The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
For Whom the Bell Tolls · 1940
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1940
Showing 69 works across all media from 1940
Self-portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
1940 · Harry Ransom Center, Austin
A thorn necklace draws blood at her throat, a dead hummingbird hangs from it, and a monkey and a black cat watch from behind.
★ 7.2
Native Son
1940 · 504 pages
Bigger Thomas drives for a rich white family in 1930s Chicago and kills their daughter in a panic his first night. Wright keeps you inside his head and will not soften him.
★ 7.2
His Girl Friday
Directed by Howard Hawks
1940
Hawks made the reporter a woman and the ex-husband her editor, then had them talk over each other so fast the film runs at over two hundred words a minute.
★ 7.0
★ 6.9
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
1940 · 368 pages
Four people in a Georgia mill town confide everything to John Singer, a deaf man who lip-reads them and answers little. McCullers fills the place with people who cannot reach each other.
★ 6.9
The Invention of Morel
1940 · 103 pages
A fugitive hiding on a deserted island finds the place full of elegant visitors who cannot see him, dancing to the same record week after week. Bioy Casares imagined virtual reality in 1940.
★ 6.8
Darkness at Noon
1940 · 288 pages
Arrested by the revolution he helped build, Rubashov confesses to crimes he never committed. The novel sold half a million copies in France and pulled a generation of Western leftists away from Moscow.
★ 6.8
The Grapes of Wrath
Directed by John Ford
1940
That a major studio released this in 1940 is still hard to believe: Ford films an Oklahoma family driven west by the banks, and Gregg Toland lights the migrant camps like documentary photographs.
★ 6.8
The Philadelphia Story
Directed by George Cukor
1940
Katharine Hepburn was labeled box-office poison and controlled the rights to her comeback vehicle: she picked the director and approved the cast, then let Cary Grant and James Stewart crash her wedding.
★ 6.6
Farewell, My Lovely
1940 · 230 pages
Out of prison and hunting the girl he lost eight years ago, Moose Malloy sets the private detective Philip Marlowe loose on Bay City, where the police belong to whoever is paying.
★ 6.5
And Quiet Flows the Don
1940 · 624 pages
Grigory Melekhov loves his neighbor's wife and rides for the Reds, then the Whites, then neither, while war and revolution finish the Don Cossacks. Sholokhov wrote under Stalin and spared no side.
★ 6.5
The Great Dictator
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1940
Chaplin attacked Hitler while America was still neutral, in his first talking picture: the two men were born four days apart, and the globe dance is the cruelest joke he ever staged.
★ 6.5
The Tartar Steppe
1940 · 288 pages
Giovanni Drogo rides out to a frontier fortress and gives it his life, scanning an empty desert for the enemy who would justify it. Buzzati turned postponement into a form of terror.
★ 6.3