1933's Best Movies: 90 Years Later

Unlike with previous polls -- where I've gone with the contenders in the top 2,000 films -- I ended up going with the 1933 titles that made up the top 5,000 on the overall list, in order to fill the options out.

I've only seen a handful...Sons of the Desert, followed by Zero for Conduct. I used to have students do the great minute-and-a-huff scene from Duck Soup, but the one time I watched it, I remember a lot extraneous stuff.

Voted The Mascot, such a weird dark film for something aimed at the kiddywinks. Just gets stranger and stranger as it goes along.

Want to cast a vote for design for living but duck soup is there so

Duck Soup
Zero for Conduct
Man's Castle
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
Dinner at Eight
King Kong
The Invisible man

^^

One of these. May vote for Man's Castle because Borzage is so underrepresented in these things.

Gold Diggers vs. Testament of Dr. Mabuse for me

oops -- forgot Bitter Tea....

Want to cast a vote for design for living but duck soup is there so

I got it for you, love that film so much. Surprised it didn't cause thousands of scandalized Baptists to burst into flame around here.

Design for Living was an easy pick for first but, boy, are there ever some stellar flicks in this list.

The scene at 48:30 here, the wives at a movie (they think Stan and Ollie may have died in a shipwreck), is one of the funniest I've ever seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqOGLwUC-4w

My 1933 favorites in descending order:

Duck Soup [Leo McCarey]
Zéro de conduite [Jean Vigo]
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [Fritz Lang]
Man's Castle [Frank Borzage]
Passing Fancy [Yasujirô Ozu]*
The Bitter Tea of General Yen [Frank Capra]
Hallelujah, I'm a Bum [Lewis Milestone]*
King Kong [Ernest B. Schoedsack & Merian C. Cooper]
Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan [Luis Buñuel]
By Candlelight [James Whale]*

(* not listed in poll)

I might have to add Pilgrimage and Sons of the Desert too - I've seen them both, but I've forgotten whatever reservations I may have had about them because what I do remember about them is amazing.

That Buñuel documentary has the unforgettable of the sheep, ram, calf, or whatever tumbling down the mountain.

*has the unforgettable image

Gold Diggers of 1933 has too much amazingness not to vote for, but Duck Soup is also next level. This seems to be about the time filmmakers sorted out all the problems with sound recording and really went for it.

Great year for comedy

I can understand ppl getting a bit sick of Baby Face because it's such an OTT example of a semi-feminist pre-coder but it does go pretty hard. Bonus John Wayne sexual humiliation content, too.

Voting for Gold Diggers of 1933 as it's my favorite Busby Berkeley joint. Honorable mention to Land Without Bread.

Las Hurdes. I know "film buffs" are supposed to love every era of film, but there are frankly no more than a handful of films from each year of the 30s that really excite me. It seemed an ancient epoch even in the 90s.

The '80s seem more ancient tbh

I haven't watched Las Hurdes since my high school buddies and I rented that VHS package with it and Un Chien Andalou. Still remember that sheep tumbling down the clif.

There are some las hurdles from any era tbh

Byron couldn't have said it so graciously.

The '80s seem more ancient tbh

You're probably not watching an 80s film saying constantly, "everyone onscreen is now dead", though.

I mean, half of them are tho

That Buñuel documentary has the unforgettable image of the sheep, ram, calf, or whatever tumbling down the mountain.

Watched this on YT very recently - the whole film is unbelievably brutal! Parts of it obv staged. The different camera angles on the goat down the mountain sequence strongly suggest that more than one poor goat was pushed over the edge by their director.

Voted for Zero for Conduct.

I know "film buffs" are supposed to love every era of film, but there are frankly no more than a handful of films from each year of the 30s that really excite me. It seemed an ancient epoch even in the 90s.

― Halfway there but for you, Thursday, 12 October 2023 15:15 (fifty-three minutes ago) link

OTOH, I always assumed this would be the case based upon the relatively small sampling that I'd seen but I went hard into the '30s over the course of the pandemic and have been taken aback by the % of movies from that decade (particularly from the earlier half of the decade) that seem fresh as a daisy to me. There have really only been a handful that felt musty and well past their expiration date.

Also OTOH, I do not get all the love for Zero for Conduct! It was fine but basically did nothing for me. Which has made me hesitant to watch L'Atalante for fear of the discovery that my tastes are too vulgar to appreciate Vigo. What am I missing?

Both Zero for Conduct and L'Atalante (otherwise quite different films) have that mixture of the poetic and dreamy (the pillow fight in Zero, the underwater sequences in L'Atalante) and the rawly realistic that I find irresistible, and definitely a precursor to Bundle's similarly earthy surrealism.

1930s a very strong decade for American horror films ... unlike the 1940s.

Bunuel's!

1940s are a nearly nonexistent decade for American horror films. Like, the full list is a little longer than the one on Wikipedia but not by much.

There but for the grace of the decade goes Val Lewton

I've read a somewhat involved account - having to do with film ratings and censors in both the US and UK - that explains why Universal basically stopped making horror films for two years in the '30s (1937 and 1938 iirc), but I wonder what accounts for the dearth of US horror films in the 1947-1949 period.

Impossible to talk about this stuff without resorting to gigantic overgeneralization but I think for Hollywood the 40's have a lot more films that hold up as total masterpieces but the 30's are very solid for dependable pulpy thrills - horror, gangster flicks, musicals, weepies. Your average 30's Hollywood film is gonna be punchy, feature some surprisingly hard edged stuff (even postcode) and be over in 70-85 minutes, this last aspect a virtue not to be underrated!

Well, if that film was made between 1930 and 1934, that is.

The late '30s are its own beast.

I don't know about that - looking at my letterboxd logs for 37-39, the WB gangster stuff is still chugging along (sometimes disguised as g-man sure), there's some great iconic horror films and generally, as I said before, it's quite surprising how much harder edged stuff made it through postcode.

RE: dearth of horror films at the end of the 40s - as a genre it was just dead at the box office, so the Universal monsters ended up playing comedy adjuncts to Abbot and Costello. Also: the start of the SF film boom, much more relevant to postwar bomb paranoia than the Frankenstein monster’s origins in lightning and electricity.

Genre was just crying out for sex and colour and British character actors and lush cinematographers and set designers eg Hammer films

I'm not disagreeing with you, Daniel, but the taut dirty stuff tends to appear before 1934-1935.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Morbs is smiling

I could dance with you 'til the cows come home. On second thought, I'd rather dance with the cows 'til you came home

But I can’t see the stove

still haven't seen Duck Soup. The only ones of these I've watched are Baby Face, which is a great example of a louche pre-code film, and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

Mabuse had my vote (I prefer it to even M), but I won’t argue this winner

Design for Living is one of the few Lubitsch that leaves me cold.

Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct is only 44 min long, a view of students in a repressive boarding school, but it is highly regarded. It is the film he made before L'Atalante. I haven't seen it but it is on the Criterion Channel

The decades having closed, time for the final showdown: Final round: The best movies from years celebrating an anniversary divisible by 10 (1923-2013), as chosen by ... ILX