my favorite movies of 1939:

(1) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

(2) The Wizard of Oz

(3) Gone with the Wind

(4) Only Angels Have Wings

(5) The Women

(6) Wuthering Heights

(7) Destry Rides Again

favorite of 1939:

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

(James Stewart, Claude Rains, Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, Thomas Mitchell. Directed by Frank Capra.)

I guess this is just another lost cause. … All you people don’t know about lost causes. Mr. Paine does. He said once they were the only causes worth fighting for.

Stream Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on these sites.

2nd favorite of 1939:

The Wizard of Oz

(Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Margaret Hamilton, Billie Burke. Directed by Victor Fleming.)

The moment when Dorothy (Judy Garland) moves from her sepia-toned home in Kansas to the vibrant colors of Oz is a crucial dividing line — not just in this movie, but in all of film, essentially announcing a new way of making movies:

The dark side of The Wizard of Oz was captured in this newspaper listing (which has often been shared online without crediting the writer, Rick Polito):

Rotten Tomatoes sums up the critics’ consensus:

An absolute masterpiece whose groundbreaking visuals and deft storytelling are still every bit as resonant, The Wizard of Oz is a must-see film for young and old.

Ebert tapped into why this movie sticks with us as children, and why adults keep showing it to kids one generation after another:

Salman Rushdie, growing up in Bombay, remembers that seeing the film at 10 “made a writer of me.” Terry McMillan, as an African-American child in northern Michigan, “completely identified when no one had time to listen to Dorothy.” Rushdie wrote that the film’s “driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults, and how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies.” McMillan learned about courage, about “being afraid but doing whatever it was you set out to do anyway.”

They’re touching on the key lesson of childhood, which is that someday the child will not be a child, that home will no longer exist, that adults will be no help because now the child is an adult and must face the challenges of life alone. But that you can ask friends to help you. And that even the Wizard of Oz is only human … .

“The Wizard of Oz” has a wonderful surface of comedy and music, special effects and excitement, but we still watch it … because its underlying story penetrates straight to the deepest insecurities of childhood, stirs them and then reassures them. As adults, we love it because it reminds us of a journey we have taken. …

[Dorothy’s] friends on the Yellow Brick Road (the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion) were projections of every child’s secret fears. Are we real? Are we ugly and silly? Are we brave enough? In helping them, Dorothy was helping herself, just as an older child will overcome fears by acting brave before a younger one.

I don’t like this forest. It’s dark and creepy.

Of course I don’t know, but I think it’ll get darker before it gets lighter.

Stream The Wizard of Oz on HBO Max.

3rd favorite of 1939:

Gone with the Wind

(Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Hattie McDaniel, Thomas Mitchell. Directed by Victor Fleming [uncredited directors: Sam Wood, George Cukor].)

When I think of myself with anything I could possibly hope for and not a care in the world — and you here in this horrid jail! And not even a human jail, Rhett, a horse jail! …

Scarlett! Can it be possible that … that you’ve grown a woman’s heart, a real woman’s heart?

This is the longest movie on this blog.

Having heard about how this nearly four-hour movie is so problematic and racist (Washington Post link), I put off watching Gone with the Wind until recently. So how did I react when I finally saw it? Well, something like this:

😐🙂😳😲😱🙁😂😒😔🙂😂😢😖🤨😫😭🥺

This Chicago Tribune review sums it up:

“Gone With the Wind” offers the kind of big, rich, opulent experience the movies are in a unique position to offer but seldom do. A sweeping historical epic, set in Atlanta and the Georgia countryside before, during and after the Civil War, the film follows four strong central characters — and dozens of memorable minor ones — through a series of crises and life-challenging moments.

Those fictional but full-blooded people include Vivien Leigh’s saucy, self-obsessed, indomitable plantation belle Scarlett O’Hara, Clark Gable’s sexy, courageous rake-adventurer Rhett Butler, Leslie Howard’s aesthete Ashley Wilkes and Olivia de Havilland’s saintly Melanie Hamilton, with Hattie McDaniel’s earthy Mammy (like Leigh’s, an Oscar-winning performance) the most memorable of the gallery around them.

One of this great but frustrating movie’s weaknesses is the lackluster performance by the out-of-place Leslie Howard, who, unlike Vivien Leigh, couldn’t manage to put aside his real-life British accent and commit to playing a Georgian. I agree with this BBC piece (“Gone with the Wind: Is it America’s strangest film?”):

The idea that anyone — let alone anyone as unconventional as Scarlett — would choose this wishy-washy character over … Rhett is absurd: the most preposterous aspect of a daringly, bewilderingly idiosyncratic film. After more than 75 years, we’re still mesmerised by Scarlett. We’re still tantalised by Scarlett and Rhett. But Scarlett and Ashley? Frankly, we don’t give a damn.

If only he’d been played by Jimmy Stewart!

But I didn’t have the experience some have of losing interest in the later parts which have been criticized for turning the movie into a relatively conventional melodrama. I like the focus on personal relationships better than the earlier, more historical stretches about the ravages of war, which give the sense that the filmmakers were trying hard to make Gone with the Wind the most grandly important movie ever … while glossing over so much of what was important about that time in our history.

Stream Gone with the Wind on HBO Max.

4th favorite of 1939:

Only Angels Have Wings

(Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Thomas Mitchell, Rita Hayworth, Richard Barthelmess. Directed by Howard Hawks.)

Geoff (Cary Grant) is a pilot who runs a freight air service in a South American port town. From the beginning he comes off as a callous and reckless leader who’s willing to risk lives — but not his heart. Bonnie (Jean Arthur) hates what Geoff does but also hates herself for loving him.

Airplane stunts keep this movie exciting, and an unpredictable ensemble cast keeps you wondering where it’s all going. There’s the loyal, aging pilot who’s incongruously called “the Kid” (Thomas Mitchell); MacPherson, who the Kid can’t forgive for an act of cowardice that killed the Kid’s brother (Richard Barthelmess); and MacPherson’s wife, who has a history with Geoff (Rita Hayworth in her breakthrough role).

From Hollywood’s pivotal year of 1939, Only Angels Have Wings feels strongly connected to movie history, and not just other aviation movies. The romantic and psychological tension in a land of ex-pats would come back a few years later in Casablanca (my favorite movie of 1942). Howard Hawks directing a steely and macho Cary Grant shows us another side of him a year after Hawks directed Grant as a timid and addled paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby (my favorite of 1938). Rita Hayworth’s ambiguous role — you can’t pigeonhole her as a girl next door or femme fatale — leaves us wanting more and hints at her career-making title role in Gilda (one of my favorites of 1946). And the dangerous mission to deliver nitroglycerin foreshadows the influential 1953 French movie The Wages of Fear.

For all the male-dominated daredevil scenes in Only Angels Have Wings, we really see things through Jean Arthur’s eyes. Her Bonnie character is the one who most clearly sees through the insane world in which she’s found herself, even when she’s a willing part of it.

Why does Only Angels Have Wings still resonate today? Not because of how cruel anyone in it is. This isn’t a stock battle of good vs. evil. The point is to watch what happens to people when occupational duty replaces ethical sensitivity, and workers bet their lives just to belong on the team. If this movie has a villain, it isn’t one person but the whole system they all feel stuck in.

Stream Only Angels Have Wings on the Criterion Channel (with bonus features).

5th favorite of 1939:

The Women

(Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard. Directed by George Cukor.)

Razor-sharp wit and deftly deployed innuendos coexist with tender feelings and crushing heartbreak in this ensemble comedy about women … and men … though you won’t see any of the latter in this movie! Yes, The Women has no male cast members but over 100 actresses, including Norma Shearer as a disillusioned wife/mother who’s the most complex character, Joan Crawford as a devious perfume saleswoman, Joan Fontaine as a pure-hearted but constrained young bride, Paulette Goddard injecting some mischief into the proceedings, and Rosalind Russell stealing the show as sardonically as possible.

In this scene, Sylvia (Rosalind Russell) goes up to the saleswoman, Crystal (Joan Crawford), secretly knowing that Crystal is having an affair with Stephen Haines, the husband of Sylvia’s friend Mary Haines (Norma Shearer, who isn’t in this scene):

The Women isn’t seen as very feminist or progressive by our standards, but there’s enough insight amid the snappy banter to keep this movie fresh and resonant today. And the specific plot is transcended by the unspoken yet bold statement implicit in the very decision to make this movie 100% female.

Stream The Women on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

6th favorite of 1939:

Wuthering Heights

(Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon. Directed by William Wyler.)

I killed you. … Haunt your murderer! … Take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you.

Stream Wuthering Heights on Amazon Prime (it left but will likely come back), Tubi (free with ads), or these sites.

7th favorite of 1939:

Destry Rides Again

(James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Brian Donlevy. Directed by George Marshall.)

Criterion recently put out a blu-ray with a beautiful restoration of this “comedic western,” which is “both a boisterous spoof and a shining example of its genre.” In one of the Criterion extras, critic Imogen Sara Smith observes:

Destry Rides Again is both gender-bending and genre-bending, because it plays with expectations for male and female behavior in one of the genres in which gender tends to be the most traditionally defined.

Stream Destry Rides Again on these sites.

So I’ve included Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant movies on this list. When someone asked what distinguished those two actors from each other, this was my response:

Cary Grant was more suave, bold, self-assured. Jimmy Stewart was more hesitant, introverted, and imperfect. If Grant had more charm, Stewart had more depth.

They both excelled at comedy and drama. But Grant in particular was a natural at comedy — he seemed like he couldn’t help being funny. Even when Stewart was in a comedy, he brought a serious undertone.

Grant was classically masculine. Stewart was ahead of his time in having a soft, sensitive quality back when most male actors lacked such nuance.

They might have been equally great as stars. But Jimmy Stewart was the greatest male actor of his time.

(Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.)

my favorite movie of 1938:

Bringing up Baby

(Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charlie Ruggles, May Robson, Walter Catlett, Nissa the leopard, Skippy the dog. Directed by Howard Hawks.)

When you look up “screwball comedy” on Wikipedia, the first image you see is a poster for Bringing up Baby. In a screwball comedy, love doesn’t bloom in the openly romantic and sensual way we expect to see in movies; it secretly builds up through wild adventures, as Cary Grant hints when he says to Katharine Hepburn:

It isn’t that I don’t like you. … In moments of quiet, I’m strangely drawn toward you. But, well, there haven’t been any quiet moments.

No, there isn’t much “quiet” about Bringing Up Baby. The movie seems to be in a mad rush to give us as many memorable lines and scenes as possible, some of which were surprisingly risque in 1938. Katharine Hepburn accidentally tears the back of her dress at a classy outing and needs Cary Grant to protect her exposed underwear. Later, Grant is wearing a woman’s nightgown when he leaps into the air and exclaims that he “just went gay all of a sudden!”

“Baby” of the title is a leopard, which is only one of the animals in this movie: there’s also the dog, and the dinosaur …

Stream Bringing up Baby on these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.

my favorite movies of 1937:

(1) Confession

(2) The Awful Truth

favorite of 1937:

Confession

(Kay Francis, Basil Rathbone. Directed by Joe May.)

After being so smoothly, glibly charming in Trouble in Paradise (one of my favorite movies of 1932), Kay Francis becomes more rough and multi-layered and unpredictable in Confession, a heart-breaking drama that focuses on how the legal system struggles to deal with grey areas. This movie was ahead of its time with experimental camerawork, nonlinear storytelling, and MeToo themes. A sequence filmed from the perspective of a woman as she wakes up in a disoriented state, apparently having been blackout drunk with a womanizer, had me stunned to think that this movie came out in 1937, not 2017.

Confession should be better known. So should Kay Francis.

I don’t know of anywhere to stream or rent Confession, but I strongly recommend this DVD.

2nd favorite of 1937:

The Awful Truth

(Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Skippy the dog. Directed by Leo McCarey.)

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are a married couple heading toward divorce while lodging an endless series of low-key ripostes at each other.

The Awful Truth is a screwball comedy, but I also like to call it a “champagne comedy,” both because of the casual luxury that’s constantly in the background and makes it seem like the characters are playing life in easy mode, and because their banter fizzes with sparkling wit even when their marriage has gone flat.

The cast and director had an extraordinary struggle shooting The Awful Truth. They were stuck making this movie without a useable script — and this was back in the 1930s, when making an improvised movie seemed unthinkable. The assumption was that actors get paid to show up on schedule to deliver the lines they’ve memorized. Instead, director Leo McCarey made Cary Grant and Irene Dunne engage in extended improvs. Within the first week, the stars were going crazy: Dunne was regularly crying on set, and Grant wrote an 8-page letter to the head of the studio about everything that was going wrong with the movie.

After McCarey spent a while acting things out to show Grant and Dunne what he was looking for, the actors started loosening up, and the script kept getting written on the fly. McCarey drew on his experience directing the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, my favorite movie of 1933. (If you’re familiar with Duck Soup, watch for how it inspired scenes in The Awful Truth involving a bowler hat and a radio.)

Dunne and Grant had never met before, but they instantly clicked and turned out to be brilliant comedians. All that improvisation led to a movie that felt like it had an immaculate script. The agonizing process of making this movie led to a fabulous success that launched Cary Grant into stardom. The Awful Truth was nominated for several Academy Awards including Best Picture. The only Oscar it won went to McCarey, for Best Director.

Stream The Awful Truth on Amazon Prime (it left but will likely come back) or these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.

my favorite movies of 1936:

(1) Modern Times

(2) Dodsworth

favorite of 1936:

Modern Times

(Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard. Directed by Chaplin.)

This farewell to Chaplin’s “tramp” character is mostly silent; talking is done only occasionally by minor characters, and we hear Chaplin’s voice only in a nonsense song. Modern Times starts out as a slapstick lampoon of an automated, mechanized society, and turns into a love story featuring one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard: “Smile.” In the movie we hear the original instrumental version, composed by Chaplin himself. You’ve probably heard this later version sung by Nat King Cole, with lyrics inspired by the movie:

You can stream Modern Times on the Criterion Channel, (with bonus features) or HBO Max. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free 14-day trial.

2nd favorite of 1936:

Dodsworth

(Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor, David Niven, Paul Lukas. Directed by William Wyler.)

I’m out to make a new life for myself. I’m out to learn how to enjoy my leisure now that I’ve retired. I've been doing things that people expected of me always. I want to feel free. I want to sit under a linden tree with nothing more important to worry about than the temperature of the beer — if there is anything more important. … I’m out to see some of the world I haven’t seen, and get a perspective on the USA. Why, I might get to know myself at the same time. I might even get to know my wife.

Stream Dodsworth on Amazon Prime or Kanopy.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.

my favorite movies of 1935:

(1) A Night at the Opera

(2) Bride of Frankenstein

(3) Top Hat

(4) The Whole Town’s Talking

favorite of 1935:

A Night at the Opera

(Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Allan Jones, Kitty Carlisle, Margaret Dumont, Sig Ruman. Directed by Sam Wood.)

This is the first Marx Brothers movie after they switched studios from Paramount to MGM, where they had better production values but would eventually pale in comparison with their zanier early days. A Night at the Opera captured them at a sweet spot where their bigger budget coexisted with humor that was still fresh. Overall, it might be the Marx Brothers’ most accessible movie. 

Best known for a punny thing Chico says while going over a contract with Groucho, a scene where more and more people keep cramming into a small room (in the video below), and a climactic scene where the Marx Brothers’ anarchy invades a Verdi opera (Il Trovatore). A Night at the Opera revels in the paradox of the Marx Brothers: their comedy feels like chaos but is cleverly engineered down to the silliest details.

I even love the musical interludes and find some of them deeply moving. Some fans will grumble about those parts, but the heartfelt romance mixed with bedlam gives A Night at the Opera a satisfying warmth that’s allowed it to endure for 90 years.

Stream A Night at the Opera on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

2nd favorite of 1935:

Bride of Frankenstein

(Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger. Directed by James Whale.)

I listed the original Frankenstein movie as one of my favorites of 1931. That post discusses how the 1931 movie subtly creates sympathy for Dr. Frankenstein’s monster while he’s feared by the whole town. This sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, bears down more strongly on the sympathetic angle, especially in an interlude of unexpected warmth when the “monster” (Boris Karloff) happens upon a blind hermit playing violin.

Ebert called Bride of Frankenstein “the best of the Frankenstein movies — a sly, subversive work that smuggled shocking material past the censors by disguising it in the trappings of horror.” Ebert went on:

Some movies age; others ripen. Seen today, [James] Whale’s masterpiece is more surprising than when it was made because today’s audiences are more alert to its buried hints of homosexuality, necrophilia and sacrilege. But you don’t have to deconstruct it to enjoy it; it’s satirical, exciting, funny, and an influential masterpiece of art direction.

You can stream Bride of Frankenstein on these sites.

3rd favorite of 1935:

Top Hat

(Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton. Directed by Mark Sandrich.)

The plot is a very silly story of mistaken identity: you can see all along that everyone’s problems will be solved as soon as people stop jumping to conclusions and start talking normally. But Top Hat makes up for that absurdity with sublime dancing and Irving Berlin songs.

Ebert:

There are two numbers in “Top Hat” where the dancing on the screen reaches such perfection as is attainable. They are by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?” and “Cheek to Cheek.” Because Astaire believed that movie dance numbers should be shot in unbroken takes that ran as long as possible, what they perform is an achievement in endurance as well as artistry. At a point when many dancers would be gasping for breath, Astaire and Rogers are smiling easily, heedlessly. To watch them is to see hard work elevated to effortless joy … .

Stream Top Hat on these sites.

4th favorite of 1935:

The Whole Town’s Talking

(Edward G. Robinson, Jean Arthur. Directed by John Ford.)

In this comedy crime movie, Edward G. Robinson brilliantly plays two characters: a hardened killer on the lam, and a timid office worker who looks just like him. Some of the special effects are jaw-dropping for 1935: watch for a scene with both of Robinson’s characters’ faces on screen at the same time — while one of them blows cigar smoke in the other one’s face.

Stream The Whole Town’s Talking on Amazon Prime (it left but will likely come back) or these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.

my favorite movies of 1934:

(1) It’s a Gift

(2) It Happened One Night

favorite of 1934:

It’s a Gift

(W.C. Fields, Kathleen Howard, Charles Sellon. Directed by Norman McLeod.)

This is my favorite W.C. Fields movie; I prefer it to his later, bigger-budget movies. In this one, he’s not a slimy con artist but a lovable “old idiot” (as his wife calls him) — a shopkeeper who’s thwarted from doing the most basic everyday tasks like shaving or getting a good night’s sleep, while he dreams of moving away with his family to start a more prosperous business. The movie may feel slight: it’s barely over an hour long, and Fields tends to underact and mumble his lines. But in its own quiet way, It’s a Gift emerges as one of the great classic comedies.

Well, the doctors say he’s at death’s door. …

You think they’ll be able to pull him through? 

I don’t know anywhere to stream It’s a Gift, but Kino Lorber recently released it on blu-ray (with new features including commentary).

 

2nd favorite of 1934:

It Happened One Night

(Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale. Directed by Frank Capra.)

This was the first of only 3 movies ever to win all 5 top Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay.

From Criterion’s essay on this movie:

It’s often said that social progress has weakened love stories by removing all the important obstacles—the most obvious being the bygone taboo of sex before marriage, but another being the class system that’s woven throughout It Happened One Night. Yet, viewed today, the movie’s predicaments aren’t tintype relics of the fussy old days. A modern woman forced to spend the night with a hard-charging reporter she has just met is still likely to want reassurance that the room is all she’ll be sharing. …

In what must be the movie’s most famous scene (although it has a lot of competition), Pete [Clark Gable] demonstrates, at length and with a fantastic amount of condescension, the proper way to hitchhike: “It’s all in the thumb.” Ellie [Claudette Colbert], splendidly deadpan, watches an entire traffic jam’s worth of cars zip by Pete and his magic thumb, then slinks over and lifts her hem to reveal one of the loveliest legs in movie history. Cut to slamming brakes, then the couple in the rumble seat of a car. But here’s the thing: The man who has stopped (played by Alan Hale) turns out to be a road thief, bent on stealing their remaining suitcase. For all Ellie’s triumph, the creep was looking for a mark, and probably would have stopped in any event.

That’s the rhythm of It Happened One Night, a dance of syncopated folly and banter. Banter is distinct from mockery — it’s a seesaw, not a slingshot. … “Your ego is absolutely colossal,” and a cheerful reply, “Yeah, yeah, not bad, how’s yours?”

Stream It Happened One Night on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.

my favorite movies of 1933:

(1) Duck Soup

(2) Gold Diggers of 1933

(3) The Story of Temple Drake

(4) Design for Living

(5) The Invisible Man

favorite of 1933:

Duck Soup

(Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, Margaret Dumont, Louis Calhern. Directed by Leo McCarey.)

From the scene where Harpo tries to fool Groucho into thinking he’s looking in a mirror, to the extravagant musical number about going to war, Duck Soup is the Marx Brothers’ supreme achievement.

When asked about the political significance of Duck Soup, Groucho responded: “What significance? We were just four Jews trying to get a laugh.” A funny line, but I don’t believe he meant it. Their driving motivation might have been to make the audience laugh, but underneath is a satire of the reckless belligerence and foolish vanity of politicians.

Chicolini, when were you born?

I don’t remember. I was just a little baby.

Stream Duck Soup on Amazon Prime (it left but will likely come back) or these sites.

 

2nd favorite of 1933:

Gold Diggers of 1933

(Joan Blondell, Warren William, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Aline MacMahon, Ginger Rogers. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley.)

Gold Diggers of 1933 starts off brilliantly, with a joyous Ginger Rogers singing “We’re in the Money,” flanked by a chorus of women covered in coins:

For one verse she switches to Pig Latin, a playful language that disguises English words from those who don’t know the rules — hinting at the way people in this movie will slyly undermine expectations and shift how they present themselves.

This 1933 musical came out in the middle of the Great Depression and found comedy in that sadness. “We’re in the Money,” which turns out to be a dress rehearsal for a musical, is rudely interrupted by debt collectors who shut down the show. The actresses gripe to each other about how this keeps happening to them with one show after another: “They close before they open!” In the next scene, we see that some of those women are roommates who can barely get out of bed in the morning to look for jobs, and they joke about starving. Aline MacMahon rationalizes stealing milk from a neighbor’s balcony: “The dairy company stole it from a cow!”

The “gold diggers” in this movie aren’t lazy; they need to work harder and use more ingenuity because they’re facing poverty.

The movie turns to drama in an arresting grand finale focused on veterans living in poverty: “Remember My Forgotten Man.”

But before that, Gold Diggers of 1933 offers fleeting escapism in Busby Berkeley’s extravagant, larger-than-life choreography that turns people into objects. In addition to the women dressed in coins in “We’re in the Money,” Dick Powell uses a can opener to cut through Ruby Keeler’s metal armor in the movie’s most risqué number, “Pettin’ in the Park.”

Then in “The Shadow Waltz,” women are playing neon violins, and they all form a giant violin:

Busby Berkeley’s audacious style of transforming dancers into whatever he imagined would eventually inspire the indie band OK Go’s amazing one-take video for the 2014 song “I Won’t Let You Down,” which must be seen from the beginning to the end of this song for the full effect:

While Ginger Rogers is the biggest star, Joan Blondell (who later married Dick Powell in real life) is the standout, casually moving from her usual down-to-earth, wise-cracking attitude to something unexpectedly emotional and vulnerable. The scene near the end of the movie where she repeats the phrase “cheap and vulgar” — how the man she loves (Warren William) sees her — is one of the transcendently beautiful moments of Gold Diggers of 1933:

(Thanks to pre-code.com for some of the photos I used from their extensive post about this movie.)

You can stream Gold Diggers of 1933 on these sites.

3rd favorite of 1933:

The Story of Temple Drake

(Miriam Hopkins, Jack La Rue. Directed by Stephen Roberts.)

A privileged socialite (Miriam Hopkins) finds her whole life shaken up when she gets in a car accident in the middle of nowhere, and seeks refuge in a house full of shady characters.

Even if you’re familiar with the anything-goes pre-Code era of 1929 to mid-1934, you might be shocked at some of the barriers broken by this movie (which was loosely adapted from a William Faulkner novel, Sanctuary). How many movies from the ’30s confront sexual assault as a serious problem, instead of laughing it off?

The Story of Temple Drake was viewed as so scandalous that it contributed to the end of the pre-Code era the next year. But the real scandal is that this movie was generally unavailable until the past decade or so.

Criterion has released The Story of Temple Drake on blu-ray (and DVD) with a beautifully crisp picture quality, and bonus features that delve into questions like why this movie was so important and whether it was a feminist movie or a sexist one. They point out the irony that we’re lucky the movie was completely banned, unlike other pre-Code movies which were allowed to be shown but with offending scenes cut from the film. And I mean “cut” literally, as in pieces of film were sliced out of the original negatives with razor blades, and some of those scenes are gone forever. In contrast, The Story of Temple Drake was considered wholly irredeemable, so no one bothered to cut it up in order to screen the rest of it. And now we can see it in its full and true form.

I don’t know anywhere to stream The Story of Temple Drake, but the blu-ray and DVD are part of the Barnes & Noble 50% off sale on all Criterion movies, which is going through the rest of November 2021. Amazon is also lowering its price. (If you miss the Barnes & Noble sale, it usually happens every July and November.)

4th favorite of 1933:

Design for Living

(Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper, Frederic March, Edward Everett Horton. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.)

This is another pre-Code movie starring Miriam Hopkins that’s shockingly modern for 1933. At times it feels like a far-sighted precursor to Seinfeld with its frank discussions of dating and sex. And unlike most movies of the time, they actually use the word “sex.”

IMDb sums up the premise: “A woman cannot decide between two men who love her, and the trio agree to try living together in a platonic friendly relationship.”

A thing happened to me that usually happens to men. You see, a man can meet two, three, or four women, and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of interesting elimination, he is able to decide which he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice. Oh, it’s quite all right for her to try on a hundred hats before she picks one out! …

Fine. But which chapeau do you want, madame?

Both.

Stream Design for Living on the Roku Channel (free with ads) or Redbox (also free with ads).

5th favorite of 1933:

The Invisible Man

(Claude Rains, William Harrigan, Gloria Stuart, Henry Travers. Directed by James Whale.)

Claude Rains had his breakthrough role in this movie, which used eerie special effects that are still effective today.

You must hide!

Don’t worry — the whole world’s my hiding place.

Stream The Invisible Man on these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.

my favorite movies of 1932:

(1) I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

(2) Horse Feathers

(3) Broken Lullaby

(4) Trouble in Paradise

(5) Jewel Robbery

(6) Island of Lost Souls

favorite of 1932:

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

(Paul Muni, Glenda Farrell, Helen Vinson. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy.)

In the early 1930s, just a few years after talking was introduced to movies, Warner Bros. executives were skeptical that audiences would pay to see I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, based on a true story about an unfairly accused man (played by Paul Muni). The idea of making a movie to raise viewers’ social consciousness was questioned; wouldn’t people rather be entertained to take their minds off the Great Depression? (That kind of debate was shown at the beginning of Sullivan’s Travels, one of my favorite movies of 1941.)

The debate was settled when I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang became a surprise hit. It was the third highest grossing Warner Bros. movie of the year, and was nominated for Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor.

This movie shows how the American dream can be crushed by the system.

The final scene, drenched in darkness (both visual and metaphorical), was a precursor to 1940s and ’50s film noir.

In the excellent DVD commentary by film professor Richard Jewell (who coincidentally has the same name as a wrongly accused man), he recalls that when he showed I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang to a class in the 1990s, something happened for the only time in his career: a student had an outburst and started yelling at the screen because she was so upset at what was happening.

Some have credited this movie for leading to reforms of chain gangs and eventually their abolition in the US.

While the specific issue of chain gangs has faded away, the larger importance of this movie is still with us 90 years later. You can feel it in the chilling last lines, which will echo in your mind after it’s over. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is one of those “old” movies that doesn’t get old.

Stream I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

2nd favorite of 1932:

Horse Feathers

(Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, Thelma Todd. Directed by Norman McLeod.)

The Marx Brothers in college during Prohibition.

In this scene, Harpo “gets tough” with college football players they’re trying to kidnap:

“Tie on the bed, throw the rope out the window!”

The joke of Chico sitting back and letting Harpo take all the risks of confronting the football players in that scene was done out of necessity: Chico had recently been injured in a car crash, so he had to sit down for much of the movie.

(I don’t know anywhere to stream Horse Feathers, but you could check JustWatch.)

3rd favorite of 1932:

Broken Lullaby

(Lionel Barrymore, Nancy Carroll, Phillips Holmes, ZaSu Pitts. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.)

This movie’s director, Ernst Lubitsch, was known for making comedies, so Broken Lullaby, a drama, was unusual for him. His comic sensibility still shines through in grim ironies: at the beginning, after World War I, we see a military man in the foreground, standing on one leg because he lost the other one in the war, and the space where that leg should be is where we see a triumphant military parade marching through Paris. Then Lubitsch cuts to a veterans’ hospital, where a patient with PTSD wakes up screaming at hearing militaristic noises from the parade outside his window.

Lubitsch flashes back to the trenches of World War I, where a French soldier (Phillips Holmes) does his duty of shooting a German soldier but becomes distraught when he sees a letter the German wrote to his fiance, which he was in the middle of signing. The French soldier takes the dying soldier’s hand and finishes his signature. After the war, the French soldier goes out looking for something — maybe moral redemption, or human connection. First he goes to church, but the priest tells him there’s no need for confession because he’s done nothing wrong. The Frenchman isn’t satisfied with that, so he goes to Germany seeking out the loved ones of the man he killed. …

Lionel Barrymore

I don’t know anywhere to stream Broken Lullaby, so I recommend the Kino blu-ray.

4th favorite of 1932:

Trouble in Paradise

(Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Edward Everett Horton. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.)

This movie seemed to have a strong effect on Ebert, who wrote:

When I was small I liked to go to the movies because you could find out what adults did when there weren’t any children in the room. As I grew up that pleasure gradually faded; the more I knew the less the characters seemed like adults. … “Trouble in Paradise” reawakened my old feeling. It is about people who are almost impossibly adult, in that fanciful movie way — so suave, cynical, sophisticated, smooth and sure that a lifetime is hardly long enough to achieve such polish. They glide. …

Herbert Marshall plays a gentleman jewel thief, Miriam Hopkins plays the con-woman who adores him, and Kay Francis is the rich widow who thinks she can buy him. … They live in a movie world of exquisite costumes, flawless grooming, butlers, grand hotels in Venice, penthouses in Paris, cocktails, evening dress, wall safes, sweeping staircases, nightclubs, the opera and jewelry, a lot of jewelry. … What happens, and you are surprised to sense it happening, is that in a drawing room comedy of froth and inconsequence, you find that you believe in the characters and care about them.

For the past few years I’ve been watching hundreds of movies that are new to me in order to finish this list, and one of the joys of this project has been discovering Miriam Hopkins. This is the first of her movies I’ve included on the list, and it won’t be the last. She isn’t known as one of the greatest actors, but her shamelessly hammy style works wonderfully with lines like this:

You are a crook. I want you as a crook. I love you as a crook. … Steal! Swindle! Rob! Oh, but don’t become one of those useless, good-for-nothing gigolos!

Stream Trouble in Paradise on these sites.

5th favorite of 1932:

Jewel Robbery

(William Powell, Kay Francis. Directed by William Dieterle.)

A gem about a gem! Kay Francis is a rich housewife craving more thrills than she can get in her mansion, and it’s just her bad/good luck to be caught up in a jewel robbery masterminded by a man in a three-piece suit who’s impossibly debonair under the circumstances (William Powell).

By the 1940s and ’50s, a movie about a jewel thief would have to be a film noir, and it would have to teach us a grimly moralistic lesson; you’d be able to sense the finger wagging just off-screen. Jewel Robbery captures a fleeting moment before then — somehow both more innocent and more knowing, a relic of its time and yet ahead of its time. I love noir, but I also love how Jewel Robbery is … the opposite of noir? It could only have been made exactly when it was made: just two years earlier and it wouldn’t have been polished enough to achieve the same sophistication; just two years later, after the pre-Code era, and the censors would’ve killed everything fun about it, from kinkiness to marijuana. By the time it could’ve passed the censors decades later, crime movies needed less glamour and more grit.

No, we might never see another movie like this, with glistening black and white, sparkling dialogue, and actors like William Powell and Kay Francis who could throw morals out the window with such grace. It’s the kind of movie where one of them can look directly at us in closeup to share a naughty secret, and we’re not even fazed by this breaking of the fourth wall, because we know this is a frivolous movie world and we don’t need it to resemble real life; we’re just glad to be let in on the secret.

You can stream Jewel Robbery on these sites.

6th favorite of 1932:

Island of Lost Souls

(Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Kathleen Burke, Bela Lugosi. Directed by Erle C. Kenton.)

10 things about Island of Lost Souls.

Criterion’s essay sums up this pre-Code horror movie and explains how it still endures today:

based on the 1896 H.G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, Island of Lost Souls … is the story of a mad scientist’s attempts to convert wild animals into human beings by way of vicious medical procedures. Through the eyes of Edward Parker (Richard Arlen), a shipwrecked innocent, we discover Dr. Moreau (the inimitable Charles Laughton), living with his assistant, Montgomery (a laconic Arthur Hohl), among the beast-men he has molded in the laboratory he calls the House of Pain.

The film was a sensation when it was released. Its frank references to vivisection and Moreau’s delight in “feeling like God” got it banned in twelve countries, including England, where it was described as being “against nature.” In America, state censors … cut various lines and scenes, depending on local standards and tastes. Nonetheless, people were reportedly so repulsed that they vomited in their seats. …

Modern audiences, schooled in the politics of … factory farming, cloning and animal testing, may find the film’s interest in the manipulation of nature and the threat posed by science run amok quite contemporary. These themes are not, however, what makes it most resonant today. That honor belongs to the beast-men — the most wretched things of the earth, calling out for compassion. Island of Lost Souls insists on a continuity between the human and nonhuman; it asks us to relate to animals on the basis of our shared capacity for suffering. …

The point of it all is not whether they, or we, are animals or human beings. It’s about what kind of human beings we are, or could be.

A director named Lev Kalman added:

What is totally unforgettable about this film is the photography: constant fogs, blooming white surfaces, and inky jungle shadows. There’s a shot of the hero and the Panther Woman [Kathleen Burke] reflected in a pool of rippling water, then her real foot dips into the frame — it makes me gasp. …

I don’t know anywhere to stream Island of Lost Souls, but you can check here.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.

my favorite movies of 1931:

(1) City Lights

(2) Frankenstein

(3) Monkey Business

(4) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

(5) M

favorite of 1931:

City Lights

(Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Harry C. Myers. Directed by Chaplin.)

The last line of this silent movie might be one of the most poignant lines in any movie ever made.

A Criterion essay describes Chaplin’s mix of comedy and drama in City Lights:

He turns us at will between the funniest routines ever put on film and a poignant fairy tale, but never plays our empathy cheap. He wants us to cry only once. …

Chaplin gives us the single most memorable image in his entire oeuvre … and we realize we have never seen the Tramp so clearly, so pitilessly close up.

You can stream City Lights on the Criterion Channel, which also has extras including commentary. (If you don’t subscribe, try a free trial.) Or stream it on Max.

 

2nd favorite of 1931:

Frankenstein

(Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Mae Clarke. Directed by James Whale.)

Have you never wanted … to know … what changes the darkness into light? But if you talk like that, people call you crazy.

In Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, director James Whale created images that spawned endless imitations: the mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive), accompanied by a hunchbacked assistant, surrounded by wildly whirring contraptions in a spooky, cavernous lab. Dr. Frankenstein pieces together dead human body parts and animates them with massive jolts of electricity. You know what comes next: “It’s alive! It’s alive!” — but of course, the monster will wreak havoc, and it will dawn on the scientist that he shouldn’t have “played God.”

Underneath that heavy-handed moral is a subtler takeaway. Put aside the talk of how the scientist unwittingly gave the monster a “criminal” or “abnormal” brain, and ask how bad this monster really is. The most memorably disturbing thing he does in the movie seems to be an accident by someone who’s really a tall baby. After all, Dr. Frankenstein said he was creating a new life, not bringing a dead person back to life. Frankenstein’s “monster” (played by Boris Karloff in the performance that launched his career) is born into difficult circumstances and isn’t given a fair chance. People see the worst in him. They form an angry mob. The real point of the movie isn’t that playing God can create a terrible monster, but to force us to ask: who are the real monsters?

You can stream Frankenstein on these sites.

Update: I chose the sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, as one of my favorite movies of 1935.

3rd favorite of 1931:

Monkey Business

(Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, Thelma Todd. Directed by Norman McLeod.) 

The Marx Brothers had a new energy in their third movie. It’s their first that was conceived as a movie from the beginning instead of being adapted from a play, and you can tell the difference between this and their previous movie, Animal Crackers (my favorite of 1930).

In this scene, all four Marx Brothers are trying to sneak off a boat where they’ve been stowaways. In an attempt to use a stolen passport from the famous actor/singer Maurice Chevalier, they take turns impersonating him singing a song that’s supposed to go: “If the nightingales could sing like you/They’d sing much sweeter than they do/For you brought a new kind of love to me.” One problem with that plan is that one of the brothers, Harpo, is mute… 

 

4th favorite of 1931:

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

(Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian.)

This version of the 1886 Gothic novella is better than you’d expect! Back in 1931, it tackled issues like abuse, mental health, and drug addiction in a way that still feels arrestingly relevant. Fredric March is excellent as the title character(s), but Miriam Hopkins steals the show as the woman who’s not his fiancé.

Stream Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on these sites.

5th favorite of 1931:

M

[German]

(Peter Lorre, Gustaf Gründgens. Directed by Fritz Lang.)

This is a crucial bridge between earlier, more surreal German expressionist movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and the more familiar genres of film noir and serial killer movies. M is also transitional in another way: it straddled the silent and talkie eras by being largely shot as if it were a silent movie before sound was overdubbed in post-production (see this video for details).

Stream M on the Criterion Channel (try a free trial if you don’t subscribe), Max, Kanopy, or other sites. 

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.