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| The Best Movie of 1946 by Brody Wilder 04/05/2026, 8:36pm PDT | ||||
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| WINNER: It's a Wonderful Life
Earnestly wholesome Jimmy Stewart was the ideal leading man for director Frank Capra's populist fables. They first worked together on 1938's You Can't Take It with You, a Dharma & Greg-pattern romcom/socialist screed. Stewart played the son of a munitions baron who married into a family of proto-hippies, and was eventually coaxed out from under his father's thumb to persue his own dream: unlimited clean-burning conflict-free solar power. Good luck with that, buddy! In 1938 the world needed munitions a lot more than it needed solar. They reunited for 1939's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which Stewart played a literal Boy Scout troop leader appointed to the US Senate. Expected to serve as willing stooge in a Teapot Dome-style political scandal, Stewart instead turned the tables on party leadership, exposing their corruption - but not before several Boy Scouts were nearly beaten to death by hired goons. Their final collaboration was 1946's It's a Wonderful Life. Having returned from military service - Capra made educational films, Stewart flew bombers - they were ready to once again start churning out pinko commie pap. Unfortunately, audiences had other ideas. While Americans were gung-ho about socializing their losses during the Great Depression (they elected FDR three fucking times), with the rest of the world bombed back into the stone age those greedy Yanks were ready to leverage their wartime industrial base to rebuild the global order - and make a lot of money doing it. So, while not an instant career ender, It's a Wonderful Life marked the beginning of the end for Capra's socially conscious filmmaking. Now rightly regarded as a classic, It's a Wonderful Life's modern popularity sprung from the film falling out of copyright in 1974, allowing TV stations to fill countless hours of December programming royalty-free. If Capra were alive today, he could make a polemic about how neverending copyright laws are denying Americans their cultural birthright - and that would flop, too. A Dangerous Title: The Big Sleep Originally set for release in 1945, Warner Bros decided to hold The Big Sleep back so they could clear their slate of war pictures while there was still a war on. The studio also took the opportunity to do extensive re-shoots, capitalizing on the sexual chemistry of real-life newlyweds Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The result is one of the best and least sensical detective noirs of all time. Bogart takes over the role of Philip Marlowe, last played by Dick Powell in 1944's Murder, My Sweet, while Bacall plays a dame somehow related to his investigation (it's complicated). Directed by Howard Hawks, you can tell this was made during the war because even the cab driver is a sexy young girl who wants to jump Bogie's dusty old bones. Later, he seduces a librarian by pulling a full-sized bottle of whiskey out of his comically high-waisted pants. Don't kid yourself - this was always intended to be funny. Isn't It Ironic: The Best Years of Our Lives This wasn't! 1946 was the year audiences went cuckoo for PTSD. Directed by William Wyler, The Best Years of Our Lives told the Very Important story of returning veterans struggling to re-adjust to civilian life. It became the highest-grossing film since Gone with the Wind and cleaned up at the Oscars (one actor was awarded two statues for the same performance, it was crazy). Like most of Wyler's movies - we've already covered Jezebel and The Letter, though his best wouldn't come until 1959's Ben-Hur - it's well worth watching, the sort of high-budget prestige picture that's perhaps most valuable as a snapshot of one particular point in American history. A point at which soda jerk was a legitimate career, and the biggest thing anyone had to worry about was the atomic bomb. Good times. She Started a Heat Wave: Gilda Speaking of atomic bombs, the boys in the lab were so taken with Rita Hayworth's performance in this classic noir that they named the very first nuclear device detonated post-Nagasaki, "Gilda". Here's a photo of the historic bombshell adorning the historic bombshell. Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, the Jewish latina whose photo would one day camouflage a tunnel out of Shawshank Prison endured a full year of extremely painful electrolysis treatments to achieve her classically white hairline. That suffering paid off, though, when she captivated a nation with her stripperly performance of Put the Blame on Mame (it wasn't really Rita singing, obviously, but an uglier girl). You could watch just that part on Youtube, but I'd recommend torrenting the whole movie. It's pretty good. Not Just a Skit on Sesame Street: The Postman Always Rings Twice Hollywood's first successful method actor, John Garfield, already had some great performances under his belt by the time he headlined this, his first great movie. Garfield plays a drifter who schemes with Lana Turner to murder her much older husband and take over his roadside diner. It's the kind of story that's all the more vicious because the stakes are so low, the kind that couldn't have been told before the success of Double Indemnity. Director Tay Garnett's decision to film on location lent a gritty authenticity missing from the more stagebound Gilda, while pin-up-girl-turned-serious-actress Turner gave even Rita Hayworth a run for her money. (If you need more noir, try the same year's Nobody Lives Forever, also with Garfield.) |
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