[Hayden]

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

dead hoofer's eying the hoi-palloi,
dolls, dishes, dreamboats,
no, can't cut a rug,
the moxie, no
can't cut a rug—

runs out of gas,
whistling dixie,
as the mob counts clams,
a buzz from swigging sidecar,
running out of gas, tipsy,
no, can't cut a rug—

shincracker, dizzy,
mad to watch limbs dance,
as smoke wisps beyond means,
and the bird gives you a glance—
but, no, can't cut a rug—

jitterbug—
(jitterbug)—

knowing dreams are only til
the credits roll black—






The gist/ rules:

BEA composes a list of our 100 favourite films of the 1940s. (Again! V2!). All lists will be PMed to me or posted in this thread, maxing out at 100. The final list will be 100 films. I'll be accepting lists of any denotation up to 100. The size of your list determines its weight. Films must be longer than 30 minutes. Films must have an international premiere date between January 1st 1940 and December 31st 1949. Documentaries are allowed.

The Original list

Lists will also be accepted in IMDb and Letterboxd format. Deadline will be February 15th 2026.

🥳
_________________
Doubles & Conch

[Hayden]

I encourage the posting/sharing of publicly available films from the 40s 😄 —

If you've ever wanted to watch the following, but haven't—

Brief Encounter
A Matter of Life & Death
Spellbound

Archive.org also has a fair slew of harder to find films.

I look forward to everyone's recs 😎
_________________
Doubles & Conch

[Hayden]

My personal 40s list only has 50 entries, but I'm hoping to expand it to 70-75 by the deadline. My watchlist for the poll—

—The Grapes of Wrath
—Red River
—Kind Hearts and Coronets
—The Philadelphia Story
—Record of a Tenement Gentleman
—One Wonderful Sunday
—I Walked with a Zombie
_________________
Doubles & Conch

[CA Dreamin]

Back when we did our 1980s Version 2 project, cestuneblague broke down that decade into three distinct parts. I'm gonna do the same here with the 1940s, although breaking down this decade into three parts is pretty darn simple...Pre-War, War, and Post-War.

Pre-War - Cinema at the start of the 1940s was, predictably, much like the late-30s. Overall, the tone of most movies was upbeat and light-hearted. Popular genres that carried on from the previous decade included musicals (Strike Up the Band, Broadway Melody), screwball comedies (The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday), adventure (The Thief of Baghdad, The Sea Hawk), and westerns (Boom Town, Northwest Passage). All these films were from 1940, but you wouldn't think from watching them that the world was descending into the largest conflict in human history. Of course, it's not as though audiences were oblivious to world events at the time, but it makes total sense that they wanted escapism, the same type of escapism they received a few years earlier before the threat of war was on anyone's mind. However, there was no escaping World War II. Sooner or later, it would directly or indirectly affect nearly everyone on the planet. Cinema would play a vital role in the war.

Wartime - For one, movie theaters were a source of information and updates from the front-lines, through documentaries and newsreels. Movies were also tasked with shaping public opinion, propaganda if you will. Every country who was fighting the war and had an active film industry, was expressing their country's patriotism and cultural values through cinema. Many times, that would also come with villainizing the other side. There was certainly censorship, too. Movies that were critical of the war and government were not allowed. There was also a noticeable shift in which genres were prevalent on the screen. Screwball comedies, musicals, and westerns were still made during the war, but they were definitely scaled back in numbers to make room for other genres, such as documentaries, espionage thrillers, and war. Yup, they were making movies about WWII while it was happening. And even in genre films that weren't directly war-related, there were subtle references everywhere. And unsubtle references...Buy war bonds!

Post-War - The war pulled down the curtains, and opened people's eyes to the fact the humanity and the world could be (and was) extremely cruel. Even as the war was winding down, you could see cinema was heading in a bleaker, more cynical direction that would become standardized in the late-40s. There were the first "problem pictures", movies that addressed societal problems that were never depicted in film before. Examples include alcoholism (Lost Weekend, 1945), racism (Home of the Brave, 1949), war profiteering (All My Sons, 1948), mental illness (The Snake Pit, 1948), political corruption (All the King's Men, 1949), antisemitism (The Gentlemen's Agreement, 1947), etc. There was also film noir, which was not a genre, but rather a style and tone. Low-key lighting, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, and story-lines/characters defined by pessimism and paranoia. Noir was used in the crime genre, that made a comeback and at its most popular since the early-1930s outlaw era (which coincided with The Great Depression, but that's a topic for the 1930s Version 2 thread). But the crime genre within film noir studied how ordinary people could be swayed to crime. Film noir style was also used in mysteries and thrillers. Even westerns and comedies were darker in tone than their pre-war counterparts. They may not have looked like a noir, but the noir influence in mood was still present. While all this was going on, countries whose film industries went dormant during the war, or were destroyed by it, had to start over from the beginning, and this led to a burst in creativity. France, Japan, Italy are the most easily-recognizable examples. Italy led the way with the Neorealist Movement, which was heavily influential in world cinema. Japan got out of its war-time propaganda mode, and delivered some great films in the late-40s. French cinema, too, saw a resurgence after German occupation ended.

What I find really fascinating is that nearly every prominent director you can think of who was active throughout the 1940s went through all three of these phases with their film output. I'll most more on that later.

Anyway, enjoy Kind Hearts and Coronets, Hayden!

[Brigand99]

This started already? I think I have a list but I have to check it first to see if it's any good.

[Brigand99]

I only got 90 for now, but I'll get 10 more when you guys post your lists and I watch some of those.

https://letterboxd.com/pascal58/list/best-of-the-1940s/detail/

[BozoTyrannus]

1. Late Spring
2. Spring in a Small Town
3. Bicycle Thieves
4. Citizen Kane
5. Children of Paradise
6. The Magnificent Ambersons
7. Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau)
8. Arsenic and Old Lace
9. The Great Dictator
10. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
11. The Third Man
12. Notorious
13. Day of Wrath (weirdly enough, this is the only Dreyer film I like, but boy do I love it)
14. The Ox-Bow Incident
15. The Red Shoes
16. Macbeth
17. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
18. Laura
19. Black Narcissus
20. Best Years of Our Lives
21. Letter From an Unknown Woman
22. Rope
23. Since You Went Away
24. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
25. Casablanca
26. Ossessione
27. It's a Wonderful Life
28. Journey Into Fear
29. The Lost Weekend
30. Neecha Nagar
31. The Bank Dick
32. Kind Hearts and Coronets
33. A Letter to Three Wives
34. Pride and Prejudice
35. Shadow of the Thin Man
36. All the King's Men
37. High Sierra
38. Red River
39. Shoeshine
40. The Stranger
41. The Sea Hawk
42. Hamlet
43. Monsieur Verdoux
44. How Green Was My Valley
45. Spellbound
46. Lady From Shanghai
47. Adam's Rib
48. Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
49. Song of the Thin Man
50. Rebecca
51. Suspicion
52. Phantom of the Opera
53. His Girl Friday
54. Ivan the Terrible Part II
55. The Thin Man Goes Home
56. Philadelphia Story
57. Drunken Angel
58. I Know Where I'm Going!
59. Maltese Falcon
60. Ivan the Terrible Part I
61. A Matter of Life and Death
62. Out of the Past
63. White Heat
64. The Grapes of Wrath
65. Now, Voyager
66. Woman of the Year
67. Gaslight
68. Lifeboat
69. Henry V
70. Brief Encounter
71. The Big Sleep
72. Thief of Bagdad
73. Moontide
74. A Day in the Country (some sources list 1936, some 1946, some 1950)
75. My Darling Clementine
76. Double Indemnity
77. Shadow of Doubt
78. Stray Dog
79. Mildred Pierce
80. A Canterbury Tale
81. Leave Her to Heaven
82. La Terra Trema
83. Ziegfeld Follies
84. Duel in the Sun
85. Brighton Rock
86. To Have and Have Not
87. Jane Eyre
88. None But the Lonely Heart
89. The Mark of Zorro
90. The Blue Dahlia
91. Make Mine Music
92. The Postman Always Rings Twice
93. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
94. The Lodger
95. Kiss of Death
96. The Little Foxes
97. Gilda
98. Anna Karenina
99. Pinocchio
100. Naked City

I have some backups in case any of these (like A Day in the Country) are ineligible for whatever reason.
Also, tragic that Meshes of the Afternoon is too short to be included, but so it goes.
_________________
I wanna take Sean Penn
And take Sean Bean
Put 'em in a blender
And make Sean Pean

[Brigand99]

Ok, just by looking at The Original List I found some that I had forgotten, so I've got 100 now.

https://letterboxd.com/pascal58/list/best-of-the-1940s/

[Repo]

[Bach]

My Top 50 of the 1940s (it might change before the deadline):

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls591142107
_________________
"De gustibus non disputandum est"