My Best Pictures By Year

As creaky and racist as this one is, it's less creaky and racist than The Birth of a Nation. At least this one has a coherent (and interesting) story. Plus, there's something to be said for Cecil B. DeMille's special sort of salaciousness.

Having skipped The Birth of a Nation, let's make it up with that movie's principals— Griffith, Gish, and Marsh—in another clumsy morality tale. But this time Constance Talmadge steals the show as the Mountain Girl.

The first somewhat watchable movie, thanks to Mary Pickford, the most appealing of the early silent queens.

Ernst Lubitsch is far and away my favorite director. Combine that with the fact that he started earlier than most famous directors, and you're going to see a lot of his movies in the early part of this list.

Along with The Merry Jail, this marks the beginning of the Lubitsch touch, helped greatly by the vitality of Ossi Oswalda.

Although the creakiness of the Victorian conventions make this difficult viewing for some, it will be worth it for others, if only to see the mesmerizing Lillian Gish hitting her stride.

For the second year in a row, we have Griffith, Gish, and Barthelmess in a hokey Victorian morality tale. The troupe have matured since Broken Blossoms, though, and Way Down East is starting to become enjoyable to modern viewers.

The storytelling is not as focused on the protagonists as Way Down East, but the Gish sisters still lend this a gravitas missing in the comedies The Wildcat and The Kid.

There's not much to distinguish the series of trashy melodramas Gloria Swanson made in the aftermath of the Great War, but this one gets a boost from none other than Rudolph Valentino. And Swanson did have something - enough to make her the clear third (after Pickford and Gish) in the trio of great early silent Hollywood actresses.

I like this movie as much for the rare views of Jazz Age Los Angeles as for Lloyd's breathtaking stunts.

Until I saw this film I thought it impossible for a silent film to tell a sophisticated story without resorting to numerous intertitles. With this film Lubitsch had mastered the art of cinema before almost any other director even learned its vocabulary.

If you've been disappointed by silent films before, but are willing to keep an open mind, give this one a try. You might wonder how anyone could hope to adapt an Oscar Wilde play to silent film, but once you've seen this film you'll wonder what Wilde needed all that dialogue for.

When I watch Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, I do it for the historical interest, my viewing enhanced by the knowledge of their personal lives and what it took to do their stunts.

When I watch Keaton, I just laugh.

I'm not a fan of German Expressionism; to me it's just artsy-fartsy (yet crude by modern standards) camera work combined with tired stage conventions and ridiculous overacting of the sort Kathy Selden makes fun of in that priceless scene in Singin' in the Rain.

What saves this Hollywood Murnau production is the star quality of Janet Gaynor in one of the three performances that netted her the first Academy Award for Best Actress. Sunrise also won one of the first two Best Picture Oscars for 1927.

The last of Keaton's films as an independent, and even better than The General. Favorite moment: Kitty walks up behind Bill, Jr. to console him over his father's imprisonment, but decides to play hard to get and turns around and walks away just as Keaton turns around to see her.

Only Lubitsch could make so sophisticated a musical so early in the sound era (the same year as the terribly-dated first all-talking picture The Broadway Melody). The stars are Maurice Chevalier (in his second talkie) and Jeanette MacDonald (making her screen debut), but it is Lillian Roth's energetic performance in her first major role that has spurred generations after to wonder "whatever happened to her?"

The only still-great film of the Silent Era, and it had to be since it was released only two months before the landmark German talkie The Blue Angel - a far more dated film, bound as it is to silent film conventions by Emil Jannings. Fresh even to modern arthouse goers like myself, People on Sunday is the pivotal film of the era, marking not only the silent-talkie and Weimar-Nazi transitions, and the beginning of the careers of five talented, soon-to-be-ex- Germans in Hollywood, but also the beginning of a remarkably modern (as in late 20th/early 21st Century, not Weimar-Modern) mode of independent filmmaking.

While the French were early players in cinema, that scene all but died with the Post-WWI recession and the rise of Hollywood and Weimar Germany. I believe French cinema only really recovered - only really found its voice - with Marius.

Don't get me wrong, though: while recognizably Continental in attitude, Marius is much more like contemporary early Hollywood talkies than the urbane, world-weary French cinema of the American arthouses of the 60s.

All my picks so far have been conditional recommendations - the best movies of the year in a time when all movies seem antiquated to modern eyes. Even my favorite so far, People On Sunday, is still a silent film - and therefore inaccessible to the vast majority of modern viewers.

Well, I'm not making any excuses for Trouble in Paradise, the earliest of my Top Ten movies of all time, and easily the best film of the 30s (not exactly a shabby decade for Hollywood).

Its genre - a comedy of manners - is not going to appeal to everyone, but this is a movie that converts people to its point of view. Lubitsch had made musicals before (including The Love Parade), but this non-musical has a rhythm to its dialogue and editing that feels more like a musical than any musical I've seen.

The best of the three major Hollywood adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's novel, and the reason is Katharine Hepburn. I don't even like Hepburn's personality or style of acting, and yet... there is something fascinating about her. It's a good book too.

This movie achieved the first Grand Slam in Academy Award history, almost single-handedly made Columbia into a major studio, and pretty much invented the screwball comedy genre.

How is it a mostly formulaic movie with a tired plot, corny script, recalcitrant actors, mundane setting, and generally low-budget feel is still loved over eighty years after its release?

I can only give my own answer: Claudette Colbert. She is a goddess in this film, as much through the way she emotes and carries herself as through her physical looks. Clark Gable ain't shabby either, but he's a doughnut-dunker by comparison.

In what would otherwise be a standard melodrama with unremarkable lead man Franchot Tone, the immortal Bette Davis earns her first Best Actress Oscar.

I have a great deal of respect for Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, and I delight in Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, and Ginger Rogers. But Bette Davis - combining those flashing eyes with the personality to instantly command any room and the freedom from vanity that allowed her to portray real emotions - is my favorite of the 30s Hollywood divas.

I think Dodsworth would be a fine if mostly unremarkable movie if it were released today. But that's saying a lot already - it is arguably less dated than any movie in the list so far. The unremarkableness itself helps it stand the test of time.

What is it about Irene Dunne? She was neither young nor appealing in the conventional Hollywood sense (although she was attractive). I don't even like her voice. Or at least I wouldn't if it wasn't for Dunne's incomparable delivery - brittle and sharp as glass. She looked like a housewife but her personality - aloof yet alluring. This might be my favorite of all screwball comedies.

As corny and dated as the story is, this serious Cukor film holds up better than the sometimes painfully unfunny hammitude of the same leads in Bringing Up Baby.

It's a cliché that 1939 was the greatest year in Hollywood history. Given the dozen or more famous candidates for Best Picture of 1939 - including Gone With the Wind, the Academy's and I'm guessing most people's choice - why would I pick slightly obscure, slightly mundane Dark Victory?

Answer: Bette Davis.

If it had been a normal year, like 1938, I wouldn't have to defend my choice. If Bette had not made Jezebel in 1938 (another fine film) and had played the similar role of Scarlett O'Hara instead, I'd probably be gushing here about GWTW.

As it is, I have to choose between my favorite performance of the period and a movie that, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing going for it but spectacle - granted, enough spectacle to almost convert me to its cause. Dark Victory may be melodramatic for modern audiences, but Gone With the Wind isn't exactly a paragon of Classical reserve either.

The best romantic comedy of all time. Lubitsch made a half dozen masterpieces, but never before and never after would he have two leads of this caliber. If he had made only this film, he would still be my favorite director.

It's hard to come up with two Hollywood personalities as different as Barbara Stanwyck and Preston Sturges. Her snake-tongued worldliness and voracious sex appeal set against Fonda's utter, utter cluelessness and Sturges' genius for off-kilter antics results in something that is impossible to recreate (although I'm sure Hollywood will try sooner or later). I don't know if I love this film or merely find it fascinating, and thanks to Sturges' many-layered wit I'll probably never make up my mind.

If you'd never met or heard anything about Americans before watching this film, by the time the credits appeared you would know everything there is to know about Americans' romantic self-image.

Sure, it takes place in Africa, features "La Marseillaise" in its most patriotic scene, has only three American natives (Bogart, Wilson, and Joy Page - who played a Bulgarian) out of a credited cast of fourteen, and was directed by a Hungarian — heck, even Jack Warner was Canadian. But that's the point: all those émigrés came to America to make what is not only the most iconic Hollywood movie of all time, but the one which, out of all the great classics, is the most collaborative — the shining example of how a movie can be more than the sum of its parts, just as we all hope America is more than just the sum of its people.

It has all the elements of mythic America: Rick working his way to the top of Casablanca society from nothing; Sam a barely-emancipated sidekick (Casablanca is black & white on so many levels); Rick's back room where lofty titles or money won't get you in but what you've done will keep you out; and, above all, the notion that when the whole world's gone to hell and everyone's given up hope you can always count on the American to do the right thing.

We downshift from perhaps the most famous movie on the list to perhaps the least famous. But The More the Merrier is anything but an obscure cult classic: it's a conventional rom com in a conventional wartime setting (the WWII housing shortage in D.C.), and was quite popular in its day. Especially notable is Charles Coburn's performance, but watch it simply because it's enjoyable.

The greatest family film ever made. Watching teenage Angela Lansbury tart it up is a hoot. Even Mickey Rooney is almost tolerable for once. And the relationship between Velvet and her mother (played by Anne Revere) forms the core of this superbly-told story.

Ultimately, though, the (justifiable) reason many modern viewers pick this one up is to watch Elizabeth Taylor in her first starring role. I don't think Liz was the most talented or even prettiest child actor ever. But if you looked up "photogenic" in an illustrated dictionary, right next to Yosemite Valley should be a mugshot of Liz Taylor.

Elia Kazan's debut film - and the only one of his I genuinely like - this will forever be noted for containing the greatest child performance of all time: that of Peggy Ann Garner. Compare this performance to that of same-age (they were born in the same month) Elizabeth Taylor the year before in National Velvet. I love Liz in that movie, but compared to Peg Liz comes off as entirely too coy.