1940s
by stitchesaresore | created - 19 Mar 2015 | updated - 27 Apr 2015 | PublicMovies I've seen and movies I want to see of all genres that were released from 1940 to 1949.
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1. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
Not Rated | 104 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
In 1900, a young widow finds her seaside cottage is haunted and forms a unique relationship with the ghost.
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz | Stars: Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, George Sanders, Edna Best
Votes: 20,864
2. I Wake Up Screaming (1941)
Passed | 82 min | Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
Why is Inspector Ed Cornell trying to railroad Frankie Christopher for the murder of model Vicky Lynn?
Director: H. Bruce Humberstone | Stars: Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Carole Landis, Laird Cregar
Votes: 5,374
3. Cat People (1942)
Not Rated | 73 min | Fantasy, Horror, Thriller
An American man marries a Serbian immigrant who fears that she will turn into the cat person of her homeland's fables if they are intimate together.
Director: Jacques Tourneur | Stars: Simone Simon, Tom Conway, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph
Votes: 25,983 | Gross: $4.00M
4. The Spiral Staircase (1946)
Approved | 83 min | Drama, Horror, Mystery
In 1916, a shadowy serial killer is targeting women with "afflictions"; one night during a thunderstorm, the mute Helen feels menaced.
Director: Robert Siodmak | Stars: Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, Ethel Barrymore, Kent Smith
Votes: 11,257
5. I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
Passed | 69 min | Drama, Fantasy, Horror
A nurse is hired to care for the wife of a sugar plantation owner, who has been acting strangely, on a Caribbean island.
Director: Jacques Tourneur | Stars: Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison, Edith Barrett
Votes: 13,665
6. The Cat Creeps (1946)
Passed | 58 min | Comedy, Drama, Mystery
A black cat is suspected of being possessed by the spirit of a elderly murdered woman.
Director: Erle C. Kenton | Stars: Noah Beery Jr., Lois Collier, Paul Kelly, Frederick Brady
Votes: 357
7. Casablanca (1942)
PG | 102 min | Drama, Romance, War
A cynical expatriate American cafe owner struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis in French Morocco.
Director: Michael Curtiz | Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains
Votes: 605,769 | Gross: $1.02M
8. Citizen Kane (1941)
PG | 119 min | Drama, Mystery
Following the death of publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane, reporters scramble to uncover the meaning of his final utterance: 'Rosebud.'
Director: Orson Welles | Stars: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead
Votes: 465,816 | Gross: $1.59M
9. Rebecca (1940)
Approved | 130 min | Drama, Mystery, Romance
A self-conscious woman juggles adjusting to her new role as an aristocrat's wife and avoiding being intimidated by his first wife's spectral presence.
Director: Alfred Hitchcock | Stars: Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson
Votes: 146,662 | Gross: $4.36M
10. Spellbound (1945)
Approved | 111 min | Film-Noir, Mystery, Romance
A psychiatrist protects the identity of an amnesia patient accused of murder while attempting to recover his memory.
Director: Alfred Hitchcock | Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll
Votes: 52,220 | Gross: $7.00M
11. I Married a Witch (1942)
Passed | 77 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Romance
A beautiful 17th-century witch returns to life to plague politician Wallace Wooley, descendant of her persecutor.
Director: René Clair | Stars: Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Robert Benchley, Susan Hayward
Votes: 9,519 | Gross: $0.31M
12. Mr. Skeffington (1944)
Approved | 146 min | Drama, Romance
Popular and beautiful Fanny Trellis is forced into a loveless marriage with an older man, Jewish banker Job Skeffington, in order to save her beloved brother Trippy from an embezzlement charge.
Director: Vincent Sherman | Stars: Bette Davis, Claude Rains, Walter Abel, George Coulouris
Votes: 6,675
13. The Little Foxes (1941)
Approved | 116 min | Drama, Romance
The ruthless, moneyed Hubbard clan lives in, and poisons, their part of the Deep South at the turn of the twentieth century.
Director: William Wyler | Stars: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright, Richard Carlson
Votes: 13,108
14. The Heiress (1949)
Not Rated | 115 min | Drama, Romance
A naive young woman falls for a handsome young man her emotionally abusive father suspects is only a fortune hunter.
Director: William Wyler | Stars: Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson, Miriam Hopkins
Votes: 17,338
15. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Passed | 100 min | Crime, Film-Noir, Mystery
San Francisco private detective Sam Spade takes on a case that involves him with three eccentric criminals, a gorgeous liar and their quest for a priceless statuette, with the stakes rising after his partner is murdered.
Director: John Huston | Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre
Votes: 166,530 | Gross: $2.11M
16. The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
Passed | 81 min | Drama, Horror, Mystery
The owner of a coal mining operation, falsely imprisoned for fratricide, takes a drug to make him invisible, despite its side effect: gradual madness.
Director: Joe May | Stars: Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price, Nan Grey, John Sutton
Votes: 5,287
17. The House of the Seven Gables (1940)
Approved | 89 min | Drama, Thriller
Based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, this classic film follows a family feud between two brothers and an ancient curse that haunts them.
Director: Joe May | Stars: George Sanders, Margaret Lindsay, Vincent Price, Dick Foran
Votes: 1,516
18. The Song of Bernadette (1943)
Approved | 156 min | Biography, Drama, Mystery
14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, living in a small town in the south of 1850s France, claims to have seen a divine vision, prompting extreme skepticism, concern from her family, and religious and political turmoil.
Director: Henry King | Stars: Jennifer Jones, Charles Bickford, William Eythe, Vincent Price
Votes: 7,643
19. Laura (1944)
Passed | 88 min | Drama, Film-Noir, Mystery
A police detective falls in love with the woman whose murder he is investigating.
Directors: Otto Preminger, Rouben Mamoulian | Stars: Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price
Votes: 51,393 | Gross: $4.36M
20. The Wolf Man (1941)
Passed | 70 min | Horror, Mystery, Romance
Larry Talbot returns to his father's castle in Wales and meets a beautiful woman. One fateful night, Talbot escorts her to a local carnival where they meet a mysterious gypsy fortune teller.
Director: George Waggner | Stars: Claude Rains, Warren William, Lon Chaney Jr., Ralph Bellamy
Votes: 30,686
21. The Uninvited (1944)
Passed | 99 min | Fantasy, Horror, Mystery
A composer and his sister discover that the reason they are able to purchase a beautiful gothic seacoast mansion very cheaply is the house's unsavory past.
Director: Lewis Allen | Stars: Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, Cornelia Otis Skinner
Votes: 12,460
22. The Body Snatcher (1945)
Approved | 78 min | Horror, Thriller
A ruthless doctor and his young prize student find themselves continually harassed by their murderous supplier of illegal cadavers.
Director: Robert Wise | Stars: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater
Votes: 10,188
23. Isle of the Dead (1945)
Not Rated | 71 min | Drama, Horror, Mystery
On a Greek island during the 1912 war, several people are trapped by quarantine for the plague. If that isn't enough worry, one of the people, a superstitious old peasant woman, suspects ... See full summary »
Director: Mark Robson | Stars: Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery
Votes: 5,261
24. Dead of Night (1945)
Approved | 77 min | Drama, Horror
Guests invited to a weekend in the country share their supernatural stories, beginning with Walter Craig, who senses impending doom as his half-remembered recurring dream turns into reality.
Directors: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer | Stars: Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave, Roland Culver, Mary Merrall
Votes: 14,209
25. The Seventh Victim (1943)
Approved | 71 min | Drama, Horror, Mystery
A woman in search of her missing sister uncovers a Satanic cult in New York's Greenwich Village and finds that they could have something to do with her sibling's random disappearance.
Director: Mark Robson | Stars: Kim Hunter, Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell
Votes: 7,574
26. The Ape (1940)
Approved | 62 min | Horror
Dr. Bernard Adrian is a kindly mad scientist who seeks to cure a young woman's polio. He needs spinal fluid from a human to complete the formula for his experimental serum.
Director: William Nigh | Stars: Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixon, Gene O'Donnell, Dorothy Vaughan
Votes: 2,061
27. The Ape Man (1943)
Passed | 64 min | Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi
A crazed scientist accidentally turns himself into a half ape, half human creature, and scrambles to find a cure.
Director: William Beaudine | Stars: Bela Lugosi, Louise Currie, Wallace Ford, Henry Hall
Votes: 1,504
28. Shock (1946)
Passed | 70 min | Film-Noir, Thriller
A psychologically distraught woman is committed to a private sanitarium by the man she witnessed commit a murder.
Director: Alfred L. Werker | Stars: Vincent Price, Lynn Bari, Frank Latimore, Anabel Shaw
Votes: 3,295
29. Scared to Death (1946)
Approved | 65 min | Crime, Mystery, Thriller
From a slab in the morgue, a dead young woman tells the bizarre tale of how she got there, through a maze of murder involving a hypnotist, a midget and a mysterious figure in a green mask.
Director: Christy Cabanne | Stars: Bela Lugosi, George Zucco, Molly Lamont, Nat Pendleton
Votes: 1,771
30. The Sea Hawk (1940)
Approved | 127 min | Action, Adventure, History
Geoffrey Thorpe, a buccaneer, is hired by Queen Elizabeth I to nag the Spanish Armada. The Armada is waiting for the attack on England and Thorpe surprises them with attacks on their galleons where he shows his skills on the sword.
Director: Michael Curtiz | Stars: Errol Flynn, Brenda Marshall, Claude Rains, Donald Crisp
Votes: 10,730
31. That Lady in Ermine (1948)
Approved | 89 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Musical
That Lady in Ermine tells two parallel stories, both taking place in the small Mittel-European duchy of Bergamo, with one set in the 19th century and the other in the 16th.
Directors: Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger | Stars: Betty Grable, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cesar Romero, Walter Abel
Votes: 921 | Gross: $1.41M
32. The Leopard Man (1943)
Approved | 66 min | Film-Noir, Horror, Thriller
A seemingly-tame leopard used for a publicity stunt escapes and kills a young girl, spreading panic throughout a sleepy New Mexico town.
Director: Jacques Tourneur | Stars: Dennis O'Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell
Votes: 5,959
33. Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Not Rated | 93 min | Drama, Fantasy, Romance
A beautiful young woman takes her father's place as the prisoner of a mysterious beast, who wishes to marry her.
Directors: Jean Cocteau, René Clément | Stars: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély, Nane Germon
Votes: 28,073 | Gross: $0.30M
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