The years immediately after World War Two did not turn on a dime into the long decade of postwar prosperity in America and the West. There were labour problems, political battles, the problem of turning soldiers back into civilians and a war economy back into a peacetime one. And there was the vast social unease and trauma after a war that confirmed that we were capable of anything, including the worst things imaginable. My previous Christmas movie columns have been romances alternating with comedy or drama – pictures like Holiday Affair (1949) and Remember the Night (1940), where the holidays...