cinemadiso's - 1940s in Films Vol. 3 List
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The Shop Around the Corner (1940)Shopworn Angel
Tell bickering Budapest gift-shop workers Alfred (James Stewart) and Klara (Margaret Sullavan) that they love each other and they might call you crazy. No lover can compare to the romantic, secret pen pal each knows only as Dear Friend. What Alfred and Klara don't know, of course, is that they are each other's Dear Friend. - Director:
- Ernst Lubitsch
- Cast:
- Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan
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It's the turn of the century in the deep South, and the Hubbard siblings are embroiled in their own money-driven, power-hungry civil war. Most calculating of the group is Regina (Bette Davis), who, along with her brother, demands ownership of a cotton mill expected to yield millions. Proving that blood is not thicker than greed, the Hubbards will stop at nothing to push their unscrupulous deal through...Even if it means destroying everyone around them! - Director:
- William Wyler
- Cast:
- Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright
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Cary Grant and a stellar cast romp through this classic farce based on Joseph Kesselrings 1941 Broadway hit and breezily directed by Frank Capra. Frazzled drama critic Mortimer Brewster (Grant) has two aunts (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) who ply lonely geezers with poisoned libations, one sociopathic brother (Raymond Massey) who looks like Boris Karloff, one bonkers brother (John Alexander) who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, one impatient new bride (Priscilla Lane)and only one night to make it turn out all right. In this circus center ring is Grant, twisting his face into a clown's gallery of flabbergasted reactions and transforming his natural athletic grace into a rubber-legged comic ballet. Youll die laughing. - Director:
- Frank Capra
- Cast:
- Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey
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Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) leads a group of Anglican nuns to a remote Himalayan range of mountains, there to set up a mission in an abandoned harem. This is her first position of authority and she finds both her physical and her spiritual limits being taxed as she has to maintain order and discipline in a claustrophobically hostile environment. Slowly but surely, however, the privations and hardship they must endure, the extremes of climate and the peculiar amorality of the local natives all combine to slowly corrupt the women's faith, pushing them further into jealousy, anger and madness... - Director:
- Michael Powell
- Cast:
- Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Flora Robson
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Nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall makes her sizzling screen debut in the first of 4 films she made opposite Humphrey Bogart. he plays a cynical American expatriate swept up in the fighting of the French resistance - and swept off his feet by an alluring young drifter - Bacall. Set on the island of Martinique in 1940, the film features smouldering performances from the legendary couple. - Director:
- Howard Hawks
- Cast:
- Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Walter Brennan
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Philandering concert pianist Stefan arrives home to find a letter which begins 'by the time you read this I may be dead'. So unfolds the story of Lisa, one of many woman with whom he had shared a brief encounter over the years and swiftly forgotten. Her life has been spent loving him unfalteringly and now he would learn the truth about his past. - Director:
- Max Ophüls
- Cast:
- Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians
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Set among Brooklyn tenements circa 1912, 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' is a portrait of the Nolans, an Irish-American family living in financially challenging circumstances, often made worse by father Johnny's (James Dunn)'s drinking and employment problems. But matriarch Katie (Dorothy McGuire) keeps the family together during all of the obstacles, caring for son Neeley (Ted Donaldson) and daughter Francie (Peggy Ann Garner), as well as Katie's outspoken, oft-married sister Sissy (Joan Blondell). But just as Francie's gift for writing opens up new avenues, more tragic developments test the family's resolve. - Director:
- Elia Kazan
- Cast:
- Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, James Dunn
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Norwegian immigrant Marta Hanson keeps a firm but loving hand on her household of four children, a devoted husband and a highly - educated lodger who reads Charles Dickens to the family every evening. Through financial crises, illnesses and the small triumphs of everyday life, Marta maintains her optimism and sense of humour, traits she passes on to her aspiring - author daughter, Katrin. - Director:
- George Stevens
- Cast:
- Irene Dunne, Barbara Bel Geddes, Oskar Homolka
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Set in Midwestern America, 'The Magnificent Ambersons' tells the tale of Isabel Amberson Minafer (Dolores Costello) and her son George (Tim Holt), an upper middle class family experiencing social decline at the turn of the century. With the industrial and technological age taking full force, the chances within the family are self destructing. After the death of her husband Wilbur (Don Dillaway), Isabel is romantically linked with Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) whom she knew from years previous to her marriage. George, unhappy with this courtship, proceeds to do everything in his power to destroy their relationship despite falling for Eugene's daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter). Disaster strikes for the Amberson family and events do not turn out as George expected... - Director:
- Orson Welles
- Cast:
- Orson Welles, Tim Holt, Dolores Costello
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Late Spring (1949)Banshun
Yasujiro Ozu's hugely influential award-winning masterpiece, 'Late Spring', is a tender meditation on family politics, sacrifice and the status quo. Noriko (Setsuko Hara) and her father, Professor Somiya (Chishu Ryu), live together in perfect harmony but old certainties are put at risk when an interfering aunt raises the question of marriage. Introducing Ozu's popular Noriko character, 'Late Spring' poignantly examines the gradual compromise between modernity and tradition. - Director:
- Yasujirô Ozu
- Cast:
- Chishû Ryû, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka
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A hurricane swells outside, but it's nothing compared to the storm within the hotel at Key Largo. There, sadistic mobster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) holes up and holds at gunpoint hotel owner Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall) and ex-GI Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart). McCloud's the one man capable of standing up against the belligerent Rocco. But the postwar world's realities may have taken all the fight out of him. John Huston co-wrote and compellingly directs this film of Maxwell Anderson's 1939 play with a searing Academy Award winning performance by Claire Trevor as Rocco's gold-hearted, boozy moll. In Huston's hands, it becomes a powerful, sweltering classic. - Director:
- John Huston
- Cast:
- Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Lauren Bacall
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Ernest Hemingway s spare, laconic short story about two professional killers and their encounter with a mysteriously unresisting victim was significantly expanded into this all-time film noir classic, which Hemingway said was the first adaptation of his work that he really admired. As washed-up boxer turned hitman victim Ole 'Swede' Andreson, Burt Lancaster made his screen debut, and was catapulted to instant stardom, not least for the screen chemistry that he showed opposite sultry Ava Gardner, whose Kitty Collins is the very personification of the femme fatale. German émigré Robert Siodmak was one of the filmmakers who helped create film noir, and Elwood Bredell s high-contrast cinematography, all harsh lighting and long shadows, elevates the film far above a conventional crime drama. But even on that level it s a first-rate demonstration of how to maintain narrative tension, with the flashback structure withholding crucial details until almost the very end. - Director:
- Robert Siodmak
- Cast:
- Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien
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Melodrama casts noirish shadows in this portrait of maternal sacrifice from Hollywood master Michael Curtiz. Its iconic performance by Joan Crawford as Mildred, a single mother hell-bent on freeing her children from the stigma of economic hardship, solidified Crawford's career comeback and gave the actor her only Oscar. But as Mildred pulls herself up by the bootstraps, first as an unflappable waitress and eventually as the well-heeled owner of a successful restaurant chain, the ingratitude of her materialistic firstborn (a diabolical Ann Blyth) becomes a venomous serpent's tooth, setting in motion an endless cycle of desperate overtures and heartless recriminations. Recasting James M. Cain's rich psychological novel as a murder mystery, this bitter cocktail of blind parental love and all-American ambition is both unremittingly hard-boiled and sumptuously emotional. - Director:
- Michael Curtiz
- Cast:
- Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Zachary Scott
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