This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.
Charley's Aunt - Sometimes all you need to love a film is one good performance, and here it's Jack Benny in the epic drag performance of a lifetime. The love farce is old hat, but Benny as the unstoppable Donna Lucia from Brazil, "where the nuts come from," would cement his comic reputation, and influence every other drag artist for decades. The second the dress goes on, something is unleashed in Benny that he could never showcase in masculine garb, and I couldn't get enough.
Hellzapoppin' - A fourth wall breaking, meta-gag pioneering, absurdist comedy about the cast and crew of a theater revue whose show is being adapted for the big screen. Several members of the cast are playing themselves, bent on sabotaging the movie within the movie, there's a ton of tricky business with shifting frames of reference, and all kinds of humorous nonsense results. It all ends happily of course, but the film takes the twistiest, silliest possible road to get there.
Penny Serenade - Irene Dunne and Cary Grant are two of my very favorite movie stars, but the movie's best scene is of Edgar Buchanan as the old print-worker who has to show the young couple how to diaper their adopted baby. "Penny Serenade" is unapologetically sentimental, but honest about all the demands and heartaches of parenthood, and its toll on relationships. Grant's speech near the end of the film is a heartbreaker - and got him a well deserved Oscar nod.
Sullivan's Travels - My favorite Preston Sturges film is a self-aware comedy about a naive actor who wants to make important films, only to learn that what most audiences really need is a good honest laugh. This contains my favorite appearance by Veronica Lake, and oddly one of the best uses of Disney's Pluto in any medium. And though the film is uplifting, Sturges still manages to give us a clear-eyed look at the darker parts of this era of America too.
Citizen Kane - Well, I'm certainly not going to say anything about Orson Welles and "Citizen Kane" that you haven't heard before. Practically every shot has been referenced, homaged, and dissected by somebody, and David Fincher made an entire film about how the script got written, eighty years later. "Citizen Kane" is not just a monumental achievement in American filmmaking, but remains a cornerstone of the mythos of Hollywood, even after all this time.
The Devil and Miss Jones - One of the more delightful pro-labor films of the era stars Charles Coburn and an out-of-touch business tycoon who decides to go undercover at his own department store in order to root out union organizers. Working in the shoe department, he learns to sympathize with the common man, admire the spirit of his co-workers, and even appreciate some female companionship. I just don't understand why Coburn is somehow a "supporting actor."
Dumbo - The first movie that I ever identified as my favorite movie. It's darker than you probably remember, with the pink elephant segment representing Disney at their most unhinged, yet so universal that even the smallest children can watch and understand the movie. Understandably there are elements that have aged poorly, but the messages of empathy and friendship are timeless. The animation, likewise, still holds up just fine.
Ball of Fire - A screwball delight that I'd describe as kind of like "Pygmalion" if Eliza Doolittle were a mobster's moll played by Barbara Stanwyck and wasn't remotely interested in learning to speak properly, and the professor was played by Gary Cooper, and he was the one who ended up getting schooled. It's also kind of like "Snow White," but instead of dwarfs you had a houseful of stodgy professors and the Wicked Witch was a gangster named Joe Lilac.
The Maltese Falcon - Like "Casablanca," this is the originator of so many detective and noir tropes that "The Maltese Falcon" can look cliche in retrospect. Detective stories were commonplace, but not with John Huston's scintillating style and flair. The femme fatale, the MacGuffin, the hardboiled detective, and both Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre as sinister villains would all become mainstays of the genre going forward - in short, "the stuff that dreams are made of."
Suspicion - Let's have an Alfred Hitchcock. 1941 saw the release of a great one with Cary Grant in the complicated role of possible murderer. There was controversy behind the scenes because the ending, and therefore the whole meaning of the film, was changed from Hitchcock's original intent. However, I still think the film works, and it works largely because Grant and Hitchcock were able to keep up doubts about Grant's character almost all the way to the end.
Honorable Mention
Meet John Doe
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