When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1929, it gave its Best Picture award to The Broadway Melody, a thoroughly unexceptional film. Not that there were many exceptional films coming out of Hollywood that year. The sound era was just beginning, which meant there were a lot of awkward pictures produced by people who basically had to learn to make a movie all over again. Even their better efforts tended to be uneven: The Love Parade is enjoyable, for example, but it has lapses in areas as basic as the pacing of the dialogue.
The result? Usually these lists are dominated by American entries, but this time just three of my top 10—and just six of the top 20—were made in the United States. And only one of those six is a feature.
1. The Man With a Movie Camera
Written and directed by Dziga Vertov
The high point of the experimental Soviet cinema of the '20s. In just a few short years, Stalin would be enforcing the idiotic artistic dogma of Socialist Realism and movies like this would effectively disappear.
2. My Grandmother
Directed by Kote Mikaberidze
Written by Mikaberidze and Giorgi Mdivani
Even before Socialist Realism, of course, the Soviets were censoring subversive art. This Georgian mixture of slapstick, surrealism, and anti-statist satire—the same combo later on display in Brazil and Death of a Bureaucrat—was suppressed almost immediately and didn't reemerge until the '70s.
3. A Cottage on Dartmoor
Directed by Anthony Asquith
Written by Asquith, from a story by Herbert Price
A silent psychological thriller about a crime of passion and its aftermath, featuring some of the most brilliant montages ever set to celluloid.
4. Hallelujah!
Directed by King Vidor
Written by Wanda Tuchock, Ransom Rideout, Richard Schayer, and Marian Ainslee, from a story by Vidor
The first great American musical.
5. Nogent
Directed by Marcel Carné with Michel Sanvoisin
A wonderful wordless documentary about a working-class weekend resort.
6. Un Chien Andalou
Written and directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali
Buñuel would later denounce "that crowd of imbeciles who find the film beautiful and poetic when it is fundamentally a desperate and passionate call to murder."
7. Pandora's Box
Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Written by Ladislaus Vajda, from two plays by Frank Wedekind
If I could run a TV network for just a day in December, I would broadcast this under the title The Jack the Ripper Christmas Special.
8. Arsenal
Written and directed by Alexander Dovzhenko
A war movie that sometimes feels like an antiwar movie—which is impressive, given that the conflict in question is the Russian Civil War and the film was made in the Soviet Union. That sort of subtlety wouldn't persist for much longer either, though Dovzhenko was more adept than most Stalin-era filmmakers at slipping things past the censors.
9. Big Business
Directed by James W. Horne with Leo McCarey
Written by McCarey and H.M. Walker
Laurel and Hardy's guide to good customer relations.
10. The Skeleton Dance
Directed by Walt Disney
Disney before it was Disneyfied.
Honorable mentions:
11. The New Babylon (Grigorii Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg)
12. Diary of a Lost Girl (Georg Wilhelm Pabst)
13. Les Mystères du Château de Dé (Man Ray)
14. Tusalava (Len Lye)
15. Hyas and Stenorhynchus (Jean Painlevé)
16. The Hoose-Gow (James Parrott)
17. Brumes d'Automne (Dimitri Kirsanoff)
18. H2O (Ralph Steiner)
19. Black and Tan (Dudley Murphy)
20. La Perle (Henri d'Ursel)
Of the films of 1929 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Woman in the Moon.
And that's it for this batch of historical movie lists. If fate allows it, we'll be back for more in December.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1939, it gave its Best Picture award to an exercise in Old South nostalgia called Gone with the Wind. I can scrounge up some nice things to say about that one—the stars are magnetic, the Technicolor photography is beautiful, and that shot of the wounded after the Battle of Atlanta is unforgettable—but ultimately it's an overlong, overwrought epic with shitty racial politics. Yet it's always one of the first films mentioned when someone goes on about how great 1939 was, followed by such other dubious choices as Dark Victory (a forgettable tearjerker) and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (sentimental and dull).
Even when the big-name movies of 1939 aren't so bad, they're often overpraised. Gunga Din is a well-told tale, but it's also as racist as Wind. And William Wyler's Wuthering Heights has a hallucinatory Gothic intensity that mixes well, if you approach it in the right frame of mind, with the script's various Hollywood absurdities—but if it's hallucinatory Gothic intensity you want, there's much more of it in Luis Buñuel's version of the story, and he has a more acute sense of the absurd as well.
Winnow out the undeserving efforts, and here's the list that's left:
1. The Wizard of Oz
Directed by Victor Fleming
Written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, from a novel by L. Frank Baum
IMDb cites five additional uncredited directors and 15 additional uncredited writers. You might expect the results to have a too-many-cooks problem, but instead that collective produced the Great American Movie—the one real masterpiece to come out of Hollywood in its alleged annus mirabilis.
2. The Rules of the Game
Directed by Jean Renoir
Written by Renoir and Carl Koch
The year's one real masterpiece that didn't come out of Hollywood.
3. Destry Rides Again
Directed by George Marshall
Written by Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell, Henry Myers, from a novel by Max Brand
This undermines the conventions of the western as thoroughly as Little Big Man or McCabe and Mrs. Miller would three decades later. But it's funnier.
4. Ninotchka
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, Melchior Lengyel, and Walter Reisch
The first great anti-Communist comedy of the sound era.
5. Stagecoach
Directed by John Ford
Written by Dudley Nichols and Ben Hecht, from a story by Ernest Haycox
Formerly overrated, now underrated. To make it feel as fresh as possible, don't think of it as a seminal western; think of it as a tense thriller that happens to be set in the Old West.
6. Midnight
Directed by Mitchell Leisen
Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, from story by Edwin Justus Mayer and Franz Schulz
Another home run for the Wilder/Brackett screenwriting team, three years before Wilder finally got a chance to start directing their scripts himself.
7. Only Angels Have Wings
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by Jules Furthman, from a story by Hawks
Hawks insisted that he knew pilots who really lived like this. I don't believe him.
8. It's a Wonderful World
Directed by W.S. Van Dyke
Written by Ben Hecht, from a story by Hecht and Herman J. Mankiewicz
Not to be confused with that other Jimmy Stewart movie with the phrase "It's a Wonderful" in the title. This picture is practically forgotten—it never appears on those "1939 was the best year ever!" lists—but I think it's one of the funniest screwball comedies of the '30s.
9. Daybreak
Directed by Marcel Carné
Written by Jacques Prévert, from a story by Jacques Viot
Like its villain, this movie talks too much. But when the characters are quiet and Carné's camera speaks, the film earns its exalted reputation.
10. Young Mr. Lincoln
Directed by John Ford
Written by Lamar Trotti
The flipside of Gone with the Wind: an exercise in historical mythmaking, this time pro-Lincoln rather than pro-Confederate. But it's a much more watchable movie, with a witty script and a charming performance by Henry Fonda as the future president. Hollywood history is a pack of lies, but here at least they lie with style.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi)
12. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra)
13. You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (George Marshall, Eddie Cline)
14. The Spy in Black (Michael Powell)
15. Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone)
16. Peace on Earth (Hugh Harman)
17. Love Affair (Leo McCarey)
18. Son of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee)
19. The Practical Pig (Dick Rickard)
20. Le Dernier Tournant (Pierre Chenal)
Of the films of 1939 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The End of the Day.