The following is the third installment in a nine-part series examining the best films of each decade, from the 1920s to the present.
Up to bat currently is the 1940s, a decade in which Westerns grew up, in which gangster pictures became film noirs, in which an Italian cinema emerged reinvented from a country in tatters.
It was also the decade when a radio star from the Mercury Theatre decided he’d give pictures a try, and movies have never been the same since.
10.) The Set-Up (1949, Robert Wise)
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An underrated gem starring the always underrated Robert Ryan as an aging boxer who’s just one punch away from palookaville, The Set-Up was shot in real time, its taut 72 minute running time equaling that of the film’s story. Set in a dingy, vice-laden city, director Robert Wise creates a complete world within the confines of the RKO set pieces, as if this were just one of thousands of dramas taking place in the seedy night. The fight scenes are particularly realistic; it wouldn’t be until thirty years later that Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull would match The Set-Up in pound-for-pound visceral impact.
9.) Red River (1948, Howard Hawks)
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Howard Hawks’ Red River is the film that permanently changed Westerns, ushering in the era of the “adult” Western and bringing a darker psychological undercurrent to the genre. John Wayne stars as Thomas Dunson, the film’s hero (and villain) who begins the West’s first cattle drive from Texas to Missouri but ends up paranoid and borderline psychotic by journey’s end. It’s not a perfect film (Joanne Dru’s final speech plays like an audition for a daytime soap) but it’s the most beautifully shot of all black-and-white Westerns, and it also marked the film debut of Montgomery Clift, an actor who brought an unequaled sensitivity and introspection to cinematic acting.
8.) Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
Although Out of the Past gets my vote as the quintessential film noir, containing all the essential elements of the genre in their rawest form, Double Indemnity is the most perfectly constructed film of its kind, featuring a flawless screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. Based on a novel by James M. Cain, the film stars Fred MacMurray as a slick insurance salesman cajoled by femme fatale seductress Barbara Stanwyck into murdering her husband. “How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” he muses in voice-over, and you know immediately that he is completely and helplessly doomed.
7.) Brief Encounter (1945, David Lean)
Anyone who knows David Lean only from his epic films, such as The Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia, may be surprised to see his name in the credits of Brief Encounter, which is anything but epic. Instead, it’s an intimate drama of soul mates who meet by chance in a railway station refreshment room, but who are both married to other people. Narrated in flashback in a near stream-of-consciousness style, it is among the most heartbreaking of movies. Trevor Howard is excellent as the male half of the love affair, but the film belongs to Celia Johnson. With her round eyes and porcelain features, she’s the embodiment of every housewife’s unspoken dreams and unconsummated passions.
6.) Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
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Casablanca is the ultimate example of what the Hollywood dream factory was capable of when absolutely everything clicked. Director Michael Curtiz was a consummate craftsman, not flashy but reliable, working from a witty screenplay by Howard Koch and Julius and Philip Epstein, which was still being written as filming took place. Max Steiner composed one of his less overbearing scores and cinematographer Arthur Edeson (who began his career in pictures in the 1910s) filmed in the signature low light Warner Bros. style. Humphrey Bogart was just hitting his stride as a leading man and Ingrid Bergman was never more luminous. The supporting cast was first rate, from featured Warners players Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, to French actor Marcel Dalio, in a small role as a croupier. Many of the film’s quotes have become engrained in popular culture – “We’ll always have Paris.” “Round up the usual suspects.” “Here’s looking at you, kid.” – but none captures the film’s weary fatalism better than, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” an encapsulation of the Bogart mystique in a single line.
5.) The Red Shoes (1948, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
I’ve always felt that movies are the greatest art form, because, when done well, they can combine the best elements of other major art forms: writing, photography, theater, music, and dance. The Red Shoes, the story of a ballet dancer torn between romantic love and her professional passion, is a perfect synthesis of those aforementioned disciplines, yet it exists on a purely cinematic level that the other arts on their own could never duplicate. The film’s centerpiece, “The Red Shoes Ballet,” begins as a fairly standard staged play, but gradually the camera draws us further and further in until the red shoes magically lace onto the feet of Moira Shearer, a moment that can only be described as pure cinema.
4.) The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)
Has there ever been a better cameo appearance than Orson Welles’ in The Third Man? At first we see only his shoe tops. A kitten rubs up against them, plays with the laces. A light from an adjacent window clicks on and there he is, standing in a doorway. The camera tracks in and there’s that devilish grin in the middle of his chubby baby face. It’s just one of the many delights in a film that features career performances by Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli, a haunting zither score by Anton Karas, moody black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker, and an unusually effective array of tilt angles utilized by director Carol Reed. And for my money, the climax through the sewers of Vienna is still the best chase scene ever filmed.
3.) Bicycle Thieves (1948, Vittorio De Sica)
The pinnacle of Italian neorealism, Bicycle Thieves is the story of Antonio, an impoverished man who embarks on a hopeless search with his son through the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle, a necessity for his job. Vittorio De Sica used nonprofessional actors and real locations, but was able to remove the rough stylistic edges from earlier neorealist films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, without compromising the integrity of the movement. The film was released in the U.S. with the mistranslated title “The Bicycle Thief,” which fails to convey the fact that Antonio was a thief himself in a country of thieves, forced into desperation by the sad conditions of postwar Italy.
2.) Late Spring (1949, Yasujiro Ozu)
Yasujiro Ozu has never enjoyed the same popularity with Western audiences as his fellow countryman Akira Kurosawa, perhaps because of the traditional Japanese themes of his films. The story of Late Spring is typical of Ozu’s oeuvre: a widower (Chishu Ryu), not wishing his unmarried daughter (Setsuko Hara) become an old maid, pretends to be engaged so that she will feel obligated to leave the nest and find a husband. Into this simple story, filmed almost entirely in static shots taken from the eye level of a person seated on a tatami mat, Ozu captures the most basic of human emotions: love, joy, sorrow, longing, and regret. Despite his reputation as being the “most Japanese” of filmmakers, Ozu’s movie language is in fact the most universal of all directors.
1.) Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
What else? Citizen Kane is the greatest film of all-time because it’s the single most influential film of all-time, bar none. It changed everything: lighting, camera angles, editing, dialogue, narrative technique. The number of great directors who have listed Citizen Kane among their top ten films is staggering – Kieslowski, Kubrick, Lean, Spielberg, Scorsese, just to name a few. Citizen Kane is a movie in which the director’s presence is apparent in every frame of film, in every second of the soundtrack. It was made by Orson Welles when he was just 25 years old, proving to be both a blessing and a curse. After its commercial failure at the box office, RKO pulled the plug on his complete artistic freedom, chopping his follow-up film, The Magnificent Ambersons, to shreds in the editing room and tacking on a sappy ending. Even in its mutilated form it nearly made this list, but it serves as a sad reminder of the limitless potential of a director who was artistically castrated by the studio system.
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