For the past several years I've been watching films for a personal Top Ten list project, with the goal of having watched at least fifty titles for every calendar year, as far back in time that I can go. This is both to give myself more context for the classics I've already seen, and to encourage myself to explore older films. I managed to finish the '50s earlier this year and then took a long break. Now, I'm gingerly starting to pick through the titles for the 1930s and 1940s.
It's going to be a long time before I hit my goal of watching fifty films for any of these individual years, because I've only seen twenty at most for any of them, and then only the most famous ones. Instead of making long lists of films to watch for specific years, I'm just picking whatever comes my way. There are a ton of old classics that I'd never seen and have been happy to catch up on at last - "Anchors Aweigh," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "National Velvet," and more. I've finally watched all the Academy Award Best Picture winners, and they're probably going to be the subject of a new feature for this blog after I'm done with the remaining Top Ten posts in the queue.
After a month watching these films, I wanted to put down some preliminary thoughts. First and foremost, I'd previously lumped the whole era together in my head as a sort of nebulous early Hollywood mishmash of MGM musicals, screwball romantic comedies, and Jimmy Stewart delivering stirring speeches. The '30s and the '40s are very distinct eras, technologically, stylistically, and culturally. The '30s had the Pre-Code era, and were still using many recognizable elements of silent filmmaking well into the second half of the decade. The studio star system really became dominant here as the big moguls consolidated their operations and took more creative control. The late '30s and the '40s is where everything became glossier, and had more of a prefab, assembly line quality. For instance, I watched both the 1931 and 1941 versions of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Despite the '41 version having bigger stars and fancier effects, the Pre-Code version has the better performances and the more memorable moments of horror.
I didn't expect to find any actors active during this period who are still working today, and was astonished to find some - Angela Lansbury made her screen debut with the 1944 version of "Gaslight" and "National Velvet," while Russ Tamblyn was Saul in "Samson and Delilah." And the annoying little kid in "Anchors Aweigh" turned out to be Dean Stockwell. My best surprise so far was finding out the Irish maid in "Dragonwyck" was Jessica Tandy. I'd never seen her as a younger actress in anything. But his was the era when all the stars I think of as the classic movie stars were young and in their prime - Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Bogart and Bacall, Rogers and Astaire, Hepburn and Tracy - they really should not have cast Spencer Tracy as Dr. Jekyll in the '41 remake, but it was wonderful to see him all the same.
I expected the racist and misogynist content to be more pronounced and more uncomfortable than ever, but so far there hasn't been much that's too objectionable. Maybe it's the films I've been picking, but minorities are absent more than anything else. African-American actors appear as service workers, if at all. Other minority characters are portrayed by Caucasian actors, and not trying particularly hard to disguise the fact. On the other hand, I did see "The Bitter Tea of General Yen," which features a wildly over-the-top caricature of a Chinese man, played by Swedish actor Nils Asther in yellowface makeup. The performance is so weird and so alien, it comes off as more bizarre than anything else. I know there's a lot more blackface and yellowface lurking here, just out of my line of sight.
So I know to tread carefully, and I suspect that my rosy view of this era isn't going to last, as I work through the more popular films and get down to the mediocrities nobody talks about anymore. However, I'm looking forward to turning up more old gems too. There hasn't been a year yet where I haven't found a film worth the trouble of doing some digging to find.
Happy watching.
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