Film List hollywood 40's incl. FREE STREAMS 

Already in the 30's a certain politicization of Hollywood had begun which had a full effect in the 40's. After the war some directors and authors tried to become independent by founding their own companies - which in most cases failed because of the banks. But some, like Samuel Goldwyn, who had already created a studio before the war, produced some of the best works of the 40s. The greatest blow was dealt to the left by the Senate Committee for the "Investigation of Un-American Activities" set up in 1938. A state of paralysis spread which only began to give way after the abdication of the responsible Senator McCarthy. The turn to reality made the American documentary film movement clear, the cut to a new period marked the appearance of Orson Welles Citizen Kane. Kane bore the features of various self-made men, including Welles. He presents himself as an idealist or materialist, egoist or altruist - as the situation demands. Every opinion about him is correct, but none hits its core. The structure of the film resembles a journalistic study and does not obey conventional dramaturgy. The favourable conditions under which Citizen Kane was produced were never given to Welles again. With von Strohheim he shared the lot of an "auteur maudit". In addition to Welles, it was William Wyler who initiated the renunciation of the traditional style. Similar to Welles Wyler stood for a kind of "inner montage" of his movies, The best years of our lives used the film language of the Italian neorealists. Like Chaplin's, Hitchcock's work does not belong to any period. He stayed the same forever, his crime movies were regarded as the perfection of the genre, but they were never interested in the crime case. In a static order Hitchcock's heroes experience the uncanny, they get into a crime, are falsely suspected or pushed into action. The horror rises from the everyday. Familiar objects such as telephones, liquids or jewellery become messengers of disaster. Through the perspective of the camera, things change and become uncanny. As in the British horror novels, everything grows out of everyday bourgeois life and is not metaphysically grounded as with the German Expressionists. Hitchcock's Happy Endings are usually transparent as attempts at appeasement; his horror is broken again by Anglo-Saxon irony. Preston Sturges was an author in the European sense who developed the American comedy of the pre-war period into a social satire. He activated forgotten techniques of comedy all the way back to slapstick comedy. Sturges polemicized against society and against his own comedies. Sullivan´s travels was the main work, a milieu investigation among the very poor, whose preferences the director Sullivan explores in order to create in the end not a social film, but an undemanding laughing stock for his clientele. The black series hit the tone of the time the hardest, was equally suspicious of the ruling order and authentic in its milieu drawing. The black series, the documentary crime film and the socio-critical film were three trends of the time. Of all three, "pure" works can be derived such as John Huston's debut The Maltese Falcon. The best documentary crime films are Kiss of death by Henry Hathaway, The naked city by Jules Dassin and Panic in the streets by Elia Kazan. They don't focus on crime, but on its resolution. Socially critical films such as The best years of our lives by William Wyler, The men by Fred Zinnemann or All the king´s men by Robert Rossen examine the susceptibility of the petty bourgeoisie to totalitarian movements. Even anti-racist films such as Home of the Braves or those that denounced antisemitism such as Crossfire were made. In contrast to the black series, the socially critical films of the 40s had no style of their own. Many of the directors sank to insignificance during the 50s or gained some important works from the reception of the style of the 40s. Only a few grew beyond the limits of the realism of the 40s, only John Huston, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann and Joseph L. Mankiewicz stood out later with individual works.