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10. Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir)
Few directors saw people as clearly and soberly as Jean Renoir did, with his quietly sophisticated humanist dramas infusing an everyman’s realism into a medium that at the time was largely focused on excursions in the hyper-real. In Grand Illusion—his breakout movie and the first film not in the English language to be nominated for Best Picture—Renoir interrogates the intersections and conflicts of interest between class solidarity and nationalism through a memorable gallery of characters mired in the First World War, arriving at few easy answers but capturing exquisitely a world that was both hurtling into a political future yet still mired in its aristocratic past. Not much has changed since, and so Grand Illusion remains essential.
9. Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin)
“Modern Times is in many ways the pivot point between Chaplin’s early and late periods, as well as perhaps his most comprehensive artistic statement…The film is both anarchic in its comedy and almost anarchist in philosophy, with each act affirming at once the buffoonery and dehumanizing bent of institutions while also upholding the centrality of freely chosen human relationships through the romance and fraternity between the gamine and the Tramp. Titans of industry are productivity demons with Orwellian inclinations, and law enforcement is alternatively unimaginative and incompetent…Modern Times is his greatest work: Articulate and precise in its timely politics, yet still universal and ageless even 90 years on, in the way the Tramp was always meant to be. Like Chaplin himself, it is timeless.” - Me, here
8. The Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir)
A much more indicting affair than Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game was famously met with a tumultuous reception when first released in 1939, its intricate and melancholic representation of French society deemed “unpatriotic” by many in France, by then bracing for the Second World War and not quite in the mood to reflect on its own petty class divisions. Lost during the war and finally cobbled back together in 1959 to tremendous acclaim from a world that had finally caught up with Renoir in the interim, it remains luminous even decades on. Given its arduous journey from near-obscurity to the innermost circles of the canon, it’s easy to forget that it is, as Renoir liked to describe it, very much a “pleasant film”: Charming and buoyant with the keenly observed foibles of people that Renoir so deftly mixed into his very best films. It is a far cry from homework.
7. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, Mervyn LeRoy / Busby Berkeley)
Any celebration of this period in cinema feels incomplete without at least one Busby Berkeley joint, and Gold Diggers of 1933 combines Berkeley’s trademark aesthetic flair with a saltier and sneakily political bent. Centered on a group of showgirls attempting to stage a Depression-themed musical while also hunting for millionaire beaus, its zippy energy belies the gravity of its thematic preoccupations. Unapologetically expressionist and ambitious in its craft even as the plot suggests a light lark, it’s an awe-inspiring exercise in Doing Too Much, and all the better for it.
6. Ninotchka (1939, Ernst Lubitsch)
“Garbo Laughs!” was how they advertised this breezy Lubitsch romp at the time, and while that’s very true—and with the wit of its Billy Wilder-penned script, Garbo isn’t the only one in stitches by the end of it—it seems to under-sell the film’s sophisticated and precise portrait of humans as naturally aspirational creatures. Much like Garbo’s steely demeanor famously crumbling into giggles in the workmen’s restaurant, the film finds its power in overcoming the inertia of rigidity giving way to vulnerability, to the inherent frailty of admitting to wanting to be loved and to be surprised and to feel good about yourself: To wanting more.
5. The Awful Truth (1937, Leo McCarey)
Let’s use this space to appreciate Cary Grant, even if this isn’t the last time we’ll see him on this list. No performer is more emblematic of this period of popular cinema, whose predominant genres required a sort of acrobatic grace that Grant intuitively understood and embodied better than anyone. Whether physically or verbally, Grant could simultaneously affect composure and kook, firmness and looseness. His acting was versatile on the brink of contradictory, and he remains fascinating almost a century on for this very reason. The Awful Truth is the most comprehensive showcase for his myriad talents—with its bifurcated structure allowing him to play both the straight man and the agent of chaos beautifully—and in the luminous Irene Dunne, it gives him a screen partner every bit as attuned to the delicate rhythms all the greatest screwballs traffic in.
4. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, F.W. Murnau)
A staple of Film 101 syllabi across the world, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise remains peerless almost a century since its release, in the way it is able to elevate a barebones plot—its characters don’t even have names, just occupations—into poetry through sheer visual panache. Everyone from our greatest critical minds to freshman art students has written their piece about this—so I won’t belabor it—but allow me to offer my own summation of its greatness: It feels both eternal and contemporary even today, a palimpsest upon which cinema’s past seemed to culminate and its future heralded still.
3. Holiday (1938, George Cukor)
Depression Era audiences didn’t take too well to Holiday—likely because it is at heart a film about a man not wanting a job—but it is perhaps the most realized of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn’s four(!) collaborations, able to tap into the two mega-stars equally boundless capacity for both madcap and melancholy in the service of a lovely rom-com that manages to also sneak in a few jabs against uncurbed capitalism as an American ethos. Special mention goes to its stellar ensemble, especially Lew Ayres as the souse brother who pulls off the difficult trick of making us sympathize with a gilded-cage carouser longing to be truly free. Simply an expertly made, under-sung film.
2. Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)
The greatest (and horniest) film from Hollywood’s best (and horniest) era, Trouble in Paradise is the kind of movie whose brilliance isn’t immediately apparent because of how disarmingly light it is. Focused on a husband-wife tandem of thieves (Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins) trying to swindle a socialite (Kay Francis) who is wiser and sadder than she lets on, the film is a remarkable feat of narrative engineering disguised as a straightforward rom-com, all sparkling reparte and wink-wink innuendo revolving around a sophisticated farce. Much like an exquisitely made dessert, Trouble in Paradise is a delightful concoction that comes by its lightness of touch through a precise and rock-solid balance of ingredients zhushed up with the inimitable charm and elegant maturity that only Ernst Lubitsch can provide. Oh, if every director were as skilled a confectioner.
1. Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Howard Hawks)
Only Angels Have Wings is as close to perfect as a movie can get. Centered on the tragicomic exploits of a motley crew of airmen and travelers at a remote Caribbean airstrip, its deceptively casual workplace hangout milieu creates an effective space for director Howard Hawks to place two contradictory yet complementary undercurrents—the insular stoicism embodied by Cary Grant’s desperately manly Geoff Carter and the dynamic fragility represented by the female interlopers played by Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth—alongside and in conversation with each other, both through an exquisitely engineered screenplay and the auteur’s trademark understated formalistic elegance. Bustling with life even as it is ultimately about the different ways in which we grapple with our own mortality, it is not only the best film of its era but one of the few that, if you squint, might resemble a sort of ethos.
Films I Need to See Next (According to TSPDT): Battleship Potemkin (1925), The General (1926), The Gold Rush (1925), Greed (1924), M (1931), The Man With a Movie Camera (1929), Metropolis (1927), Nosferatu (1922), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Sherlock Jr. (1924)
But if you have any other suggestions for where I ought to go next, I’d love to hear them! Next up for February, we’ve got my 20 favorite films of the 1940s.