"Carmen Jones" (1954)

In the early 1940's Oscar Hammerstein took Bizet's celebrated opera "Carmen" and adapted it for the Broadway stage, shifting it to modern times and using an all black cast. It took Hollywood over a decade to bring it to the screen. This is a faithful, Technicolor version. While it's great to see a bigscreen "A" picture about people of color, especially considering when it was released, Hammerstein's lyrics are a tad icky, using a white man's take on black patois, songs like "Dat's Love", "Dere's a Café on the Corner", "De Cards Don' Lie", etc. That aside, there's no denying the power of those timeless tunes. What's better is the grand larceny Dorothy Dandridge gets away with here. She steals the entire movie, as she rightly should in one of the great femme fatale roles of all time. Carmen is sexy, flirty, wily, opportunistic, and downright mean, sometimes all at once. But Dandridge, seductively decked out in tight skirts, peasant blouses, and gypsy hoop earrings, is such a refreshing one-eighty from all those servant roles we had seen black women playing for decades, you can't help but be captivated. No wonder her love interest, here played by an earnest, if slightly bland, Harry Belafonte, falls for her heavily. What a tragedy that this gifted actress went on to so few other starring parts (and a too early demise). Other standouts: a dynamic Pearl Bailey in the second female lead as Carmen's best friend, belting out a big band number along with a young Diahann Carroll as her cohort. And if you're a fan of great title sequences,  this is the first of many by the groundbreaking Saul Bass, it's graphic, simple, and elegant.

"Battleground" (1949)

By the end of the 1940's it seemed the country was world weary of World War II movies. But this story of one squadron during the Battle of the Bulge, based on the real 101st Airborne Division, was a huge success. It was probably because it eschewed the rah-rah boosterism of all the films made during the war, the ones that tried, successfully, to show why we were fighting and gosh-darn-it that we could win. A new spin on the war picture was needed. So director William Wellman and Oscar winner for Best Screenplay, Robert Pirosh, instead chose to depict the daily soul-sapping grind of the lives of the soldiers. The inedible food, the sleepless nights, the fierce cold and frostbite (it takes place in the harsh winter of 1944-45 in the French countryside), and the psychological toll of knowing you could die any moment, are all vividly brought to life by an all-star cast of great actors. Van Johnson, John Hodiak, Ricardo Montalban, James Whitmore, Leon Ames, Richard Jaeckel, all get moments to shine. Yes, there's still a bit of the cliché melting pot idea here that was so prevalent in many WWII flicks, you know, all the American archetypes pulling together to vanquish The Evil Enemy, but here it doesn't seem forced. The film has a nice documentary feel too as it follows the men on their grueling cross country trek. It helps that some actual footage of the battle is interspersed to nice effect.

"The Snake Pit" (1948)

Olivia de Havilland goes for broke in her Oscar nominated performance as a beleaguered woman suffering a nervous breakdown and enduring lockup in a mental hospital. It probably can't be stated how shocking this picture's inside look at life in a looney bin must have been for audiences of that time. Given this was a Hollywood depiction, it was probably sanitized somewhat, but it's still a disturbing peek into the daily hell of being surrounded with crying, screeching, gibbering, unpredictable patients. De Havilland eschews any pretense of looking like a star here, stripped of makeup, frowzy and disheveled, she does a fine job of showing us a personality disorder where everyday is lived on the knife edge between normalcy and insanity. If the therapy and 'solution' to her psychological problem are a little too pat (she's helped by a kindhearted doctor, Leo Genn), chalk that up to the film being a primer on mental help therapies for the uninitiated viewer. Director Anatole Litvak does an admirable job of juggling the soap opera and horror elements, bringing it all home to a satisfying note of closure and heart.