Every Decade Of Cinema - Ranked

Notable films: Citizen Kane; Casablanca; The Maltese Falcon; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; It's a Wonderful Life; The Great Dictator; Bambi; The Philadelphia Story; Pinocchio; Dumbo.

The 1940s didn't start off on a promising foot for the film industry. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, overseas markets were lost. However, the film industry adapted by producing documentaries, reels, shorts, and feature films to aide the war effort (read: propaganda). Films became more realistic, a sharp turn from the escapist trend of the Depression-ravaged thirties.

After the war, the rise of suburban housing and the increasing popularity of television cost the film industry tens of millions of dollars in revenue. People were staying home watching TV, rather than going into the city to watch movies. What's more, movie studios were forced to sell off their theater chains after the Supreme Court found that owning both studios and theaters violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Despite the testy climate of the day, Hollywood managed to put out what many critics to consider to be the greatest film of all time: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. A more subtle pro-war film - Casablanca - also burst onto the scene, solidifying itself as a quintessential forties masterpiece.