You Must Remember These: 1900-1949

1946
''BERT, DO YOU KNOW ME?''
It's a nightmare we usually have in the solitude of 3 a.m., and there it was up on the screen. Jimmy Stewart returned to a hometown that didn't know him because he had never been born. If It's a Wonderful Life was just a failed piece of Christmas candy — as critics felt in 1946 — why is this scene still so harrowing? The favorite film of Stewart and director Frank Capra, the dark Life was out of step with an upbeat postwar mood, so unwanted that its copyright lapsed into the public domain in 1974. That's why every TV station in the country stuck it on its yuletide schedule — and why, 10 years later, it was everybody's favorite film. For good reason: It's one of the few movies to address our deepest fears of failure, and the only one to soothe us by resorting to sweet fantasy.

1947
HONKY-TONK HERO
On Aug. 9, Hank Williams' first single, ''Move It On Over,'' entered the Billboard country-music chart; it rose to No. 4 in three weeks. Listeners were taken by its lurching honky-tonk rhythm, the curt impudence of its lyrics, and the pinched bray of its singer. It launched Williams' intense, brief career as a songwriter-performer — he died less than six years later — but no one before had expressed such wild, dark emotions in country music, and no one since has surpassed him as an artist of thrilling despair.

1949
FUTURE SHOCK
Imagine a world of high-tech eavesdropping. Unsafe sex. Governmental institutions that poke around in the bedrooms of private citizens. Politicians who say ''speedful,'' not ''rapid.'' In 1984, George Orwell did. Forty-three years ago, he was right on time.

1949
ROCK MEETS ROLL
There was Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris' ''Good Rockin' Tonight,'' Joe Lutcher's ''Rockin' Boogie,'' and Wild Bill Moore's ''We're Gonna Rock.'' There was rock around the clock in a series of late-'40s R&B records with rock in the title. But rock didn't mix with roll until early 1949, when Modern Records released a rollicking 78 rpm single — by Wild Bill Moore again — called ''Rock and Roll.'' It was the very first R&B record with those words in the title. It had a backbeat you can use, any old time you choose.

1949
SWAT TEAM
He could give it to her good; she could give it to him right back. They were opposing lawyers, they were equals, and they were crazy enough about each other to fight fair. So when an exasperated Spencer Tracy swatted Katharine Hepburn's regal rump during a back rub in Adam's Rib and she yowled, ''You meant that, didn't you? You really meant that!'' we knew he knew she knew what that swat meant: It meant things were fine, even when things were lousy. A remarkably enlightened lesson in war and peace between the sexes.