Popular films
included:
Anchors Aweigh starring Frank
Sinatra
and Gene Kelly
The Bells of St.
Mary’s
starring Bing Crosby
and Ingrid Bergman
The Lost Weekend starring Ray
Milland and
Jane Wyman
Mildred Pierce starring Joan
Crawford
Spellbound
starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman
The Story of G.I.
Joe
starring Burgess Meredith
A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn
directed by
Elia Kazan
The Woman
in the Window directed by Fritz
Lang.
Fiction included: Nancy Bruff’s The Manatee, T.B.
Costain’s The Black Rose, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up,
Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, Sinclair Lewis’s Cass
Timberlane, John P. Marquand’s Repent in Haste, George
Orwell’s Animal Farm, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row,
Irving Stone’s The Immortal Wife, James Ramsey Ullman’s The
White Tower, Jessamyn West’s The Friendly Persuasion, and
Richard Wright’s Black Boy.
Popular songs included: “All That Glitters is Not Gold” by Dinah
Shore, “Beulah’s Boogie” by Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra, “Choo
Choo
Ch’Boogie” by Louis Jordan and his Typanny Five, “The Gypsy” by The Ink
Spots, “Her Bathing Suit Never Got Wet” by the Andrews Sisters,
“Homesick,
That’s All” by Frank Sinatra, “I’ll Be Back” by Gene Autry, “I’m Tired”
by
Private Cecil Grant, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” by Vaughn
Monroe
and his Orchestra, “Till the End of Time” by Perry Como and “Waitin’
for
the Train to Come In” by Peggy Lee.
Hans Laube, a
Swiss inventor, created “Smellovision,” which was a smell
pack triggered by television waves to accompany television shows
featuring that scent. Years later filmmaker John Waters would try
to revive the fad with his film, “Polyester.”
Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson recorded ``Move On Up a Little Higher.”
March 31: Tennessee Williams’s The
Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway.
April 12: President
Roosevelt died
at the “little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia and Vice-president
Harry S Truman became the thrity-third president.
May 21: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren
Bacall married in Mansfield, Ohio.
August: Gasoline rationing ended.
August 6: The U.S. military dropped
a bomb with a photo of Rita Hayworth on the Bikini Islands, and four
days
later a bathing suit was named after the islands.