Favorite Films for Each Decade

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact. And since I’ve had a relatively long life, my editors and I have decided to run this article as a weekly series over the next few months, decade-by-decade, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

      These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.

      I was born in 1948, so I didn’t see any of the 1940s films or most of the ‘50s films until much later. I’ve also cheated a bit by including brief mentions of five additional movies per decade that were close behind my main selections, and citing five more “How could he leave out?” films.

      To narrow down the almost infinite number of possibilities, I’ve made some arbitrary decisions:

      1) Only one film each decade by a particular director; 2) only English-language movies, due mainly to gaps in my knowledge about foreign-language films except for Italian neo-realism, French New Wave and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and 3) no TV miniseries.

      My love of movies and movie history didn’t come early—I wasn’t one of those kids who spent every weekend hour in dark movie theaters. It wasn’t until the early 1970s, when I was continuing my long-delayed undergraduate studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz when I encountered a visiting film professor named Al LaValley.

      He taught a course on Hollywood in the 1930s which examined the interrelationships between movies, history and society, and I was hooked. In this pre-VHS era, he had an extensive collection of ‘30s and ‘40s films on reel, and he generously showed them to students and friends inside and outside of class. (Al later founded the film bookstore Limelight in San Francisco, wrote four books on movies, founded the Film Studies department at Dartmouth, and co-directed the documentary “A Time of Change: Confronting AIDS.”)

      Later in the ‘70s, when I was a graduate student in American history at Stanford, I minored in film and was the TA for several classes on film and film history. During this time I taught a class at the East Bay Socialist School in Oakland on “The Red Decade and the Silver Screen” and debated the editor of “Jump Cut” magazine on the question “Was Frank Capra a Fascist?” (I argued that he wasn’t.)

      By the 1980s, I had given up teaching and academia for a career in journalism. As an arts and entertainment editor for a variety of newspapers and magazines I got to work closely with our film critics, took advantage of press screenings for new films and also began writing regularly about movies. When I worked at the Sacramento Bee in the 1990s and 2000s, I wrote a syndicated weekly column on DVDs which allowed me to focus on film and TV history as well as on recent movies.

      But I’m sure I’ve missed some great movies that should be on this list. Yet this still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of movies to choose from.

      Let the arguments begin.

1940s

“His Girl Friday” (1940)

      I first saw this newspaper comedy in a college film class in the early 1970s amid the rise of the women’s movement, and it was a revelation. Director Howard Hawks had a long and diversified career in Hollywood, leaving his mark on a variety of genres—War (“The Dawn Patrol,” “Sergeant York,” “Air Force”), Westerns (“Red River,” “Rio Bravo”), Adventure (“Only Angels Have Wings,” “To Have and Have Not”), Gangsters and detectives (the original “Scarface,” “The Big Sleep”).

      But it was in his screwball comedies that Hawks showcased intelligent and forceful women who often ran circles around their male protagonists—consider Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby,” Barbara Stanwyck in “Ball of Fire,” Ann Sheridan in “I Was a Male War Bride,” Ginger Rogers in “Monkey Business,” Paula Prentiss in “Man’s Favorite Sport” and, especially, Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday.”

      In “His Girl Friday,” Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer maintained the pungent, rapid-fire and overlapping dialogue found in the movie on which it is based, 1931’s “The Front Page,” but turned the story upside down by casting Russell in a role played by a man (Pat O’Brien) in the earlier film.

      Russell gives a spectacular performance as an ace newspaper reporter torn between her love of her job and a chance to get a scoop, and her desire to seek a more “normal” life as a stay-at-home wife. That her dilemma also involves choosing between her boss, the conniving editor played by Cary Grant, who also just happens to be her ex-husband, and her hapless insurance salesman fiancé (Ralph Bellamy), makes this proto-feminist film even juicier.

      It remains a clear example of the adage, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” and a reminder, especially to us men, that women have been fighting for a long time for their rightful positions in the workplace.

      Close behind, in no particular order:

      “Notorious” (1946): In one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable suspense films, Cary Grant investigates and Ingrid Bergman infiltrates a group of exiled German Nazis living in Rio de Janeiro after the end of World War II.

      “Casablanca” (1942): Just about everyone has seen this immortal World War II love story starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, and for good reason—it is one of the rare movies that can be watched umpteen times and remain fresh and enticing.

      “Citizen Kane” (1941): This spectacular debut film from the multi-talented Orson Welles (star, director, producer and co-writer with Herman Mankiewicz) is both a barely veiled demolition of the life and career of William Randolph Hearst and a breakthrough in its use of non-linear story-telling, deep-focus cinematography and more.

      “The Lady Eve” (1941): The funniest in a string of vibrant 1940s comedies from writer/director Preston Sturges, this stars a conniving Barbara Stanwyck as the daughter of a con man who sets her sights on a nerdy but handsome heir to a fortune, played by Henry Fonda.

      “Adam’s Rib” (1949): The best of a bunch of clever comedies pairing Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, this George Cukor-directed battle of the sexes features a NYC assistant district attorney (Tracy) going up against his defense attorney spouse (Hepburn) in the case of a wife (Judy Holliday) who shot her philandering husband.

      But, perhaps you’re wondering, how could he leave out “Double Indemnity,” “The Great Dictator,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Third Man” and “To Be or Not To Be”?

Coming next week: The 1950s

Bruce Dancis spent 18 years as the Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Sacramento Bee, after previously serving as an editor for the Daily Californian, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, M.I. (Musicians’ Industry) Magazine, Mother Jones and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote about Film and TV History in a weekly column about DVDs that was syndicated by the McClatchy and Scripps Howard news services. Since 2003 he has co-chaired a summer film program at the Three Arrows Cooperative Society in Putnam Valley, NY. He is the author of “Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War” (2014, Cornell University Press) and appears in the documentary film “The Boys Who Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War” (2020). He lives in Cardiff, CA, and Putnam Valley, NY.