So I’ve been looking for things to do lately, as has everyone. Laid-back, easier projects mainly. And what could be easier than a top ten list, I think to myself foolishly. But hey, it could also be fun. Thinking back to my the best of the decade list for the 2010s had me considering the best movies from other decades, at least of the ones I’ve seen, which is admittedly a far smaller number than these most recent ten years. We’re talking less than a hundred for the 1930s (which I’m starting at because the 1920s was mostly covered by this list). More than just about any other decade, the 1930s seems to have the highest amount of unsung gems; great movies that slipped under the radar during the pre-Code and early Code days, headlined by some of the most versatile movie stars of the era.
Because of this in a way, no single decade compels me more than the 1930s, and its wide assortment of great films includes honourable mentions It Happened One Night (1934 dir. Frank Capra), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 prod. Walt Disney), Swing Time (1936 dir. George Stevens), Lost Horizon (1937 dir. Frank Capra), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939 dir. Frank Capra), Modern Times (1936 dir. Charlie Chaplin), The Smiling Lieutenant (1931 dir. Ernst Lubitsch), L’Atalante (1934 dir. Jean Vigo), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937 dir. John Cromwell), Bringing Up Baby (1938 dir. Howard Hawks), Trouble in Paradise (1932 dir. Ernst Lubitsch), Frankenstein (1931 dir. James Whale), David Copperfield (1935 dir. George Cukor), King Kong (1933 dir. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack), and Morocco (1930 dir. Josef von Sternberg). As overexposed and problematic as it is, even Gone with the Wind can’t be ignored.
But as for the movies I love the most from that decade and because I’ve got the time to kill, well here we go:
10. The Thin Man (1934)-directed by W.S. Van Dyke
Surely one of the best pairings ever put to film was William Powell and Myrna Loy in this adaptation of the Dashiell Hammet novel that spawned one of the earliest film franchises -five sequels running until 1947. Powell and Loy’s chemistry is dynamite as Nick and Nora Charles, a charmingly alcoholic socialite couple who solve mysteries to stave off the boredom of their upper class lifestyle. The actual mystery at the heart of the movie, the disappearance of Maureen O’Sullivan’s father and death of his secretary, isn’t really interesting or important. The whole film is instead propelled by the strength of these characters, their offbeat flirtatiously bickering personalities, and the witty writing by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. It’s not easy for exorbitantly wealthy characters to be likable, but the Charles’ really are -perhaps because of the eccentric attitude they have towards their riches. They’re a wonderfully adventurous and sexy couple too with sensational comic timing birthed out of skilled improvisation from both actors, each of whom was saved from typecasting by this movie. Also they have a dog called Skippy. Fun and somewhat ahead of its time, The Thin Man is a great comedy whodunit and unconventional Christmas movie to boot.
9. Duck Soup (1933) -directed by Leo McCarey
Sometimes it’s enough for a movie just to be really, really funny. I already talked about Duck Soup, the best of the Marx Brothers movies, years ago, but it’s worth repeating just how good the slapstick is, how sharp the dialogue is, and how exceptional the satire is. The film treats you to an arsenal of the best material from these iconic vaudevillians, who don’t take an ounce of the film seriously that’s not devoted to a joke. For what it is worth, the film is primarily a politics and war spoof as Groucho’s Rufus T. Firefly is appointed leader of the nation of Freedonia while its’ rival Sylvania sends Chico and Harpo as a couple doofus spies after him. The film is the origin of many of Groucho’s most famous one-liners as well as other notable sketches like the brilliant Groucho-Harpo mirror gag and the ridiculous elongated war sequence. But beneath the surface, the movie still remains relevant as it viciously mocks nationalism and xenophobia. It takes aim at the then present film industry and the Hays Code as well. Not everything lands (particularly a minstrel show reference and a decent chunk of sexist humour), but for a comedy from 1933, it’s remarkable how much of it still does.
8. M (1931) -directed by Fritz Lang
A reliable classic of serial killer cinema, Lang’s first sound movie is still a powerful and complicated movie to think about. Who’s side does the film want you to be on, the mans’ or the mobs’? What is it really saying about murder and sensationalized crimes and vigilante justice? An expert specimen on how society responds to murder, it is also disturbingly prescient in its themes of mob mentalities and prejudice (both of which are arguably justified in text) ahead of the rise of Nazism is Germany. That scene where child killer Hans Beckert, played by an astoundingly pitiable Peter Lorre, is branded with a chalk ‘M’ on his coat to signify his identity and as a target for hate reads much differently post-Nazi Germany. Lang wrote the film with his then wife Thea von Harbou, who notoriously had Nazi sympathies, adding an extra layer to such scenes and interpretations. Equally uncomfortable, though for different reasons, is the mock trial where Beckert frames his crimes as an unstoppable urge that he has no control over, and of which he accuses all his tormentors as capable of. A movie that also makes great use of its sound and artistic choices (including mere suggestions to the acts of violence), M is a difficult film to grapple with, but a rewarding one nevertheless.
7. City Lights (1931) -directed by Charlie Chaplin
Yes, I’ve already talked about this movie; one of the last cries of the silent film industry that wound up being one of its best, but it came out in 1931 so it belongs here too. Charlie Chaplins’ sweet romantic comedy about the Tramp falling in love with a blind florist is abundantly heartwarming as much as it is silly and funny. It features some of the best routines of the iconic silent comic, particularly in his subplot with a drunken millionaire who’s friendly towards him when hammered but repelled by him when sober. The boxing match is another classic scene of slapstick comedy, one of many detours the plot takes as the Tramp simply works to make enough money to afford a miracle surgery for the flower girl -who Virginia Cherrill plays with the utmost warmth. Through it all Chaplin is customarily superb and lovable, keeping the film light and tender even as it addresses serious subject matter like suicide and disability. Indeed the melancholy that exists in the corners of the movie make its moments of triumph all the more impactful. The ending of course is one of the great movie endings, unusually subtle and sincere for a Chaplin vehicle, and a perfect cinematic moment.
6. Bride of Frankenstein (1935) -directed by James Whale
The first ever sequel to be better than its predecessor, Bride of Frankenstein is the greatest of the classic Universal monster movies by a pretty large margin. Adapted from a plot-line of Mary Shelley’s novel that had been absent from Whale’s 1931 film, it concerns Frankenstein’s Monster, now capable of speaking, pressuring his creator into making him a mate so as to not be alone in the world. While the earlier film had largely played up the Monster as an unstoppable abomination, this one re-emphasized his sympathetic nature, more-so even than Shelley’s novel. The mob that torments the Monster is framed as a villainous force, we get a lovely scene where he befriends a blind man, and his inescapable loneliness is felt much more viscerally. We’re meant to relate to him as much as Frankenstein. Boris Karloff returns of course in his best performance, alongside Colin Clive as Frankenstein; and they’re joined by Ernest Thesiger as the enabling and even madder scientist Doctor Pretorius, and Elsa Lanchester as the iconic title character (as well as Shelley in a framing device). Heavily queer-coded and with even heavier doses of Shelley’s Promethean themes, it is a marvellous and seminal cinematic achievement in gothic horror.
5. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) -directed by Lewis Milestone
I don’t think any movie has better captured the insidiousness of the First World War than All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the first great war movies and anti-war narratives. Beginning with an incendiary speech on the glories of war indoctrinating a whole classroom of students, demonstrative of the ignorance much of Europe had as to the impending form and cost, the film not only emphasizes the brutality with a scale and vividness no war movie would be allowed to express again for decades, but does so from the German side of the conflict -the enemies of the nation which it was made in. It’s an early example of humanizing those who just over a decade earlier had been routinely vilified, showing that they had no more an idea what they were fighting for than the Americans or British or French. It highlights the depressing pointlessness of it all, encapsulated through the view of Lew Ayres’ impressionable young soldier, who in a perfect moment returns to that school after witnessing horrors and seeing friends die to reveal the truth of war to the next generation -only for that professor to refute his honesty and continue propagandizing to the youths, who are taken in by it. How scary is it that that continues to happen?
4. The Grand Illusion (1937) -directed by Jean Renoir
Another First World War film, but this time from the French point of view in a German prisoner-of-war camp, that examines class and ideological dynamics within the context of war and nationalism. French officer de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) gets along with their captor Major von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) better than he does with his fellow prisoners of lower social standing; sharing experiences, linguistics, politics, and culture with the German officer that elude his less privileged countrymen. Both these aristocrats represent a dying world order and are intelligent enough to realize it, in contrast to Jean Gabin’s working-class Maréchal and Marcel Dalio’s Jewish Rosenthal -the heroes of the story if it can be said to have any. But The Grand Illusion is a humanist piece, identifying and sympathizing with everyone while critiquing the systems that dominate them. It is thoughtful and optimistic in its view of the human spirit, and politically and ethically conscious in a way that few films of that era were. As a Renoir film it’s also stunning of course, characterized by that Impressionist beauty inherited from his father, with marvelous set design, atmospheric lighting, and mesmerizing long takes -particularly at the end. This was the first movie given a DVD release by Criterion, and if that’s not proof enough of its worth, it was also so dangerous to Nazi ideology that they tried to burn every copy when they invaded France. Thankfully, they didn’t.
3. The Wizard of Oz (1939) -directed by Victor Fleming
I wrote a whole essay on this movie relatively recently so I’ll keep it short. The Wizard of Oz is one of the most important and influential movies of all time for good reason. It remains as sweet and fun and imaginative and intelligent as it always has been -few movies are more timeless. And it’s not just because of the fantasy and the songs and the revolutionary special effects and the gorgeous use of technicolour, but that the characters are rich and deeply relatable, the story simple but thrilling, and the ideas compelling and profound. It’s the film that made Judy Garland immortal, and every performance around her is pretty damn good too, especially Margaret Hamilton -equally immortal for one of the very best screen villains. The Wizard of Oz is likely the oldest movie that is still a staple of western childhood, still watched and enjoyed by generation upon generation and it absolutely deserves to be; capturing something universal in the wants and imaginations of children and the child in all of us, even after more than eighty years. There’s no place like home.
2. A Tale of Two Cities (1935) -directed by Jack Conway
A couple years ago I listed this as the best Dickens adaptation and I stand by it. It relates all the most important aspects of the book and translates them effectively to film. But it’s also just a great film on its own merits, of an impressive scale for the subject matter, appropriately weighty, and with a cast really well-suited to their roles from Basil Rathbone and Reginald Owen to Blanche Yurka, Isabel Jewell, and Edna May Oliver -many of whom would play other roles in Dickens movies, some even in that years’ simultaneous David Copperfield adaptation. But of course the movie’s greatest strength is Ronald Colman’s performance as Sydney Carton, the self-sacrificing melancholic lawyer at the heart of the story. It’s a personal favourite of mine in the annals of cinematic acting, though at risk of sounding too biased, so is the character and the story itself. But Colman brings him to life with such extraordinary yet seemingly effortless tangibility it’s difficult to not be engrossed by or feel the depth of his sadness and longing through little more than an expression. The brilliance of that finale awaiting the guillotine, the emotion and horror and hopelessness tinged with that small vestige of grace could only be better if it were Dickens’ last chapter itself.
1. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) -directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley
I was first introduced to the idea of Robin Hood through a rental video my dad showed me when I was about nine. I hadn’t been exposed to the popular Disney movie or the more recent Kevin Costner fronted Prince of Thieves. Instead I met this legendary hero through the dashingly charismatic and colourful Errol Flynn -the man who’s unequivocally defined the character in pop culture more than anyone else. The Adventures of Robin Hood is golden age Hollywood filmmaking at its finest. Grand, rich sets and production values that transport you to a movies’ world, a clever and charming yet humble hero, a beautiful and impassioned love interest, memorable villains both suave and incompetent. It’s got a little of everything and is exquisite to boot, with opulent visuals highlighted (like in The Wizard of Oz) by its breathtaking technicolour vibrancy. It’s a relentlessly fun movie, exciting and noble, Robin Hood’s values having that same corny yet inimitable sincerity behind them as Supermans’ forty years later. It’s a romance in the traditional sense, and its perfect that way -allowing for an energy and life absent from most subsequent interpretations trying for “gritty realism”. Flynn and Olivia de Havilland are glorious, Claude Rains is joyfully camp, Basil Rathbone magnificently dastardly. Everyone else including Una O’Connor, Herbert Mundin, Alan Hale, and Melville Cooper play their parts stupendously. The arrow shot and that duel on the stairs are still perfect movie moments and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score is stirringly revolutionary. Though the Robin Hood legend predates this movie by centuries, it feels like the purest, most distilled form of the story and I wish Hollywood had the courage to make a movie like this again.
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