The film (and Garson’s stiff-backed, Academy Award-winning performance in particular) has dated very badly; it’s difficult now to see the qualities that wartime audiences found so assuring.

One of the better Bob Hope vehicles.

It could be [Lubitsch's] finest achievement, and it's certainly one of the most profound, emotionally complex comedies ever made, covering a range of tones from satire to slapstick to shocking black humor.

A dubious proposition, but in Sturges’s hands a charming one, filled out by his unparalleled sense of eccentric character.

George Stevens’s plodding, straitlaced direction takes much of the edge off this 1941 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle.

Howard Hawks's 1941 version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a delight.

It may be questionable history (though the film is anything but jingoistic), but it is superb filmmaking, personal and vigorous.

A stodgy Universal thriller from 1941, redeemed by a name-heavy cast.

Everyone concedes that this 1941 Hitchcock film is a failure, yet it displays so much artistic seriousness that I find its failure utterly mysterious—especially since the often criticized ending (imposed on Hitchcock by the studio) makes perfect sense to me.

Not entirely a pale shadow, but definitely fading. [12 Jan 2012, p.36]

Though it was made during a bitter artists' strike in 1941, it's one of Disney's most charming and perfectly proportioned films, uninflated by the cultural pretensions Uncle Walt was fond of slipping in.

As in all the best Fordian cinema, though everything changes and most things die or disappear, what remains in memory and in spirit triumphs—and what on the surface is a tender and sad film becomes instead joyous and robust.

The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur?

Mitchell Leisen's polished direction serves this 1941 melodrama written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

What can you say about the movie that taught you what movies were?...Kane is no longer my favorite Orson Welles film (I'd take "Ambersons," "Falstaff," or "Touch of Evil"), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking about Welles - or for that matter about movies in general.

This 1941 film, which Warren Beatty remade as Heaven Can Wait, is nothing special in itself—a fairly routine romantic comedy from the 40s, with Robert Montgomery having a hard time acting like a lowlife.

The film is more strange than good, yet its self-conscious treatment of the politics of beauty seems eerily prescient.

Though a bit slow to start and overlong (GBS added 18 minutes to the screenplay), this is still an enthusiastic and intelligent rendering of the wonderful Shavian wit and sense of the ridiculous.

Preston Sturges extended his range beyond the crazy farces that had made his reputation with this romantic 1941 comedy, and his hand proved just as sure.

A delicious bit of Americana (1941) by Raoul Walsh, capturing superbly the 1890s ambience of Walsh’s own early years.

The screenplay is by Norman Krasna, a hack of the lowest degree, but Hitchcock shapes it smoothly to his personal ends.

Sam Wood, the El Supremo of Hollywood hackdom, squired this one to glory.

George Cukor gives it the royal treatment with a splendid supporting cast.

A better-than-average Bette Davis vehicle (1940), well constructed by that shrewd old hack, William Wyler, from a Somerset Maugham play.

A masterpiece of the art of animation. The concept and some of the episodes are tainted with kitsch, but there's no other animated film with its scope and ambition—it is, in Otis Ferguson's words, “one of the strange and beautiful things that have happened in the world.”

This film contains one of Hitchcock's most famous set pieces—an assassination in the rain—but otherwise remains a second-rate effort, as immensely enjoyable as it is.

Walsh may not have been directly responsible for the structure (the second half is a remake of an earlier Warners melodrama, Bordertown), but his personal response to the material puts it across.

Typically overstuffed MGM prestige product (1940), but one that came out surprisingly well, with a minimum of Eng. Lit. posturing and some elegance of design.