Best Movies of the 1940s

Citizen Kane to Bicycle Thieves. The decade Hollywood's wartime censorship ended, and European cinema began its post-war renewal.

The 1940s is the most-historically-loaded decade in cinema's first century. The first half is dominated by World War II — the Hollywood studios producing wartime propaganda alongside their commercial output, the European film industries either destroyed (much of France, Italy, Germany) or relocated (the Polish, German, and Czech filmmakers who fled to Hollywood). The second half is dominated by the war's aftermath — Italian neorealism, the French Resistance films, the German rubble films, and Hollywood's transition into noir.

Our picks across the decade.

The ten

  • Citizen Kane (1941) — Orson Welles at twenty-five. For sixty years the consensus 'greatest film ever made'.
  • Casablanca (1942) — The most-quoted screenplay ever written.
  • The Third Man (1949) — Carol Reed. Anton Karas zither. Postwar Vienna.
  • Double Indemnity (1944) — Billy Wilder. The film that defined noir.
  • Bicycle Thieves (1948) — Vittorio De Sica. The foundational text of Italian neorealism.
  • Rome, Open City (1945) — Roberto Rossellini. Italian neorealism's announcement.
  • The Maltese Falcon (1941) — John Huston's debut. Bogart as Sam Spade.
  • It's a Wonderful Life (1946) — Frank Capra. The Christmas Eve commercial flop that became one of the most-watched American films of the 20th century.
  • The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) — William Wyler. Three veterans returning home.
  • Notorious (1946) — Hitchcock. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.

What the decade established

The 1940s established almost every major non-musical American genre in its modern form. The film noir (Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past). The post-war social-problem drama (The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire). The psychological thriller (Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt). The deep-focus realist drama (Citizen Kane).

It was also the decade that produced Italian neorealism, the single most-influential European film movement of the 20th century. Bicycle Thieves, Rome Open City, Paisà, La Terra Trema — these films, made for almost nothing, on the streets of post-war Italian cities, with non-professional actors, became the foundational template for almost every subsequent realist film tradition globally. The 1950s French New Wave, the 1960s Czech New Wave, the 1970s American New Hollywood, the 2000s Romanian New Wave — all are downstream of Italian neorealism.