Watch HDToday. In a year in which Marlene Dietrich was breaking all stereotypes as an actress and as a woman by becoming a US citizen and Orson Welles was presenting the best allegation on the loss of power in his masterpiece Citizen Kane, Europe was drained in an all-out war led by big dictators in which treason, death and violence corrupted all layers of society. Nineteen Forty-one is a tribute to one of the hardest years in the history of the twentieth century.