The Second World War didn’t just displace and kill millions of people. It reshaped the cinematic industry in many countries involved with the combat effort, and in some respects, it further emphasized the role of film as a propaganda medium. Despite the ravages of this infamous global conflict, however, the world of movies continued to evolve, to develop new techniques and editing methods.

The value of the story rivalled that of the actors’ performance, and the golden age of Hollywood continued to set new trends and deliver incredible stories onto the silver screen. Filmmakers from Europe, Mexico, Asia and Russia didn’t back down either, though each continent brought forth its own cultural identity and elements of style. Therefore, this next decade we’re about to delve into is rife with key moments that further shaped the cinema we know and love today.

1939: The Classics Emerge

There were many movies that made film history in 1939. To be honest, it was hard to pick the truly seminal ones, since each of these films is now considered a building block of cinema itself. ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939), directed by King Vidor, is at the top of the list. He remained uncredited at the time after replacing the already-credited Victor Fleming, who’d left the production to shoot ‘Gone with the Wind’ that same year.

‘Over the Rainbow’ is, to this day, one of the greatest song performances in history and an iconic scene. When MGM’s super-production was first previewed, the studio’s execs felt that the movie was too long, so a number of cuts were made. ‘The Jitterbug’ was among the casualties, and Judy Garland’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ almost got the boot, as well. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, going against this idea that people didn’t go to the movies to watch a farm girl sing against the black and white backdrop of Kansas. The most achingly lovely musical performance thus survived the final cut, and the song went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

‘THE WIZARD OF OZ’ (1939), ©METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER (MGM)

Victor Fleming secured his pictorial immortality with ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939), an ambitious and spectacular rendition of Margaret Mitchell’s eponymous book. But for a big picture that covers entire decades of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, it’s strikingly short on spectacle, since the plot is more concerned with the romantic travails of Scarlett O’Hara and other characters. Much of the action, such as Leslie Howard’s night-riding raids with the Ku Klux Klan and even the deaths of major characters, happens off-screen.

Despite that, ‘Gone with the Wind’ delivers an unforgettable scene when Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett searches for Harry Davenport’s Dr Meade among a crowd of 16,000 wounded Confederate soldiers. This moment conveys the dreadful price that soldiers pay in wartime, as Scarlett realizes the extent of the suffering. There are 800 extras and about 800 more dummies on screen as the camera pulls back and up to take in an acre of open-air hospital from a godlike vantage.

‘GONE WITH THE WIND’ (1939), ©METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER (MGM)

The filibuster at the end of ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’ (1939) not only defined James Stewart’s screen persona, it also helped define how Americans would see themselves in the post-war era. Frank Capra’s cinematic masterpiece gives us Mr Smith as the quintessential American hero—boyish, energetic, naïve and idealistic, an innocent soul thrust into politics by a corrupt political machine that foolishly thinks he’ll be easy to manipulate. But in his crazed, desperate zeal during the filibuster, Mr Smith ends up representing the dark side of American idealism as it confronts reality. Capra’s films are widely regarded as corny and overly simplistic nowadays, though most critics fail to see how dark and subversive his portrayals of American life really are.

‘MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON’ (1939), ©COLUMBIA PICTURES

In 1939, 11-year-old Shirley Temple was topping the box office. Glamorous goddesses like Greta Garbo were considered ‘unwholesome’. The Hollywood Reporter had gone as far as to declare her ‘box office poison’, and yet Ms Garbo laughed in Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘Ninotchka’ (1939), and the whole of America went through a sudden spell of adulthood that lasted for months. Playing Nina Ivanovna Yakushova, a special envoy from Moscow in Paris, Ms Garbo scoffs at the sight of a fancy hat shop window. ‘How can such a civilization survive which permits their women to put things like that on their heads? It won’t be long now, comrades.’

‘NINOTCHKA’ (1939), ©METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER (MGM)

1940: Of Comedy and Cartoons

Howard Hawks is at his most laconic and most eloquent with the arrest of Earl Williams scene in ‘His Girl Friday’ (1940). We find ourselves in the press room of the Criminal Courts building of a major American city. Cary Grant’s Walter Burns, newspaper editor, and Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson, ace reporter, have just hit an exclusive pot of gold as John Qualen’s Earl Williams, convicted murderer and freshly escaped from death row, has picked the press room to hide in. It’s a brilliant fast-paced comedy sprinkled with typically Hawksian shots and intelligent narrative.

‘HIS GIRL FRIDAY’ (1940), ©COLUMBIA PICTURES

A key character that emerges at this point in history is Bugs Bunny in ‘A Wild Hare’ (1940). In their ‘Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons’, animation historian Jerry Beck and author Will Friedwald said it best: ‘The classic cartoon that solidified the personalities of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and became the blueprint for their future encounters.’ Furthermore, this film contains the first utterance of the famous line ‘What’s up, Doc?’.

1941: Citizen Kane

Of all the movies that made it onto the big screen, it was Orson Welles’s ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941) that embedded itself in the annals of history. It was his first feature-length oeuvre, which he co-wrote, produced, directed and acted in. Nominated for nine Academy Awards, it took home the trophy for Best Writing (Original Screenplay), which Mr Welles shared with Herman J. Mankiewicz, who also penned ‘The Wizard of Oz’.

Most importantly, it was the film’s encyclopaedic nature that doubtlessly impressed Jorge Luis Borges, who called ‘Citizen Kane’ a film that ‘teems with multiplicity and incongruity’, never more so than in its final moment, for the credits represent the true end—this final accounting of the story reconfiguring the cinema itself as a ‘catalogue raisonné’.

‘CITIZEN KANE’ (1941), ©RKO RADIO PICTURES

1943: Casablanca

Everyone remembers Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in ‘Casablanca’ (1943), Michael Curtiz’s masterpiece. Their performances aren’t just exquisite. They’re the stuff of silver screen legends. ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ is perhaps one of cinema’s most memorable lines, which Bogart’s Rick says to Bergman’s Ilsa.

But it’s the last speech that offers yet another defining moment, as Rick and Captain Renault agree to leave everything behind in Morocco and go off to join the Free French against the Nazis. The pair walk off into the foggy night to an unknown, but presumably legendary future. Bogart’s final words take the sting off what might come across as a downbeat and sentimental wartime sacrifice ending, since his character has bid the love of his life and his business farewell, but he says: ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’ Like all great endings, it’s also a beginning—of a story we can only imagine.

‘CASABLANCA’ (1943), ©WARNER BROS.

1944: A Year Full of Magic

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ‘A Canterbury Tale’ (1944) gave us what could easily be described as the single greatest cut in the history of film. We begin with a quote from Chaucer, an illuminated manuscript, and a group of medieval pilgrims on a road through the Kentish countryside. In close-up, a hood is taken off a falcon, and the bird soars into the skies, watched by a noble falconer played by James Sadler. In a match-cut that skips 600 years, the falcon becomes a Spitfire, and we return to Sadler’s face looking up, only now he’s wearing a 1944 British soldier’s tin-hat, offering an astonishing visual effect.

The entrance of a femme fatale in a film noir is always a key moment, and ‘Double Indemnity’ (1944), one of the finest examples of its genre, does not depart from the rule. It is an exquisite example of film noir’s construction of femininity and a highlight in Barbara Stanwyck’s career, as she stands at the top of the stairs, covered only by a towel and seeming unattainable and domineering towards the aroused visitor. And then she comes down the stairs… While Ms Stanwyck certainly wasn’t the most beautiful actress of her era, she was definitely one of the most talented, as she manages to convincingly portray her character as both cold and engaging.

‘DOUBLE INDEMNITY’ (1944), ©PARAMOUNT PICTURES

An unforgettable snippet of Hollywood’s golden age comes through the sizzling chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, a pair that went on to tie the knot after Howard Hawks’ ‘To Have and Have Not’ (1944). The situation of the film is pure Bogart—a selfish man is forced by circumstances to commit to a cause. But the one who steals the show is Bacall in her hypnotic first ever performance. She was so nervous during the shoot that she tensed her neck muscles and dropped her chin in what would become known as ‘the look’, and yet she delivered one of the power lines of cinema: ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.’

‘TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT’ (1944), ©RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE/MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY 2009

1946: Camera Movements and Cannes

The crane was among Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite toys from the earliest years of cinema, but the suspense master’s use of it in the Cary Grant-Ingrid Bergman thriller ‘Notorious’ (1946) still ranks among its most memorable appearances. The famous crane shot occurs during a black-tie party at which Bergman’s Alicia is supposed to use a purloined key to access the wine cellar. It starts high above the party, peering down over a second-floor railing at the guests, then slowly descends to pick out Alicia. It moves even closer to reveal the key in her hand, giving us a truly meaningful camera movement that amplifies the plot.

That same year, nineteen countries teamed up to take the first substantial step toward the creation of a global film culture by organizing the Cannes International Film Festival. The opening night was on 20^th September 1946, seven years after its intended first date (cancelled due to the outbreak of World War II), and it marked the birth of a worldwide film culture with celebratory fireworks and film-star/soprano Grace Moore crooning the ‘Marseillaise’. There were numerous disruptions, including blackouts and Hitchock’s ‘Notorious’ reels projected in the wrong order, but nothing could dim the event’s roaring success.

THE ORIGINAL EVENT POSTER, ©FESTIVAL DE CANNES

1948: The Paramount Divestiture Decree

The federal government of the United States filed a lawsuit that became known as ‘United States vs Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al.’, charging the ‘Big Five’ studios (Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., 20^th Century Fox, and RKO) with violating antitrust statutes. The move came after complaints piled up from independent theatre exhibitors that the Hollywood studios’ chokehold on producing, screening and distributing films had created a monopoly that restrained free competition. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that all studios had to divest themselves of their nationwide theatre chains.

Combined with dropping ticket sales and the growing proliferation of television sets, the ruling meant the loss of predictable and guaranteed theatrical income for the studios. It ultimately led to the physical dismantling and sale of studio backlots and warehouses about a decade later. Ironically, as the number of moviegoers declined in the ‘50s, it was the film corporations that ultimately benefitted from these sales, passing on the loss to independent theatre owners—the very entities that the Paramount decree had intended to protect.

1949: The Glory of Melodrama

Vincente Minnelli was a master of both the musical and the melodrama, the one director who was able to display the close kinship between the two genres. His films are rich in dynamic and visually stunning set pieces of mounting tension and blissful release. It’s a cinema of ‘key moments’, and ‘Madame Bovary’ (1949) illustrates the peak of his powers with the ball’s kinetic sequence.

‘MADAME BOVARY’ (1949), ©METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER (MGM)

In this scene, provincial doctor Charles Bovary, played by Van Heflin, and his beautiful wife, Emma, beautifully brought to life by Jennifer Jones, attend a ball hosted by a nobleman. The entire moment is structured by the changing styles, tempos, and time signatures of the musical pieces played during the celebration—all composed by Miklós Rózsa, and Emma is pursued by Minnelli’s tirelessly moving camera. It ends with a regal order that every window in the ballroom be smashed, and Madame Bovary’s husband lurchingly descending onto the floor in pursuit of her. It is not just cinematically satisfying as a scene. It is socially embarrassing, intense, and therefore impossible to forget.

The first half of the 20^th century got off to a slow start in terms of cinema, but as the artistic medium and its technology evolved, so did storytelling for the silver screen. The golden era opened the doors for many writers, directors and actors, their names forever inscribed in the annals of movie history.

With the development of cinema came numerous milestones—from new camera movements and plot building methods to revolutionary dramatic performances and editing breakthroughs that virtually changed how we view films today. This decade further established the industry, paving the way for the billions of dollars of box office profits that followed and later turned California into one of the world’s largest economies. Of course, the changes occurred globally, with European, Russian and Asian directors making their mark. But as we take another stroll down memory lane, it’s hard not to notice that America’s contribution to the silver screen is fundamental and impossible to deny.

1928: The Genius of Comedy in the Great Depression

Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Circus’ is one of the crown jewels of cinema. Rich in both comic invention and tender sentiment, it’s a beautifully crafted masterpiece of comedy which centres on the familiar figure of the Tramp, who inadvertently becomes the star of a circus as a clown, only to have his heart broken by Merna Kennedy’s gorgeous equestrienne. The brief final scene crystallizes all that is wonderful about Chaplin—for it is not only entirely his creation, it is also only about him.

In that moment of solitude, he is no less ‘the funny man’ the circus audience clamoured for, nor less the touching man, the resilient man, the poetic man. As Charlie Chaplin the filmmaker perceives the Tramp, he is all of the above, an eternal figure. His genius is distilled in an ending that is at once simple and sublime.

‘THE CIRCUS’ (1928), ©CHARLES CHAPLIN PRODUCTIONS

1929: From Spain and Russia with Love

Luis Buñuel’s first movie, a collaboration with Salvador Dalí titled ‘Un Chien Andalou’, is still taught in film schools today. Its ‘slice of eye’ opening scene is one of the most provocative moments in cinema. It qualifies as gore, though there’s a clear lack of realism, since the victim doesn’t move back at the sight of the blade and the special effect is obvious. The image is disturbing and voluntarily shocking, but it’s also a metaphor of the director’s desire to show us what’s really inside human beings: urges, passions, and desires. The visual assault brilliantly expresses the theoretical angle of the Surrealist revolution while simultaneously applying it.

‘UN CHIEN ANDALOU’ (1929)

While the Spanish were fiddling with shock value, the Russians were nurturing their documentary making skills through Dziga Vertov. In ‘Man with a Movie Camera’, the scene where the city comes to life is now remembered as a seminal moment, part of the greatest work of experimental documentary in cinema. In it, a camera seems to raise an entire city from the dead. Nearly eight decades after it was made, this film is an important chapter in academic studies, as the ‘20s Soviet Union was basically the cinematic think tank of the world. Soviet films themselves might seem ideologically shrill, but the sheer artistic joy that they exude is ever present.

Away from the European continent, however, a key event worth noting happened in the United States. On 16^th May, 1929, the first awards ceremony hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences concluded with the presentation of two, not one, Best Picture Oscars. Briefly making a distinction between artistic achievement and middlebrow success, the Academy gave the ‘Best Picture, Production’ statuette to William Wellman for his spectacular WWI aviation epic ‘Wings’ (1928), and the ‘Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production’ to F.W. Murnau’s ‘Sunrise’ (1928).

‘SUNRISE’ (1927), ©FOX FILM CORPORATION

1930: Eisenstein Goes to Hollywood

After the worldwide success of ‘Battleship Potemkin’ in 1925, the Soviet government sent its star director on a tour of European capitals with the purpose of studying the new sound process. He only had $25 on him. While in Paris, Sergei Eisenstein signed a six-month contract with Paramount to develop and direct films in the movie capital. At the time, Paramount Pictures were Hollywood’s most sophisticated and continental studio, having already worked with Lubitsch, Sjöström, and Murnay—who’d already achieved artistic and financial success in the capitalist mecca.

Eisenstein had his fun while he worked in Hollywood, but he confounded expectations with his disdain for professional actors and his insistent focus on indicting capitalism, smack in the middle of ‘An American Tragedy’. A right-wing campaign then sought to deport Paramount’s ‘Jewish Bolshevik’, so the studio chose to put aside their yearning for artistic respectability. They drew a stiff line between commercial concerns and progressive art by cancelling Eisenstein’s contract. In that precise moment, profitability and formalist art forever parted ways in Hollywood.

SERGEI EISENSTEIN IN NEW YORK, 1930, ©SPUTNIK

1931: City Lights and Dracula

One of the most sublime and most definitive moments in cinema came with the last scene of ‘City Lights’. Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp is just out of prison and more down and out than ever when he meets Virginia Cherrill’s Girl—a witness to his discomfiture but also one who’s been laughing at him behind his back. When she asks: ‘You can see now?’, he says ‘Yes, I can see now.’ The film fades to black on a closeup of the Tramp looking at her, smiling but still torn between joy and a state of tension and uncertainty. It’s one of those rare scenes that doesn’t need words—so exquisite that merely remembering it is enough to bring tears through its profundity.

The vampire continued his own evolution through Tod Browning’s ‘Dracula’, starring Bela Lugosi. It is the first great talking horror film, giving us a memorable scene with Mr Lugosi’s Count as he makes a grand entrance at the top of a cobweb-draped staircase, immaculately clad in evening clothes and his black cape, saying: ‘I… am… Dracula.’ At the time, the Hungarian actor’s command of English was still shaky, so he had to learn his lines phonetically, adding to the curiousness of his cadences. Others have played the role and were required to put their own spin on the line—among them, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman, to name but a few, yet Lugosi is still the definitive Dracula.

‘DRACULA’ (1931), ©UNIVERSAL PICTURES

1932: Of Venus and Gangsters

Two films made history in 1932. The first, in my humble opinion, was ‘Blonde Venus’, directed by Josef von Sternberg and featuring the exquisite talents of Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant. The ‘Hot Voodoo’ scene is especially worth remembering, as it not only marks one of the flashiest entrances of all times, it also signals the intention to subvert conventional morality—Ms Dietrich revealing herself from beneath a gorilla costume, the beauty within the beast, hirsute virility shed for teasing female eroticism.

Unfortunately, there were many racist elements in that era’s cinema; in ‘Blonde Venus’, we have the black-faced backup dancers to look past in order to see how Ms Dietrich’s character is pushed beyond the genre conventions, reinventing herself in every variety of womanhood available in Hollywood back then: devoted mother, cabaret star, drunken harlot.

‘BLONDE VENUS’ (1932), ©PARAMOUNT PICTURES

The art of screenwriting was taken to a superior level with Ben Hecht’s penning of ‘Scarface’, directed by Howard Hawks. He was a Chicago newspaperman, a novelist and a playwright, making his entrance onto the Hollywood stage at the end of the silent era. After writing Sternberg’s ‘Underworld’, the very first gangster picture, Hecht told Howard Hughes that he could double the body count of any previous gangster film and write one twice as good. For $11,000, he finished the script in 11 days and delivered what is arguably the best of the ‘30s machinegun mafioso cycle.

‘SCARFACE’ (1932), ©THE CADDO COMPANY

1933: Nazis, Marx Brothers, King Kong

Shortly after Hitler took office, Joseph Goebbels took over the newly founded Ministry of Propaganda in March of 1933. Fritz Lang’s ‘The Testament of Dr Mabuse’, which was scheduled for its theatrical release in that same month, was banned by the Ministry’s censorship office. Not long afterwards, Goebbels allegedly summoned Lang to his office, apologized for the banning, then told him that both he and Hitler were big fans of his films, inviting him to head a new agency supervising German film production. It isn’t yet clear if Mr Lang’s account of this meeting is entirely true, but we know that a few months later, he left Germany and the Nazi regime behind.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, silent comedies continued to live on in the talkies, best exemplified by the work of the Marx Brothers. ‘Duck Soup’ gave us yet another variation of the mirror gag, which had previously been used by Charlie Chaplin in ‘The Floorwalker’ (1917) and by Max Linder in ‘Seven Years Bad Luck’ (1921)—it also inspired future productions, such as Roman Polanski’s ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’ (1966).

‘KING KONG’ (1933), ©RKO RADIO PICTURES

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack presented one of the great and truly iconic pieces of cinema with ‘King Kong’, the tale of the giant gorilla that took on the big city and developed a soft spot for the delectable Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray. The greatest moment is, of course, when he stands atop the world’s tallest man-made structure with the same fierce pride and compelling dignity as at the top of his mountain on Skull Island.

1934: Frank Capra Becomes a Legend

Ten years after Harry Cohn founded Columbia Pictures, the studio had an unexpected smash with ‘It Happened One Night’. Frank Capra’s no-frills direction meshes perfectly with Robert Riskin’s rat-a-tat screenplay, giving us the now-famous scene from this original Hollywood romantic comedy: Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert must share a rural motel room; he uses a blanket he dubs ‘the walls of Jericho’ to block their views from each other, and a delightful, ageless dialogue ensues. ‘It Happened One Night’ was one of the first films to win all top-five Oscars—production, director, actor, actress, and screenplay.

‘IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT’ (1934), ©COLUMBIA PICTURES

1935: Technicolor Vanity Fair

Rouben Mamoulian’s ‘Becky Sharp’ is an impudent stripping down of Thackeray’s classic panorama of social climbing. It caused quite a few monocles to drop at the time. But despite the film’s witty nuances and Miriam Hopkins’ stellar performance, its core purpose was to display the new technology of three-strip Technicolor, which was finally perfected after twenty years of experimentation. The old processes only registered variations of red and green, while the new one used with ‘Becky Sharp’ offers brilliant, distinct shades of buttercup yellow, burnt orange, and Wedgwood blue, along with a more natural skin tone—a technological landmark in film history.

‘BECKY SHARP’ (1935) RESTORED THREE-STRIP TECHNICOLOR SHOT, ©PIONEER PICTURES CORPORATION/UCLA FILM & TELEVISION ARCHIVE

1936: The Foundation of the Cinémathèque Française

Most of us likely remember Ernest Lindgren from the United Kingdom, Jacques Ledoux from Belgium, Henri Langlois from France, and Iris Barry in the United States as founding fathers and mother, respectively, of film archives. They all shaped the art and science of collecting, preserving, and making available the moving image heritage for posterity at a time when cinema was merely seen as a minor form of art. But it was thanks to Henri Langlois’ efforts of establishing the Cinémathèque Française that turned the endeavour into a cultural phenomenon.

It is only his name that is associated today with the venerable institution, and that is mostly because of Mr Langlois’ knack of turning his passion into a ‘cause célèbre’. His agitprop genius helped propel the Nouvelle Vague movement, and his way of amassing and concealing film prints is pretty much the stuff legends are made of.

HENRI LANGLOIS, ©STEVE MUREZ

1938: Angels with Dirty Faces

To this day, Rocky’s death scene is still shocking—James Cagney’s screams sound so real. Nevertheless, what an incredible Hollywood-schmaltz moment!

Convicted for the murder of a double-crossing, no good rat played by Humphrey Bogart, Cagney’s Rocky Sullivan is visited by Father Jerry, his boyhood friend, the night before he’s due to die on the electric chair. Rocky promises to die the way he lived, spitting in the eye of authority and refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him break.

‘ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES’ (1938), ©WARNER BROS.

His demise is perhaps one of the most chilling snippets ever projected onto the big screen. Realizing that the youngsters who adore him might end up just like him, Rocky puts on a cowardly act and starts screaming as he’s dragged off the next morning to his execution, as a last attempt at pushing others away from his path. It turns him into a genuine martyr, as he proves he is man enough to recognize his fragility and to do one last good thing in this world.