These films were released during the 1940s

Rope

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Rope is Alfred Hitchcock’s purest exercise in stylistic experimentation. In adapting the play “Rope’s End” to the screen, Hitchcock wanted the action to seem unbroken and continuous. The problem was, of course, that film magazines could only hold eight minutes of film. That meant that every eight minutes, the director would have to find some way of masking the transition to the next reel. Usually that meant having a character momentarily block the camera with their back. The experiment was only partially successful because, quite frankly, each cut only managed to draw undue attention to itself.

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Saboteur

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Alfred Hitchcock‘s first film for Universal, Saboteur follows his favorite theme of the innocent man falsely accused and on the run. This time Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) a young worker at a wartime aircraft factory is suspected of setting the fire that killed a close friend of his. Fleeing the police, he sets off in pursuit of Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd), a surly character who gave Kane the gasoline-filled fire extinguisher that resulted in the man’s death.

Compared to later Hitchcock films, this is a fairly straight-forward wartime potboiler, although the director’s hand does help elevate Saboteur about the crowd. It reworks the basic plot of The 39 Steps, which would also be foundation of Hitchcock’s later classics like The Man Who Knew Too Much and North By Northwest. Many of the standard Hitchcock trademarks are here, most notably the blonde heroine. Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane) is not, however, the frigid, distant, psychologically damaged figure that would dominate later Hitchcock films.

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Citizen Kane

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Citizen Kane begins with an audacious touch that suits the outsized egos of both its creator and its subject. The opening title bills the film as a “Mercury Production by Orson Welles.” 1941 was more than a decade before François Truffaut began to advocate the “auteur theory,” the notion of the director as the primary “author” of a film, but it clearly conformed to (and, in part, inspired) Truffaut’s ideas. Orson Welles’ hand is on every frame of this film, along with the revolutionary touch of his cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

Kane is a clean break with the Hollywood conventions of the time in terms of both structure and style. This is truly modern film in the way we currently understand the term. Continue reading