It's a Wonderful Life (December, 1946)

The movie premiered at the Globe Theater in New York Dec. 20, 1946.  The Washington Post has an article about the little girl who played the part of "Zuzu."

"It was just a job. All the kids in my neighborhood went over to the studios, Jimmy and Larry, and Carol and me. We walked over or were taken over by our moms, trying for crowd scenes or other work to make a little money.”

But after her film work ended, she grew up fast. “My mother died when I was 12, and right after my dad died in a car crash. I was 15 and had no family. The court sent me to live with my uncle and aunt in Missouri,” she said.

“They were kind of nutso religious fanatics who didn’t believe in movies, dancing, singing, that kind of thing,” she remembered. “I don’t think they believed in laughing, either.”

Soon she was married with two daughters, then divorced, and the girls’ father died in a hunting accident. Remarried, she had a son and daughter and helped raise her second husband’s three children from a previous marriage. Then her 18-year-old son committed suicide, and her husband died of cancer. She retired to take care of her teenage daughters, two of whom became single parents.

“My life has never been wonderful,” she offered quietly. “Maybe when I was a child, but not after age 15.”

Great Expectations

Valerie Hobson and Jean Simmons in Great Expectations (1946, dir. David Lean)

‘Let me see you play cards with this boy.’
‘With this boy! Why, he is a common labouring-boy!’
I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer - only it seemed so unlikely -
`Well? You can break his heart.’

-- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Photo and text via Old Hollywood.

The Big Sleep (1946)

The Big Sleep is known for its convoluted plot. During filming, allegedly neither the director nor the screenwriters knew whether chauffeur Owen Taylor was murdered or had killed himself. They sent a cable to Chandler, who told a friend in a later letter: "They sent me a wire ... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either"...

The cinematic release of The Big Sleep is regarded as more successful than the pre-release version (see below), although some complain it is confusing and difficult to follow. This may be due in part to the omission of a long conversation between Marlowe and the Los Angeles District Attorney where facts of the case, thus far, are laid out. Yet movie-star aficionados prefer it to the film noir version because they consider the Bogart-Bacall appearances more important than a well-told story...

The Big Sleep was made in the age of Hays Office censorship, and accordingly some of the more risqué elements of the plot were either presented discreetly or done away with altogether. In the novel, the books Geiger profitably rents are pornography, then illegal and associated with organized crime. The photograph of Carmen wearing a "Chinese dress" and sitting in a "Chinese chair" alludes to that.

In the film, Joe Brody is killed by Carol Lundgren who believes he killed Geiger. In the novel, Lundgren is Geiger's homosexual lover, a detail which goes unmentioned in the film.

In the novel, Marlowe finds pornographic photographs of Carmen and later finds her naked in his bed. In the film, the photographs show Carmen was at Geiger's house when he was killed (thus possibly implicating her in his murder). The novel's nude bedroom scene in Marlowe's apartment is altered in the film to a clothed Carmen awaiting him in an armchair.

More at Wikipedia.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious"

Ingrid Bergman (gowns by Edith Head), Cary Grant, Claude Rains. 

The action opens in Miami, Florida, "Three-Twenty, P.M., April the Twenty-Fourth, Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Six..."

The video above is Part 1 of 11, which means you can watch the entire movie on YouTube if you are so inclined.

The Night Before Christmas (1946)

Via Anything and Everything.