The Best Movies: 1942

The 10 Best Movies of 1942

1. Casablanca. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid. Not only the best picture of this year, but the best movie ever. Nothing else comes close. Want proof? Name another movie with this many memorable, still quoted, lines: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” “You played it for her, you can play it for me. If she can stand it, I can. Play it!” “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” “Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.” “Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” “Inside of us, we both know you belong to Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” “We’ll always have Paris.” “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” And the simplest of them all, and still my favorite: “Here’s looking at you, kid.” And this doesn’t even count many of the memorable spoken exchanges in the movie. I have watched this film more than 100 times and each time seems like the first.

2. Yankee Doodle Dandy. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Starring James Cagney and Joan Leslie. It’s getting right around the perfect time to watch this movie — July 4. This is schmaltz raised to an art form and, as hammy as it is, the film’s manipulative sentiment gets to me every time, even with all my defenses up. Cagney is simply magnificent as George M. Cohan. It is reputed that after seeing Cagney’s portrayal of him in this film, Cohan said “My God, what an act to follow.”

3. Sullivan’s Travels. Written and directed by Preston Sturges. Starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. Sturges made some of the best films during the first half of this decade — The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty, The Palm Beach Story (see below), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero — but this was his masterpiece, a variation on Gulliver’s Travels and a satirical indictment on the way Hollywood made movies at the time. Most of Sturges’s films were made strictly for entertainment value. This one, however, packed a powerful message. I could describe the plot, but it would sound contrived. Trust me, however, it works to perfection.

4. Now, Voyager. Directed by Irving Rapper. Starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains. The Ugly Duckling fairytale remade as pure soap opera and Davis’s most popular film of the decade. Like Dandy above, this is incredibly manipulative — the makeup artists had to work very hard to make Davis look as bad as she does during the early parts of the film — but it has a depth lacking in most films of this type. As a director, Rapper was smart enough not to get in Davis’s way.

5. Random Harvest. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. Amnesia has always been a popular plot device for Hollywood screenwriters, but in the genre of Amnesia Films, this is the pick of the litter. Colman is superb and although Garson won a best actress Oscar this year for the much overrated Mrs. Miniver, she is far superior in this film. I always found Garson to be stuffy, but she literally lets her hair down in this movie. Her scenes with Colman are pure magic.

6. The Palm Beach Story. Written and directed by Preston Sturges. Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor and Rudy Vallee. After taking on Hollywood with Sullivan’s Travels (No. 3 on this list), Sturges sets his satirical sites on the idle rich in this film, one of the funniest movies you’ll find from this period. It may not have the bite of Sturges’s best films, but it is still a delight. Vallee almost steals the show as multi-millionaire J.D. Hackensacker III and Astor is particularly wicked when she deals with her dumb lover.

7. Kings Row. Directed by Sam Wood. Starring Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings and Ronald Reagan. The flip side of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, showing small town America not as an idyllic place but the location for tragedy. It is also the film that features the finest performance from the actor who would, almost 40 years later, become president of the United States. This is a film from this era that I would like to see remade with a script that is closer to the novel from which it was adapted.

8. To Be or Not To Be. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Starring Carole Lombard, Jack Benny and Robert Stack. Proof that a comedy can convey an important social commentary, be considered as propaganda and yet still be hilarious. The film was controversial at the time of its release because many felt Lubitsch, a German, was holding up the Poles to ridicule, although in reality he is lampooning the Nazis and portraying the Poles as patriots. This was Lombard’s last film; just after it was completed, she was killed in a plane crash as she flew to Hollywood to appear in a war bonds appeal on Benny’s radio show.

9. The Man Who Came to Dinner. Directed by William Keighley. Starring Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan and Monty Woolley. A perfect example of it’s better to be lucky than good. The producers wanted Lionel Barrymore to play Sheridan Whiteside, but, for some reason, he had problems with the dialogue. So Barrymore was replaced by the then-largely-unknown Woolley who had created the part on Broadway and his performance is the reason this film turns out to be a comedy classic.

10. The Magnificent Ambersons. Directed by Orson Welles. Starring Joseph Cotten, Anne Baxter and Tim Holt. Welles’s constant bickering about how this movie was “stolen” from him has elevated it to a status higher than it deserves. Welles does employ some stunningly innovative visual tricks to enhance an essentially mundane story and Agnes Moorehead delivers the performance of her life. But some of the soliloquies border on a tedium even Welles couldn’t rescue. This is another film difficult to find on DVDs that will play in North American players.