1944's Best Movies: 80 Years Later

In keeping with previous polls, I've gone with the contenders in the top 2,000 films, but they now offer the entire starting spreadsheet. Here are the titles that carry through through the top 5,000 films ever.

2147	2084	Ciel est à vous, Le	Grémillon, Jean	1944	France	105
2227	2244	Phantom Lady	Siodmak, Robert	1944	USA	87
2371	2344	Gaslight	Cukor, George	1944	USA	114
3692	3565	Children Are Watching Us, The	De Sica, Vittorio	1944	Italy	85
3704	3589	Going My Way	McCarey, Leo	1944	USA	126
3957	3843	Halfway House, The	Dearden, Basil	1944	UK	95
4098	3982	Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks	Neville, Edgar	1944	Spain	85
4210	4146	Ministry of Fear	Lang, Fritz	1944	USA	85
4251	4129	National Velvet	Brown, Clarence	1944	USA	125
4395	4259	Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7	Käutner, Helmut	1944	Germany	111
4840	4706	Story of Dr. Wassell, The	DeMille, Cecil B.	1944	USA	140

OK, slow down.

Gonna throw in a vote to The Woman in the Window, my favorite American Fritz Lang picture and favorite Edward G. Robinson performance.

I tend to only want to vote for Ivan the Terrible in its entirety, but even just half of it is the movie of the year, followed by Canterbury Tale and Curse of the Cat People (#5707, appallingly enough)

Meet Me in St. Louis. This one is easier than 1954, though I suspect Ivan will win and that wouldn't be wrong.

This is one year when I'm happy to vote for the Hollywood picture over the international film; I could easily have picked Laura, Double Indemnity, Meet Me in St. Louis, the two Sturges joints, or A Canterbury Tale.

A Canterbury Tale v. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek for me (Hail is pretty astonishing thematically but less sustained fun iirc?). A hard choice, but a banner year for sexual perversity!

OPFERGANG (Veit Harlan; Germany) [#1678]

never heard of this, and Germany in 1944...?

It's crazy that only Double Indemnity out of all Hollywood ones was nominated for the BP Oscar. Meet Me in St. Louis won no Oscars at all, unless you count the Academy Juvenile Award won by Margaret O'Brian for all of her 1944 work.

Gaslight got a BP nomination this year, so maybe that's a clue.

I'm sure Meet Me would've been in the lineup if that weren't the first year they cut it down to just five nominees

Eisenstein's a visual and conceptual genius whose films I find nearly unwatchable: they're not slow-paced, they're no-paced. Haven't seen any of Lang's American pictures.

On the strength of the theme song, Laura over Double Indemnity.

Voting for Maya Deren's experimental short, which is so far ahead of its time, I could watch it in a loop all day. (I usually watch it at least a couple of times in a row.)

MoMI (coincidentally?) screened Ivan parts I & II (in 35 too) when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. I hadn't seen them in years, but I thought it was a masterwork - watching it now, I was a lot more sensitive to the rhetoric that would never disappear, pointing the way to Putin's invasion. Powerful and chilling.

I like how Meet Me In St Louis shows an era where being in a mid rank American city could still be hopeful and upwardly mobile.

Archers

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Double Indemnity is great, but Meet Me In St. Louis is such a captivating film, I have to vote for that

"You ever been bit by a dead bee?" endures in my heart forever.

Ditto "I think you're swell--so long as I'm not your husband."

Among the Hollywood productions, I would've gone with Meet Me in St. Louis - great film. But At Land gets my vote.

I love more of these than maybe in any other of these polls, but going with Meet Me in St. Louis because I think it’s so remarkable — one of the greatest Hollywood musicals, but also such a small, carefully observed story. You can fault it for being basically the quid/ags of the bourgeoisie circa 1900, but it’s so fully inhabited and felt. Nothing else like it.

“Meet me in st louie, louie” makes me want to kick someone’s teeth in

I’m not a rewatcher but Meet Me in St Louis is good enough for the occasional rewatch.

“Meet me in st louie, louie” makes me want to kick someone’s teeth in

If only the filmmakers had got their first choice for opening song: "Stayin' Alive"

These movies being 80 years old is crazy

I have voted for the Double Indemnity. :)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The Woman in the Window is fantastic, right up until the last 5 minutes or so...

A worthy victory for the Glue Man

I used to dislike the ending of The Woman in the Window but I actually think it's pretty brilliant. (FWIW, Lang himself came up with it and knew what he was doing.) In its own way it's deceptively a happy ending and tragic in a different way - it's a manifestation of his own feelings of guilt, and no matter how dreary or boring he may find his home life, he will never allow himself to escape it and was unlikely to find more in life to begin with.

I voted for Deren's film, but it's still a well-deserved victory by the Archers.