cooper, Christopher Guest, Barbara Hershey, Tom Wilkinson, Bernadette Peters, Mercedes Ruehl, James Taylor, Billy Crystal, William Gibson, Bobby Orr, Wolf Blitzer, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Steven Tyler, Diane Wiest, Al Gore, Rhea Perlman, John Oates, Steve Winwood, Brian Eno, Grace Jones, Stevie Nicks, Powers Boothe, Jerry Mathers, Phylicia Rashad, Clarence Thomas, Kathy Bates, Raffi, Jay Thomas, Cat Stevens, Gary Trudeau, Peggy Fleming, Sally Struthers, Tipper Gore, Robert Plant, John Noble, Sgt. Slaughter, Lewis Black, Christa McAuliffe, Terry Bradshaw, John Ritter, Jeremy Irons, George R. R. Martin, Phil Hartman, Olivia Newton-John, Bryant Gumble, Avery Brooks, Donna Karan, Margot Kidder, George Wendt, Glenn Frey, Vincent Schiavelli, Prince Charles, Howard Dean, Ozzy Osbourne, Ted Nugent, Samuel L. Jackson, Gerard Depardieu, and Donna Summer were born;
While Orville Wright, Dame May Whitty, D.W. Griffith, Babe Ruth, Gregg Toland, and Edith Roosevelt died.
The following is a list of my ten favorite movies released in 1948:
10) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Down on their luck drifters Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin meet prospector Howard (Walter Huston) and head into the Sierra Madre to make their fortune.
As the men work feverishly in harsh conditions to get gold out of the mountains, they grow increasingly paranoid about the motives of their companions and wrongly assume a stranger who happens upon their camp wants to take the treasure for himself.
While dealing with their paranoia, they must also contend with a cadre of Spanish bandits led by the enigmatic Gold Hat.
Huston is delightful, his dancing scene upon discovering gold is one of the purest moment of joy in cinema. Bogart is, of course, wonderful. The scene with Gold Hat which produced the iconic “we don’t need no stinkin’ badges” line has seeped into the marrow of American culture.
It stands as a perfect allegory for the corrupting influence of money, a filmed version of the Biblical axiom: the love of money is the root of all evil.
The descent of the three men (especially Dobbs) is hard to watch, but all too easy to believe.
Dancer Vicky and composer Julian fall in love while working on a ballet based on a Hans Christian Anderson story: The Red Shoes.
Julian and Vicky marry and quit the company, but the ballet’s director, Boris Lemontov, convinces Vicky to come out of retirement to star in a revival of The Red Shoes. When Julian confronts her at the premiere, Vicky is forced to choose between the love of her life and her passion.
Technicolor has rarely looked better than the breathtaking ballet; it’s one of the best integrations of dance on film. This is the epoch of the epic partnership between Michael Powell and Eric Pressburger; it’s a sad, hypnotic film about deferred dreams and the costs of following your passion.
After her mother dies in childbirth, deaf and mute Belinda Macdonald (Jane Wyman) lives with her resentful father (Charles Bickford) and aunt (Agnes Moorehead) on a Canadian farm.
Belinda is raped and gives birth to a boy named Johnny. The townspeople assume the father is the new town doctor, Dr. Richardson, who has developed an affection for Belinda.
When the actual rapist realizes he’s fathered a child, he tries to take the baby as his own. In the ensuing struggle, Belinda kills him and is tried for murder.
A transcendent performance by Jane Wyman as the titular character makes this work. We empathize with Belinda, but don’t pity her (although her circumstances could make that easy).
As sexual violence against women has become front page news, it’s jarring to see the issues take center stage in a seventy-year old movie; a stark reminder of how entrenched the problem is.
7) Key Largo
Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) travels to a hotel in Key Largo, Florida to visit the father (Lionel Barrymore) and surviving spouse (Lauren Bacall) of his friend, George Temple, who died during the war.
A hurricane prevents him from leaving and he’s stuck at the hotel with alcoholic Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor) and the gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson).
The scene of Gaye singing only to be humiliated by Rocco is worth the price of admission. Director John Huston knew Trevor was uncomfortable with the scene, so he surprised her by telling they would film it just before the camera rolled. The result is a raw intensity which may have singlehandedly won Trevor an Oscar.
This is an exciting gangster movie with Robinson at his peak, Barrymore rising for one last hurrah, and amazing chemistry between Bogie and Bacall.
Republican Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury) convinces her lover Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy) to run for President. She plans to wield power behind the scenes as a puppet master.
Grant’s estranged wife Mary (Katharine Hepburn) agrees to pretend their marriage is still functioning because she believes Grant would make a good President. Unfortunately, the potential power corrupts him and complicates their relationship.
Angela Lansbury will be remembered as a kindly older detective, a female Columbo, but her film career was completely different from Jessica Fletcher. She’s excellent as a manipulative, duplicitous power player (foreshadowing her later, better known work in The Manchurian Candidate).
The supporting cast: including Van Johnson, Adolphe Menjou, Lewis Stone, and Margaret Hamilton are all excellent.
Hepburn and Tracy had a legendary Hollywood romance. While their chemistry is sublime in all nine of their collaborations, this is one of their better films. It was a nice touch to set it during the actual 1948 election and place Matthews as a rival to real life candidates like Thomas Dewey.
The inside baseball stuff about our political system and the insinuation it’s just a game played by the rich is a fascinating take which only seems more accurate seventy years later.
After conductor Sir Alfred de Carter (Rex Harrison) learns his wife may be cheating on him, he fantasizes about his reaction during his next performance. As he conducts three different pieces by Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Rossini, he envisions three different scenarios. In one he murders his wife and frames her lover, in another he graciously accepts her decision to move on, and in the last, he engages her in a deadly game of Russian roulette.
After he comes home, he tries to kill her, but bungles it horribly, only to learn she wasn’t unfaithful after all.
Harrison is hysterical. Rudy Valle (a one-time matinée idol) is delectable. The musical fantasy sequences are wonderfully staged and the music precisely picked, complementing the tone of the onscreen action.
Sturgess’ cynicism was about ten to fifteen years too soon, but many of his trademarks (most prominently his rapid fire dialogue) are now revered and echo in modern comedies. There’s a reason Quentin Tarantino listed this as one of his favorite films. You can see the seeds of his non-traditional heroes and reliance on coincidence to advance the plot.
4) Rope
Influenced by the theories of their former teacher Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), Brandon Shaw and Phillip Moran (Stewart Granger) murder their classmate David Kentley as an experiment to get away with the “perfect murder.”
To test their accomplishment, they stuff David’s body in a chest and host a dinner party inviting Mr. Cadell, and David’s father, aunt, and fiancée.
Throughout the evening, Brandon drops hints about David’s disappearance, while Phillip is increasingly nervous and scared about what they’ve done.
Hitchcock’s film takes place in real-time and through inventive edits appears to be one long take. The small apartment setting creates a feeling of claustrophobia which adds to the intensity.
Brandon Shaw is a chilling villain who kills for the beauty of the crime and is smart enough to almost get away with it.
The intellectual discussion of the aesthetics of murder is an amusing exercise; these ideas underpinned the rise of violent films in the latter half of the twentieth century.
This is an underrated film in Hitchcock’s oeuvre and his first collaboration with Stewart would lead to a series of masterpieces in the next decade (Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo).
3) The Search
In the European chaos following World War II, army engineer Steve (Montgomery Clift) befriends a young Czech Holocaust survivor played by Ivan Landl. The boy doesn’t speak English, so Steve calls him Jim and takes him under his wing.
Jim is determined to find his mother, but Steve assumes she’s deceased and intends to take the boy back to America with him. At the last moment, his still living mother arrives to claim him.
It’s a lovely film about the lasting confusion caused by war and the kind-hearted heroes who sorted through the rubble and destruction to rebuild Europe.
Clift is excellent, but the movie belongs to the young Ivan Jandl (who didn’t speak English and learned his lines phonetically). Sadly, Landl wasn’t allowed to come to the United States to receive the Juvenile Academy Award he won for his work in this film.
Director Fred Zinneman personalized dramatic societal upheavals better than most other directors.
This film follows Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) as she struggles with schizophrenia and the treatment she undergoes to combat her disease, including electroshock and hydrotherapy.
Over seventy years later, this examination of mental health treatment remains relevant; western society is still struggling to humanely treat the mentally ill and there’s still a significant stigma attached to those suffering from diseases of the mind.
This is a harrowing portrayal of a terrifying illness, and one of the greatest achievements of Hollywood legend Olivia de Havilland.
The final entry in Roberto Rossellini’s war trilogy, this film shows the desperation of Germans rebuilding their lives after the Second World War through the eyes of twelve-year-old Edmund Kohler, who lives in Berlin with his adult siblings and ailing father.
Naive Edmund misunderstands what his former teacher (a closeted Nazi sympathizer) says about the survival of the fittest and makes a consequential decision which leaves him even more confused and isolated.
Rossellini may have agreed with the rationales which led to the Allied invasion and defeat of Nazism, but he didn’t wish to lionize or mythologize the war. There may be just wars, but none are fought justly, and once unleashed, the awesome destructive power will inevitably matriculate and metastasize in unexpected ways, leaving ruin in its wake.