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.
