Welcome to the Decades Project, my ambitious yearlong project detailing my favorite films from each decade! I’ve been wanting to do a broad overview of my journey in film for a while now, and 2023 seems to be the year where I’ll be hitting a handful of movie milestones—1,500 films seen, 400 great movies, 100 five-star films—which gives me an excuse to attempt a sort of demarcation.
We’ll be doing a post roughly every two weeks, with each month from January to June covering one decade and the latter half of the year devoted to super-sized lists on the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s—the three decades that I’ve been alive for and thus have seen the most movies from. If you’re looking for a total of 240 potential new favorites (or want to keep abreast on any other stuff I write), do hit that subscribe button below!
This is the one time during this series where I’ll be doing two decades at once, and it’s wholly because my exposure to 1920s cinema (and anything older, for that matter) is sorely lacking. In fact, it’s difficult to think of two decades in cinema history that fit more awkwardly together, because it’s difficult to find a bigger sea change in popular movies than the one that occurred right in the middle of this time period, when The Jazz Singer (1928) dragged the industry not only kicking but now also audibly screaming into the sound age. Less wide-reaching but still notable was the Hays Code coming into full-force in the early 30s, representing a shift in the kinds of stories being told just as the advent of sound changed how we told them.
All in all, these two decades when taken together represent less a distinct era in cinema and more the connective tissue between two chapters in the story of a medium still building out the bedrock of its own syntax. What all these films share, then, is the ramshackle excitement of an artform discovering itself, and the idiosyncratic talents involved in that project.
(There are also plenty of laughs.)
Hopefully when I revisit this exercise in 2033, I’ll have enough pre-Sunrise cinema under my belt to give the 1920s the spotlight it deserves. In the meantime, here’s a quick overview at some of my favorite films that are almost as old as my grandparents.
Honorable Mentions: The 39 Steps (1935), Design for Living (1933), Jezebel (1938), Ladies of Leisure (1930), Swing Time (1936)
20. Midnight (1939, Mitchell Leisen)
As the rest of this list will make quite clear, I love screwball romances, and it doesn’t get much more screwball-romance than this: Long cons, rags-to-riches aspirations (it was right after the Depression, after all), the agonizing decision between marrying for love or for money, the whole shebang. Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, and John Barrymore (of the Drew Barrymores!) are three of classic Hollywood’s more under-sung figures—there will be a lot of those throughout this list, alas—and they do remarkably charming work here as a showgirl and cabbie who lie to everyone and themselves about how they feel about each other, and the somber scion quietly conspiring to bring them together.
19. Baby Face (1933, Alfred E. Green)
If you were to just take her Hays Code-era work, Barbara Stanwyck would already be one of classic Hollywood’s most storied figures, but it’s her pre-Code oeuvre where she really shines. Baby Face might be the most audacious of them, seeing as it centers on Stanwyck’s protagonist interpreting Nietzsche as a philosophical ethos through which she justifies sleeping her way to the top, and not unconvincingly so. Far more modern in its sensibility than many features even today, it’s a remarkable showcase for both Stanwyck’s considerable talent and pre-Code Hollywood at its most risque.
18. If You Could Only Cook (1935, William Seiter)
Speaking of underrated stars of Classic Hollywood, we as a society ought to talk about Herbert Marshall and Jean Arthur more. I will later on in this series—their respective masterpieces happen to be (spoiler!) my two favorite films of the 1930s—but even in this feather-light lark about an auto exec (Marshall) who escapes from his problems by posing as the husband of a job-hunting woman (Arthur) so they could apply for a joint butler-cook position before falling in love with her for real, the two shine, bringing inimitable zip to a romp that wastes none of its 72 minutes.
17. Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks)
It’s Katharine Hepburn. It’s Cary Grant. It’s a leopard. It’s everyone on the cast acting like they downed five shots of espresso before every take. What more do you need me to say? Pure cinematic bliss.
16. The Wind (1928, Victor Sjostrom)
Arriving right at the tail end of the silent era, Victor Sjostrom’s The Wind feels like something of a culmination for the form. It’s a gritty, dusty Western that trades in the genre’s typical pulpy playfulness for dirt-under-fingernail toughness, and Sjostrom makes sure you feel just how gritty and dusty it is, building some gorgeous images around the solitary figure of Lillian Gish, the first truly great actress of the then-nascent artform. To argue for its importance, then, is easy; to fully convey its desolate beauty through words, though? Impossible.
15. Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)
It’s easy to dismiss Stagecoach as a relic, and in many ways (read: the racism), it is. However, it was also undeniably a game-changer of its time that remains wildly entertaining today, with John Ford’s peerless camera work coupled with John Wayne’s star-making turn to create a sleek and rollicking piece of pop. No art has informed the American national project (for better or for worse) than pulpy westerns, and Stagecoach feels like the beginning of all that myth-making, and by extension, the masterful deconstructions and variations we’ve seen from cinema (and even Ford himself) since.
14. City Lights (1931, Charlie Chaplin)
Perhaps the film that best melded Charlie Chaplin’s political, narrative, and aesthetic preoccupations into a well-balanced whole, City Lights sums up best the style of one of cinema’s true titans. Defiantly a silent film despite being made well into the burgeoning sound era, City Lights parlays a deceptively simple story about Chaplin’s Tramp endeavoring to help a blind flower girl into a lovely paean to persistent kindness in the face of urban isolation, as well as a host of rollicking set pieces (the boxing scene is a classic) whose kinetic energy feels quintessentially Chaplin.
13. Hands Across the Table (1935, Mitchell Leisen)
It feels odd to think of Carole Lombard as someone we don’t talk about enough, given that when we do, it’s in the hushed tones reserved for a vaunted legend of the form. Still, it’s difficult to dispute that few (if any) of the films she made in her tragically too-short career aside from To Be or Not to Be (where she’s only a supporting player, really) are familiar to anyone beyond the real ‘heads, which is a shame. Directed by the underrated Mitchell Leisen, Hands Across the Table is particularly neglected in her oeuvre but feels not just emblematic of her work but screwball cinema as a whole: A zany, hyper-realist ode to strivers and dreamers, with a keen understanding of and allegiance to the working class and their myriad struggles.
12. It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra)
Remember when movies like this could sweep the Oscars? Famously one of only three films (the other two being the much more grave One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs) to net the vaunted “Big 5” awards (Picture, Director, Lead Actor, Lead Actress, and Screenplay), It Happened One Night charms because it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is, because it understands that what it is—a whip-smart rom-com about two born rebels falling in love starring two megawatt stars—is more than enough. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert bring their A-games to Frank Capra’s sensitive (and hilarious) vision of the America we sometimes forget about.
11. The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)
The unfortunate thing about The Wizard of Oz being so deeply embedded in the canon is that it’s easy to forget just how weird this movie is. Sure, you might know that there’s an extended musical number where munchkins celebrate a woman getting crushed by a tornado-borne house, but trust me when I say that it is far more gloriously deranged than you remember. Watching it, it’s easy to understand why this might be the one thing stoners and conservative grandmas agree on.
More than anything else, I’d love a good recommendation for films I should seek out from each of these eras. Nothing brings me more joy than discovering a new favorite. In fact, I’m midway through Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife right now, and I could see it making this list had I seen it earlier. Drop any recs below!