The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) Queer Film A-
Monty Wooley delights as the impossibly pompous Sheridan Whiteside in William Keighley’s wonderful adaptation of the Kaufman/Hart play.
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Author: Patrick Browne
Casablanca (1942-1943) Queer Film A+
Written on the fly by the fabulous Epstein twins and Howard Koch and directed by Michael Curtiz, this is one of the most romantic of all Hollywood movies.
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Cat People (1942) Queer Film B+
The finest achievement of producer Val Lewton’s legendary RKO horror cycle, Cat People (1942) occupies a foundational place in queer film history because it mobilizes horror not as spectacle but as a grammar of deviance, repression, and embodied otherness.
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The Seventh Victim (1943) Queer Film D+
Despite a loyal cult following, The Seventh Victim is a pale imitation of Cat People with numerous queer-coded characters, again, courtesy of queer screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen. The plot oscillates between the baroque and the faintly ridiculous, with Tom Conway reprising his role as the psychiatrist Dr. Judd and after a while, you begin to realize that The Seventh Victim is a weird sort of prequel to Cat People.
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Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Hitchcock A+
Alfred Hitchcock, the cinema’s greatest director, made seven perfect films in which every shot, every camera move, every editing sequence is, well, perfect. And this is one of them!
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