965 Films & TV Shows Set In Europe During The 1940s
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Quai des Orfèvres
🇫🇷 France The 1940sJenny Lamour sings in a music hall in postwar Paris, accompanied by her husband, Maurice Martineau, on piano. When Martineau notices his wife flirting with an older businessman named Georges Brignon, he follows her to Brignon's house with the intent to kill him. At the house, Brignon is found murdered -- but by someone else. Inspector Antoine conducts an investigation that implicates Martineau, whose planned alibi comes loose.
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The Damned
🇳🇴 Norway Atlantic Ocean The 1940sA group of Nazis and sympathizers board a submarine bound for South America in the hopes of finding shelter.
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Dancing with Crime
England The 1940sWhen his best friend is murdered inside a London dancehall, a cab driver and his girlfriend involve themselves in the investigation and discover a major criminal operation hiding behind the club's friendly facade.
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Frieda
🇵🇱 Poland The 1940sThe film that puts the question - Would YOU take Frieda into YOUR Home? — A young German girl marries an Englishman and moves into his family's household during the last days of World War II. The family and community have conflicting feelings about her presence in the community, and as a result, the family is forced to face their own moral code as they deal with their own prejudices and fears about the seemingly innocent German girl. The war ends, and she finally seems to be accepted into the family and community when her Nazi brother shows up to create havoc.
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To Live in Peace
🇮🇹 Italy The 1940sVivere in pace is a 1947 Italian comedy-drama war film directed by Luigi Zampa.
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Tragic Hunt
🇮🇹 Italy The 1940sSet amongst the Italian peasantry of WW2, Caccia Tragica (Tragic Chase) is set in motion when a truck loaded with money targetted for farming projects is stolen by bandits. The local villagers set aside their petty political and personal differences, banding together to capture the outlaws and recover the loot. The story takes a romantic detour by concentrating on the romance between two young people caught in the middle between the pursuers and the pursued. At the time of its release, Caccia Tragica was perceived as a Communist tract (it was produced by the left-leaning National Association of Italian Partisans). This didn't prevent the film from winning an award at the 1947 Venice Film Festival, quite a coup for first-time director Giueseppe De Santis.
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School For Danger
🇫🇷 France The 1940sSchool for Danger is a semi-documentary film depicting how Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) provided trained agents, arms and other assistance to the European resistance groups fighting against Hitler. The "stars" of the film are two actual British agents, Captain Harry Rée DSO, OBE, Croix De Guerre, Médaille de la Résistance, and Jacqueline Nearne, MBE. As agents "Felix" and "Cat", they recreate some of their adventures in France. This film is also known as Now It Can Be Told
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The Murderers Are Among Us
🇩🇪 Germany The 1940sAfter returning from a concentration camp, Susanne finds an ex-soldier living in her apartment. Together the two try to move past their experiences during WWII.
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Paisan
🇮🇹 Italy The 1940sSix vignettes follow the Allied invasion from July 1943 to winter 1944, from Sicily north to Venice.
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I See a Dark Stranger
🇮🇪 Ireland 🇫🇷 France The 1940sThe woman hunt is on... For the girl with the little black book. — Determined, independent Bridie Quilty comes of age in 1944 Ireland thinking all Englishmen are devils. Her desire to join the IRA meets no encouragement, but a German spy finds her easy to recruit. We next find her working in a pub near a British military prison, using her sex appeal in the service of the enemy. But chance puts a really vital secret into her hands, leading to a chase involving Bridie, a British officer who's fallen for her, a German agent unknown to them both, and the police...paralleled by Bridie's own internal conflicts.
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A Matter of Life and Death
England The 1940sNeither Heaven nor Earth could keep them apart! — When a young airman miraculously survives bailing out of his aeroplane without a parachute, he falls in love with an American radio operator. But the officials in the other world realise their mistake, and dispatch an angel to collect him.
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The Battle of the Rails
🇫🇷 France The 1940sA 1946 war movie which tells the courageous efforts by French railway workers to sabotage Nazi reinforcement-troop trains.
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Shoeshine
🇮🇹 Italy The 1940sAt a track near Rome, shoeshine boys are watching horses run. Two of the boys Pasquale, an orphan, and Giuseppe, his younger friend are riding. The pair have been saving to buy a horse of their own to ride...
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The Captive Heart
🇩🇪 Germany The 1940sA series of stories about the lives and loves of nine men in a Prisoner of War Camp over five years. Location shooting in the British occupied part of Germany adds believability. The main story is of Hasek (Redgrave) a Czech soldier who needs to keep his identity a secret from the Nazis, to do this he poses as a dead English Officer and corresponds with the man's wife. Upon liberation they meet and decide to continue their lives together. The other inmates' stories are revealed episodically.
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School for Secrets
England The 1940sThe Secret a Million Kept! — Wartime tale of a group of British scientists efforts to develop the first radar system. They did it just in time for it to be used in the Battle of Britain against the might of the Nazi Luftwaffe. Without it the little island could well have been overrun.
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Somewhere in Berlin
🇩🇪 Germany The 1940sAfter WWII, Berlin lies in ruins. For Gustav, Willi and their friends the rubble provides an adventurous, dangerous playground. Especially for Gustav, it helps pass the time, as he longs for his father's return from a POW camp. One day a stranger arrives, looking helpless and hopeless... Gerhard Lamprecht built his reputation during the 1920s and '30s with films like Emil and the Detectives (1931, script Billy Wilder) and socially-critical Berlin films based on the drawings of Heinrich Zille. In Somewhere in Berlin-his first postwar film, made just months after the cessation of hostilities-he portrays the people of the shattered city with precision and psychological realism.
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Men without Wings
🇨🇿 Czechia The 1940sAfter an attack against the guard of the Third Reich, Nazi repression intensifies, and the Czechoslovakian resistance's organized sabotage in an aircraft factory leads to Gestapo shootings.
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Desire
🇮🇹 Italy The 1940sThere's a girl like her in every town! — Paola, a Milan call girl, returns home to her village in the Abruzzi mountains in an attempt to go straight. Rejected by her father, blackmailed by a former lover, and lusted after by her brother-in-law, she turns to her beloved sister for support. Denied succor, like so many of Rossellini’s isolated figures, Paola awaits the arrival of her fiancé, who has offered her a new start, but instead decides that life is untenable.
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Jéricho
🇫🇷 France The 1940s -
A Defeated People
🇩🇪 Germany The 1940sA Defeated People is a 1946 British documentary short film made by the Crown Film Unit, directed by Humphrey Jennings and narrated by William Hartnell. The film depicts the shattered state of Germany, both physically and as a society, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The narration explains what is being done – and what needs to be done – both by the occupying Allied forces and the German people themselves to build a better Germany from the ruins.
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The Searching Wind
District of Columbia 🇫🇷 France 🇩🇪 Germany 🇮🇹 Italy The 1940s The 1930s The 1920sWith a screenplay adapted by Lillian Hellman from her own play, director William Dieterle's 1946 drama stars Robert Young as a U.S. ambassador in Europe in the years before WW2.
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A Friend Will Come Tonight
🇫🇷 France The 1940sCommander Gerard and his band of guerrillas have found the ideal hideout: a nursing home in the Alps where, along with the mentally ill, are also hiding a Jewish girl and a Swiss doctor who might be a spy for the Germans ...
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Les Clandestins
🇫🇷 France The 1940sA resistance leader is wounded when the Germans raid his underground print shop. He escapes to the home of a German-friendly Parisian and is helped by her son and daughter. A Jewish doctor also aids him. They all join him in his efforts against the Nazis and derail a munitions train.
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