Ordinarily at this point I would tell you who won the Oscar for Best Picture, sometimes to praise the choice but usually to use it as a foil. But the Oscars didn't exist yet in 1924. The champion at the box office was The Sea Hawk, but that doesn't work well as a substitute, since I haven't seen it. I guess I should just jump into the list:
1. Sherlock Jr.
Directed by Buster Keaton
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
Here sit the seeds of both The Purple Rose of Cairo and Duck Amuck.
2. L'Inhumaine
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier
Written by L'Herbier, Pierre Mac Orlan, and Georgette Leblanc
A brilliantly demented spectacle that eventually becomes science fiction. Among its many attractions: a vision of television in which the performer views her audience instead of the other way around, changing channels to watch one fan after another.
3. Cartoon Factory
Written and directed by Dave and Max Fleischer
My kinda Clone War.
4. Ballet Mécanique
Directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy
Written by Léger
A Cubist ballet.
5. Au Secours!
Directed by Abel Gance
Written by Gance and Max Linder
A haunted-house farce, featuring a flurry of gags, camera tricks, and surrealist insertions.
6. He Who Gets Slapped
Directed by Victor Sjöström
Written by Sjöström and Carey Wilson
The slapping routine just might be the darkest comedy act in Hollywood history.
7. Girl Shy
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Written by Taylor, Tim Whelan, Ted Wilde, and Thomas J. Gray
In the climactic chase, Harold Lloyd's character commits a series of larcenies and puts dozens of people's lives at risk, all to prevent a wedding that could have been easily annulled after the fact. But it's OK, because it's funny.
8. The Last Laugh
Directed by F.W. Murnau
Written by Carl Mayer
The most silent of silent dramas.
9. The Crazy Ray
Written and directed by René Clair
This list didn't have room for Clair's most celebrated film of the year, the enjoyably loopy experiment Entr'acte. But I couldn't leave out this sci-fi comedy about a machine that freezes a city in time.
10. The Navigator
Directed by Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp
Written by Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
"He had completed all arrangements—except to notify the girl."
* * *
Of the films of 1924 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Aelita: Queen of Mars.
I have not watched enough good movies from 1914 for a top 10 list, so we'll stop the tour here. For the record, my favorite film of 1914 is Les Vampires (or at least those installments of the serial that came out that year) and my favorite film of 1904 is The Impossible Voyage. And of the handful of motion pictures I've seen from 1894, I guess the best is Autour D'une Cabine. If I've missed a masterpiece from that year, let me know.
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.)
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1944, it gave its Best Picture award to Going My Way. That's not a bad movie, but it's a trifle; it feels perverse to hand it the prize in a year that produced as many great films as this one.
1. Double Indemnity
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, from a novel by James M. Cain
It's a bleak and ugly story about murder and betrayal, and at times it's as funny as any of Wilder's comedies.
2. To Have and Have Not
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, from a novel by Ernest Hemingway
A lot like Casablanca, but better.
3. Laura
Directed by Otto Preminger
Written by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt, from a novel by Vera Caspary
Roger Ebert called this film's allure "a tribute to style over sanity." He didn't mean that as a put-down, and I don't either.
4. The Curse of the Cat People
Directed by Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch
Written by DeWitt Bodeen and Val Lewton
This sweet fantasy film about a lonely child has what just might be the most misleading title in Hollywood history.
5. Hail the Conquering Hero
Written and directed by Preston Sturges
"You don't need reasons. Although they're probably there."
6. The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France
Directed by Laurence Olivier
Written by Olivier, Dallas Bower, and Alan Dent, from a play by William Shakespeare
It's a propaganda picture, but don't get hung up on that. It's also the most visually inventive Shakespeare movie I've seen, a film that feels like an illuminated manuscript come to life.
7. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
Written and directed by Preston Sturges
Between this and Conquering Hero, you'd never dream Sturges' career was about to crash.
8. A Canterbury Tale
Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
A tale of love, war, and a mysterious figure who assaults women by pouring glue in their hair. And it's actually even stranger than that makes it sound.
9. It Happened Tomorrow
Directed by René Clair
Written by Clair, Dudley Nichols, and Helene Fraenkel, from a story by Hugh Wedlock and Howard Snyder and a play by Lord Dunsany
This one was nearly made by Frank Capra instead, and the story is certainly suited for the Capra treatment. But it works as one of Clair's American fantasies too. Indeed, it comes in a slot ahead of the bona fide Capra movie on this list.
10. Arsenic and Old Lace
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, from a play by Joseph Kesselring
Surely the finest portrait of Teddy Roosevelt ever to grace the screen.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Old Grey Hare (Bob Clampett)
12. Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk)
13. At Land (Maya Deren)
14. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock)
15. Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang)
16. The Suspect (Robert Siodmak)
17. Jammin' the Blues (Gjon Mili)
18. Little Red Riding Rabbit (Friz Freleng)
19. The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang)
20. The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (Edgar Neville)
Plus a nod to the Halloween sequence in Meet Me in St. Louis. The rest of the picture doesn't do much for me (aside from "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"), but if the Halloween segment were a standalone short it might make it into my top 10.
Finally: Having wrapped up my 1954 list with a shoutout to what is probably the only Ingmar Bergman movie to climax with a girlfight in a jazz club, I'll wrap up 1944 with a shoutout to what is probably the closest Bergman ever came to writing a film noir. Torment was his first produced screenplay, he got an assistant director credit too, and it's a pretty solid debut.
Of the films of 1944 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Battle of China.
