List of Films Based On Actual Events - 1940s

1940s

• Young Tom Edison (1940) — Inventor Thomas Edison's boyhood is chronicled and shows him as a lad whose early inventions and scientific experiments usually end up causing disastrous results until a life or death event in his home town redeems him and his ideas.
• Edison, The Man (1940) — In flashback, fifty years after inventing the light bulb, an 82-year-old Thomas Edison tells his story starting at age twenty-two with his arrival in New York.
• Sergeant York (1941) — Alvin C. York, a pacifist from the Tennessee hills, becomes the most decorated American soldier of World War I. Gary Cooper won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Directed by Howard Hawks.
• The Pride of the Yankees (1942) — Gary Cooper plays NY Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig, "the luckiest man on the face of the earth"; Gehrig teammates including Babe Ruth play themselves in the film. Herman J. Mankiewicz and Jo Swerling adapted Paul Gallico's story; Sam Wood directed.
• Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) — Story of George M. Cohan, the actor-singer-dancer-playwright-songwriter-producer-theatre owner-director-choreographer known as "The Man Who Owns Broadway."
• Dillinger (1945) — Early outlaw depiction, starring Lawrence Tierney; uses footage cannibalized from Lang's You Only Live Once.
• Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) — Loosely, life of songwriter Jerome Kern, played by an all-star cast: Sinatra, Garland, Horne, et al...
• Rope (1948) — Two young men attempt to prove their superiority by performing the "perfect murder" of a former classmate, hiding his body in a chest in their apartment, and then serving dinner off it for a party. Based on a 1929 play that was inspired by the Leopold and Loeb murder in 1924. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
• Citizen Kane (1941) - Inspired by true events