When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1934, it gave its Best Picture award to the proto-screwball classic It Happened One Night. This is one of those rare years where the prize at least arguably went to the right movie. But on my list, another film edged it out:
1. The Black Cat
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by Ulmer and Peter Ruric
This isolationist fable is Ulmer's best feature, the best film to star Karloff and Lugosi together, and perhaps the purest example of a picture that claims to be based on a Poe story while ignoring Poe's plot entirely.
2. It Happened One Night
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Robert Riskin, from a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams
There's a lot to love in this movie, but it's the "Flying Trapeze" scene that's closest to my heart.
3. L'Atalante
Directed by Jean Vigo
Written by Vigo and Albert Riéra, from a story by Jean Guinée
Romance on a floating Cornell box.
4. The Thin Man
Directed by W.S. Van Dyke
Written by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, from a novel by Dashiell Hammett
"Ever heard of the Sullivan Act?" "Oh, that's all right, we're married."
5. Dames
Directed by Ray Enright with Busby Berkeley
Written by Delmer Daves
This cheerfully amoral musical feels like a product of the pre-Code period, though it appeared about a month too late for that. It spends about an hour mocking the bluenoses, then morphs into a series of psychedelic Busby Berkeley sequences that feel more like 1960s pop art than 1930s pop culture.
6. The Scarlet Empress
Directed by Josef von Sternberg
Written by Eleanor McGeary
A thoroughly ludicrous drama, and I mean that in the most favorable way possible.
7. Granton Trawler
Directed by John Grierson
One decent movie that didn't make it onto this list is Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran. Like Flaherty's film, Grierson's documentary about a Scottish fishing boat is a lyrical look at lives lived close to northern Europe's waters. But while Flaherty's film is a romanticized recreation of the way people may have lived long before the movie was made, this attempts to show us what fishermen were experiencing in 1934.
8. The Mascot
Written and directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz
The Nightmare Before Christmas of the '30s.
9. Lieutenant Kijé
Directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer
Written by Yury Tynyanov
A brief thaw in Soviet cinema allowed a movie like this to be released: an anti-authoritarian satire where a bureaucratic error creates an imaginary officer and then the SNAFU Principle lets him rise through the ranks. The story had to take place in czarist times, of course—but before long, even that wouldn't work as camouflage.
10. Soldier's Story
Directed by Čeněk Zahradníček and Vladimír Šmejkal
Written by Šmejkal
It's an eight-minute abstraction of every antiwar saga set in World War I, and it's more effective than at least 90% of them.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch)
12. Ship of the Ether (George Pal)
13. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock)
14. Crime Without Passion (Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur)
15. We Live in Prague (Otakar Vávra)
16. Ha! Ha! Ha! (Dave Fleischer)
17. The Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright)
18. The Old Fashioned Way (William Beaudine)
19. A Dream Walking (Dave Fleischer, Seymour Kneitel)
20. Babes in Toyland (Gus Meins, Charles Rogers)
Of the films of 1934 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Accordion—the movie that prompted Joseph Stalin to say, "Never make such rubbish as Accordion again." (I said the Soviets saw a thaw. I didn't say they were free.)