‘Casablanca’ & More Classics That Make the 1940s the Most Romantic Movie Decade
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It’s no wonder the 1940s boast an outsize share of romantic classics. As Americans flocked to theaters seeking an escape, the booming studios fed them a steady stream of hits coupling Holly-wood’s major stars. Here are our faves.
In the 1942 drama Casablanca (on Max) the backdrop of Nazi-occupied French Morocco intensifies the stakes of a rekindled affair between world-weary café owner Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and the married Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman).
Alfred Hitchcock’s film noir Notorious (1946, on Tubi) sets up an agonizing romance for Cary Grant as a postwar spymaster and Bergman as the daughter of a convicted Nazi, forced to sacrifice their relationship for a mission that could get her killed.
Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (Everett Collection)
A trio of legends—Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart—have one of the wittiest love triangles in rom-com history in 1940’s The Philadelphia Story (on Tubi). Hepburn plays an overprivileged socialite whose debonair ex-husband (Grant) and a prying reporter (Stewart) turn up right before her imminent remarriage.
A couple offscreen, Hepburn and Spencer Tracy didn’t have to work hard to show genuine chemistry in 1942’s Woman of the Year (on Tubi), the first of their nine films together.
And there are barriers aplenty in 1944’s take on Charlotte Brontë’s brooding Jane Eyre (rent on Prime Video) with Joan Fontaine in the title role of a governess smitten with her secretive employer, Edward Rochester (Orson Welles).
