1942 Top Ten List

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)

The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges)

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)

Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler)

The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman)

The Talk of the Town (George Stevens)

To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch)

Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock)

The Glass Key (Stuart Heisler)

Additional 1942 Films By Rating

Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper)

Gentleman Jim (Raoul Walsh)

In Which We Serve (Noel Coward & David Lean)

Syncopation (William Dieterle)

The Next of Kin (Thorold Dickinson)

Went the Day Well? (Cavalcanti)

Native Land (Leo Hurwitz & Paul Strand)

Woman of the Year (George Stevens)

Bambi (David D. Hand)

Les visiteurs du soir (Marcel Carné)

For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.

Ratings are on a needlessly precise 100-point scale.

Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are marked with if I currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit them and they get a numeral. (Lists from prior to about 1988 are especially suspect, as I compiled them long ago from memories that were in many cases already pretty dusty.)

Seen but currently unrated (and not presumptively among my top 10): Desperate Journey (Walsh); The Major and the Minor (Wilder); My Sister Eileen (Hall); Roxie Hart (Wellman); Take a Letter, Darling (Leisen); Yankee Doodle Dandy (Curtiz)

As yet unseen: Journey Into Fear (Foster); Kings Row (Wood); This Gun for Hire (Tuttle)

I occasionally write reviews of older movies, but it happens too infrequently to file them by year.