The Mark of Zorro (1940, USA) – A perfect Zorro, far better than any swashbuckler Errol Flynn ever made. But why nobody connects the voice of the masked bandit with the recently arrived gentleman from Spain, and why Zorro thinks he can be a hero of both the people and the nobility of California, is beyond me. Watched it all.

The Torrid Zone (1940, USA) – I’m fascinated by Hollywood’s use of banana republics as an oasis of dirty bars, loose women and gentlemen rogues. Not enough to watch this, though. Watched: 8 minutes.

Arizona (1940, USA) – Civil War era Tucson is a place of folksy, enterprising American men, and one folksy, enterprising American woman, all trying to carve out a living while the threat of war, bandits and injuns hangs over their heads. Most Westerns deal with the breakdown of law and order, but here there’s a sense of there being no society at all except what individuals build for themselves, giving the movie the feel of a political manifesto. You almost expect Lazarus Long to show up. Watched it all.

Down Argentine Way (1940, USA) – From this failed government attempt at courting Latin American opinion (true!), we learn that Argentina is both exotic, friendly and safe. Why, the aristocrats are so friendly and safe that they only speak English, and require translators when they talk to the stereotypical commoners who serve them. Watched: 8 minutes.

Boom Town (1940, USA) – Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable are oil prospectors (and occasional thieves) who strike big, go bust, fall out, make up, etc. etc. This goes on for about 20 years. There Will Be Free Market Ideology, (a little bit, at the end – yay!) Watched it all.

The Bank Dick (1940, USA) – I’ve been disappointed by the comedies of this period. Even including the occasional funny screwball comedy, the first to hold up to even a lesser Marx Brothers is this W. C. Fields movie. The plot .. ah, who cares? I laughed. Watched it all.

Seven Sinners (1940, USA) – Marlene Dietrich has fallen since her earlier movies, which this feels like a regurgitation of. Watched: 15 minutes.

Die Rothschilds – Aktien auf Waterloo (1940, Germany) – When I watched The House of Rothschild, a pro-Jewish movie about the rise of the Rothschild bank, I had no idea how influential it had been on anti-semitic German movies. Die Ewige Jude used a distorting sample from it to prove Jewish greed, and this movies refutes it, retelling the same events from an anti-semitic and anti-capitalist perspective. Watched: 25 minutes.

The Ghost Breakers (1940, USA) – It was a dark and stormy night. The lights went out, and Bob Hope told a joke about painting his stupid black servant white, so he could see him in the dark. Watched: 8 minutes.

Fantasia (1940, USA) – Oh. My. God. Yes. This is the second movie in this marathon to make me cry. The .. the vision of it. I’m stunned. We’re watching an old culture give birth to a new. Absorbed it all.

Rebecca (1940, USA) – Laurence Olivier’s wife dies, and the timid woman he marries on the rebound fails to live up to her predecessor, in whose shadow she now lives. In a way she’s even outacted by the memory of this character we never meet. Fantastic Hitchcock. Watched it all.

The Long Voyage Home (1940, USA) – Follows a crew of sailors from a night of alcohol and prostitutes in the West Indies, through dangerous waters in the Atlantic, to another night of alcohol and prostitutes in England. Excellent wartime drama, with little plot, much atmosphere. Watched it all.

My Favorite Wife (1940, USA) – Sometimes Cary Grant goofing around is exactly what a movie needs. Other times it isn’t. Grant thinks his wife is dead, so he marries a second, but then his first wife returns. Farce ensues. Watched: 17 minutes.

Dark Command (1940, USA) – John Wayne plays George W. Bush, an illiterate Texan who runs for election as Marshal in a Kansas town against Al Gore, a book learned snob. Bush wins, pushing Gore over the edge to a career of criminal PowerPoint presentations. Fine movie on the border between Civil War drama and Western. Watched it all.

The Thief of Bagdad (1940, UK) – Have you read the Sandman story where Harun al-Rashid asks to have Baghdad moved into the world of dreams, where its wonders can be preserved against decay and death forever, pure and impossible? Well, this is that place, captured perfectly. Watched it all.

I Love You Again (1940, USA) – William Powell, an upstanding citizen, anti-vice fundraiser and overall tee-totalling bore, gets knocked over the head, and wakes up as William Powell, a charming crook. His wife Myrna Loy finds this quite an improvement. Watched it all.

Slightly Honorable (1940, USA) – There are several sparks of life in this movie, including the description of a Pacific island paradise that leads up to the picture above, but that doesn’t prevent it from being bad. Watched: 14 minutes.

Michael Shayne, Private Detective (1940, USA) – Crime movie that verges hesitantly on the edge of noir. Now just replace the friendly detective with Humphrey Boghart, and the nice young woman who has an endearing gambling problem with a femme fatale.. Watched: 15 minutes.

The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940, USA) – Something tells me that the obviously guilty defendant is innocent, and that the so far unintroduced Peter Lorre is both strange, murderous, and residing on the third floor. Watched: 12 minutes.

My Little Chickadee (1940, USA) – When Mae West is good, she’s very good. When she’s bad, she’s better. No, actually, when she’s bad she’s just bad. But this is one of her good ones. Chased out of town by the prudes for flirting with the local gentleman bandit, she finds herself another town with the usual sheriff/crook/idealist triangle. Features W. C. Fields in bed with a goat, and Mae West teaching a class of unruly teenage boys. Watched it all.

The Howards of Virginia (1940, USA) – Cary Grant (36) plays an unconvincing early 20′s Matt Howard, young Thomas Jefferson’s comical sidekick, in this patriotic movie where the slaves always seem to hover right outside of the screen. Credited with being the flop that taught Grant never to star in costume dramas. Watched: 16 minutes.

Three Faces West (1940, USA) – A doctor from Vienna finds wartime refuge in the US, but in order not to cause competition for big-city doctors, he cheerfully allows himself to be auctioned on a radio show to whatever tiny backwater town wants him. I’m sure the producers didn’t find this premise the least bit condescending. Watched: 15 minutes.

Li’l Abner (1940, USA) – Bad comic book adaptations have a long history. Watched: 4 minutes.

The Lady in Question (1940, USA) – French drama comedies haven’t impressed me so far, and neither does this American drama comedy set in France. A bicycle store owner becomes juror at a murder trial. Hilarity Ensues. Watched: 13 minutes.

Dr Cyclops (1940, USA) – Hey, a mad scientist sci-fi! In Technicolor! A biologist moves into the Amazon jungle to learn to harness the power of Radioactivity over Life and Death, which, properly harnessed, he uses to turn big creatures into small creatures. He turns horses into .. small horses, pigs into .. small pigs, and people into .. small people. It’s a diabolical plan that is sheer elegance in its simplicity. (Step three: Profit!) Preposterous and fun. Watched it all.

His Girl Friday (1940, USA) – Goofy-boy Cary Grant tries to prevent his ex-wife from giving up her career as a journalist to settle down as some loser insurance salesman’s baby machine. They team up to prevent the hanging of a man who .. isn’t exactly innocent as such, but all he did was shoot a “colored cop”, and a man shouldn’t hang just because a city’s “colored vote” demands it, now should he? This is a quite fantastic movie, (as well as fantastically loud). Best line, when Grant tells the news desk to clear the front page: “Never mind the European war, we’ve got something much bigger!” Watched it all.

Der Ewige Jude (1940, Germany) – “There are 4 million Jews in Poland”, says the narrator, and what can one possibly add to that? The focus in this documentary is on the Eternal Jew as a parasite who embodies everything that is evil about individualism and capitalism. However civilized some European Jews may appear, there’s always a filthy money-grabbing rat underneath. Watched it all.

Pinocchio (1940, USA) – Little boys who don’t obey their parents will be seduced by foreign girls and kidnapped by gypsies and pedophiles. The subtexts of Pinocchio are rather disturbing, and should not be explored too closely, but this is fine anime. Watched it all.

The Westerner (1940, USA) – Some phony judge hangs people for the slighest offense, which is very wrong of him, and then Gary Cooper comes along. A western comedy where the humor is so quiet you can hear the crickets chirping. Watched: 21 minutes.

The Great McGinty (1940, USA) – Hobo makes big in politics, then ends up in run-down bar in a “banana republic”, (so says the intro text). Watched: 19 minutes.

Night train to Munich (1940, UK) – Spy thriller about some stupid Czech super weapon that mustn’t fall into Nazi hands. The daughter of the weapon’s inventor is sent to a concentration camp, a tiresome little place where the guards talk sternly to you, and from which she easily escapes with the help of a fellow inmate. Or is it all .. a trick?!! Interesting use of miniatures for architectural special effects. Watched: 17 minutes.

Waterloo Bridge (1940, USA) – Love story set in the shadow of World War I, as remembered at the outbreak of World War II. I predict an unexpected reunion at the end, before the now middle-aged officer once again leaves tragically for war. Watched: 17 minutes.

Jud Süß (1940, Germany) – Oh shit, I just realized I’ll be spending the next several months trying to remember how many people had been killed in the war at the time of the movie I’m watching. For instance, at this time, Europe’s Jews were still alive. As for the movie, it’s well made, and built on a story template that is more familiar than I expected. In a performance reminiscent of the English bad guys in Braveheart, a Jew who dresses like a Regular German worms his way into the confidence of the Duke of Württemberg, and becomes the most powerful man in the state. The Jew’s reign of terror ends after he rapes a German girl, which turns the people against him and all his kind. I admit it: I cried. They fucking did it, the bastards. They murdered them all.

The Philadelphia Story (1940, USA) – Katharine Hepburn juggles her fiancee, her ex-husband and a gossip journalist before her second wedding. This is a perfect movie, even though, having now seen this version once and the 1956 remake twice, I am still not sure what’s actually going on here. Watched it all.

Gaslight (1940, UK) – A Suspicious Foreigner moves into his murdered aunt’s house in London, where he sets out to drive his wife to madness. It’s the darker sort of English mystery, with an atmosphere that would fit well to a Poe movie. Watched it all.

My 1930′s movies marathon is over. Now what? What else? The 1940′s! Why? Because I’m insane, because it’s fun, and because nobody else is doing it.

It’s insane because the number of movies available from my Mysterious Disreputable Sources increases sharply for every year of movie history. But as long as I can finish the years in less than real time, I could actually take this pretty far.

What, someone made a good movie this year? Be patient. I’ll get around to it.

A reader has requested a list of only the movies that I think are worth watching. I’m tempted, but that kind of misses the point. There are no lists of movies worth watching, and never will be. There are only lists of movies worth watching for me, or you, or someone else. You could pick some of the movies I watched to the end, (which has been and will remain the only way I grade these movies), but who knows what forgotten masterpieces you’ll miss out on?

Reading reviews in search of the perfect choice of movie is pointless when you can just get a hundred random movies, and watch them for as long as you’re interested, and no longer. (Just remember to get the ones you like from a Non-Mysterious Reputable Source afterwards. Don’t be a leech.) The movies you find that way will be your own, in a way some idiot reviewer’s favorite never can be.