1940s

Welles, twenty five, made the film that tops most greatest lists: deep focus photography, overlapping dialogue, and a fractured in...

Huston directed his first film and defined film noir in one move. Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, Mary Astor lying beautifully, Sydn...

Of all the gin joints, the luckiest accident in studio history. A wartime script rewritten daily became the most quotable film eve...

Barbara Stanwyck anklet launches the definitive noir: an insurance salesman, a bored wife, a perfect murder policy. Raymond Chandl...

A love quadrangle among theater folk in 1830s Paris, filmed in occupied France under Nazi censorship. Jacques Prevert dialogue, Je...

Three veterans return home to a changed America: a banker, a sailor, and an airman who lost both hands, played by real veteran Har...

The ballet film to end all ballet films: a young dancer torn between love and art, an impresario who demands everything, and a fif...

A father and son search Rome for a stolen bicycle that means a job and survival. Nonprofessional actors, real streets, neorealism ...

Gold, paranoia, and Humphrey Bogart unraveling in the Mexican mountains. The stinking badges line entered the language. Walter Hus...

Postwar Vienna, divided zones, a zither score, and Orson Welles delivering the cuckoo clock speech from a ferris wheel. Joseph Cot...

Hitchcocks first Hollywood film, and his only Best Picture winner. A timid bride moves into Manderley and lives in the shadow of t...

Chaplin plays both a Jewish barber and Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomainia, and dances with a balloon globe while the world burne...

George Bailey wishes he had never been born and an angel shows him the town without him. A flop in 1946 that grew into the most br...

Bogart and Bacall trade innuendo at machine gun pace in the noir where even the novelists could not explain who killed the chauffe...