1944
Showing 47 works across all media from 1944
Double Indemnity
Film noir gets its blueprint here: Wilder and Chandler wrote dialogue nobody has matched for hardness, and set the pattern of the doomed man telling his own story.
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
Three flayed creatures crane and scream on orange grounds. Shown as the war ended in 1945, they made Bacon's reputation overnight.
The Glass Menagerie
Tom narrates the St. Louis apartment he escaped, where his mother relives the seventeen gentlemen callers of her girlhood and his limping sister tends her glass animals. Everything turns on one visitor.
The Road to Serfdom
Hand economic decisions to planners and you lose political freedom too, because someone must decide whose purposes count. Hayek published it in 1944, and it became the founding text of the postwar right.
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Reason set out to free humanity from myth and produced new forms of domination instead. The philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer, exiles in California, coined the culture industry to name entertainment that manufactures obedience.
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening
A bee circles a pomegranate, and in the second before waking it has become two tigers and a bayonet coming at Gala's arm.
Nude with Calla Lilies
An armful of calla lilies is nearly bigger than the woman kneeling behind it. Rivera came back to the flower and its sellers constantly.
No Exit
Hell is other people, and Sartre proves it by locking a coward, a seducer, and a mother who drowned her baby in one bright room with no mirrors and no sleep.
To Have and Have Not
Hawks bet Hemingway he could film his worst book, and hired William Faulkner to help: Bacall was nineteen, met Bogart on set, and says the whistle line straight to him.
Swinging on a Star
Van Heusen heard Crosby warn a son at dinner he might grow up a mule, and Burke built the lyric.
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.