Hitchcock, Hawks, Huston, Sturgess, Bogart, Grant, Stewart, Lorre, Bergman, Bacall, Hayworth, Hepburn -- what a decade for film!
FAVORITE 1940s FILMS
1. Casablanca (legendary in every way)
2. Notorious (Bergman more beautiful than ever)
3. The Bicycle Thief (you'll cry!)
4. Arsenic and Old Lace (Grant and Lorre, two of the best at the top of their games)
5. The Big Sleep (even better than Chandler's book, thanks to Bogart)
6. The Maltese Falcon (Huston's first and best film)
7. Double Indemnity (great film noir -- starring the dad from My Three Sons!)
8. His Girl Friday (screwball comedy with machine-gun fast dialogue, very witty)
9. Rope (Hitchcock's experimental "long take" movie based on the Loeb/Leopold case)
10. Laura (stylish whodunnit starring Gene Tierney)
HM in alpha order: To Be or Not to Be (Jack Benny cracking wise in the face of a Nazi invasion), Gaslight (the 1944 version with Bergman; of interest etymologically for the term "gaslighting"), Gilda (the glamorous Hayworth), To Have and Have Not (good Hemingway adaption starring Bogart and Bacall), The Killers (the ur-Reservoir Dogs), Philadelphia Story (Hepburn: "The time to make up your mind about people is never"), Sullivan's Travels (big influence on the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- come to think of it, The Big Sleep influenced The Big Lebowski), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (you'll cry, part two!), The Uninvited (nicely directed supernatural mystery), White Heat (loopy but entertaining performance from Cagney; parodied humorously in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult).
2/10/2018 6:58 PM (edited)