Gaslight 1944 - A chilling psychological thriller

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IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: George Cukor
Main Cast: Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, Angela Lansbury

"With three very talented stars (Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten) at the peak of their popularity, 1944's Gaslight is another wonderful, must-see addition to the Cukor filmography. It is a multi-leveled, ceaselessly entertaining film that stands the test of time. Based on Patrick Hamilton's play Angel Street, the script plumbs such ripe topics as manipulation, compulsion, madness and marital relations. Bergman deservedly won an Academy Award for her role as the 'insane' wife who trusts her husband, even if it means she may be going insane; she holds the story together with one of her most impressive performances. It's a difficult character to make believable, but the actress brings such a tethered vulnerability to the part that it gives the film an air of truth and sadness. Gaslight was nominated for seven Oscars - including one for Angela Lansbury's first film role - but Bergman's was the only victory." - www.allmovie.com

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The miracle of Morgan's creek 1944 - One of the best comedies of all time

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Preston Sturges
Main Cast: Eddie Bracken, Betty Hutton, Diana Lynn, William Demarest, Brian Donlevy, Akim Tamiroff

"In 1944, with the restrictive Hays Code very much in effect, the mere fact that Preston Sturges was allowed to make The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was remarkable in itself. After all, a comedy about a girl who gets drunk at a party with a bunch of soldiers and wakes up the next morning hung over and pregnant, with no memory of who the guilty party might be (except that his name sounded like 'Ratzywatzy'), hardly conformed to Hollywood's ideal of womanly virtue. But while the film's audacious content was out of the ordinary in its day, its lasting importance comes from the fact that it's a very, very funny movie. Sturges' superb ear for dialogue is in evidence throughout, as is his knack for bringing out the best in his cast: Betty Hutton gives the best and funniest performance of her career, while Eddie Bracken's work is rivaled only by his turn in Sturges' other 1944 masterpiece, Hail the Conquering Hero. If the premise seemed daring, Sturges gleefully heaped absurdity after absurdity upon it, to the point where even Norval and Trudy are barely able to keep track of their own hare-brained scheme to retain Trudy's good name (as well as that of Mr. Ratzywatzy, wherever he is). While the movie can be accused of playing Trudy's unwed pregnancy for laughs, she certainly seems painfully aware of the gravity of her situation, no matter how funny the circumstances it puts her through. And the scene between Trudy and Norval shortly after she's given birth is sweet and unexpectedly moving, as, after a genial assault on propriety, we're reminded in all sincerity of the simple power of love between two people. In Sturges' best movies, people do ridiculous things but somehow land on their feet; his characters rarely fell farther, or landed with more unexpected aplomb, than in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek." - www.allmovie.com

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To have and have not 1944 - A classic war time action-romance in the shadows of Casablanca

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Howard Hawks
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Walter Brennan, Dolores Moran, Hoagy Carmichael

"A masterful blend of comedy, romance, and action, Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not is filled with the director's signature situations and relationships. The characters could have been lifted from any one of a number of Hawks films: a strong, stoic hero (Humphrey Bogart), a clueless sidekick (Hawks regular Walter Brennan), and a bold, sexually-charged heroine (Lauren Bacall, in her screen debut). A few scenes even recur in the director's other films, such as the classic, post-kiss line, 'It's even better when you help'. Jules Furthman and William Faulkner loosely adapted the screenplay from an Ernest Hemingway novel; though the setting of To Have is the Caribbean, the characters and Bogart's unselfish transformation is clearly reminiscent of 1942's Casablanca. Hawks would exploit the tremendous chemistry between Bogart and Bacall again in his next film, 1946's The Big Sleep.
The film's enduring popularity is primarily - if not solely - due to the sexy chemistry between Bogart and Bacall, especially in the legendary 'You know how to whistle, don't you?' scene. The most salutary result of To Have & Have Not was the subsequent Bogart-Bacall marriage, which endured until his death in 1957. For the record, a more faithful-to-the-source cinemadaptation of the Hemingway original was filmed in 1950 as The Breaking Point." - www.allmovie.com

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Laura 1944 - An elegantly crafted classic film noir

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IMDB rating: 8,2

Director: Otto Preminger
Main Cast: Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson

"This adaptation of Vera Caspary's suspense novel was begun by director Rouben Mamoulien and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, but thanks to a complex series of backstage intrigues and hostilities, the film was ultimately credited to director Otto Preminger and cameraman Joseph LaShelle. Preminger's low-key approach to a story of lethal obsession allows the suggestions of sexual deviance emanating from Clifton Webb's epicene critic Lydecker, Dana Andrews's cynical yet besotted necrophiliac cop, and the pragmatic Vincent Price-Judith Anderson couple to permeate the seductively cool atmosphere. David Raksin's famously bewitching theme invokes titular mysterious beauty Gene Tierney, but it is questionable if the real woman can measure up to the power of portraiture and Lydecker's memory. 'Proper' love may triumph but it is a compromised victory. One of the most popular suspense films of the 1940s, Laura earned Oscar nominations for Best Director, Supporting Actor for Webb, Interior (now Art) Direction, and the sharp screenplay, winning the prize for Joseph LaShelle's black and white cinematography. Released the same year as Billy Wilder's caustic noir Double Indemnity, Laura was another intimation of the wave of cinematic darkness that would crest post-World War II." - www.allmovie.com

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Double indemnity 1944 - The definitive American film noir

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IMDB rating: 8,5

Director: Billy Wilder
Main Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred McMurray, Edward G. Robinson

"Directed by Billy Wilder and adapted from a James M. Cain novel by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity represents the high-water mark of 1940s film noir urban crime dramas in which a greedy, weak man is seduced and trapped by a cold, evil woman amidst the dark shadows and Expressionist lighting of modern cities. The idiosyncratically attractive Stanwyck, generally thought of as pretty but hardly a bombshell, was rarely as sexy as she was as Phyllis Dietrichson, and never as sleazy; Phyllis knows how to use her allure to twist men around her little finger, and from the moment Walter Neff lays eyes on her, he's taken a sharp turn down the Wrong Path, as Phyllis oozes erotic attraction at its least wholesome. While MacMurray was best known as a 'nice guy' leading man (an image that stuck with him to the end of his career), he was capable of much more, and he gave perhaps the finest performance of his life as Walter Neff, a sharp-talking wise guy who loses himself to weak, murderous corruption when he finds his Achilles Heel in the brassy blonde Phyllis. (MacMurray's only role that rivalled it was as the heartless Mr. Sheldrake in The Apartment, also directed by Wilder.) And, while they followed the Hays Code to the letter, Wilder and Chandler packed this story with seething sexual tension; Neff's morbid fascination with Phyllis's ankle bracelet is as brazenly fetishistic as 1940s filmmaking got. Double Indemnity was not a film designed to make evil seem attractive - but it's sure a lot of fun to watch. Double Indemnity ranks with the classics of mainstream Hollywood movie-making." - www.allmovie.com

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Heaven can wait 1943 - A charming nostalgic comedy from Lubitsch

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IMDB rating: 7,6

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Main Cast: Gene Tierney, Don Ameche, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Laird Cregar, Spring Byington, Allyn Joslyn, Eugene Pallette, Signe Hasso, Louis Calhern

"Based on Birthdays, a play by Laslo Bus-Fekete, Heaven Can Wait was Ernst Lubitsch's last great movie. The enduring classic came at the end of two decades of excellent work, which included such Hollywood masterpieces as Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not to Be. In this era, the 'Lubitsch Touch' became a marketable moniker which characterized his impact on the early sound days of Hollywood. Heaven is typical of the 'Touch': it's a perfect blend of sophistication, romance, wit and bittersweet sentiment. The benevolent story reveals Don Ameche's life to be as average as any man's, but Lubitsch's genuine tenderness elevates the tale to the majestic. Ameche and Gene Tierney deliver mature, convincing performances, appropriate to the subject matter. Heaven was nominated for Oscars for Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography, and was a significant influence on director Frank Capra's beloved It's a Wonderful Life." - www.allmovie.com

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Sahara 1943 - A first-rate war movie, one of Bogart's finest

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: Zoltan Korda
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Bruce Bennett, J. Carroll Naish, Lloyd Bridges, Rex Ingram, Dan Duryea

"Zoltan Korda's Sahara was one of the more exciting action movies to come out of World War II, with a brace of fine performances and a plot - derived, in part, from The Lost Patrol as well as from a Soviet-made documentary entitled The Thirteen - that has been reused at least a dozen times since (most directly in a solid western called Last of the Comanches). But it was also a movie that helped its director find his own 'voice' as a filmmaker, and stands as a uniquely leftist (but not communistic) action film to come out of Hollywood in the middle of World War II. Director Zoltan Korda was the left-leaning brother in the filmmaking family led by Alexander Korda, and throughout the 1930s had been forced to sublimate his own ideological leanings to those of his far more conservative brother.
Sahara, made for Columbia Pictures rather than for Alexander Korda, was the movie where Zoltan's sympathies with colonized and oppressed peoples finally broke out into the open, and his antipathy toward British imperialism finally manifested itself. The hero is American, portrayed in low-key fashion by Humphrey Bogart. He's almost an archetype, a cool, clear-thinking tactician, unencumbered by racial or class prejudice, and immediately takes charge of the contingent of British soldiers on the run from the Germans, telling them how to survive, how to fight and, in many ways, how to live. The British aren't depicted as evil so much as aloof in terms of their officer class, and motivationally out of reasons for fighting the Germans. The movie is a subtly ideological work with a heavy emphasis on action, and it gave Bogart (as well as Bruce Bennett and Dan Duryea) a chance to play uniquely clear and richly heroic roles.
The filmmaker would later bring Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country to the screen at a time when few people outside of South Africa knew or cared about the racial divisions in that country." - www.allmovie.com

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Shadow of a doubt 1943 - Hitchcock's personal favorite

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Main Cast: Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey, Henry Travers, Patricia Collinge, Hume Cronyn

"One of Hitchcock's best films of the 1940s, Shadow of a Doubt is both a fascinating psychological case study and a scathing portrait of the American middle-class family. The film is often considered one of Hitchcock's darkest, and the director himself reportedly claimed it as his favorite. Cynicism underlies all the proceedings, from young Charlie's 'miraculous' summoning of her Uncle Charlie (tantamount to calling up the Angel of Death) to Uncle Charlie's chilling exposition of his view on life, relayed to his niece: 'You live in a dream. Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?' This is one of Hitchcock's most unsettling films, preoccupied like many other Hitchcock works with good vs. evil, and the capacity for evil that lurks within us all; and it is also one of his most stylized, gorgeously shot by Joseph Valentine. Featuring stellar performances from Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten (as well as Hume Cronyn's comical debut as a dim-witted, self-appointed murder 'expert'), Shadow of a Doubt is a memorable experience as both a major Hitchcock film and an enduringly creepy commentary on human nature." - www.allmovie.com

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The life and death of Colonel Blimp 1943 - A British masterpiece from Powell & Pressburger

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Main Cast: Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook, Roland Culver

"By today's standards, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp seems a brilliantly written and executed character study with period overtones - 'the British Citizen Kane', as one critic described it in recent years. But the 163-minute movie was one of the most controversial productions in England during the war, and the disputes over its content and distribution overshadowed the film's virtues for nearly 40 years. Powell and Pressburger, also known as 'The Archers', had already courted controversy in 1941 with their propaganda movie 49th Parallel. Blimp seemed as if it was designed to engender displeasure from the government: Anton Walbrook, who was the leader of the anti-Nazi Germans in 49th Parallel, plays an even more sympathetic expatriate German in this movie; the title character, who represents the epitome of the British officer class of the First World War, is depicted as a well-meaning but doddering old buffoon, incapable of dealing with the Nazi threat; and the hero, Clive Candy (brilliantly played by Roger Livesey), makes his name on a civilian escapade during the Boer War, just as Prime Minister Winston Churchill had. The movie seemed certain to attract official censure, and it did. Powell and Pressburger were denied the use of military equipment or personnel while Blimp was in production, and the government voiced its further strenuous objections to the parties financing the movie. Once it was completed and released, the film was denied an export license to the United States until almost two years after the war, by which time it had been shorn of nearly an hour of material. It took 40 years for the uncut version to reach America in its original Technicolor splendor. After the wait, audiences found a movie that seized upon many of the structural elements found in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, with its back-to-front-to-back narrative path. The Archers took the class satire and social consciousness found in the best work of Noel Coward - as well as in the original David Low cartoon whence the Colonel Blimp character originated - and turned those elements into something uniquely theirs, a film very wry and dry in its tweaking of British sensibilities, universal in its observations on life, love and longevity in the middle of a world war." - www.allmovie.com

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The Ox-Bow incident 1943 - A brilliantry structured classic western-noir about vigilante justice

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: William A. Wellman
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Anthony Quinn, William Eythe, Harry Morgan, Jane Darwell, Matt Briggs, Harry Davenport, Frank Conroy

"This now-classic indictment of mob rule was a pet project of both star Henry Fonda and director William Wellman, both of whom agreed to work on lesser 20th Century-Fox projects in exchange for this film.
The Ox-Bow Incident was an anomaly at the time it was released. Produced in the middle of World War II, when Hollywood was concentrating on movies that either boosted morale or entertained, it did neither: it was a major studio release, with a hot young star (Henry Fonda) in the lead, about an unjustified lynching in the 1870s West. Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel had been kicking around for years, but Hollywood had never had much luck making movies about mob violence and vigilante justice (Fritz Lang's Fury had been a box-office disaster for MGM before the war, despite the presence of Spencer Tracy), and no one was anxious to film it. Twentieth Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck agreed to do the movie only because Fonda and Wellman agreed to do other films for the studio, and the result was a movie that was singularly unpopular during its initial release but which has aged magnificently. It was a labor of love by all concerned, a chilling indictment of American justice and America's past in which there are no heroes, just participants who are less guilty than others. Once the war was over, and the movie made it to television, it began to find an audience; the belated response from critics and viewers, as well his pride in having made it, inspired Fonda's similar effort 14 years later to make 12 Angry Men, a movie built on a similar theme. Ironically, 12 Angry Men also took decades to find its audience and begin recording a profit. For all its lack of recognition at the time, The Ox-Bow Incident has become, along with Otto Preminger's Laura, perhaps the most distinctive and well-remembered film issued by Fox during the first half of the 1940s." - www.allmovie.com

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In which we serve 1942 - A British wartime classic

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IMDB rating: 7,4

Directors: Noel Coward, David Lean
Main Cast: Noel Coward, Michael Wilding, James Donald, John Mills

"Few morale-boosting wartime films have retained their power and entertainment value as emphatically as Noël Coward's In Which We Serve. To witness Coward's sober, no-nonsense direction (in collaboration with his co-director/editor, David Lean) and to watch his straightforward portrayal of navy captain Kinross, one would never suspect that he'd built his theatrical reputation upon sophisticated drawing-room comedies and brittle, witty song lyrics. The real star of In Which We Serve is the British destroyer Torrin. Torpedoed in battle, the Torrin miraculously survives, and is brought back to English shores to be repaired. The paint is barely dry and the nuts and bolts barely in place before the Torrin is pressed into duty during the Dunkirk evacuation. The noble vessel is finally sunk after being dive-bombed in Crete, but many of the crew members survive. As they cling to the wreckage awaiting rescue, Coward and his men flash back to their homes and loved ones, and, in so doing, recall anew just why they're fighting and for whom they're fighting. Next to Coward, the single most important of the film's characters is Shorty Blake, played by John Mills. (Trivia note: Mills' infant daughter Juliet Mills appears as Shorty's baby.) Even so, the emphasis in the film is on teamwork; here as elsewhere, there can be no stars in wartime.
The movie's most important attribute was also its least appreciated: its structure, which owed a great deal to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) in breaking up the action into flashback vignettes and non-linear storytelling. Coward and Lean had studied the Welles film closely in pre-production, and they applied its lessons about film narrative to a topical, contemporary action setting. In Which We Serve is arguably the popular film that best took the breakthroughs of Citizen Kane and ran with them into new dramatic territory." - www.allmovie.com

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Cat people 1942 - A hugely influential, psychological horror classic

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IMDB rating: 7,5

Director: Jacques Tourneur
Main Cast: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, Jack Holt

"In just a three-year period in the 1940s, producer Val Lewton created some of the most influential and intelligent psychological horror films ever made, bringing a depth to the 'B' movie that would influence any number of independent-minded Hollywood filmmakers in later years. Lewton's first, and probably best, effort was Cat People, a psychological mood piece, more reliant on suspense and suggestion than overt 'scare stuff'. Simone Simon plays an enigmatic young fashion artist who is curiously affected by the panther cage at the central park zoo. She falls in love with handsome Kent Smith, but loses him to Jane Randolph. After a chance confrontation with a bizarre stranger at a restaurant, Simon becomes obsessed with the notion that she's a Cat Woman - a member of an ancient Serbian tribe that metamorphoses into panthers whenever aroused by jealousy. She begins stalking her rival Randolph, terrifying the latter in the film's most memorable scene, set in an indoor swimming pool at midnight. Psychiatrist Tom Conway scoffs at the Cat Woman legend - until he recoils in horror after kissing Simon. If the film's main set looks familiar, it is because it was built for Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (Lewton later used the same set for his The Seventh Victim). Cat People was remade by director Paul Schrader in 1982." - www.allmovie.com

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Bambi 1942 - An enduring classic animated movie from Disney and his crew

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IMDB rating: 7,4

Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, David Hand, Graham Heid, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Norman Wright

"The classic Felix Salter story Bambi provides the basis for this near-perfect Disney animated feature. We follow the male deer Bambi from birth, through his early childhood experiences with woodland pals Thumper the rabbit and Flower the skunk, the traumatic sudden death of Bambi's mother at the hands of hunters, his courtship of the lovely doe Faline, and his rescue of his friends during a raging forest fire; we last see the mature, antlered Bambi assuming his proper place as the Prince of the Forest. In the grand Disney tradition, Bambi is brimming with unforgettable sequences, notably the young deer's attempts to negotiate an iced-over pond, and most especially the death of Bambi's mother - and if this moment doesn't move you to tears, you're made of stone (many subsequent Disney films, including Lion King, have tried, most in vain, to match the horror and pathos of this one scene). The score in Bambi yielded no hits along the lines of 'Whistle While You Work', but the songs are adroitly integrated into the action. Bambi was the last of the 'classic' early Disney features before the studio went into a decade-long doldrums of disjointed animated pastiches like Make Mine Music." - www.allmovie.com

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Mrs. Miniver 1942 - A little dated, but still impressive war-time propaganda movie

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: William Wyler
Main Cast: Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Teresa Wright, Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Henry Travers, Richard Ney, Henry Wilcoxon

"As Academy Award-winning films go, Mrs. Miniver has not weathered the years all that well. This prettified, idealized view of the upper-class British home front during World War II sometimes seems over-calculated and contrived when seen today. In particular, Greer Garson's Oscar-winning performance in the title role often comes off as artificial, especially when she nobly tends her rose garden while her stalwart husband (Walter Pidgeon) participates in the evacuation at Dunkirk. However, even if the film has lost a good portion of its ability to move and inspire audiences, it is easy to see why it was so popular in 1942 - and why Winston Churchill was moved to comment that its propaganda value was worth a dozen battleships. Everyone in the audience - even English audiences, closer to the events depicted in the film than American filmgoers - liked to believe that he or she was capable of behaving with as much grace under pressure as the Miniver family. The film's setpieces-the Minivers huddling in their bomb shelter during a Luftwaffe attack, Mrs. Miniver confronting a downed Nazi paratrooper in her kitchen, an annual flower show being staged despite the exigencies of bombing raids, cleric Henry Wilcoxon's climactic call to arms from the pulpit of his ruined church-are masterfully staged and acted, allowing one to ever so briefly forget that this is, after all, slick propagandizing.
In addition to Best Picture and Best Actress, Mrs. Miniver garnered Oscars for best supporting actress (Teresa Wright), best director (William Wyler), best script (Arthur Wimperis, George Froschel, James Hilton, Claudine West), best cinematography (Joseph Ruttenberg). Garson's Oscar win and lengthy acceptance speech became a long-running joke in Hollywood - for example, the claims that she stayed at the podium for 45 minutes or more. (Her actual acceptance remarks took around 5 minutes, still the longest-ever Oscar acceptance speech.)
Richard Ney, who plays Greer Garson's son, later married the actress and still later became a successful Wall Street financier. Mrs. Miniver was followed by a 1951 sequel, The Miniver Story, but without the wartime setting the bloom was off the rose." - www.allmovie.com

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The pride of the Yankees 1942 - An entertaining and inspiring baseball biography of a legendary player

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Sam Wood
Main Cast: Gary Cooper, Teeresa Wright, Babe Ruth, Walter Brennan, Dan Duryea

"Historically, only a few baseball movies have done well at the box office, mostly because audiences are lukewarm to portrayals of heroes of the diamond. Sam Wood's The Pride of the Yankees, however, is an exception, and an improbable one: neither producer Samuel Goldwyn nor star Gary Cooper knew anything about baseball, and it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to pay money to see a story in which everyone knew the outcome. Goldwyn may not have understood the sport (he thought players got promoted up through the bases, from first base to third, and couldn't understand why Gehrig was such a great player if he was 'only' a first baseman), but he understood the public better than almost any other producer. The poignancy of Lou Gehrig's story - he became a sports hero out of a modest upbringing only to see fate strike him down, and then accepted that fate with heroic stoicism - might've played well at any time, but the fact that America was heading into a war in which people with would be sacrificing themselves made the material even more topical. Cooper portrayed Gehrig with perhaps even more dignity than the real man possessed, and his romantic scenes with Teresa Wright as Gehrig's wife were warm and honest. Director Wood's understated, unpretentious telling of the tale captured the subject of baseball but also provided a snapshot of Americans in general." - www.allmovie.com

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Yankee Doodle Dandy 1942 - A classic biography showcasing Cagney's talents

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Michael Curtiz
Main Cast: James Cagney, Joan Leslie, Walter Huston

"Yankee Doodle Dandy was one of the best World War II-era patriotic propaganda films, and it has proven itself enduringly popular in the decades following its release. The film succeeds almost entirely on the performance of James Cagney as legendary song-and-dance performer George M. Cohan, although significant credit should also be given to director Michael Curtiz, who expertly stages each scene to display the talents of his star. The film features an over-the-top framing device in which Cohan tells his life's story in flashback to President Franklin Roosevelt. The story is effectively fiction, using only the outline of Cohan's life and some of his songs as reference points. The musical sequences are among the best in any film of the era. The film was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won three, including Best Actor for Cagney. The real-life Cohan died shortly after the film's release, living long enough to see it and like it despite, or perhaps because of, its lack of accuracy about his life." - www.allmovie.com

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Now, voyager 1942 - The greatest love story of the 40's

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: Irving Rapper
Main Cast: Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper, Bonita Granville, John Loder

"Olive Higgins Prouty's popular novel was transformed into nearly two hours of high-grade soap opera by several masters of the trade: Warner Bros., Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, director Irving Rapper, and screenwriter Casey Robinson. Now, Voyager's potentially soapy story became a superior melodrama about one woman's self-actualization from put-upon spinster to stylish philanthropist. With Warner Bros. designer Orry-Kelly's costumes and Max Steiner's Oscar-winning score playing key supporting roles, Charlotte's transformation from a dowdy, neurotic wallflower into a beautiful, elegant woman is matched by her discovery of inner strength through love. With Davis' masterful performance showcasing her signature forcefulness as well as her capacity for romantic gentleness, Now, Voyager became a considerable hit. Henreid's neatly suggestive means for lighting cigarettes became one of the high points of Hollywood romance, and Now, Voyager's final moment of resignation and self-sacrifice has entered the pantheon of great closing lines." - www.allmovie.com

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The Palm Beach story 1942 - A delirious screwball romance

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IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: Preston Sturges
Main Cast: Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, Rudy Vallee

"The Palm Beach Story is yet another satirical gem from director Preston Sturges, who gives the story a cynical edge sharper than in other screwball comedies. In 1942, even as the Great Depression was giving way to the war-time economy of World War II, poking fun at the idle rich continued to be a popular comic motif. The film's title is less meaningful to current audiences than it was to moviegoers of the 1940s, when train travel was the most frequent way that people got between cities, and the wealthy of the eastern seaboard rode trains each winter to the warm shores of Palm Beach, Florida. The performances in The Palm Beach Story are uniformly strong, with such non-comic actors as Joel McCrea and Mary Astor showing the diversity of their talents. Claudette Colbert gives one of the best performances of her career, though it is often overshadowed by her work in It Happened One Night." - www.allmovie.com

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The magnificent Ambersons 1942 - A mutilated but still a thrilling cinematic experience

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Orson Welles (Fred Fleck, Robert Wise - additional sequences, uncredited)
Main Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead, Orson Welles

"Orson Welles' followup to Citizen Kane (1941) was utterly different from Kane in style and texture, but just as brilliant in its own way. Writer/director Welles does not appear on camera, but his voiceover narration superbly sets the stage for the movie's action, which fades in valentine fashion on Amberson Mansion, the most ostentatious dwelling in all of turn-of-century Indianapolis. At the time of its production, Orson Welles was the big noise among new young filmmakers, but not a very profitable one. His first movie, Citizen Kane, had generated press and praise, but not profits. RKO, never a profitable studio and in danger of receivership for much of its history, needed The Magnificent Ambersons to be a hit. Welles had shot Ambersons true to Booth Tarkington's novel and elicited sterling performances from his cast. But Tarkington's story - which Welles deeply loved, having previously dramatized it on radio with himself in the role of George Amberson Minafer - centered on an insufferable prig, selfish, nasty, and vain. Preview audiences came away disliking the movie because they disliked its central character, brilliantly portrayed by Tim Holt. RKO drastically recut the movie, poisoning its relationship with Welles (and with composer Bernard Herrmann, who came to Welles' defense and ended a promising career at the studio). Holt's George Amberson Minafer was, in many ways, the antecedent of Laurence Harvey's Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a character described by the closest thing he has to a friend as 'impossible to like'. And audiences weren't much more ready for Harvey's character in 1962 than they were for Holt's in 1942." - www.allmovie.com

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To be or not to be 1942 - A controversial classic

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IMDB rating: 8,3

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Main Cast: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill

"Ernst Lubitsch directs the 1942 political satire classic To Be or Not to Be, which marked the final screen appearance of comedienne Carole Lombard. To Be or Not to Be remains one example of a wartime propaganda film that retains its freshness and entertainment value outside its original historical context. Made during World War II by German expatriate Ernst Lubitsch, the film features anti-fascist themes that never overwhelm the characters, and it allows star Jack Benny to fashion a likeable performance that transcends the story's political content. Where many topical comedies veer into either serious drama or excessive sentimentality, To Be or Not to Be maintains its satiric edge without descending into self-parody. The film works as a comedy, as a political thriller, as an anti-fascist satire, and as an allegorical parable. The dialogue contains sharp, ironic observations aimed at the absurdity of totalitarian dogma. While Nazis and Hitler were Lubitsch's specific targets, the film retains a more universal mockery of government oppression and the willingness of bureaucrats to accept their tasks without questioning them. The movie was remade in 1983 starring Mel Brooks and real-life wife Anne Bancroft." - www.allmovie.com

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Casablanca 1942 - A truly classic masterpiece

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IMDB rating: 8,6

Director: Michael Curtiz
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, S. Z. Sakall

"One of the most beloved American films, this captivating wartime adventure of romance and intrigue from director Michael Curtiz defies standard categorization. It's hard to imagine a movie in which the leads are better cast: Humphrey Bogart's tough, effortless cool gives Rick the ideal balance of honor and cynicism, Ingrid Bergman's luminous beauty makes it seem reasonable that men would fight for Ilsa's affections, and Paul Henreid's Victor is cold enough that you can imagine Ilsa's being tempted by her old flame. The supporting cast is superb down the line; Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Dooley Wilson, and S.Z. Sakall are all so memorable that one tends to forget that none is onscreen for very long. The screenplay often walks the border of cliché, but the story has just enough twists, and the dialogue so much snap, that it stays compelling throughout. And Michael Curtiz knew just when to turn on the schmaltz and when to cut it off. Casablanca blends romance, suspense, humor, and patriotic drama with such skill that one imagines it must have happened by accident, and the movie looks better with each passing year." - www.allmovie.com

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Dumbo 1941 - A wonderful animation from Disney's classic era

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IMDB rating: 7,3

Directors: Samuel Armstrong, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen, John Elliotte

"The shortest of Disney's major animated features Dumbo involves a baby elephant with unusually large ears. Ostracized from the rest of the circus animals, poor Dumbo is even separated from his mother, who is chained up in a separate cage after trying to defend her child. Only brash-but-lovable Timothy Mouse offers the hand of friendship to Dumbo, encouraging the pouty pachyderm to exploit his 'different' qualities for fame and fortune. After trepidatiously indulging in a vat of booze, Dumbo awakens in a tall tree. Goaded by a group of jive-talking crows, Dumbo discovers that his outsized ears have given him the ability to fly. The musical score by Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace won Oscars for them both." - www.allmovie.com

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Meet John Doe 1941 - Capra's dark and powerful comedy about the power of the press

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: Frank Capra
Main Cast: Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, Spring Byington, James Gleason, Gene Lockhart, Rod La Rocque

"Meet John Doe is the Frank Capra movie that spoke most directly to the mood of the United States at the time that it was made. It's a fundamentally pessimistic film, without a positive resolution, and also an astonishingly mature movie - virtually groundbreaking as a 'message' movie aimed at a mainstream audience. Appearing in 1940, it closed out a decade that had been dominated by despair, disillusionment, dislocation (economic and personal), and desperation, a period characterized by a reliance on often inept government officials or duplicitous would-be leaders. All of these elements are present in Meet John Doe from its opening scene (a mass layoff at a newspaper), and they get addressed over and over again as the plot unfolds. The movie also had the courage to put some very attractive stars - Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck - in some very unattractive roles, as two people putting over a huge fraud on a public that trusts them. It wasn't considered a very successful film in its own time, being a little too dark and mature amid the ominous reality of the European war being waged at the time, but it is probably the best of Capra's 'message' pictures and his best slice-of-life drama other than It Happened One Night." - www.allmovie.com

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https://archive.org/download/meet_john_doe/meet_john_doe_512kb.mp4

Here comes Mr. Jordan 1941 - A charming classic fantasy

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Alexander Hall
Main Cast: Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes, Claude Rains, Rita Johnson, Edward Everett Horton, James Gleason

"The usually debonair Robert Montgomery stepped out of character in this classic comic fantasy to play a clean-cut boxer, Joe Pendleton, who's been sent to heaven before his time. Mr. Jordan, a kind of celestial executive, rectifies the error by loaning Pendleton the body of a millionaire named Bruce Farnsworth who's just been murdered by his wife. When she learns that he's alive again, the fun begins. The kind of beautifully executed film that turns the auteur theory on its head, it's driven by a script that always manages to keep its fiendishly complicated farcical maneuvers in perfect focus. Montgomery is wonderful as the simple boxer who just wants a shot at the title, as is Claude Rains as the dryly sardonic angel. But it's veteran James Gleason's Academy Award-winning performance as Joe's manager Max Corkle that steals the film. The scene in which Joe finally convinces Max that his spirit is inhabiting the body of Farnsworth is a masterpiece of comic acting.  Here Comes Mr. Jordan is one of the most consistently clever romantic comedies of the 1940s, and richly deserving of the Oscars won by screenwriters Sidney Buchman, Seton I. Miller and Harry Segall. A sequel, Down to Earth, was filmed in 1947, with Roland Culver as Mr. Jordan; and in 1978, the original Jordan was remade by Warren Beatty as Heaven Can Wait." - www.allmovie.com

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Sergeant York 1941 - A great war movie with excellent performance by Cooper

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Howard Hawks
Main Cast: Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Joan Leslie

"Sergeant York is among the best of war-time propaganda films, with a superb performance by Gary Cooper in the title role. It was natural that, as the United States entered World War II, Hollywood would want to make a movie about the life of Alvin York, the most decorated U.S. soldier in World War I. The real-life York set several conditions for the production: (1) That the film contains no phony heroics, (2) that Mrs.York not be played by a Hollywood 'glamour girl' and (3) That Gary Cooper portray York on screen. All three conditions were met, and the result is one of the finest and most inspirational biographies ever committed to celluloid. It is a tribute to the skills of director Howard Hawks that, removed from its historical context, Sergeant York remains one of the most powerful screen biographies, though it perhaps falls short when compared with the realism of such later war-bios as Patton. The battle sequences, edited by William Holmes, are usually sharp, and Cooper gives one of the most memorable performances of his outstanding career. Sergeant York was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning two, Cooper for Best Actor and Homes for Best Film Editing." - www.allmovie.com

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How green was my valley 1941 - The classic masterpiece of John Ford

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IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: John Ford
Main Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O'Hara, Anna Lee, Donald Crisp, Roddy McDowall, John Loder, Sarah Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald

"How Green Was My Valley is fondly remembered by fans of director John Ford for its loving recreation of a Welsh coal mining village. Spanning some fifty years in the life of its protagonist, the film presents an often poignant portrait of the good and bad of small town life. At the center of the story is the dehumanization brought by increasing technology; the scenes in which more efficient machinery makes some of the mines' best workers unneeded and unemployed remain relevant to today's audiences and our environment of shifting corporations and uncertain security. Ford scholars differ on where to rank How Green Was My Valley - indeed there is no clear consensus on what film critics and historians consider to be Ford's greatest - but it was a popular choice as the best film of 1941. Based on the novel of the same name by Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley won five Academy Awards in 1941, including Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Crisp), Best Art Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Picture (beating Citizen Kane). The book was later adapted into a 1975 BBC miniseries." - www.allmovie.com

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The lady Eve 1941 - An outstanding romantic comedy showing Sturges' perfection

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Preston Sturges
Main Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette,William Demarest

Preston Sturges wrote and directed this classic romantic comedy starring Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, who are involved in a scintillating battle of the sexes, as Sturges points up the terrors of sexual passion and the unattainability of the romantic ideal. The Lady Eve is among the funniest films of the World War II era, and one of the few comedies whose humor has survived both cultural changes and shifting audience demographics. Directed by Preston Sturges with his usual efficiency, the battle-of-the-sexes story allows star performers Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck to shine, though supporting performer William Demarest often steals the show. As was common in the censorship-laden war era, Sturges resorted to several clever sexual symbols. Fonda's character is an expert on snakes, and there is a funny moment when the audience catches the phallically suggestive book title, Are Snakes Necessary?. The dialogue is consistently bright and peppy. - www.allmovie.com

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Sullivan's travels 1941 - One of the finest movies about movies ever made

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IMDB rating: 8,2

Director: Preston Sturges
Main Cast: Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake

"The most ambitious of Preston Sturges' string of 1940s classics, Sullivan's Travels is a brilliant mixture of genres, combining giddy comedy with often brutal realism, made all the more powerful by the contrast. The first part of the film, which details the botched attempts of idealistic film director John Sullivan (Joel McCrea) to leave Hollywood, smoothly blends outrageous slapstick with Sturges' customary satirical dialogue, and includes classic exchanges between Sullivan and his Hollywood producers (Robert Warwick and Porter Hall) and his hilariously droll and opinionated butler (Robert Greig). The tone of the movie changes considerably with three bravura sequences. The first, a graceful, wordless section in which Sullivan and his nameless companion (Veronica Lake, showing a nice flair for comedy) spend a night among the homeless, proves that, although Sturges is noted mainly for his writing, he was also a sensitive and talented director. The second, a violent chain-gang episode almost shocking in its stark realism, and the third, a short musical passage set in a rural church, hammer home the movie's apparent moral: that, as Sullivan puts it, 'there's a lot to be said for making people laugh'. Sturges may seem to be ridiculing a cinema of ideas, but his final joke is that Sullivan's Travels supports a different argument: that comedy and serious drama can co-exist quite happily after all." - www.allmovie.com

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The Maltese falcon 1941 - The first film noir

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IMDB rating: 8,2

Director: John Huston
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre, Barton MacLane, Sydney Greenstreet

"Adapting Dashiell Hammett's novel - and staying as close to the original story as the Production Code allowed - first-time director John Huston turned The Maltese Falcon into a movie often considered the first film noir. In his star-making performance as Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart (taking over from George Raft) embodied the coolly ruthless private eye who recognizes the dark side of humanity, in all its greedy perversity, and who feels its temptations, especially when they are embodied by a woman. While Huston's mostly straightforward visual approach renders The Maltese Falcon an instance of early noir more in its hardboiled attitude than in the chiaroscuro style common to other films noirs, the collection of venal characters, colorfully played by Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook, Jr.; Mary Astor's femme fatale; and Bogart's morally relativistic Spade pointed the way to the mid-1940s flowering of noir in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), and Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). A critical as well as popular success, The Maltese Falcon was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, establishing Huston as a formidable dual talent and Bogart as the archetypal detective antihero who can be as unscrupulous as the next guy but also adheres to his own personal code of honor." - www.allmovie.com

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