History of Film, Part 3: 1930-1939 • Page 2

I watched Fritz Lang's M tonight. Easy to see the influence this had on a lot of procedural / crime thrillers ever since.

Everyone's a suspect and everyone's a vigilante. There's a surveillance state and police state, that are completely hopeless in catching the killer.

Instead it's the underworld, the criminals out of find him, so they can return to their life of crime, undisturbed by the police. What we have is a city state, either side of the law, out to find one man, who is completely tearing apart the way they live. We have the final despairing speech from him, positioning himself as a symptom of societal malaise, while to the others in the room, he's the cause.

If I was an infamous and hunted child murderer, I probably wouldn't whistle a distinctive tune everywhere I went. Particularly if I had a face like Peter Lorre.

 

Top 30 Favorites:

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)
Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938)
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)
One Way Passage (Tay Garnett, 1932)
Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)
Monkey Business (Norman Z. McLeod, 1931)
Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939)
Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939)
Horse Feathers (Norman Z. McLeod, 1932)
You Can't Take It with You (Frank Capra, 1938)
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936)
King Kong (Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack)
A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935)
Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey, 1935)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, 1938)
The Informer (John Ford, 1935)
City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932)
Captains Courageous (Victor Fleming, 1937)
Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937)
Love Affair (Leo McCarey)
Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks)
The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932)

Foreign stuff I enjoy outside the Top 30:
Le Million (Rene Clair, 1931)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
Le Jour Se Leve (Marcel Carne, 1939)
L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
Pepe Le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937)
The Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, 1936)
Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)
The Baker's Wife (Marcel Pagnol, 1938)
Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)
Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)
La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931)
Song at Midnight (Ma-Xu Weibang, 1937)

Underrated/Underseen:

The Road to Glory (1936, Howard Hawks)
Absurdly underrated war film from the god Howard Hawks. I think about this movie all the time since seeing it.

Mannequin/Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, 1937/1933)
Two really great romantic melodramas from an absolute master of them.

Lady for a Day/The Bitter Tea of General Yen/The Miracle Woman (Frank Capra 1933/1933/1931)
Early Capra while he was still finding his signature style was pretty fascinating and all 3 of these are underappreciated, especially The Miracle Woman which is a fascinating movie about faith and cynicism.

The Walking Dead (Michael Curtiz, 1936)
Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)
Unsung horror classics, with Mad Love having one of Peter Lorre's best performances this side of M.

Yes My Darling Daughter (William Keighley, 1939)
Not sure how this passed the Hays Code with pretty direct discussion of sex (apparently it was banned in NY by censors) but a very unique little movie for the era that's very charming and stood out from a hundred other '30s obscurities.

The Dark Angel (Sidney Franklin, 1935)
A+ weepie starring the luminous Merle Oberon

The Young in Heart (Richard Wallace, 1938)
On paper, it shouldn't be anything much, as there were plenty of "criminals and neer-do-wells learn the value of caring about people" stories, but something about this one just threads the needle perfectly. Perfect cast of mostly B-tier stars and character actors, a little touch of screwball, just the right amount of sentimentality. It just works.

The Hurricane (John Ford, 1937)
One of the great disaster movies, in my opinion. The effects of the titular storm still are super impressive.

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (Henry Hathaway, 1936)
Some of the most beautiful Technicolor of the '30s (first film ever to be shot in color outdoors and only the second feature ever shot in three-strip Technicolor). Lovely score. Great scenery. The story is also very solid, and typical of the adaptations of novels at the time where there's more than enough plot to go around, but its the aesthetics that make it a stand-out.

 

Watched The Wizard of Oz tonight.

I haven't knowingly watched this before, but it's the sort of film that I feel like I know anyway, with pretty much every beat and song familiar.

The shift to vibrant colour here in Oz is so beautiful, I can't imagine watching this in 1939 and seeing the colours here for the first time, particularly if you were a child. The power of cinema for sure. I love the paintings as landscapes here, works perfectly in a fantasy like this, and the technicolor just looks beautiful.

I've seen some of the AI "upscaling" of this they did when playing in the big sphere thing in Vegas, what a disgusting thing that is.

Rhyming prowess with mouse is both diabolical and brilliant.

 

It plays because it’s not a one-off but an active conceit for the whole song. I’ve always been fond of “hippopotamus” and “thrash him from top to bottom-us”