The Story of Film shows how the trauma of war made cinema more daring. The story starts in Italy, and then we go to Hollywood, discover Orson Welles and chart the darkening of American film and the drama of the McCarthy era. Screenwriters Paul Schrader and Robert Towne discuss theses years. The director of Singin in the Rain, Stanley Donen, talks exclusively about his career, and we discover that British films like The Third Man best sum up these extraordinary years.