Timeline
History of Motion Pictures
1940 – 1949

A Brief Overview of the Decade

Rising from the economic ashes of the “Great Depression”, the 1940s brought a global war that changed the very concept of war. For the first time civilians were as likely to be killed as soldiers, and a doomsday weapon of unimaginable power was unleashed bringing the planet suddenly, and violently into the “Nuclear Age”. Nearly every country was brought into World War II, and no country was unaffected by it. By the time the war ended in 1945, over 35 million people had died because of the conflict.

Although the United States stayed out of the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the U.S. finally joined the Allies it joined the battle against all of the Axis powers: Japan , Italy and Germany. The public quickly learned the meaning of new words like “Blitzkrieg”, “Kamikaze”, “Wolfpacks”, ”Liberty Ships”, “Spitfires”, “Buzz Bombs”, and “V–2s”. Toward the end of the war even more horrible terms entered the common vocabulary, such as “Atomic Bomb”, “Radiation Poisoning”, “Concentration Camps”, and “The Final Solution”. As American men went to war, women joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers changing forever the dynamics of family life. By 1944 over half the women in the U.S. had a job outside the home.

The reports from London of Edward R. Murrow and his staff, broadcast throughout the country by CBS News Radio, brought the Battle of Britain directly into America’s living rooms and demonstrated the tremendous potential of this popular medium. Music entered the home as never before when Columbia Records introduced the “high fidelity” sound of LPs, 12–inch long–playing records that created a “hi–fi” boom. Then, by the end of the decade, more and more people began buying televisions so they could tune in to NBC’s “Texaco Star Theater” and watch the antics of Milton Berle who was dubbed “Mr. Television”.

After the catharsis of the war, an uneasy peace engulfed the world that was dominated by the less violent, but almost as intense, battle of ideologies. In 1945 Berlin was divided into four administrative sectors, and the political line was actually and metaphorically drawn between the Soviet Union on the one hand, and America, Britain and France on the other. Winston Churchill noted in 1946 that, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” and a strange and unique “Cold War” was unofficially declared. The battle between Communism and Democracy had begun, and as the poet W.H. Auden noted, the world drifted into an “age of anxiety”.

The first half of the decade saw Hollywood participating in the war effort with tremendous enthusiasm. Many celebrities volunteered to fight, and many distinguished directors risked their lives to make combat documentaries. When the USO (United Service Organizations) was formed, it encountered no difficulty in recruiting entertainers through the Hollywood Victory Committee to entertain the Allied troops, and the “Hollywood Canteen” was opened by Bette Davis and John Garfield to give members of the armed forces a chance to meet their favorite stars. But the second half of the decade saw Hollywood suddenly engaged in its own fierce battles. The U.S. House of Representatives’ Un–American Activities Committee suddenly considered Hollywood to be a “center of Communist activity”; the studios and the unions battled for control of the Hollywood workforce; more and more of the Hollywood talent became freelance and independent; the censors continued to crack down on film content; and the Justice Department ended the decade by winning an antitrust action against Paramount, which forced all five major studios to divest themselves of their theaters and, as a consequence, their controlled chain of distribution.