This month, we’ll be tackling the 1940s on the Decades Project! I’ve got some more contemporary content coming down the pipeline over the next few months, but this series is so important to me because the original reason I wanted to do this newsletter was to highlight the under-seen discoveries I stumble upon during my cinema journey. Certainly not every film I feature is under-seen (spoiler: Citizen Kane is in this one), but I’m always excited to spread the word, in my own small way, about some of the past’s more eclectic offerings.
Recently, the insufferable Film Twitter discourse carousel has spun back into “Sex scenes are bad?”, but this time with a dangerous bit of historical revisionism, as some folks have tried to cast the Hays Code—a set of cinema “rules” designed to enforce a repressive, quote-unquote “palatable” portrait of American institutions—as a sort of quality control that maintained a sense of “elegance” to Classic Hollywood. It is an incomplete reading at best and malicious ahistoricism at worst: A nostalgia for an imagined past that could easily slide into building a harmful artistic future.
With that discourse coinciding with this particular decade’s installment, I figured it’d be a good space for me to cover it.
Writer and critic Katharine Coldiron offers a much more thorough and eloquent explanation as to why that claim is so outrageous here, but in short: The great films that emerged from this era of cinema are timeless and thrilling not because of but despite the Hays Code. The fact that we have them today is more a testament to the ingenuity of artists finding ways to work around its conservative obstructiveness, and even then, so many films were stifled by the risk-averse sensibilities the Code instilled in studios and eventually audiences. It is not something we ought to bring back
Many of the films listed here are radical and nuanced explorations of the human condition whose touchier themes had to be smuggled under a veneer of relative sterility. They range from enshrined masterpieces and genre codifiers to forgotten gems and career-killers, but all of them exhibit an irrepressible curiosity for, honesty about, and thoughtfulness over the human condition that stood in stark opposition to the staid homogenization that the Code promoted and that certain misinformed people online seem to want desperately to return to.
We would’ve had more of them if it weren’t for the Hays Code. That’s the simple truth.
Honorable Mentions: Ball of Fire (1941), The Great Dictator (1940), Heaven Can Wait (1943), The Killers (1946), Now, Voyager (1942), Out of the Past (1947), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), White Heat (1949)
20. Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Preston Sturges)
As pitch-black as Hollywood comedies (both in its time and anytime) get, Unfaithfully Yours sees screwball maestro Preston Sturges at his most delightfully unhinged. Following a haughty conductor (Rex Harrison) as he concocts three different revenge fantasies for a wife (Linda Darnell) he suspects is cheating on him—all perfectly envisioned, none competently executed—it blends together Sturges’s trademark whip-smart dialogue and up-to-eleven slapstick with an ingenious and quietly radical orchestral structure in a gleeful send-up of bumbling rich men and their petty humiliations.
19. Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Charlie Chaplin)
While there’s always been a hefty undercurrent of darkness and gravity in Chaplin’s films—I mean, his outing before this was about a fascist dictator—Monsieur Verdoux sees the famed performer play his grimiest character: A serial killer who murders rich widows for their money in order to support his family. Even in these morally grayer clothes, Chaplin’s thesis is as razor-sharp as it was in Modern Times and The Great Dictator: Under modern capitalism, we both encourage and hypocritically condemn ruthlessness, both to the detriment of a kinder world. It is his best movie.
18. Moonrise (1948, Frank Borzage)
While it never quite matches the thrilling Expressionist highs of its opening sequence, Frank Borzage’s Moonrise is a minor miracle of a noir, dispensing of the genre’s typical puzzle box for a broader and more fablelike meditation on trauma and heritage. One of the last great films from one of early Hollywood’s oft-forgotten pioneers, the movie captures so well the staccato rhythms of a psyche at war with itself, negotiating the destructive aftershocks of a self-loathing so deep-seated it’s almost tattooed onto one’s DNA. It is a remarkable, dark-hearted gem.
17. Dance, Girl, Dance (1940, Dorothy Arzner)
Beyond being, for her entire 16-year directing career, the only prominent female director working in Hollywood (she was the first female member of the DGA), Dorothy Arzner was also a uniquely excellent filmmaker whose proto-feminist portraits of headstrong women in male-dominated worlds would influence her film school student Francis Ford Coppola in his own sojourns into complex heroes overwhelmed by a society conspiring against them. In Dance, Girl, Dance, Arzner—with the help of a luminous Maureen O’Hara in the lead role—preoccupies herself with the interior lives of women dancers seeking some form of hard-won dignity in art despite the pressures of life. For once, it isn’t about the men this time in one of the decade’s most lyrical explorations of an artist’s compromise.
16. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
The recently-deposed Greatest Film of All Time has honestly been done dirty by the reputation that’s preceded it. You can’t blame people for mistaking Citizen Kane for some inaccessible piece of highbrow self-indulgence when we hardly speak of it except in hushed tones. While it earns every bit of the awe it elicits at a craft level—Those shots! That screenplay!—it’s also simply an exquisitely composed piece of pop entertainment: Macbeth by way of the free market and the free press. It is perhaps the first film to put together all of the things that make the medium great, and it also spins a mighty fine yarn to boot.
15. Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Double Indemnity is how little it’s been dulled by the hosts of imitators it spawned in its wake. Every schmuck-and-dame noir made after it has ransacked Billy Wilder’s seedy, steamy masterpiece for parts, but very few have even sniffed the rarefied air it occupies. To be fair, none of them had Wilder behind the camera and Barbara Stanwyck in its crosshairs. Even almost 80 years since, her Phyllis Dietrichson still smolders on screen like no other, spinning her web around the hopelessly lust-struck Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) as the walls close in around them. Sounds familiar? You’ll eat it up anyway. Few films have been so influential and yet remain so unmatched.
14. Mildred Pierce (1945, Michael Curtiz)
I’ve seen plenty of callous heels in the movies, but never has a character elicited a more violently and viscerally hateful reaction from me than Veda Pierce, the ungratefully spoiled daughter of our titular heroine in Michael Curtiz’s other great film of the 1940s. This is a compliment, of course; in a way, this might be Ann Blyth’s picture more than it is Joan Crawford’s, even as Crawford turns in top-shelf work as a single mother put through an absolute wringer. Mildred Pierce is a film that finds its brilliance in the gloriously heightened pitch where only martyrs and monsters live. The very best melodramas weaponize their inherent artifice to show vicious truths that cannot be unseen, and this is one of the brightest stars in the genre’s crown.
13. Bicycle Thieves (1948, Vittorio de Sica)
It’s easy to talk about Bicycle Thieves exclusively through the lens of its importance, so vast is the shadow it casts on much of cinema even today. Perhaps the consensus talisman for the hugely influential Italian neorealist movement, Vittorio de Sica’s seminal fable of the proletariat remains a relevant portrait of the working class’s Sisyphean tribulations, its ability to incite righteous anger rendered no less potent by time. Perhaps that is more a testament to how little the human project has advanced in the interim, but every revolution needs this sort of reminder and call to action.
12. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles)
So much of the mythology behind The Magnificent Ambersons swirls around all it could’ve been. Famously hijacked and mangled by RKO from Welles’s original cut while he was reportedly incommunicado in South America, it was in its original form the director’s self-proclaimed masterpiece. Plenty of glimmers of that brilliance remain in the version that survives: A taut and elegiac 80-minute epic (a paradox in its own right, that fact) bleeding with exquisitely-captured nostalgia in the face of rapidly changing world, all played by Welles’s accomplished troupe of regular players. Even in its tragically truncated form, it is still the great director’s best film.
11. Cluny Brown (1946, Ernst Lubitsch)
The last film Ernst Lubitsch ever finished before his untimely passing, Cluny Brown distills everything magical about the director’s famously sophisticated style into its leanest and sleekest permutation: A melancholic yet hopeful (and tastefully racy) portrait of an irrepressible striver negotiating the repressive mores of the society she moves in. Amid the zaniness of high society and lady plumbers, Cluny Brown is a portrait of an unsinkable woman. It is a film about the radical idea that you can carve out your own place in this world, even as everyone seems to be telling you otherwise: Squirrels to the nuts, you tell ‘em.
Part 2 should be out next weekend, but before then, I’d love some 40s recs if anyone has them!