Movie Tree--Teresa Wright

If I were accomplished at photo-shopping, this post would be much cooler. Here goes anyway. I have a tendency to track actors and actresses I love from one project to another. I guess this isn't that surprising, other than it has led me to discover certain things in all the wrong directions. Anyway, here is the origins story of my love of the Thin Man, and in a later post, how the same movie also leads to Touch of Evil.


It all begins with Shadow of a Doubt. I watched this in college in a Hitchcock class. It became not only my favorite Hitchcock movie but also one of my all-time favorite movies. Somewhere there is a really good article comparing It's a Wonderful Life and Shadow of a Doubt. The premise is that both explore the dark side of American life and particularly of the small American community. The difference is that Capra has situated it as both outside the family and outside of reality itself. In Shadow of the Doubt, however, the dark side of American life is inseparable from the good. It's in the town--the seedy bar where one of Teresa Wright's classmates works. It's in the family--Uncle Charlie is the dangerous murderer. And finally it's in the protagonist herself--Teresa Wright in the end pushes Uncle Charlie off the train in what might be an accident and what might be self-defense or it just might be murder on her part. It's also the first time I ever noticed or cared about editing, since Hitchcock edited the movie as a romance even though it's a thriller about a serial murderer.


Teresa Wright led to the Best Years of Our Lives, which is also so good. Three vets from three different ranks and three different class backgrounds take the same plane back to their home town. It deals with each of their difficulties integrating back into civilian life, and the difficulties of each of their families in having them back. All three are heartbreaking in their own ways, though the movie ends as sweetly as you can imagine. I'll also say that it's a reminder that having a draft is really the only fair way to do things. Everyone cares about the war, and everyone has something to lose. Which doesn't mean everyone ends up the same after the war, but it's a far cry from the current war where the vast majority of kids serving in the war are underprivileged and the vast majority of people that care about them have a relatively small political voice. At any rate, Teresa Wright's mother was played by Myrna Loy . . .


Which led me to the Thin Man. I had read that there was nothing quite like the banter in the Thin Man, but really there isn't. Myrna Loy and William Powell are so good together, so fun, and so believable. It's hard to pull off a characterization of a relationship anywhere between the beginning or the end, but The Thin Man manages and throws in a mystery for good measure. And that is the history of how I came to love all three films.