In The Year....1941
I swear I picked this year at random
So I have plucked the year 1941 from the old jar full of years, and like it or not we are going to talk all about it. The average cost of a home was $4,075. The most popular names were John and Barbara, which are my parents names, although they were born about a decade later. The most famous actors were Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Jimmy Stewart, Carry Grant and Gary Cooper. The President of The United States was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
1941 was one of the most significant and devastating years in recent history. The United States entered into WW2 following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, as German forces arrived in North Africa, and invaded Russia, Yugoslavia and Greece. Britain’s major cities remain under attack from the Hitler and the Nazis. The gas chambers were horrifically put to use at Auschwitz.
On the bright side, America’s greatest living actor, Nick Nolte was born, and thank god for that. Sure the world was on fire and spinning out of control but can you imagine Lorenzo’s Oil with Gary Busey??!! Don’t even let your minds go there folks, we are already unpacking a lot here. 1941 gives us the first great film noir in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, the sweetest little elephant in Disney’s Dumbo, two of the all time best screwball comedies in Preston Sturgess’ The Lady Eve and Howard Hawks’ Ball Of Fire, and of course, perhaps the most important and influential film of all time, Orson Wells’s, Citizen Kane.
