Nineteen Forty-Nine was a great year for movies, one that earned the ad of a decade later that “movies were better than ever”. Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” won the Best Oscar, the awards trying to believe that the most quality movies were also the most popular, but the year also included the musical “On the Town”, a blockbuster musical by the young people of Comden and Green and Leonard Bernstein, “Pinkie”, a movie about a mulatto girl trying to live in the South that showed some of the sorrows of segregation, “The Treasure of Sierra Madre”, which was a story as tightly drawn as a Chaucer story, and even the awful “My Friend Irma” remarkable only because it introduced Martin and Lewis, who stole the show with Martin’s suave deliveries, including his signature ability to caress the microphone, and Jerry Lewis, who was not so much imitating a cripple as much as imitating a nerd before there was such a term. It seems that the movies had moved on beyond World War II to pick up the new issues of the post-war world, such as suburbanization in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” which was produced in 1948, and even in the 1949 and wonderfully comic “I Was a Male War Bride”, where the women were seen as independent minded and responsible and sensible. Cary Grant was the comic foil to Ann Southern’s straight man, the opposite of Burns and Allen, a duo from the era of the Thirties, where Allen played the ditzie foil. Movies were into social issues, such as the overdrawn “Gentleman’s Agreement”. The weekly movie goer didn’t need to read the papers. Those who tuned into the dream factory had plenty of real issues to chew on. The major studios were at work with socially significent stuff, not just with film noir detective and crime stories that portrayed dark emotions shot mostly at night, such as “The Postman Rings Twice” or “Sorry, Wrong Number”, the genre seeming profound because the protagonists were quirky as well as bad. (But, then again, “Richard III” would qualify as a film noir piece.)