Late Spring isn’t about American control of Japanese territories in the 1940s rather, it’s about a father and daughter going about their business within that world, a film that honors minutiae and celebrates the mundane with superlative grace. If you want to know what an artist’s critique of postwar censorship in Allied-occupied Japan looks like, just watch Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring and keep your eyes peeled for the Coca Cola sign. It’s one of those films that really send you to another dimension. Powell’s camerawork is mesmerizing and the film is steeped in supersaturated color, underlining the exoticism and confusion faced by the nuns. The story’s compelling enough, but what really blows me away about this film is the otherworldly visual sensibility. There are tragic consequences, naturally. And the agent who’s on call to help them do it is, well, he’s a bit of a temptation. It’s difficult to adapt to the new surroundings. ![]() Five nuns are sent to establish a convent, school and hospital in a former harem. And it’s a beautiful kind of strangeness. Jim VorelĪ melodrama set in a convent in British-ruled Himalayan India, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and starring Deborah Kerr and David Farrar, Black Narcissus provides a recipe for … well, strangeness. But who are the spirits truly interested in, and are they truly malevolent? With evocative, moody cinematography that presages the likes of The Innocents 15 years later, the film succeeds as a serious, suspenseful mystery in an era when “ghost stories” were much more likely to be comedic or campy. A brother and sister move into a crumbling seaside manor to discover restless spirits with a connection to the young granddaughter of the former owner. On some level it’s more of a mystery/romance, with the veracity of the ghosts in real doubt-not unlike Guillermo Del Toro’s modern Crimson Peak, without all the visual bluster. Widely regarded as one of the finest ghost stories of the ’40s, The Uninvited carries itself with a dignity not seen in most Universal monster movies or Poverty Row cheapies. Here are the 50 best movies of the 1940s: Also, we just think these are some damned fine films. We distilled our list based on a little bit of each of those things, but overall, it’s a suggestion of required viewing material for anyone who aspires to cultural literacy. We love what we love, and for some of us it’s romantic comedies and for others it’s monster movies, while for others it’s about this cinematic innovation or that groundbreaking foray into previously unexplored subject matter. To a large extent, “best” is a meaninglessly subjective term. This was the decade of Hepburn and Tracy, Bogart and Bacall, of nostalgia and neo-realism, star-crossed lovers and double-crossing villains. At the same time, screwball comedies proliferated. The 1940s saw the rise of Technicolor but also of film noir with its dark, cynical, moody and fatalistic stories of hard-boiled detectives and treacherous women. Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock were doing some of their best work. The 1940s saw the emergence of the auteur, filmmaking led by the director as opposed to the writer. The second World War was, of course, a heavy thread through the first half of the decade, providing fodder for stories on the one hand and on the other, a desire for the escapist balm of comedies and musicals. ![]() Critical opinion has settled pretty solidly on the “best” films of the cinematically prolific 1940s look at ten lists of the best movies of the 1940s and you’ll see a lot of overlap.
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