The Best Movies of the 1930s – Paste – Paste Magazine

As the Great Depression hit Hollywood and beyond, the booming silent era of the 1920s morphed in both sensory technology and theme. Talkies, even some in Technicolor, navigated responses to hardship that reveled in high escapism, genre symbolism and the strict idealism of Soviet socialist realism. The 1930s were a time of screwballs, musicals, Universal Monsters and the looming conservative crackdown of the Hays Code.

Some movies from the 1930s remain household names today, classics for nearly a century like The Wizard of Oz and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Some remain the most influential movies of their type, like King Kong and It Happened One Night. Others that may have fallen out of contemporary conversation require revisiting. You might be surprised how deeply the work of Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor, Yasujiro Ozu, and many more still resonate almost 100 years later.

Here are the best movies of the 1930s:

Director: Frank Capra

Similar to All The Kings Men (and not just because its incredibly old), this film chronicles the tale of Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart). Hes the leader of a Boy Scout troop before being recruited to the Senate by a team that believes hell do whatever hes toldspecifically, allow the building of a dam that will make said team rich. But unlike All The Kings Men, the main character isnt corrupted by politics, but rather defies and decries the corruption. Directed by Frank Capra, Mr. Smith has major sentimental overtones and desire for a fantastical world, as Stewarts character displays a fortitude and integrity we wish all politicians had.Nathan Spicer

Director: W. S. Van Dyke

The light romantic comedy stylings of this film are livened up by the star appearances of several celebrity prizefighters of the period. Myrna Loy plays a fashionable nightclub singer and gangsters moll toying with the heart of Max Baer, the real life heavyweight champion. With the legendary Jack Dempsey as a referee and Baers real opponent Primo Carnera in the ring, its difficult not to play a game of spot the celebrity as youre watching. In spite of the fact that at one point, Baer attempts to do some singing, this is a thoroughly entertaining, if patchy, old Hollywood movie. Christina Newland

Director: Robert N. Bradbury

After the box office failure of Raoul Walshs major studio epic The Big Trail in 1929, a movie intended to make the young John Wayne a Western star, the budding actor dusted off his chaps and fled to smaller independent studios to hone his craft. For the next decade, until John Ford resurrected him in 1939 as a bona fide screen presence in Stagecoach, Wayne became a matinee idol in numerous entertaining though mostly forgettable B-movie oaters. Riders of Destiny, his first of many for Monogram Pictures, is notable for a number of reasons. Among themit marked Waynes first performance as a singing cowboy, and the movies action sequences are brilliantly choreographed by the legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, who also plays one of the villains henchmen in the picture. As with many of these so-called Poverty Row Westerns of the 1930s, Riders of Destiny is a brisk narrative and high on sensational plot twists. Villains are dastardly, in this case a corrupt savage capitalist played by Forrest Taylor, who intends to steal all of the water from surrounding ranchers, charging them an exorbitant fee for its use. And our hero is stalwart and true, here played by Wayne. What makes this singing cowboy more interesting than all of the yodelers who would appear on screen afterward is a simmering violence and darkness within him. None of it is laid on too thick; Waynes character is ultimately true blue and on the side of goodness. But neither Gene Autry nor Roy Rogers would ever sing about the blood a-runnin just before showdown. A minor though significant entry in Waynes filmography. Derek Hill

Director: Tod Browning

Tod Browninga director of the 1930s far more legendary for his monster movie creations (Dracula, Freaks)turned his attention to the boxing ring in this early sound film. Starring two very famous actors of the eraLew Ayres and Jean Harlowthis film reveals the pitfalls of the successful fighter, grown arrogant and idle with his wealth. While Iron Man is a fairly straightforward and par-for-the-course boxing drama, the talented cast elevates the materialHarlow was the perfect gold-digging moll, and had been a prizefighters squeeze in real life. Christina Newland

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Greta Garbos emotionless bureaucrat personifies the then-young Soviet machine in Ernst Lubitschs pre-war classicat least until she learns to love both a man (Melvyn Douglas) and the freedom of the West while stationed in Paris. It can be a little surprising to see how early our conception of Russian Communism was fixed in popular culturethe jokes often revolve around Russians who cant believe the mundane creature comforts of the West, which remained a fixture of Cold War anti-Russian comedy into the early 1990s. Still, Garbo is transfixing in her first comedy, backed by genuine romance in her flirtations with Douglas. Garrett Martin

Director: Michael Curtiz

This is fairly run-of-the-mill Warner Brothers fare of the Depression era, right down to the spinning newspaper headline montages and cigar-chomping promoters. Michael Curtiz (of Casablanca fame) directs the story of a good-looking, cornfed fighter whose career is taken on by a well-heeled manager (Edward G. Robinson) and his sympathetic girlfriend (Bette Davis), but through his wholesomeness, eventually appeals to his managers better nature. It may be a touch predictable, but its hard not to like any film starring Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogartsnarling at each other in smoky rooms and chomping on cigars in rough old gyms. Christina Newland

Director: James Whale

Given the name, youd be forgiven for assuming that this long-forgotten and then rediscovered James Whale classic had created the genre we colloquially refer to as old dark house movies, but in reality, the Frankenstein director seems to have been making a sly commentary on the familiar Hollywood tendency toward endless repetition. In reality, old dark house films replete with burglars, monsters and secret passageways had been all the rage in the American film industry through the 1920s and the end of the silent era, but as with so many other genres the arrival of sound created a talkie revival, with The Old Dark House as a new ur-template: One part parody and one part sincere thriller, expanding upon the elements of films like The Cat and the Canary while attaching major stars of the day (Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton) to a familiar story. The classic tropes are all there: A dark and stormy night; a group of strangers in a mansion; mistaken identities; disfigurement; a family secret. Elevating those elements is Whales considerable directorial talent, employing the same Expressionist-inspired use of darkness and shadow so often praised in the better-known Frankenstein or Bride of Frankenstein. The Old Dark House, in fact, seems like a film tailor-made for Whales beautifully atmospheric black-and-white visuals, all the more impressive now with modern restoration. Jim Vorel

Director: Jean Renoir

If theres anything about La Chienne that could use tweaking, its the ending, or the endings, which occur in a procession of climaxes and resolutions that each trick you into thinking the film is about to end. Most films, even very good ones, could stand to be a few minutes longer. La Chienne could stand to be a few minutes shorter. Lets be fair, though: La Chienne is the second sound film of Renoirs career, the first being On purge bb, a 46-minute comedy about a constipated baby, made five years after the commercial failure of 1926s Nana. He made other films between Nana and La Chienne, but La Chienne feels like an essential component of his recovery post-Nana and a testament to his mastery of craft. It took him only two movies to get the swing of sound as an element of cinema, though La Chienne employs it so skillfully youll be gulled into thinking hed been making sound films for years beforehand. La Chienne is a beautifully made (if protracted) film about horrible, ugly people, a story of jealousy, greed and deceit thats shot with the incomparable skill of one of the mediums true legends. Its a snapshot of Renoirs movie history, the moment when Renoir truly became Renoir. By extension its also a snapshot of the whole mediums history, an example of how sound can change a picture, and a lesson in film school well worth attending. Andy Crump

Director: George Marshall

Blazing Saddles obsessives: You owe it to yourself to watch Destry Rides Again. There are some obvious connections, like how in Blazing Saddles, Madeline Kahn seems to lift her sultry yet chronically fatigued German saloon entertainer pretty much directly from Marlene Dietrichs Frenchy, a firecracker who can certainly hold her own in a barroom brawl. (Quite a progressive character for a 1930s Hollywood Western.) Then theres director George Marshalls light, slapstick-inflected touch with a Western 101 premisenew sheriff (Jimmy Stewart) rolls into a rowdy town to set it straightwhich helped make Destry Rides Again a massive hit, as well as set a new tone, drawing a delicate line between parody and tense drama, for the genre without jeopardizing the audiences grounded connection to his characters. (The fact that it revitalized Dietrichs then-dead career is the cherry on top.) Look to the films many fight sequences, full of outrageous yet carefully choreographed chaos, and its hard not to see the scene in Blazing Saddles where were introduced to Rock Ridge. (All thats missing is an old woman getting beat up while complaining, Have you ever seen such cruelty?) Marshall delivers an infectious atmosphere of fun, while Dietrich and Stewart employ their natural charms in service to some dynamite chemistry. Oktay Ege Kozak

Director: Edwin L. Marin

There have been more than 20 adaptations of the Charles Dickens classic holiday morality tale, but only one (Bill Murrays Scrooged) clearly tops this early talkie from MGM. A familiar tale that helped turn the Christmas season into a time of social charity and humanitarianism, this is a genuine holiday classic.Staff

Director: Leo McCarey

One of the best comedies of 1930s Hollywood, The Awful Truth feels fresh more than 80 years after its release, most likely due to director Leo McCareys love for cultivating an improvisation-heavy set and keeping his actors on their toes. Even though his film was based on a hit Broadway play, McCarey constantly threw out chunks of the script and made up new scenes on the spot, which disoriented his cast to the point that stars Irene Dunne and Cary Grant became paranoid and anxious about the quality of their performances, since they were rarely allowed to spend enough time rehearsing their lines and getting to the bottom of their characters. This got to a point where Grant tried to get out of his contract because he thought his performance was going to be an embarrassment. This anxiety was exactly what McCarey sought from his actors, which infused this whimsical tale of a couple (Dunne and Grant) on the brink of divorce, sabotaging each others romantic interests, with manic immediacy that created some unforgettable lines and gags. Consider a scene where Dunnes character awkwardly dances in front of Grant and his characters love interest, making a fool of herself. The comedy of the scene comes from the characters utter lack of finesse, an unmitigated feeling Dunne derived from being told to perform the dance on the spot. Even though its not as memorable or groundbreaking as Make Way For Tomorrow, McCareys other 1937 production, The Awful Truth is prime 30s screwball, thanks largely to the strong chemistry between Dunne and Grant.Oktay Ege Kozak

Director: George Cukor

Before Bringing Up Baby, before The Philadelphia Story, Cary Grant fell for Katharine Hepburn as a boy in Sylvia Scarlett. Its directed by George Cukor, who was at that point the unofficial social director of gay Hollywood. Obvious transmasculine resonance of The Boy Kate aside, theres also Cary Grants fabulous vocal drag as he slides in and out of a Cockney accent and deeper into a wonderfully bewildering T4T, con-artist-on-con-artist vibe. (Kate kisses Dennie Moore, too, just to keep the score even.)Daniel Mallory Ortberg

Director: G.W. Pabst

Is Westfront 1918 the better-made Pabst film or is it just better preserved? Compared to Kameradschaft, the 2K restoration of Pabsts trench warfare reenactment looks downright pristine, and even then its still cobbled together using a duplicate negative. Maybe praising Westfront 1918s crisper image quality isnt fair when were talking about movies necessarily stitched up using the spare parts our international film archives have in their possession. But Kameradschaft and Westfront 1918 are different movies not only in terms of the quality of their restorations, but in terms of their purposes. Kameradschaft nearly counts as a feel-good movie, though it takes place primarily beneath the earth, in the dark, where all is engulfed by flames. (The Hell motif isnt easily missed.) Westfront 1918 takes place within a different kind of Hell, wherein youre stuck in a ditch with comrades, lobbing explosives at enemies who occasionally turn out to be your allies. If youre lucky enough to go home, youre actually not lucky at all, because home has morphed into a barren pit of starvation and hopelessness. Theres no reprieve from the soul-sucking awfulness of war, not even in the arms of your wife, mostly because her arms are full of the butcher and his meat. (Not actually a play on words, but close enough.) Kameradschaft ends with a warm, life-affirming celebration. Westfront 1918 ends with literal madness and heartbreaking regret. Both films are rooted in actual events, but Westfront 1918s vision of wars boundless ruin ultimately feels all too real. Andy Crump

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Before Alfred Hitchcock came to America and made some of the greatest thrillers ever, he had a lucrative filmmaking career in England, including many films American audiences still havent seen. One of his finest was The 39 Steps, where a man attempts to help a secret agent, but once the agent dies, the man is suspected of murder and goes on the run. While it may sound similar to other Hitchcock films, like North By Northwest, The 39 Steps is one of the most perfect combinations of Hitchcocks shocks and bitingly witty scripts.Ross Bonaime

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

Better known for his later films like Ugetsu, Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi found his voice early on. He crafted this bleak romance with a rich sense of people and placein this case a troupe of touring performers in provincial Japan. Irie Takako is captivating as the title character, a performer trying to pay her long-distance loves college tuition, during good times and increasingly bad ones. Japanese silent film includes the tradition of the benshi, a live storyteller who would describe details of the story and recite dialogue while music played. It makes for a uniqueif sometimes overly wordyway to experience a film. Jeremy Mathews

Director: Tod Browning

At this point, director Tod Brownings Dracula has become such an indelible cornerstone of pop culture that its nearly impossible to view the film separate from its iconic standing. Yes, the film is a classic for a reason, but how does it really stand up? Lets start with the obviousBela Lugosi is phenomenal in the title role, oozing charisma with an ever-present undercurrent of menace. As a studio, its Universals greatest shame that, despite perfecting his Dracula on stage throughout the late 1920s, Lugosi only secured the role after some heavy lobbying and the departure of several potential actors. In fact, the lone downside to Lugosis towering presence is that, when hes not onscreen, the movie becomes significantly less interesting. Thats not the fault of the cast, who all turn in decent performances, but its like a talented college basketball player playing one-on-one with Michael Jordan at his primeeven the best are bound to look amateurish by comparison. Besides Lugosi, the other MVP of the film is cinematographer Karl Freund, who complements Lugosis presence with a shadowy, Gothic look that would go on to haunt moviegoers dreams for decades afterward. And while the much-celebrated Spanish version of Dracula unquestionably made bolder creative decisions, its Lugosis performance that elevates this production from an effective adaptation to a cultural landmark. Mark Rozeman

Director: Mervyn LeRoy, Busby Berkeley

Sharply hilarious, pre-Code musical Gold Diggers of 1933 is one of the best representations of choreographer Busby Berkeleys over-the-top majesty. The Depression-set fantasy (about financing a production, marrying rich and simply making it through the day) is filled with glamour and vulgarityand actual currency. The Were in the Money number is so catchy and coin-filled that youll be jingling long after the movie ends. Aside from the lavish and intensive soundstages, its humor and game cast (Ginger Rogers solos like a star) help set it apart from Gold Diggers of 1935 and Gold Diggers of 1937, both of which also feature geometric and inventively vaudevillian work by Berkeley. An extravaganza atop a careers worth of extravaganzas.Jacob Oller

Director: King Vidor

King Vidor, critically beloved director of silent and early sound Hollywood, had a critical and commercial success on his hands with this Academy Award-winning film. Penned by well-respected female screenwriter Frances Marion, The Champ is an archetypal tale of a floundering has-been fighter (the legendary Wallace Beery) stuck in the bottom of a bottle. In an attempt to live up to the devotion of his young son (Jackie Cooper), who is on the verge of being taken away by his estranged mother, the broken-down Beery fights one last battle to prove his worth. A poignant film on the father-son bond and the powers of forgiveness, The Champ went on to inspire a whole series of similar redemption narratives in 30s Hollywood. Christina Newland

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov

Now famous in cinephile circles for lush visual works like The Cranes are Flying (1958) and I Am Cuba (1964), Mikhail Kalatozovs reputation might go back further if Stalins regime hadnt repressed his films. His rural documentary Salt for Svanetia (1930) and war drama The Nail in the Boot were both banned for favoring formalistic aestheticism over dialectical materialism. Luckily, the films survive and we can now see this story of a soldier failing in his mission because of poorly-made footwear in all its formal and aesthetic glory. Both the army sequences and, somehow, even the courtroom scene at the end burst with passion and flare. Jeremy Mathews

Director: Gregory La Cava

Gregory La Cavas My Man Godfrey is kind of like a proto-Le Dner de Consor Dinner for Schmucksexcept that My Man Godfrey is really good and neither the latter nor the former film measure up to it. La Cavas inroads to skewering the upper crust is through the upper crust itself: The film takes its outsider protagonist, Godfrey Smith Parke (William Powell), whos not an outsider at all but a man in exile from high societys bosom, and inserts him into circumstances where hes the sanest, sharpest man in the room. Rich people are wild. Thats the films subtext, or just its text, because Godfreys charges, the members of the family Bullock, are either completely out of their gourds or stuffed headfirst up their own asses. Theyd have to be, perhaps, to mistake him for a vagrant when hes actually a member of the elite class just like they are. Theyd also have to be observant and considerably less self-absorbed to make these fine distinctions. La Cava has fun with the scenario, as does Powell, and as does the rest of the cast, in particular Carole Lombard, playing young Irene, who falls head over heels for Godfrey, blithely unconcerned with his disinterest, and Gail Patrick as the daffy Mrs. Bullock, full of unfettered, dizzying joy. Dizziness, of course, is a requirement. Films like My Man Godfrey, screwball joints that move at a laugh-a-minute pace, demand the exhaustion of their viewers, and La Cava wears us out as surely as he delights us. Andy Crump

Director: George Melford

Its crazy to imagine a film being shot multiple times, with different casts and in different languages, today but this was once common practice. Thus was born the Spanish version of Universals classic Dracula. It features an entirely different castno Bela Lugosi as Dracula or Dwight Frye as Renfieldbut filmed on the exact same sets, with the same script. The Spanish crew was literally filming at night, after the English-language crew had gone home for the day. Its remembered today because of the visual transformation it undergoes: Director George Melford ultimately proved much more active and experimental than Tod Browning, the director of the English-language version, which imbues the Drcula with significantly more interesting and challenging cinematography. Many shots that are simply static in the Browning Dracula (which is a bit of a stuffy movie, although extremely important historically) are given a new lease on life in the Spanish version. The performances are also solid, although unsurprisingly theyre nowhere near as iconic as Lugosi. Watching the Spanish version, you cant help but wish for a third version of the 1931 Draculastarring Lugosi and Frye, but directed by Melford. With that combination, perhaps it would be Dracula and not Frankenstein hailed as the crown jewel of the original Universal monster series.Jim Vorel

Director: George Stevens

For better and worse, RKO musical Swing Time, the duos sixth film of nine together at the studio, represents best the tenure of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaires partnership. An international box office success, about the troubled courtship of kindhearted gambler Lucky (Astaire) and hardheaded-until-she-isnt dance instructor Penny (Rogers), Stevens spectacle for his two icons features a breathtaking dance with Astaires only cinematic set piece ever performed in blackface (ergh) and a joke/crucial narrative point having to do with cuffs on mens trousers that is so dependent on fashion mores of the 1930snot to mention, so important to the success of our whole love storyone might wonder retroactively if the bottoms of mens pants were intended to be a more plangent metaphor buried within an otherwise stupid plot. They werentbecause nothing is that deep in Swing Time. But such is the stuff of the immense surface pleasures of the film, of its ravishing sets shot magnanimously by David Abel, of its snowbound urban din conveying all kinds of warmth and texture, of the ways in which the characters are unable to express their big feelings in small words, so their whole world conspires to showcase the synchronicity of their bodies in motion. It takes about 25 minutes for all the pieces to align to give us our first musical number, but once it begins, far be it for any of us to question the calibrationthe preternatural space-time precisionwith which Astaire and Rogers are deployed. For many, this may be their first encounter with the two stars films; no one expects the Mr. Bojangles homage until they do. Regardless, Swing Times endured for its skin-deep bliss, and even today were unable to look away. Dom Sinacola

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

While wandering the countryside, a nave young man with a propensity for the occult stumbles upon a castle where he learns that the owners teenage daughter is slowly descending into vampirism. Upon seeing the village doctor trying to poison the girl, the boy intervenes and complications, naturally, ensue. Notable as being one of the few early vampire movies not even passingly based on Bram Stokers Dracula, Vampyr nonetheless brought very little joy to its creator, legendary Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc). Forced to shoot the production in three different languages (French, German and English), Dreyers first sound film experience was a proverbial trial by fire. To add salt to the infuriating production, the film was released only after some fairly heavy censoring. The reception was no less brutal, with critics delivering scathing reviews. As the years have passed by and an appreciation for Dreyer has grown, however, so has an appreciation for the film, with many modern critics citing its subversive take on sexuality to be years ahead of its time. Shot with the delicacy and elegance of a dream, Dreyer quickly plunges the viewer into an expressionistic hellscape of shadows and dread. Though it may be a bit slow for some audiences, even with a sparse 73-minute runtime, Vampyr is a intense mood piece that picked up where Nosferatu left off. Mark Rozeman

Director: King Vidor

King Vidor, one of the most respected filmmakers of silent and early sound Hollywood, caused a stir in Depression-era U.S.A. with this remarkable Communist parable. In this celebration of the power of the collective, Vidor imagines a group of unemployed Americans coming together to dig an irrigation ditch and thus enrich their farm with healthy wheat crops. Its not exactly the most commercially thrilling material, but its a sincere and idealistic little story of homespun hard work and the triumph of the little guy. Vidor always worked with bold visuals in mind, and Our Daily Bread delivers in that regardoffering an almost avant-garde montage sequence part of the way into the film. Christina Newland

Director: G. W. Pabst

Kameradschaft starts suddenly, as these things do: Deep beneath the earth, in a mine located on the border separating Germany from France, itself divided into two distinct sections based on nationality, a fire smolders. The French build walls around it to contain it, but you cant contain fire with brick forever. Eventually, the mine explodes and collapses, trapping French miners in droves, their families on the surface watching smoke billow from the mine in helpless awe. Kameradschaft is one of the forms early disaster movies, and like contemporary disaster movies it hones in on humanity uniting in the face of common catastrophe. (Its also based, if loosely, on an actual disaster, the Courrires mine disaster of 1906.) The Germans put together a team to save the day, convincing their bosses and their countrymen that intervening is simply the right thing to do. Borders dont matter. Tensions between nations dont matter. Risk to life and limb doesnt matter. (Wittkopp [Ernst Busch], the German miner leading the effort to rescue the French, proclaims that theyd come to his aid if the shoe was on the other foot.) But those tensions have to be established before any thrilling heroics take place, whether in a game of marbles between bickering sons of French and German border guards or in a beer hall misunderstanding. The tensions chafing both countries are palpable. The note of humanity on which the film ends, which is more like a full-blown symphony, reveals them as wastefully petty. Its a cathartic moment that still applies more than eight decades after its release. Andy Crump

Director: Luis Buuel

Ever since the Maysles and Frederick Wiseman and D.A. Pennebaker became direct cinema heroes in the 1960s, cinma vrit has become something of a default method for documentary filmmakersthe less mitigated the experience, the more illuminating the truth. But the further one digs into the forms origins, the more an ethnography like Luis Buuels Land Without Bread begins to rear its suspiciously exaggerated head. An exploration of the Las Hurdes region in Spain, where inhabitants are steeped in such poverty that the idea of bread is alien to them, Buuels account is part travelogue, part surrealist parody of the kinds of over-exoticized travelogues of the time. In attempting to describe the extent of the regions scarcity (where one practice is to take in random orphans in order to claim the government welfare that accompanies them), Buuel spares no brutal detail, setting out to make these peoples lives seem as excruciating as possible. Undoubtedly over the top, yet terribly stirring, the film claims that one doesnt have to look far to find a compelling documentary subjectsadness and devastation can be found right in your backyard. Dom Sinacola.

Director: Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu isnt generally thought of as a gangster film director, but thats not the only thing that makes Dragnet Girl so interesting. Ozu pays tribute to the American genre, but doesnt strictly adhere to it. He creates a weird hybrid setting thats like an American Japan, and populates it with characters facing genuine moral dilemmas. Working with high stakes, Ozu makes a film thats more urgent in plot than his familial dramas, but no less artful. Jeremy Mathews

Director: James Whale

Egregiously omitted from most best sequel discussions, this darkly inventive would-be love story may well be the finest of the golden-age Universal monster movies. With its extravagant Gothic aesthetic and timeless Hollywood mores (We belong dead!), the film is the face of an era and a fearsome inspiration to many that followed.Sean Edgar

Directors: Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteaus surreal avant-garde masterpiece about the burden of artistic creativity lays out, with dizzying glimpses of grace and terror, the bitter yet honest facts about our creations. Mainly, that they might be more in control of us than we are of them, and that, if were lucky, they will outlive us to breathe new life onto themselves. Cocteaus tricky use of in-camera effects to create fantastical dream logic imagery, like a hand that gains a mouth or a mirror that works as a portal to an artists subconscious mind, is a treasure trove for fans of David Lynchs work. Especially if the final season of Twin Peaks was your bag, you pretty much owe it to yourself to check out The Blood of a Poet. Oktay Ege Kozak

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Lubitschs masterpiece about class, status and seduction focuses on two thieves who fall in love while masquerading as nobility throughout Europe. Made before the Hays Code, its a boldly sensual film, with a sexual charge to much of the dialogue and a frank depiction of romantic moresin fact, once the code was adopted in 1935, the movie was effectively banned from rerelease until the late 60s. Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins play refined crooks who try to swindle a wealthy widow played by Kay Francis, with romantic and sexual complications arising from Francis and Marshalls growing relationship and the presence of Franciss other suitors. Its a smart, seductive film, with a gorgeous ambiance and a script that sees through the bluster and artificiality of the social hierarchy. Its also still funny to this day. Garrett Martin

Director: Rowland V. Lee

Deciding which of the classic Universal Monster movies should be featured on this list proved an incredibly difficult proposition. Notably absent is James Whales 1931 classic Frankenstein. Why? Well, despite what you may have heard, Frankenstein may very well be the third best film of its own series, surpassed not only by the well-recognized Bride of Frankenstein but also by the much less appreciated Son of Frankenstein as well. Director James Whale and original Dr. Colin Clive have moved on, the latter replaced by classic Sherlock Holmes portrayer Basil Rathbone as our new protagonist, Wolf Frankenstein, who returns to his fathers ancestral castle only to find that the legendary monster isnt quite as dead as hes been led to believe. Bela Lugosi, of all people, enters the series as the first Frankenstein character called Igor (although its actually Ygor), a ghoulish caretaker who claims to literally be undeadhanged by the villagers and sustaining a broken neck, but somehow not dying. His master plan: To use Wolfs scientific knowledge to resurrect the monster (Boris Karloff, one final time) and then use the monster as a tool of vengeance to hunt down the men who hanged him. With cavernous, opulent sets in Frankenstein manor, Son of Frankenstein is a lush, prestigious-feeling production that boasts masterful performances from Rathbone, the one-armed inspector (parodied in Young Frankenstein) played by Lionel Atwill and especially from Lugosi, who is at his absolute best in a role that is far more nuanced than that of Dracula. With its gorgeous, gothic visuals and expanded run-time, Son of Frankenstein is the secret crown jewel of the entire Universal Monster series. Jim Vorel

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

The same year that saw American cinema classics Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz released gave us legendary Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchis sublime masterpiece of Japans monumental style. In The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, with Imperial Japan at its most jingoistic, the director has quietly retreated from the looming threat of bellicose nationalism, choosing instead to craft an exquisite cinematic monument to traditional kabuki theatre. Mizoguchis camera is a wondermoving with the same elegance and aching patience of kabukiand the Criterion teams restoration and 4K transfer is stunning, the best that could be struck from reclaimed positive and negative prints of the 1939 film. Nearly 80 years later, Chrysanthemum reveals itself to be as subversive in regards to gender as it is so politically, with a heartbreaking story of one womans unrequited sacrifice sure to leave viewers shaken. Chris White

Director: Lewis Milestone

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The Best Movies of the 1930s - Paste - Paste Magazine

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