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Thousands of full-length films were produced during the decade of the 1940s. The actor Humphrey Bogart made his most renowned films in this decade. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane were released. Citizen Kane made use of matte paintings, miniatures and optical printing techniques. The film noir genre was at its height. Alfred Hitchcock made his American debut with the film Rebecca, and made many classics throughout the 1940s. The most successful film of the decade was Samuel Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives; the film was directed by William Wyler, and starred Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, and Harold Russell. The film won nine Academy Awards.
Technicolor
thumb|left|[[Lobby card for The Thief of Bagdad(1940), which used new matte painting techniques for use with Technicolor]]
By the 1940s, Hollywood's effects specialists had over a decade of studio experience. Technicolor had been especially challenging but faster film introduced in 1939 began to make Technicolor a viable option for studio production. Rear projection in color remained out of reach until Paramount introduced a new projection system in the 1940s. New matte techniques, modified for use with color, were for the first time used in the British film The Thief of Bagdad(1940). However, the high cost of color production in the 1940s meant most films were black and white. By the end of the war, Mexico had firmly supplanted Argentina as the leading producer of Spanish-language films in Latin America. Argentina's Golden Age of Argentine cinema, which had dominated Spanish-language markets since 1939, entered a prolonged crisis; under President Juan Perón (1946–1955), protectionist measures—including screen quotas and state subsidies—managed to revitalize production levels, but financial fragility remained, and the industry never fully recovered its international position.
Post-war slowdown
Cinemas were located in the city and the expansion of suburban housing in the post-War period meant declining revenues at the box office. The availability of television in homes was another factor that gave families in the suburbs an alternative to traveling to the theaters located in city centers. Between 1948 and 1952 average weekly attendance declined from 90 million to 51 million.