These are my favorite films from the 1940s.

Rated 10/10
His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940)
The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940)
The Lady Eve (Sturges, 1941)
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles, 1942)
Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)
Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock, 1943)
Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)
Ivan the Terrible, Part 1 (Eisenstein, 1944)
Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944)
Children of Paradise (Carné, 1945)
Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945)
Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945)
Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945)
Shoe Shine (De Sica, 1946)
Great Expectations (Lean, 1946)
The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)
It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946)
Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946)
My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946)
The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946)
Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948)
The Third Man (Reed, 1949)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer, 1949)
White Heat (Walsh, 1949)

Rated 9/10
The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940)
Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940)
Fantasia (Sharpsteen, Hand & others, 1940)
The Bank Dick (Cline, 1940)
The Thief of Bagdad (Berger, Powell & Whelan, 1940)
Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges, 1941)
Random Harvest (LeRoy, 1942)
To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch, 1942)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Hammid & Deren, 1943)
To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944)
The Killers (Siodmak, 1946)
Fort Apache (Ford, 1948)
The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger, 1948)
Hamlet (Olivier, 1948)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei, 1948)
Red River (Hawks, 1948)
All the King’s Men (Rossen, 1949)
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford, 1949)