Your top 10 movies of the 1940s?

I am not sure about a top-ten list, but It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) is easily one of my favorite films of all time. Jimmy Stewart relates to George Bailey on such an intimate and instinctive level, and Capra forces his protagonist and his viewer to confront the darkness in a way that most movies do not. He shows how the margin between triumph and tragedy is paper-thin, and every scene—every moment—is memorable. Few, if any films, are that uplifting and yet that shuddering—It's a Wonderful Life may epitomize cinematic catharsis. (By the way, I have seen the film in the theater six times since December 2013.)

Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) epitomizes, and perhaps defines, film noir's imperative to transgress, to behave immorally and criminally simply because you can. Sure, there is a practical (if licentious) motivation behind the behaviors of the leading characters, but clearly there is something more at play.

Two other films noir from the 1940s that really stand out to me are The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), the first commonly acknowledged noir classic (if not the first commonly acknowledged noir in general), and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). When I viewed The Maltese Falcon in the theater a year ago, I was amazed by how coldly and relentlessly dark the film's tone and vision happen to be—it almost seems animated by the spirit of a German silent horror movie such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920). Out of the Past, meanwhile, memorably uses both rural and urban landscapes to invoke the nature of fatalism.

I also have to mention Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948), perhaps the greatest Western of the forties and one of the movies that still, to this day, sets the standard for exploring the nature and meaning of masculinity. In retrospect, one almost could not imagine John Wayne and Montgomery Clift being in the same movie together, let alone the same Western, but their combination here is sublime.