Bogie doing noir. Chaplin doing satire. Screwball comedies being screwy. No wonder the picturehouses of the 1940’s were packed.
The ‘40s in film are exactly what you think they were: Casablanca, Citizen Kane, It’s A Wonderful Life. But they were also about Disney getting freaky, avant-garde shorts getting spooky, Alec Guinness playing eight parts in one movie, and a pair of British directors doing whatever the heaven and hell they wanted with cinema, making magic in the process.
Here’s our starter list of 20 of the greatest films of the 1940s…
The Great Dictator (1940)
Best watched as the culmination, rather than the start, of a Charlie Chaplin marathon, The Great Dictator is written by, directed by, and stars, in a double role, the Tramp himself. This was Chaplin’s first real all-sound picture, and boy, he didn’t waste the opportunity: the film takes aim at Hitler and Mussolini, sorry... Adenoid Hynkel, “our fooey”, dictator of Tomainia and his fascist friend Napolini of Bacteria.
Yes, he’s making fun of stormtroopers and the rest *in 1940*, hence its initial ban in countries including Germany, Spain, Ireland and parts of South America.
Chaplin plays both Hynkel and a Jewish barber, who returns to his shop in the middle of the tyrannical regime, after years of amnesia from WWI. If that sounds like homework, it isn’t.
The perfect blend of slapstick and satire, there’s a globe ballet, a barber ballet (which inspired the Bugs Bunny short) and a food fight for the ages. You just cannot top Charlie Chaplin trying to tear spaghetti lengthways.
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Now, we could have picked the terrific 1940s noirs The Big Sleep or Carol Reed’s The Third Man, which each have their own highlights, whether it’s Bogie and Bacall or a legendary cuckoo clock speech. But John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon takes the crown. Humphrey Bogart’s detective Sam Spade is set on a MacGuffin hunt around San Francisco after his partner Miles gets killed on a job.
With Mary Astor as the femme fatale and shady characters with names like Joel Cairo and the ‘Fat Man’ hinting at other lives lived in Istanbul and Hong Kong, Huston keeps us guessing. Spade is as inscrutable to us as he is to the rest of the wild, unpredictable players, with red herrings surrounding his character and motives and (spoiler alert for a 80-odd-year-old movie) just when you get wrapped up in the black bird statue stuff with the rest of them, you realise Spade’s been solving the murder of his friend all along. Impressive, clever, entertaining film-making.
His Girl Friday (1940)
![His Girl Friday | Original Trailer [HD] | Coolidge Corner Theatre - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/0GYX46Bs1_8/maxresdefault.jpg)
There is about a five minute stretch of His Girl Friday, about two thirds of the way through, which might just be the highest heights film dialogue has ever reached. Cary Grant’s newspaper editor Walter Burns is trying to convince his ex-wife and reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) to ditch getting married to some poor sap and write him a front-page exclusive on the criminal they’ve temporarily kidnapped instead.
Howard Hawks’ screwball rom-com has the sharpest and wittiest flirting of the bunch, all while throwing corruption scandals, goofy officials and a moving jail-cell interview into the mix. The rest of the hacks are a great hang too. Tarantino namechecks HGF as an inspiration for his rapid-fire Pulp Fiction script, and it shows.
Casablanca (1942)
Once you’ve seen Kate McKinnon’s SNL spoof of Casablanca’s final air strip scene, it’s ve-ery difficult to get her out of your head for your next rewatch of Michael Curtiz’s classic. But put her to one side, you mus,t because the ‘classic’ category was made for genuinely timeless movies like this one.
Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, a kiss is just a kiss, of all the gin joints in all the world, here’s looking, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow… Alongside the immortal lines stacked on top of immortal lines, scenes like the rendition of the Marseillaise in Rick’s nightclub are still incredibly forceful. Play it again (Sam).
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
“You’re life and I’m leaving you”, says David Niven’s RAF fighter pilot Peter Carter to his American military radio crush, June, as he thinks he’s going down. Only he’s not leaving her because Conductor 71, of the upstairs Other World, has made a celestial error in this peerless Powell & Pressburger high fantasy. Carter ultimately takes his case - of falling in love after he should have died - to trial.
A Matter of Life and Death deftly used the clerks and bureaucracy and hierarchies and systems to ground its depiction of heaven, decades before Pixar’s animators were even born. (Soul is a good modern counterpart).
Otherwise, everything here is supremely playful, from the literal stairway to heaven and the switching between Technicolor (earth) and black-and-white (the Other World), to the ping-pong camera shots and the now much-copied, mid-gesture pauses of mere mortals while the ‘gods’ and the dead stand around and chat outside of time. This is a film about war, love, law, medicine and, what you might not expect from the premise, the English as a people and a country. Importantly, Michael Sheen’s favourite film.
Rope (1948)
Alfred Hitchcock moved to Hollywood in 1939 and signed a seven-year contract with producer David O. Selznick, the man who had coaxed him over the Atlantic. He then spent his 1940s making films like Suspicion, Notorious, his version of Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt and this one, Rope, a weird, little slice of suspense that clocks in at under the 90-minute mark.
Based on a play and taking place in real time over the course of one evening, it opens on Brandon and Phillip, two preppy sorts who have just strangled their friend David and hidden him in a wooden chest. Even more unhinged, they’ve invited David’s family to a party that night, plus David’s girlfriend and their old housemaster Rupert Cadell (Jimmy Stewart), the only man who might figure out or even maybe understand the murder.
With stylish production, uncharacteristically long takes, queer undertones and rather a lot of high-brow philosophy, it’s more than just a quirk in the master’s oeuvre.
Fantasia (1940)
The pioneering film that nearly sank Disney as a studio and the logical conclusion to all those ‘Silly Symphonies’, Fantasia stands alone in the House of Mouse back catalogue. It kicked off Walt’s 1940s, which would also see Disney release Dumbo, Pinocchio and Bambi.
Fantasia, meanwhile, is ambitious and strange and allergic to something as boring as a linear plot, all while elevating animation to the level of classical music. So much so that we'd be careful what age you introduce this phantasmagoria to young kids.
Sure, it has Mickey, dinosaurs and Stravinsky, three of their favourite things, but all those horns and shadows do get mighty creepy at times. That said, the flowers twirling between bubbles to the Nutcracker suite are pretty enough for all. Pure magic.
To Be or Not To Be (1942)
Ernst Lubitsch’s black comedy would make an excellent double feature with either The Great Dictator (above) or Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, which owes a considerable debt to this genius 1942 flick.
Carole Lombard and Jack Benny play Maria and Joseph Tura, two famous actors who are putting on Shakespeare with their troupe when they all get mixed up in international espionage and the Polish resistance in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, to very funny effect.
The way Lubitsch moves, and doesn’t move, the camera is just exquisite. The subject matter, and its farcical treatment, split critics in the early ‘40s as you’d expect but To Be or Not To Be is now rightfully lauded for its comedy heroics. Even Slavoj Žižek is a fan.
Late Spring (1949)
While not quite as devastating or famous as Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story - which features in our 1950s films edit - Late Spring is up there as a quietly perfect film. The first instalment in the ‘Noriko trilogy’, with Early Summer following in 1951 and Tokyo Story finishing us all off in 1953, Late Spring sees Chishū Ryū (the sweetest face in Japanese cinema) and Setsuko Hara play father and daughter.
Shukichi is persuaded that his daughter should marry and, being twenty-seven, the sooner the better. As Noriko comes to realise that she can’t just stay and look after her father, Ozu gives her turn towards acceptance all the time she needs to accept, with a bittersweet, melancholy strain running through every plea and gesture. The ‘last’ trip to Kyoto, the wedding day itself and the coda with Shukichi alone in a bar are all sublime.
Cat People (1942)
Catwoman first appeared as a character named ‘The Cat’ in DC Comics at the turn of the ‘40s, but the cursed folktale feline of Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 horror is a fairly distant relation, if that. In his stylish, creepy Cat People for the studio RKO, which has a crisp 73-minute runtime, we meet Serbian fashion illustrator Irin, who is obsessed with a black panther at the zoo in Central Park.
She bumps into an engineer named Oliver Reed there, and things get supernatural pretty quickly. The modern-feeling jump scares and psychological profiling are cut through with moody monochrome and the B-movie drama of skipping between city streetlights at night or swimming in the pitch-black in the basement. Remade by Paul Schrader in the ‘80s.
The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
![The Lady from Shanghai (1947) Original Trailer [FHD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/C_FTmZ0Y_hw/maxresdefault.jpg)
No matter how many times we see it, the final five minutes of this Orson Welles flick seem to compel me to hold my breath and just stare until it’s over. Every time. Just Welles, a blonde Rita Hayworth and Everett Sloane, a cane, a couple of guns and a funhouse hall of mirrors.
With homages in John Wick, Enter The Dragon, and The Simpsons, you’ve seen this sequence even if you haven’t actually seen it. The legend goes that Welles pitched this project to Columbia without ever having read the book it’s based on, just to get the money for the costumes for another movie.
The other 1 hour 27 minutes of this film noir have enough memorable scenes - in a courtroom where Sloane’s Arthur Bannister is both the witness and the lawyer, a visually arresting Chinese theatre show - and enough nice lines - “maybe I’ll die trying” - to forgive the dodgy Irish accent on Welles’ sailor Michael.
Meshes of The Afternoon (1943)
What is a 14-minute silent film doing on a list with such greats? Once you’ve seen it, you’ll understand. From directors Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hammid, this avant-garde short appears way ahead of its time as it’s insanely influential. It’s David Lynch before David Lynch, for starters, and Meshes’ DNA can be seen in one or two of the movies mentioned here.
Dream logic, poetic repetition, pure dread, alongside what the likes of Welles were doing with Citizen Kane, this was experimental filmmaking when it really mattered. Deren’s later husband, musician Teijo Ito, created a superb score for the short, and there’s some fun, alternate musical interpretations kicking around on the internet if you want to tweak the experience.
The Lady Eve (1941)
The first half of Preston Sturges’ screwball comedy is absolute dynamite. The second half is good too, but it’s the ocean liner hijinks that make The Lady Eve iconic. Barbara Stanwyck, a lady and a gentleman, who, a few years later, became the highest paid actress in Hollywood.
Here she plays Jean Harrington, a card shark - read, conwoman - who, on board an ocean liner, sets her sights on Henry Fonda’s bashful rich guy, who’s just been up the Amazon for a year hunting snakes (get it?) so hasn’t seen many glamorous, monomaniacal women. Uh oh. The chemistry between Stanwyck and Fonda is off the charts, and the pair of them are hilarious, particularly during one famous scene on a chaise longue.
And Charles Coburn is a riot as the ‘Colonel’, Harrington’s co-conspirator. To cap it all off, The Lady Eve is yet another of those ‘40s films with a perfect closing line.
The Red Shoes (1948)
Technicolor alchemy from British directors Powell & Pressburger in The Red Shoes, the film that Martin Scorsese says “plays in my heart”. This is a backstage musical that’s not actually a musical, an existential love triangle of sorts and a reworking of a dark fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Moira Shearer is Victoria Page, a young dancer, and Marius Goring is Julian Kraster, a young composer, both eager to work for Anton Walbrook’s Boris Lermontov and his beyond prestigious ballet company.
What follows, as they set up shop in a theatre in Monte Carlo in order to stage The Red Shoes, is a beautifully realised journey of pain, sacrifice and discipline as Victoria is made to choose between great art on the one side and love and life on the other. The opening night section is in a class of its own, for the precision of the cinematography, the intensity of the dancers, and the flawless execution of the image-making. MOIRA SHEARER FOREVER.
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
A clever caper, delivered with high irony and heaps of panache. This late ‘40s Ealing comedy stars Alec Guinness - that’s Obi-Wan to you - as eight different members of the rich, eccentric D’Ascoyne family, all of whose lives are in peril due to the scheming of Dennis Price’s cast-out Louis. You’ve got to keep your wits about you with Kind Hearts, some of the throwaway lines will hit you minutes, hours or even days later and have you chuckling.
The film does very nicely on repeat watches. No less than Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford were hired to work on the script, but none of their dialogue made the final edit: that’s how cut-throat Roger Hamer’s film is. And it’s tricky to pick between the Guinness performances of a Duke, a banker, an amateur photographer and five more of the family. He almost drowned playing the Admiral, and Agatha the Suffragette’s screen time is short but memorable. His Parson and General are probably the funniest.
Brief Encounter (1945)
Just over halfway between Regency period dramas and yearny Korean Netflix shows, we have David Lean’s pair of buttoned-up Brits who fall in love at a train station in Brief Encounter.
The catch? They’re both married. With a subtext-strewn Noel Coward screenplay and Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson’s repressed-to-the-starched-collars performances, this is an emotional affair to remember. The stakes are high, the society is pure surveillance, and the suburban malaise feels very, very real. Lean, who also took on Dickens’ Great Expectations in the ‘40s, here proves that less is more.
Citizen Kane (1941)
This is a film so towering in its ambition, its status and its impact on the grammar of film that it turns even the most hardened, most opinionated Letterboxd users to jelly, making them go all coy or ironic or meta in the face of it.
For a lot of the 20th century, Citizen Kane was considered the best film ever made; in recent years, it’s lost that perch to films like Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. Orson Welles - co-writer, director, star - is impish and brutish and sad-sack as newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane, a character based on William Randolph Hearst. (David Fincher’s Netflix film Mank is excellent on the origins of the story.)
The narrative is framed by reporter Jerry Thompson trying to find out the meaning of Kane’s last word, ‘Rosebud’, after his death, by interviewing his friends and ex-wife and visiting his monumental home, Xanadu, with flashbacks to show us how precisely Kane “got everything he wanted and then lost it”.
Welles, who was 25 at the time, and his cinematographer Gregg Toland, used every technical trick in the book, from radio, from theatre and from early film, plus they made up a bunch of new ones. Welles has said that Kane is so innovative because they didn’t know what they weren’t supposed to do with the camera: deep focus, low angles, dissolving transitions, overlapping dialogue. And honestly, maybe it’s the monochrome, maybe it’s the performances, but some of the ageing needed to tell this story looks better than most modern films.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)
This Frank Capra title is a real Marmite film, but if you think of it as just a twee, preachy Christmas black-and-white movie, then you haven’t sat down to watch It’s A Wonderful Life all the way through in a while.
Loosely based on the story of A Christmas Carol, our everyman is Jimmy Stewart, here playing businessman and Bedford Falls family man George Bailey. Clarence (Henry Travers) shows George an alternate timeline where he never existed - it’s one big, nightmare-ish ick, things have not gone well - before George comes to, you know, appreciate what he’s got and such. But the main thrust of Clarence’s message - “remember, no man is a failure who has friends” is actually a top-tier cinematic lesson.
Bicycle Thieves (1948)
Permit me to turn film-school-bro for just a second, but Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves - also known as The Bicycle Thief - is a landmark of realism in Italian cinema, and all cinema for that matter, influencing lots of documentaries and independent films over the years.
Taking cues from Roberto Rossellini’s earlier Rome, Open City in 1945, de Sica set out to show the post-war poverty and living conditions of normal, everyday people, while shooting them in such a way as to keep their dignity. It was shot on location in Rome and using untrained, non-professional actors, some of whom were performing similar roles, jobs and hustles on film to their own.
Now, decades later, you might need to settle into it, but when you do, it still feels direct and generous and vital. Bicycle Thieves was named the greatest film of all time in the first-ever edition of Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade poll of film critics in 1952 and it’s rightly kept its place in the canon ever since.
Double Indemnity (1944)
Director Billy Wilder, while trying to convince Barbara Stanwyck to play this part, apparently asked her, “Well, are you a mouse or an actress?” She signed on. The story is based on a James Cain novella, with a script co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, who makes a rare on-screen cameo here. An insurance man meets a woman.
A woman convinces an insurance man to kill her husband for the money, that sort of thing. It’s a neat inside-man twist on the usual detective noir with Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes, the clever insurance boss who could figure out Walter Neff’s meticulously plotted train murder. The striking, German expressionist-coded use of light and shadow in the shots of Phyllis Dietrichson’s LA home and Neff’s apartment is a cut above your usual noir. And the framing of the whole sordid story, via Neff’s dictated confession, as he slowly bleeds out in his office, is a master stroke.
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