Casablanca
Directed by Michael Curtiz
1942
Proof that a studio picture thrown together in a hurry can outlive everything around it: eighty years on, the lines are still in the language and the romance still lands.
★ 9.7
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1942
Showing 69 works across all media from 1942
White Christmas
1942
Berlin's snowless Christmas song, the best-selling physical single ever pressed, and the sound of every soldier's homesickness.
★ 9.3
The Stranger
1942 · 123 pages
Meursault buries his mother without crying, takes a lover, and shoots a man on a hot Algiers beach. At his trial the tears he never shed matter more than the killing.
★ 8.9
Nighthawks
1942 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Four people sit under fluorescent light behind a curved sheet of glass, and Hopper gave the diner no door in or out.
★ 8.9
Casablanca · 1942
Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
1942 · Tate Modern, London
Black lines, white ground, three primary colors and nothing else. Mondrian spent decades taking painting down to this and called it Neo-Plasticism.
★ 7.5
The Myth of Sisyphus
1942 · 212 pages
The only serious philosophical question, Camus opens, is whether to kill yourself. His answer: the universe will never explain itself, so you live anyway, unreconciled, like Sisyphus happy pushing his rock uphill forever.
★ 7.2
The World of Yesterday
1942 · 472 pages
Zweig grew up in a Vienna that believed in security, art, and progress, and lived to watch it burn twice. He mailed this memoir to his publisher the day before he killed himself.
★ 6.9
Bull's Head
1942 · Musee Picasso, Paris
A bicycle saddle and a set of handlebars, joined. Picasso joked that someone might one day turn it back into a bicycle.
★ 6.7
Sullivan's Travels
Directed by Preston Sturges
1942
Preston Sturges aimed the sharpest dialogue of his career at Hollywood itself: a director of hit comedies decides to make something serious about poverty, and goes looking for it in person.
★ 6.5
Europe After the Rain II
1942 · Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
Ernst made the eaten-away textures by pressing and lifting paint, working on it while fleeing occupied Europe for America.
★ 6.5
Embers
1942 · 213 pages
Two officers who trained together meet for dinner after forty-one years. The general has questions about a morning hunt and his dead wife, and the candles burn down while he circles them.
★ 6.5
Casablanca · 1942
Suite Francaise
1942 · 431 pages
Paris empties in June 1940 and Nemirovsky follows it south, into a village where a woman is drawn to the German officer billeted in her house. She died at Auschwitz in 1942.
★ 6.4
Speech to the Reichstag, April 26, 1942 · 1942
West with the Night
1942 · 293 pages
Raised barefoot in Kenya, Markham hunted with Nandi boys, trained racehorses, and scouted elephants from the air before flying the Atlantic alone. Hemingway said she made him ashamed as a writer.
★ 5.6
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
The Screwtape Letters · 1942
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy · 1942
1942
Bambi
Directed by David Hand
1942
Disney kept live fawns at the studio so the animators could watch them move: the backgrounds are painted like Chinese landscape scrolls, and the film trusts weather and silence where other cartoons talk.
★ 5.0
West with the Night · 1942
1942
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Directed by Michael Curtiz
1942
James Cagney was known for gangsters and had started life as a hoofer: he plays George M. Cohan flat out, and improvised the dance down the White House staircase on the day.
★ 4.1