One of the first titles to be preserved in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, The Maltese Falcon is landmark filmmaking. Regardless, poor Larry never asked to turn into a werewolf, and he spends most of the sequels trying to figure out a way not only to be cured, but to kill himself and end his long suffering in the process. As is the case with many films of the 1940s, especially those foreign selections made or released in the shadow of World War II occupation—by the Axis or otherwise (see also: Kurosawa’s navigation of American censors during the U.S.’s squatting in Japan)—Le Corbeau is a morally thorny tale, infatuated more with the indelible darkness of all human beings than in exploring any sense of hope that the world need not be a crappy place. The 1940s saw the rise of Technicolor but also of film noir with its dark, cynical, moody and fatalistic stories of hard-boiled detectives and treacherous women. …  •   Akira Kurosawa shoots every scene in the pursuit of making his audience swelter, yanking us into the frame and effectively immersing us in his neorealist depiction of Tokyo. —Tim Grierson.  •   Greed is not good. —A.C. Starring: The Top 10 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Top 20 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Top 50 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Top 100 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Top 250 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Best Horror Movies Of the 1980s; The Best Science Fiction Movies of 1977; The Best Comedy Movies Of the 2000s; The Most Recently Released Movies Ultimately Clarence jumps into the river before George can do it; activating the suicidal man to save Clarence rather than kill himself. Starring: Five nuns are sent to establish a convent, school and hospital in a former harem.  •   Cary Grant, Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce, Film Noir  •  Mystery  •  Psychological Thriller, Jacques Tourneur —A.C. Epic, lavish, tragic and enchanting, this film has enormous style and a kind of poetry to it. James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger, Based-on-a-True-Story  •  Based-on-Theatre  •  Crime Drama, Jacques Tourneur Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Humphrey Bogart, Based-on-20th-Century-Literature  •  Detective Film  •  Femme Fatale, Alfred Hitchcock Like Rashomon, Drunken Angel puts male toughness on trial and makes it look ridiculous, but the study of manliness might be a smokescreen for Kurosawa’s veiled jabs at the board of censors installed by the U.S. government in post-World War II Japan. Starring: She’s not bound (at least briefly, repeatedly) to the mise en scène, a rebellious force keenly aware of her charms. —A.C. And it’s one of the most enduring ones for a bunch of reasons, including Stewart’s amazing performance and a beautiful script by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett along with Capra. https://www2.bfi.org.uk/thriller/100-thrillers-see-before-you-die/1940s The Top 10 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Top 20 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Top 50 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Top 100 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Top 250 Mystery Movies of the 1940s; The Best Horror Movies Of the 1980s; The Best Science Fiction Movies of 1977; The Best Comedy Movies Of the 2000s; The Most Recently Released Movies The Bicycle Thief is both a sentimental portrait of a father and son, and a dramatization of the social issues of its era. We must start with the movie that revitalized the Whodunit genre, and honestly maybe the best Whodunit film of them all. —A.G. What holds up beautifully is Wayne’s fascinating slow fade from strapping man in the prime of life to defeated old guy, placed against Matt’s ascendancy. Starring: The violent, stylized set pieces are as visceral as the verbal confrontations. Weird, beautiful, orgiastic, abstracted, wildly colored and meticulously recorded, the film was a critical darling and considered to be an incredibly bold move on Disney’s part, though many in the classical music community nitpicked Stokowski’s arrangements. A prototypical “war of the sexes” comedy in which each side represents the status quo for his or her respective gender, Adam’s Rib transcends its dumbest Mars-vs-Venus trappings by portraying Tracy’s Bonner as a stuffy turd too caught up in his derision of women to do anything about the fact that a famous musician lothario (David Wayne) is getting mighty close to cuckolding him, were Amanda Bonner a dunce susceptible to shameless advances. —A.G. Cocteau was a poet as well as a filmmaker, and this is a strong example of how the two crafts inform one another, in the way it harnesses imagery to create metaphorical connections. In Stray Dog,  Kurosawa emulates the central feat of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, the marriage between the stylized trappings of film noir and cinematic realism, but Stray Dog doesn’t copy Dassin’s work; rather, it absorbs and applies lessons taught by The Naked City in ways that only a filmmaker like Kurosawa could.  •   It’s one of those films that really send you to another dimension. Deanna Durbin, Ralph Bellamy, David Bruce.  •   Starring: Like Double Indemnity, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce succeeds on the strength of its leading lady; in this case that’s the immortal Joan Crawford, who plays the film’s central character, not to mention all of its heart and soul. Weird and wonderful and powerful filmmaking. Best B Movies the 1940s by karljhickey14 | created - 27 Dec 2015 | updated - 08 Jan 2019 | Public No Noir , Westerns , or series (except minor series , and series with only two or three films ).Those are the categories or genres with the best B movies , and are generally better known . Throw it on at your next Halloween party, and you’ll see that it holds up remarkably well. He painstakingly storyboarded the drama to include complex camerawork and lighting schemes, evocative POVs, and an uninterrupted seven-minute take whose logistics boggle the mind. —Bonnie Stiernberg. RKO cut the film from two hours, five minutes to one hour, twenty minutes and showed it in mono to trim costs. The story of a proud, well-off Midwestern family whose position and stability are compromised by the advent of the automobile, The Magnificent Ambersons was itself a victim of the vicissitudes of mass production-but that hasn’t stopped it from being an enduring and masterful Welles classic. Joan Fontaine plays a young woman in 1900 Vienna who falls in love with a concert pianist. Even Veda is contemptuous of Mildred for daring to have the moxie to have it all. —A.G. British … Release Calendar DVD & Blu-ray Releases Top Rated Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Showtimes & Tickets In Theaters Coming Soon Coming Soon Movie News India Movie Spotlight. Everett Sloane, Rita Hayworth, Ted de Corsia, Charles Vidor And it’s a beautiful kind of strangeness. Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan, Anthony Mann  •   Mutilated or not, the film continues to be lauded for its inventive mise-en-scène and its superlative performances by Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello and Agnes Moorehead. Stefan, the pianist (Louis Jourdan) is remarkably clueless, and, reading the letter as he’s preparing to leave town to evade a duel, follows Lisa through a series of flashbacks starting when she was 14, progressing through an episode where they’d had a brief tryst, to her marrying someone else and giving birth to Stefan’s child, to him trying to seduce her at a chance encounter without realizing she was the same woman, to their child’s death from typhus, which is threatening to carry her off as she writes the letter. Starring: Chandu the Magician (film) Charlie Chan at … This was the decade of Hepburn and Tracy, Bogart and Bacall, of nostalgia and neo-realism, star-crossed lovers and double-crossing villains. —Andy Crump. Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond, Richard Thorpe —B.S. Smart, sweet, and witty; probably the quintessential film of the 1940s, and one of the best feel-good movies of the 20th century. It was the film where the young starlet met director Vincente Minnelli, her future husband and father of Liza, and it’s a formative production in the history of the American musical in general. Seven years before his powerhouse turn in The Big Heat, Glenn Ford played second fiddle to Rita Hayworth—how the hell could you not?—in Charles Vidor’s exotic thriller. Alfred Hitchcock • Starring: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey. By showing its audience the positive side of capitalism in action, the film reminds us of its negative side, too, posturing about Christmas’s true meaning and capturing New York City at the peak of its bustling consumerist culture.  •   —A.C. The opening number, as we drift through the Smith household meeting each member as they pass off bars of “Meet Me in St. Louis” to each other, instantly establishes the warm, familial tone while implanting an ear worm into your subconscious that you’ll find yourself humming days later. The American occupation whitewashes and corrupts Japanese culture in equal measure, and Drunken Angel captures it all with deft humanism. Starring: It’s a trajectory that will seem pretty traditional when it comes to stories like this—a clear progenitor is Citizen Kane, replete with Rossen’s dedicated eye to following the film’s god-like politician, Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), as he both attains and, especially, freefalls from grace—but with a contemporary sense of cynicism when it comes to the American political landscape, it helps to get a reminder, if melodramatic, that corruption and power have always been blasphemous bedfellows. Sign In Now ► When Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck) takes over as director of the hospital where the remote and emotionally null Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman)  works, Petersen quickly realizes something is amiss with Edwardes, and it quickly comes to light that he isn’t Edwardes at all and that he is suffering amnesia. It doesn’t take much to do violence upon others. Prone to throbbing headaches, he’s a dangerously troubled tough guy who still retreats to his mother’s lap, and declares “Made it, Ma! After Jarrett’s plottingly protective ma (Margaret Wycherly) get killed—by his equally scheming wife (Virginia Mayo), though she convinces him his right-hand man did the deed—he stages a break, and his next heist. (Sadomasochism much?) Regardless, Cat People was a populist hit in its day before being reevaluated decades later as a landmark of ’40s horror.  •   You just put your lips together and … blow.” Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner at the typewriter. But today George Cukor’s suspense-gem has also attained mandatory-viewing status because it is the source text for the term “gaslighting.” The word has been swept into public discourse and mass misuse and misunderstanding. As one might imagine, things don’t go well for Anna. Mysterious, rich in feeling, deliciously creepy, and with jewel-tone supporting performances by Angela Lansbury and Joseph Cotten, it was a great psychological thriller in its day and it remains one now. So, yeah, of course he’s gotta get blown up, noir-comeuppance style. Taking up the themes he’d turned over in his two previous films—the now-iconic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vampyr (1932)—Dreyer brought his soul’s concerns onto an international stage by heading once again into the past, telling of a pastor (Thorkild Roose) and ersatz witch hunter in 1623 who’s spared a woman accused of witchcraft in order to wed her daughter, Anna (Lisbeth Movin). —A.G. It was restored partially in 1946 and to its original condition in 1990. —A.G. The plot is simple: A woman (Judy Holliday) shoots and injures her cheating husband (Tom Ewell) after catching him in the act, so District Attorney Adam must represent the prosecution (cheating asshole) while Amanda, energized by her husband’s blindness regarding a woman’s helplessness when it comes to adultery, takes up the defense. Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Sullivan, Stuart Heisler Starring: Disney, who wasn’t much of a classical music buff, found his famously boundless curiosity piqued by the concept of using animation to support music rather than the other way around, and plunged into the project with enthusiasm, believing it would open people’s ears (like his own) to classical music they had previously ignored. Starring: or Create A New Account ►, Carol Reed We distilled our list based on a little bit of each of those things, but overall, it’s a suggestion of required viewing material for anyone who aspires to cultural literacy. The earliest mystery films reach back to the silent era.The first detective film is often cited as Sherlock Holmes Baffled, a very short Mutoscope reel created between 1900 and 1903 by Arthur Marvin.It is the earliest-known film to feature the character of detective Sherlock Holmes, albeit in a barely recognisable form.. Because it’s not possible. There are probably a decent number of auteur-theorist types who’d quibble with me for saying Casablanca is a perfect film. And yet, upon its U.S. release in 1948, on the eve of the Red Scare, critics liberal and not mostly crapped all over it, unwilling to penetrate Dreyer’s dense pace and denser obsession with an immaculate visual language. Famed for the groundbreaking FX of its iconic transformation scene, and aided by the same top-notch makeup that Jack Pierce employed in Frankenstein, it raised the bar for horror FX substantially. woman, and it is one of the most brilliant soundtracks of its day. This postwar psychic landscape is subversive as hell—and suburban too, no longer confined to metro limits. Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock were doing some of their best work. Starring: Roy Del Ruth • Starring: Bebe Daniels, Una Merkel, Dwight Frye. Starring: Basil Rathbone, Renee Godfrey, Mary Forbes, H. Bruce Humberstone Fantasia ran at New York’s Broadway Theatre for 49 consecutive weeks, the longest film run ever at the time. Mike Mazurki, Anne Shirley, Dick Powell, Edgar G. Ulmer —A.C. C. Captured in Chinatown. This neo-realist film is has been considered by many to be “the greatest film of all time.” It received a special Academy Award for Most Outstanding Foreign Film several years before the category officially existed. An hour of the original film was cut and the ending re-shot, and though Welles had left detailed instructions on how it should be edited, the studio overrode him and the excised footage from his rough cut was trashed. Robert Mitchum, Robert Young, Robert Ryan, George Marshall The first commercial film-animated or live-action-ever to be shown in stereophonic sound. Three unlikely comrades pursue  a cache of gold, and the resulting obsession turns them against each other with tragic results. Long before the Boomers came to know Fred MacMurray as the kindly father on My Three Sons, the actor essayed his best performance in Double Indemnity as the deplorable, hard-boiled Walter Neff, who falls for a married temptress (Barbara Stanwyck) who talks him into killing her husband. As the letters pile up and one cancer patient (Roger Blin) commits suicide (due to a letter from the Raven informing him that his cancer is terminal), the town grows increasingly desperate to find the culprit, sparking a witch hunt that catches Dr. Germain in the midst of his many lies. When are you making an honest-to-goodness piece of art, and when are you just playing a sick game of nostalgie de la boue? “The Great American Novel made one of the few enduring Great American Motion Pictures,” John Springer wrote of The Grapes of Wrath in The Fondas, his chronicle of the Fonda family dynasty.  •   The fault goes all the way to the bank in Tulsa, but really, knowing who’s to blame for your misfortunes doesn’t put a roof over your head, and The Grapes of Wrath proclaims boldly its belief in people before profit right up to Henry Fonda’s iconic closing speech, a poetic dedication to the need for social justice in a nation caught under the heel of corporate greed. He’s a fraud, his work is empty, and he knows it, so like any hack who desperately needs artistic validation to assuage his feelings of creative guilt, he hefts a hobo stick over his shoulder and hits road in the guise of a down-on-his-luck tramp, followed all the while by a lavish double-decker bus as well as the inescapable grip of his own prestige. Top of the World!” as the bottom falls out from under him. —A.S. Kindler has has moved to a small New England town and married the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice, teaches at a prep school—essentially has erased every possible trace of his former identity, save one: a longtime obsession with clocks. Peter Lorre plays the surgeon, who has altered Jonathan’s face to make him look like Boris Karloff (naturally). —A.G. —Dom Sinacola. Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Carole Landis, Robert Clampett Still, Cagney is mesmerizing to watch self-destruct. The Third Man 1949, 93 min. Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Based-on-20th-Century-Literature  •  Gothic Film  •  Mystery, Otto Preminger —D.S. Rope is notable for its extremely long takes and for taking place in real time, making it one of Hitchcock’s more experimental movies. The film understands wartime trauma in ways most war films simply don’t; it captures Italy’s emotional, and sociopolitical fragility in the aftermath of World War II on celluloid like an insect trapped in amber, indulging in slight degrees of wish fulfillment while staging a credible representation of Italian resistance to German occupation in 1944.  •   There were a lot of great noirs in the ’40s. We chat his character Jeff Jackson, what it was like to executive produce, what to expect in future movies and get some insight into his career journey. —A.G. Aside from Bogie’s legendary turn, the other performances are spot-on: among them, an already scandalized Mary Astor as the femme fatale; Sydney Greenstreet (Casablanca) as hulking baddie Kasper “Fat Man” Gutman—astonishingly, his film debut; and Peter Lorre as an obviously gay associate of Gutman’s whose homosexuality was muted for the folks at the Hays Code. Honorable Mentions: Searching (2018) A Simple Favor (2018) Wind River (2017) Inherent Vice (2014) Sherlock Holmes (2009) Primal Fear (1996) Scream (1996) Blow Out (1981) The Conversation (1974) Murder On The Orient Express (1974) In The Heat Of The Night (1967) Diabolique (1955) The Big Sleep (1946) Starring: The imagery of the dream ends up helping to resolve the case (go, psychiatry! Starring: William Powell, Barry Nelson, Donna Reed, Joe May Wilson continues to prove Kindler’s identity, and Kindler goes to greater and greater lengths to conceal it. Today, with the rest of Dreyer’s oeuvre to reflect on (especially Ordet, which was his only commercial success, despite being just as ponderous and obtuse as Day of Wrath), this film is simpler to parse.  •   An American thug in Buenos Aires, our narrator Johnny Farrell (Ford) cheats, and then cheats some more: first at the casino of an older businessman involved in a Nazi cartel, and then with the businessman’s young new wife, his ex, Gilda (Hayworth). Robert Mitchum dominates, whether in his tête-à-têtes with Kirk Douglas or his simmering flirtations with Jane Greer. Innovative cinematography, intriguing storytelling and great acting are all reasons to watch this dramatic mystery, in which journalists race to unspool the mystery of the absurdly wealthy and tyrannical Kane’s mysterious dying word, “Rosebud.” The way the plot unfolds is fascinating, the shifts in point of view are superb, and the mirroring opening and closing sequences are beautiful. Top 100 Movies of the 1930's. Comedy-mystery is a film genre combining elements of comedy and mystery fiction.Though the genre arguably peaked in the 1930s and 1940s, comedy-mystery films have been continually produced since. William Powell, Gloria de Haven, Harry Davenport, Comedy Thriller  •  Comedy  •  Crime Comedy, Thorold Dickinson Starring: In an era where your Labradoodle probably has its own therapist it’s easy to forget that psychoanalysis was a relative rarity, reserved for people of significant means … and people in mental hospitals, which is where this psychological thriller by Alfred Hitchcock takes place. The story’s compelling enough, but what really blows me away about this film is the otherworldly visual sensibility. Bogart’s antihero is a man of honor, as it suits him—he has no qualms about kissing his dead partner’s widow while the body’s still warm, or turning in the guilty woman he loves to the police.  •   Starring: To a large extent, “best” is a meaninglessly subjective term. You may not be able to imagine this film without Welles, but try imagining it without Reed: You’d have no film at all, and we’d be robbed of one of the most significant archetypes of filmmaking in the medium’s short lifespan. —A.G. —A.G. —A.G. Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price, Robert Siodmak This story’s been with us since the 18th century and rendered in countless iterations, so I’ll forego the plot summary and just say that from the fourth-wall-breaking preamble in which the director entreats the audience to approach the film with inner-child-forward faith in the magic of fairy tales, to the end, this film remains a treasure of subtle imagery and mesmerizing music, baroque opulence, sexual intensity and total indulgence in fantasy. Starring: While there he befriends an undercover fed (Edmond O’Brien, whose other noirs include The Hitch-Hiker) bent on nailing him for greater crimes. 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