Many point nostalgically at 1939 as the best year in the history of movies. The year of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. That golden year, when every film was a perfect piece of entertainment, designed to last forever. Indeed, many '39 films are now huge, monolithic presences that seemingly can't be budged from their pedestals or the vast amounts of space they take up on video store shelves.
Well, we've seen these films. And we've noticed that some of them are bloated and hysterical, as if their producers were in a rush to get everything on the screen: money, color, music, war, the history of ages and peoples, Munchkins, and more money... as if this was their last chance to sum up everything they knew in their careers, everything they stood for as human beings, all the hopes, aspirations, and dreams of mankind—or at any rate, those of a small group of very wealthy, very powerful men in Southern California.
Our top ten films reflect other concerns. Their directors all perfected their craft in the silent era, when the cinema relied solely on the expressive potential of the image, and by 1939, they had all established unique styles and sensitivities. They too looked around and saw a world in trouble, desperate to make sense of the past. But these directors weren't interested in grabbing their audience by the collar and shaking it into a state of beatific imbecility. They didn't betray their aesthetic principles and worldviews. From the hipster enclave of Howard Hawks's Andean pilots to the ever-expanding vistas of Alexander Dovzhenko's socialist martyrs, the best films of 1939 create worlds that are immediately identifiable, complete, and enduring.
The ten best
1. Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu; Jean Renoir, France)
"Nothing is natural these days," says Christine (Nora Grégor), daughter of a Viennese conductor and wife of the wealthy Robert (Marcel Dalio). What she really means is that everything's natural now, including horror and stupidity. With surprising dolly work that brings together the rich and their servants only to sketch their divisions, this movie deftly shows up a pre-war world about to have its lights knocked out. Renoir himself has a big part in this movie, some of it spent in a bear suit during an evening of theatrical entertainment at Robert's chateau. This sequence is the dark heart of the film: an X-ray of society in which Renoir brings into play everything he feels about people's need for disguises and illusions. If Rules of the Game has been made cold for you by History of Film 101, see it again. It's the best of films because seemingly without trying to do anything, it does everything a movie could hope to do.
2. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Zangiku monogatari; Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
To see a movie by Mizoguchi is to experience an entirely different way of imagining film. This one's devastating story unfolds in the late 1800s. A second-rate kabuki actor (Shotaro Hanayagi), scion of a prestigious theater family, falls for his little brother's nursemaid (Kakuko Mori). Cast out for the shame of it all, they tour the provinces until he perfects his craft and she becomes gravely ill. Defined by lengthy tracking shots and low angles where the weight of an entire culture presses down on the characters, the film's mastery never obscures the story's disconsolate sadness. Here, artistic dedication and self-sacrifice lead inexorably to poverty, illness, and the compromises that rip lovers apart. After watching a film of such rigor and tragedy, the cinema in general seems like a medium that's been as abused as one of Mizoguchi's heroines.
3. Young Mr.Lincoln (John Ford, USA)
Set in the Illinois of 1832 and dramatizing only a couple of events in the future president's (Henry Fonda's) early years as a lawyer, Young Mr. Lincoln is concentrated mythmaking. Ford presents Lincoln as human, of course, but with comic differences from ordinary men. He arrives in town riding a donkey, and his soon-to-be famous stove pipe hat just looks ridiculous. Fonda never lets go of the real. Under Ford's direction, he's at his best telling his sweetheart "I love red hair," reading books, or judging pies at a contest. Ultimately, Fonda's dancing says it all. There's something very dark in that scene. It has a fleeting-but-frozen, sorrowful quality that points in the direction of the film's end, where Lincoln goes off into history to be killed. Of the three Ford masterpieces from 1939, two starred Fonda. It was their year.
4. Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, USA)
An adolescent fantasy impossible to resist, set in a fog-shrouded, completely unlikely South American outpost. Here, under adverse weather conditions, cynical Cary Grant and his gang of wisecracking flyers are inexplicably bent on getting the mail delivered at all costs. Skulking stonily around Hawks's elastic medium shots is Richard Barthelmess as a disgraced pilot who must redeem himself in the eyes of the group. Meanwhile, having been burned by one woman (Rita Hayworth), Grant reluctantly gets serious about a new one (Jean Arthur, incongruously perky and a little too drippy for an unsentimental man's woman). In the best of his five 1939 roles (cf. Stagecoach, Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Thomas Mitchell plays Grant's adoring sidekick, a quintessentially Hawksian character. Like all the best Hawks films, Only Angels emphasizes grace and humor under pressure and creates a complete, hermetic world surrounded by night and no future.
5. Shchors (Alexander Dovzhenko, USSR)
In Hollywood in 1939, directors had to answer to powerful producers like David O. Selznick and Darryl F. Zanuck; in the Soviet Union, they had to answer to Stalin. That most demanding of film enthusiasts not only "suggested" the idea for this epic about a noted Ukrainian Bolshevik military hero, but also had the script rewritten after purging several of its surviving real-life characters. Amazingly, the film, which took three years to prepare and produce, is faithful to the personal vision of Dovzhenko, one of the cinema's great poets. Moving swiftly, from its first shattering images of black bomb smoke erupting behind a row of sunflowers, through short slashes of movement and combat, extravagant and tender scenes of emotion, and darkly witty parodies of the despised bourgeoisie, Shchors rediscovers the silent cinema's freedom of visual and narrative invention. Inevitably, the soundtrack resounds with pep talk and dogma, but Dovzhenko and the actors give humanity even to characters cut out of the most rigid Stalinist cloth: Yevgeny Samoilov's Shchors, a trim, young, brainy leader almost but not quite comfortable when he has to appear as a man of the people, is a remarkable creation. Unlike Sergei Eisenstein's better-known war epic Alexander Nevsky, released a year earlier, Shchors lives and breathes.
6. The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, USA)
Fastest and most entertaining of 30s gangster films, this whiplike escapade follows James Cagney from post-WWI disillusionment to the top of the bootlegging racket to boozy decline and despair. The violent scenes areconcentrated, vicious, and exhilarating. So is Cagney's performance, which is like a superbly paced 106-minute dance routine. Along for the ride are Humphrey Bogart, Gladys George, Frank McHugh, and Paul Kelly—exponents of a terse but high-energy style of acting whose secret has been lost. Under the direction of Walsh, the most human of great directors, the film evokes time and place with equal parts documentary-like authority, nostalgic overstatement, and poetic condensation.
7. Stagecoach (John Ford, USA)
Archetypal characters are made profound through the subtle movements of actors in this fast-paced and beautiful film. Ford takes a group of clichés from any old western (the outlaw, the lawman, the whore, the good girl, the drunken doctor, the gambler, and Andy Devine), puts them on a stage through hostile Indian territory, and delivers a casual primer on the cinema. Not once does he come off pretentious or out to prove anything, even if he is summing up the genre and criticizing the attitudes of people we might call "settlers." Standard situations are casually avoided or deepened; John Wayne, as the Ringo Kid, enters without a horse, covered in dirt, carrying all his belongings. There's a scene in this film that features only the intense faces of Ford's actors, seen in medium close-up as they sit in the chilly, wind-blown stagecoach, and music plays on the soundtrack. They exchange glances or try not to. They mark time and get nervous. Why should they speak? What's to say?
8. Drums along the Mohawk (John Ford, USA)
Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert are pioneers in upstate New York during the Revolutionary War. Less highly regarded than Ford's two other 1939 films, Drums along the Mohawk is no less great. Ford's first color film, it has his stylistic signature: slowly paced, often beautifully designed scenes that lope up to or away from some all-but-withheld emotional shock or release. Resembling a pageant rather than a well-made play, the film is built out of fragments, some of them merely effective, some awesomely moving. An essential cinematic piece of American history.
9. Love Affair (Leo McCarey, USA)
Love Affair is an alluring shipboard romance that slips from wistful to tragic without apology. McCarey's career, a hard-to-follow line that starts in silent comedy and ends in priest pictures, proves that a director of great originality can mix genres even as he's inventing them. Like their director, Irene Dunne, as a fashion buyer-singer, and Charles Boyer, as a playboy-painter, really seem to be making it up as they go along. Perhaps it's McCarey's faith in his actors' humanity that inspires them so much. Irene Dunne effortlessly maintains such a high level of charisma in this film that she's even charming playing the ukulele in a wheelchair.
10. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, USA)
Soviet envoy Greta Garbo and rich playboy Melvyn Douglas fall in love in a pre-war France as venal and doomed as that of Rules of the Game. It's less funny and less brilliant than Lubitsch's anti-Nazi masterpiece, To Be Or Not To Be (1942), but beneath Ninotchka's frivolity lies a subversively prescient attack on both communism and capitalism. The characters aren't profound, but thanks to Garbo, dazzling in her greatest performance, their struggle against history has the right poignancy.
Honorable mention
1. Son of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee, USA)
In the third of the Universal series, Basil (Sherlock Holmes) Rathbone plays the Baron's strangely named heir, Wolf. He goes around several bends to deliver a performance of dashed hope, mental anguish, and complete breakdown. Still, this remarkable turn is almost obscured by Lionel Atwill's wooden-armed Inspector Krogh and Bela Lugosi's broken-necked Ygor. Lugosi, who also appears in Ninotchka, of all things, completely nails Ygor's pain and malice, and Atwill's clipped precision consistently hits the bullseye, even when he's shoving darts in his arm. Son of Frankenstein doesn't cheat. The rash actions of its crippled characters have real consequences. Their moral landscape, pre-war Europe as nightmare, is completely externalized, and not only in the set design. There's a parallel universe where Son of Frankenstein is showcased on network TV each year instead of The Wizard of Oz. To get there, you need only click your heels, not three times, like Dorothy, but only once, like Inspector Krogh.
2. My Apprenticeship (V lyudyakh or Among People; Mark Donskoi, USSR)
Part Two of Donskoi's trilogy of films based on the boyhood memoirs of Maxim Gorky. It takes up the saga as the young hero (Alexei Lyarsky), chafing under his brutal, ignorant guardians, discovers great Russian literature and splits to experience life, first as a dishwasher on a steamship, then as a helper in an icon painters' studio. The tone is realistic, the implicit revolutionary idealism passionate but unstressed, the survey of ordinary life in late czarist Russia concretely detailed and filled with regret for the waste of human possibilities.
3. The Light Ahead (Di Klyatshe; Edgar G. Ulmer, USA)
A love story between a blind girl (Helen Beverly) and a lame man (David Opatoshu), set in an eastern European shtetl as reimagined on a New Jersey farm. Visually, this Yiddish-language film by low-budget giant Edgar G. Ulmer is so poverty-stricken and abstract it almost makes the back-projected highway and shabby apartment of Ulmer's Detour (1946) look elaborate. Warm lighting, strong compositions, and fervent performances give The Light Ahead a uniquely affecting intensity.
4. Each Dawn I Die (William Keighley, USA)
A relentless gangster/prison break/exposé/social reform movie in which James Cagney is so good he almost dies. Keighley's restless, mobile camera tends to extend shots until they're ugly, and it only adds to this constantly surprising film's brutality.
5. Jesse James (Henry King, USA)
A retelling of the bandit's myth as nostalgic, low-key Americana, in which Jesse (Tyrone Power) and his brother, Frank (Henry Fonda), rob trains and banks not out of greed, but as a midwestern family-farm protest against industrialization from the east. If the story's a fairy tale, it's told with total conviction, as gripping action scenes punctuate the Technicolor flow of elegiacally viewed landscapes.
Most wanted
1. Disputed Passage (Frank Borzage, USA)
A China-set medical drama, starring sarong comedienne Dorothy Lamour, cuddly-but-menacing Baku-born Akim Tamiroff, and John (Bulldog Drummond) Howard as doctors. It's the 1939 film we most regret not being able to see. Directed by Frank Borzage, whose career and life are still too mysterious for a director of his stature, the film evidently concerns the need for self-sacrificing love among scientists. For now, we can only wonder how Borzage, noted for his brand of rooted-in-reality religio-mystical spirituality, handles this odd group of characters, opposed to marriage, searching for salvation, close to death, finally resorting to the laying on of hands.
2. Frontier Marshal (Allan Dwan, USA)
Randolph Scott as Wyatt Earp and Cesar Romero as Doc Holliday. Dwan made his first western in 1911, his last in 1957; this one, near the midpoint of his career, would be worth seeing even if it's just another of his many tossed-off gems of popcorn logic. And it might be one of his masterpieces. Who knows?
3. They Were Nine Bachelors (Ils étaient neuf célibataires; Sacha Guitry, France)
A clever promoter (Guitry) enlists nine elderly Frenchmen for a matrimonial service catering to resident alien women. That's the premise of what we must assume is another deft example of the incisive, fast-paced, brilliantly constructed comic fables Guitry was turning out during this period, films so original their time still hasn't come yet—not here in the US, anyway.
4. Ambush and Island of Lost Men (both Kurt Neumann, USA), King of Chinatown (Nick Grinde, USA), The Magnificent Fraud (Robert Florey, USA), and Persons in Hiding (Louis King, USA)
People throw around the term "B movie" pretty carelessly nowadays, but these are the real thing: cheap, violent crime films or twisted exotica, made by Paramount to play with their bigger-budgeted films, each running under 75 minutes. The skilled, inventive, sometimes crackpot directors of these films were collectively responsible for a total of 17 films in 1939 (!); the shared, oddball casts featured the likes of Anna May Wong, Anthony Quinn, J. Carrol Naish, Akim Tamiroff, Patricia Morison, Ernest Truex, William Frawley, Broderick Crawford, Philip Ahn, and Lloyd Nolan. Ambush, a chase film, was written by S. J. Perelman and his wife; Persons was penned by Horace McCoy from a book by J. Edgar Hoover's ghostwriter and stars Morison and Naish as Bonnie and Clyde; Island, also written by McCoy, features Wong as an embezzler who ends up in a labor camp; King, with Tamiroff as a crime lord who falls for lady doctor Wong, is a gangster picture orientale; and Fraud, again with Tamiroff, the hidden hero of 1939, concerns a ham actor forced to impersonate a South American dictator. Why valuable junk like this remains buried is a mystery.
5. I Met a Murderer (Roy Kellino, UK)
In what sounds like an engagingly offbeat British thriller, James Mason kills his wife and changes his identity, only to have his past catch up with him in the form of a novelist (Pamela Kellino) who sees him as best-seller material. Someday this film will be remade and the remake will be a big success: remember where you heard about it first.
Overrated
1. Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood, William Cameron Menzies, USA)
A big, long, overblown movie that every half hour or so feels the need to wave its arms at you and scream that it's not just a motion picture, it's a Major Event. To give the film its due, it rolls along all right for a while and has some impressive scenes, especially during the Civil War part, and some of the performances are good, Butterfly McQueen's shockingly so. But the film drags painfully in its second half, its tone alternately overbearing an hesitant, as if the filmmakers wanted to make it clear they had something to say but weren't too sure what it was. For a movie that had four directors and two second units, it isn't too bad.
2. The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, King Vidor, USA)
There's something sick about criticizing The Wizard of Oz, a movie that's made so many people so very happy for so many years; a film that brings nothing but joy into the heart of the child in each of us. There's something about it, though, that's like sticking your head into the spin-art drum at the county fair. One minute you're surrounded by farmers and cows, the next, you just need to sit down until this feeling passes. It's the kind of a movie where monkeys aren't enough, they also have to fly. Maybe the problem's that there's one midget too many. Who wouldn't want to go home?
3. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, USA)
A movie that gets a lot of mileage out of abusing character actors and children, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington only comes alive when it's doing stuff like watching family-sized Eugene Pallette try to get out of a phone booth. What's left is a lot of shots of James Stewart looking at buildings and a phony ending guaranteed to leave even the most idealistic viewer crestfallen.
4. Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, USA)
In this ridiculous perversion of Emily Brontë's novel, Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) and Catherine (Merle Oberon) are a couple of boring fashion plates. Their doomed passion is so mundane and long-winded that you root for the "normal" characters to force it to the ground and kick it to death. A film so bad it deserves a shot-for-shot remake starring Alec Baldwin and a supermodel.
5. Gunga Din (George Stevens, USA), Beau Geste(William Wellman, USA), and The Four Feathers (Zoltan Korda, UK)
A trio of films that pass off jingoism as boisterous camaraderie. Even players like Cary Grant and Victor McLaglen (Gunga Din) and Gary Cooper and Brian Donlevy (Beau Geste) can't rescue these unadventurous adventure films from tedium. Could even the most cold-hearted of adolescent boys excuse movies this ponderous?
6. Le jour selève (Daybreak; Marcel Carné, France)
The elements are in place for a great film: Jean Gabin as a factory worker holed up in his room chain-smoking after killing a man (the hypnotically repellent Jules Berry), Alexandre Trauner's atmospheric sets, fine music by Maurice Jaubert, dialogue by Jacques Prévert, a mood of suicidal hopelessness. Somehow the end result is academic and uninvolving.
7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, USA)
Charles Laughton's performance, for which this lead balloon is mainly remembered, achieves the rare feat of being more cartoonish than any cartoon ever made. Half as long as Gone with the Wind, but equally overproduced and approximately twice as boring.
Check out more from Club Havana's Secret History of Cinema:
Introduction;
1946;
1953;
1968;
1976;
1983; and
1994
Chris Fujiwara and A. S. Hamrah are Club Havana Productions.
A version of this article originally appeared in the Media Zone of the Web site Tripod.
