Released in 1946, Nobody Lives Forever, the earliest entry in the series, is such a fascinating reflection of its era that it’s worth lingering on. The plot line is familiar enough, but the screenplay by W.R. Burnett, based on his novel I Wasn’t Born Yesterday, gives Garfield a post-war motivation and not just a romantic one for his change of heart: between his young days as a scam artist and his return to the underworld, he went to war and spent his first few months back home recovering in an Army hospital. That experience has altered his perspective; his reflex move is to go back to the life he led before he saw combat, but it’s a bad moral fit for him now. What Fitzgerald responds to in Garfield is the good man underneath the con, the man whose true colors came out in the crucible of battle. Garfield, who deserves a series all his own, had a gift for conveying this kind of inner conflict, and though he himself wasn’t a veteran, in the movies he made in the late ’40s, such as Gentleman’s Agreement and Body and Soul and even the classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice, he lost the brashness of his early career and acquired greater gravitas.
These movies tend to be crisp and fast – several, including The Window, come in under 80 minutes, and only Nobody Lives Forever runs over an hour and a half. They aren’t bloated with self-importance or special effects or too many plot ideas, like almost every one of this year’s early-summer releases. You can see a double bill and be out again in just half an hour longer than it takes to sit through the latest Pirates of the Caribbean picture — and I guarantee you’ll have a much better evening.
Related:
Once were films, Darkness visible, Stoli Bar and Restaurant, More 
- Once were films
The riveting young Barbara Stanwyck is an embodiment of that blessedly uncorseted but sadly brief era just before Hollywood was battened down by the self-censoring Hays (Production) Code in 1934.
- Darkness visible
Welcome to the dark territories again, the republic of bitterness and bile known as noir.
- Stoli Bar and Restaurant
In some ways the owners of Stoli are wonderfully naïve about American culture; in others, wonderfully sophisticated and knowing.
- Straight outta Kafka
We want to get into the shower and not emerge until November 2008.
- Dark passage
The Production Code, Hollywood's notorious self-censorship program, was instituted by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in 1930, but it didn't go into effect till 1934, when it was administered by Joseph I. Breen.
- Devine DVDs
Sure, we all know Get Smart! is out on DVD in time for the holidays, and the Superman films (all of them, going back to 1948), and Mission Impossible: The Ultimate Missions Collection , sure, sure, as if you could miss the bleating sirens of studio publicity.
- Golden anniversary
Happy 50th anniversary to the San Francisco Film Festival.
- The Shaggy Dog
Dave Douglas (Tim Allen, who as the Santa Clause series attests is adept at these family shape-shifting comedies) is an LA deputy DA prosecuting an animal-rights activist for setting fire to a biotech company’s lab.
- The Russians are coming
With one exception, the eight movies in the nifty “Cold War Cinema” series at the Harvard Film Archive are popular entertainments that treat the politics and sociology of the era in a variety of ways.
- Major and minor Billy
Billy Wilder’s expansive career began in Germany at the end of the ’20s, continued briefly in Paris when he fled Hitler in 1933, and picked up in Hollywood the following year.
- Perversion, introversion
Slavoj Zizek, the fuzzy-bearded Slovenian philosopher, seems a fun guy.
- Less
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Features
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, Entertainment, Movies, Paul Stewart, Movie Reviews, Simple Plan, John Alton, Kim Novak, Anne Bancroft, John Garfield, Bill Paxton, Less
