January 3, 1945 [Tomorrow, the World!]

I'm listening to "Three Little Words"--Benny Goodman, maybe--and I'm sure they're not Tomorrow, the World!. But the Junior Nazi in the movie does--he even lifts his crazy eyes skyward to pronounce them, his mouth in a ragged grin like Gwynplaine, the Man Who Laughs, little-boy teeth all which-a-way, Hitler somewhere off in his head, beating him until he learns to like it.

It is, in short, a rough ride. Skip Homeier reprises his Broadway role as Emil Bruckner, the Hitler Youth pummeled from every side: his schoolmates--especially a bare-knuckled Pole with a second-hand grudge--his teacher, his adoptive father--Fredric March, taking it all in stride until he starts strangling Emil; but the real beating is delivered by Emil himself, stridently asserting his Master Race until he becomes the degenerate, lying and stealing, scrawling obscenities on the sidewalk, striking the gee-whiz little girl with a poker. All in the service of taking him straight down into himself, so he can hate then pity the thing he's become.

The War, it seems, is getting ready to grind toward Allied victory--I'm filled with stunned relief; could've sworn it was going to drag on until we'd all become soldiers, grim in our final careers--and Tomorrow, the World! wants us to get ready for all those would-be, has-been Nazis, with nothing to stand for except themselves. The movie may be a bit too earnest in its assertions of Main St.'s ability to find the right folk to do the job, and too ready to treat Nazism as a mental illness--but maybe they're right: Maybe something got into them, those philosophical Germans, suckers for their own nationalism, eager to obey a real winner at any cost, as long as everyone would just stop staring at them, look away, and let them talk themselves into their shining, monumental tombs. But it doesn't work that way: They will have to live, and live with themselves--oh, all of us are going to have to do that, in the new day that will follow the end of the war, with stormy weather rushing the sunshine.

The radio's moved on to "Nobody"--and damned if it doesn't fit poor little evil Emil:

I ain't never done nothin' to nobody
I ain't never got nothin' from nobody, no time
And until I get something from somebody, sometime
I don't intend to do nothin' for nobody, no time

And I will confess I found myself in fatherly tears at the end, Emil at last a small boy, alone in the dark and hoping someone safe will take his hand.

December 12, 1944 [Murder, My Sweet]

What surprised me most about Murder, My Sweet was not Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe (although that was almost enough of a shock, the little crooner-spooner-in-June-er taking on the big fellow--and not just Marlowe himself, but "Moose" Malloy, "on account-a he's large"), but that the movie knew that Marlowe has a sense of humor--although, come to think of it, having Powell play Marlowe makes absolute sense: as Marlowe narrates his own stories, he relishes his fearless similes, betraying a wit brighter--even, I hazard to add, dizzier--than any other Shamus on the stem. Powell never lets us lose sight of those wise-guy fireworks; his Marlowe is not merely weary of all the hard guys and dolls he has to shoulder past but eager to kid them along, to cast a jaundiced eye--with a glint--over their sloppy mistakes and smug cruelties. So I kept smiling at the movie--even though it was mostly befuddling--in other words, Chandler at his best, interested in leading us through the dark without a firm grip--suspects, leads, and facts slipping away on every page.

So, despite the uncertainties, the recurring pools of blackness into which Marlowe fell, Powell kept moving forward--haphazard but honest about it, managing to both grin and frown at the way things turn out, one random corpse after another, with a kiss from Nulty at the finish.

November 6, 1944 [The Woman in the Window]

Fritz Lang runs ragged Edward G. Robinson's professor in The Woman in the Window, forcing him through his own Freudian sex-and-murder meat grinder--the woman in the portrait come to life--Joan Bennett's party-girl Galatea for the hard boiled set--while the police scrape at every fingernail for clues and Dan Duryea weasels around.

Robinson is uncomfortably convincing in the anxious unraveling of his life--that one little slip, a chance to have a real looker look back, until he's just one of the fellows at the club--with a bloody scissors in his hand, the world finally slipping into silence as we join him in sleeping-powder suicide. And Lang is devilishly good at making us see chaos loom, all lines slanting down, all light descending--but, despite the mirror-tricks and shadow-play, the whole thing left me cold. I don't mind the old trapped-rat routine, but I wish the picture didn't decide at the last minute it was going to play cute.

September 8, 1944 [Double Indemnity]

Fred MacMurray walks into the spotlight--and it lies like shining sweat on his face, making him blink, his suit rumpling even as he stands there, soaked with middle-class venality, a guy who thinks he's got a bead on things, with an almost-new sedan and an adding machine and the urge to lie down with Barbara Stanwyck and run his weak mouth over every inch of her bland and curving housewife.

James M. Cain is a deeply committed pornographer of submission, so much so that it stops feeling like smut and assumes a reality--our own, the next half of the American Century marked by precise actuarial projections of cotton-headed lust and yearning, followed by apologetic smiles all around, with a widening stain in the general vicinity of the heart. You know you're in trouble when Edward G. Robinson is the only one waiting to catch you.

August 14, 1944 [Hail the Conquering Hero]

Preston Sturges's movies pull off a unique stunt: They barnstorm at you like the silent comedies used to, with completely satisfying caricatures sketched on the run by acrobatic actors--our old pal Hollywood keeping us in our seats--but with a strange sense that we're being kidded for watching. It isn't outright cynicism; more like a side-door opening, letting in a solid bar of light, pinning down some fool--politicians, mostly, and the strident "civic pride" the citizenry brings when it knocks together a bandwagon.

I'm not complaining: I like Hail the Conquering Hero's noise and bluster. The recurring business with the town's various bands is pure corn-pone chaos, as though Ives' Three Places in New England were composed in a Tilt-A-Whirl. And the Marines with fifteen cents to their name, making like Katzenjammer Kids at table, as William Demarest's Sarge makes--all right, invents--history. But most of all is long-suffering Eddie Bracken, that perfect profile of his giving him the air of a trapped parrot forced to squawk a fairy-tale of heroism to ease his worried mother--but the story gets blown up like a Japanese island, so that you can't tell friend from foe, hero from stooge.

Sturges thumbs his nose at the home front (albeit affectionately: I've never seen Edgar Pangborn given so much eventual dignity--or what passes for it in that man's harried little world). But Sturges also bows low to his leatherneck heroes, until the camera turns thankfully away from the cheering crowd at the train station and gazes with admiration at the troops, tall in a row, saluting the fools they're willing to die for. It's clear Sturges feels he has nothing to tell the Marines--but plenty to me waving on the platform as the train takes them back to the front.

January 14, 1944 [Lifeboat]

I need to see more musicals, anything bright and oblivious--jeez, even Hitchcock has made it to the front lines--stepping into a Lifeboat, the last remnant of a torpedoed ship, to remind us that all we have going for us is our contempt for Nazis--and of course that cast of survivors: Tallulah Bankhead, firm as an exclamation point, her whole body arched in calm appraisal; and William Bendix, his mouth drawn up in a Betty Boop bow, tiny eyes uncertain that his Rosie back home will want him, now that he's lost a leg; and Henry Hull, miles away from Boys Town and the Werewolf of London, chewing on his cigar, the self-made man stringy as mutton;and John Hodiak bare-chested and perpetually sneering--while the other women soften the blows of pain and death, and Hume Cronyn plays Cockney, and Canada Lee gets a chance to be not only a movie-Negro but a man, watching the white world make bad decisions.

So maybe there's more than our hatred of the Nazis--and in this picture we get one in particular to hate: Walter Slezak's Willy, the grinning beer-hall buddy who plots like Richard III to have his glorious summer--again, maybe there's simply us: More than once the survivors stare at the Nazi and ask what to do with such people. The answer hangs like cordite in the air, smokeless and sharp.