The 1940s - Greatest Films

Following the death of publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane, reporters scramble to uncover the meaning of his final utterance: 'Rosebud.'

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.

In post-war Italy, a working-class man's bicycle is stolen, endangering his efforts to find work. He and his son set out to find it.

After a rich woman's ex-husband and a tabloid-type reporter turn up just before her planned remarriage, she begins to learn the truth about herself.

An insurance representative is seduced by a dissatisfied housewife into a scheme of insurance fraud and murder that arouses the suspicion of his colleague, a claims investigator.

Two men try to convince themselves they've committed the perfect murder by hosting a dinner party after strangling a former classmate to death.

A cuckolded embezzler on the verge of suicide is helped by a tout, an alcoholic playwright, and a pick-up girl to reimburse the money with a gambling sting.

Humble Abraham Lincoln gains the respect of his Illinois neighbors, growing in stature and respect until he is elected President in 1860 and departs for Washington.

A merchant ship's crew tries to survive the loneliness of the sea and the coming of war.

An Oklahoma family, driven off their farm by the poverty and hopelessness of the Dust Bowl, joins the westward migration to California, suffering the misfortunes of the homeless in the Great Depression.

A drama about mental disease, faith, and doubt.

An escaped convict tries to hide out at his former lover's house, but she has since married and is reluctant to help him.

An English village is occupied by disguised German paratroopers as an advance post for a planned invasion.

Chicago reporter P.J. McNeal re-opens a decade-old murder case.

A private eye escapes his past to run a gas station in a small town, but his past catches up with him. Now he must return to the big city world of danger, corruption, double crosses, and duplicitous dames.

The story takes place in the old streets of Porto and by the banks of the Douro River. A gang of very young kids has just accepted a new member, Carlitos, a shy boy who has "played it tough" by stealing a doll in a shop. Carlitos soon has a crush on Terezinha, the only girl in the group. The trouble is that Eduardo, the gang boss, is also in love with the pretty girl. And he will not allow any rival to challenge him.

A group of travellers, all with something to hide in their past, take shelter from a storm in an old inn. The inn-keeper seems a little mysterious...

Released from a POW camp at the end of WW2, a French soldier tricks the wife of a fellow POW into believing her husband was killed by the Germans and seduces the grieving woman, but the 'dead' husband eventually returns home.

During World War I, the star-crossed affair of an underage French student with a woman engaged to a soldier.

After being found wandering the streets of Los Angeles, a severely catatonic woman tells a doctor the complex story of how she wound up there.

The wife of a rubber plantation administrator shoots a man to death and claims it was self-defense, but a letter written in her own hand may prove her undoing.