1941 Top Ten List

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges)

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)

Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges)

Hellzapoppin' (H.C. Potter)

The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)

Dumbo (Ben Sharpsteen)

The 47 Ronin, Part I (Kenji Mizoguchi)

The Sea Wolf (Michael Curtiz)

They Died With Their Boots On (Raoul Walsh)

Hold Back the Dawn (Mitchell Leisen)

Additional 1941 Films By Rating

49th Parallel (Michael Powell)

Three Girls About Town (Leigh Jason)

Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks)

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall)

Western Union (Fritz Lang)

I Wake Up Screaming (Bruce Humberstone)

Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal)

The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle)

Remorques (Jean Grémillon)

How Green Was My Valley (John Ford)

Ladies in Retirement (Charles Vidor)

Tobacco Road (John Ford)

High Sierra (Raoul Walsh)

The Little Foxes (William Wyler)

The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg)

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): Meet John Doe (Capra); Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Hitchcock); Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Cline); Out of the Fog (Litvak); Sergeant York (Hawks); Suspicion (Hitchcock); Tom, Dick and Harry (Kanin); The Wolf Man (Waggner)

As yet unseen: The Strawberry Blonde (Walsh); That Uncertain Feeling (Lubitsch)

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