Best Movies of the 1930s

Snow White to The Wizard of Oz to Gone with the Wind. The decade Hollywood went from silent to sound and built the studio system that would dominate cinema for thirty years.

The 1930s is the decade that built the studio system. The transition to sound that had begun with The Jazz Singer (1927) was, by the early 1930s, complete; the major studios (MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, RKO) had consolidated their vertically-integrated production-distribution-exhibition models; the Hays Code was imposed in 1934 and would constrain Hollywood content for the next thirty-four years.

Internationally, the decade is bracketed by the Weimar German cinema of the early 1930s (Fritz Lang's M, 1931; The Blue Angel, 1930) and the displaced refugee directors who fled the Nazi takeover after 1933 to work in Hollywood (Lang himself, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger). The European exodus reshaped American cinema profoundly across the following two decades.

The ten

  • Gone with the Wind (1939) — Victor Fleming et al. The most-commercially-successful film of its era. Aged badly in its racial politics; still significant as artifact.
  • The Wizard of Oz (1939) — Victor Fleming. The Technicolor sequence inside the black-and-white frame.
  • Modern Times (1936) — Charlie Chaplin. The Tramp's near-silent factory satire.
  • City Lights (1931) — Chaplin again. The most-emotionally-perfect Tramp film.
  • M (1931) — Fritz Lang. The original serial-killer thriller. Peter Lorre's career-launching lead.
  • Bringing Up Baby (1938) — Howard Hawks. Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn. The screwball-comedy peak.
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) — Disney. The first feature-length cel-animated film.
  • Stagecoach (1939) — John Ford. John Wayne's breakthrough. The Western re-established as a serious form.
  • Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) — Frank Capra. Jimmy Stewart. The populist political fable.
  • The Rules of the Game (1939) — Jean Renoir. French country-house drama. Initially banned, now widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.

Why 1939 was the year

Three of the ten films above are from 1939. The year is sometimes called the greatest in Hollywood history. The films released that single year include: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Ninotchka, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Rules of the Game (France), Of Mice and Men, Dark Victory, Beau Geste.

The cluster is not entirely an accident. The studio system was at its operational peak; the Code-era constraints had stabilised into a working production environment; the Depression-era audience demand for high-quality entertainment had reached its commercial maximum; the second world war had not yet diverted resources from Hollywood production. The year is, in retrospect, the highest sustained output of the classical studio system before the war reorganised everything.