20th Century Films: 1930 to 1934.

Between the Wars

By the early 1930s technology (including sound) and creativity had developed to the point where ambitious themes could be explored with greater confidence. The horrors of the Great War were a recent memory, to be exorcised by writers and directors. In Europe there were ominous political developments, and directors and actors were enticed (or escaping) to Hollywood as the skies darkened.

All Quiet on the Western Front / Lewis Milestone

1930. BW. USA. 130 mins. DVD.

Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. A group of German schoolboys are whipped into a patriotic fervour and volunteer for the Western Front. Disillusionment soon sets in as their lives are reduced to a simple struggle for survival and as friends disappear or are killed. One of the great anti-war movies. A similar treatment from the Allied viewpoint, Journey’s End (1930), is currently unavailable.

All Quiet on the Western Front / Erich Maria Remarque

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The Blue Angel / Josef Von Sternberg

1930. BW. Ger. 98 mins. DVD.

A two disc set with both German and English language versions of this unsavoury prospect of the Weimar Republic. A straight-laced professor is infatuated with a tawdry night club singer. She marries him, but her growing contempt and manipulation leaves him humiliated, with his life ruined. Marlene Dietrich sings Falling in Love Again. The role made her an international star.

The Blue Angel / Soundtrack Album

Format: 1 Disc. 25 Tracks.

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A Farewell to Arms / Frank Borsage

1932. BW. USA. 79 mins. DVD.

Gary Cooper stars as the American ambulance driver who falls in love with his British nurse and leaves the war behind when he discovers she is pregnant. Low key rendition of the Ernest Hemingway novel that was based on his own experiences in the Great War.

A Farewell to Arms / Ernest Hemingway

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Shanghai Express / Josef Von Sternberg

1932. BW. USA. 84 mins. DVD.

Josef Von Sternberg directs Marlene Dietrich in this melodrama where a British officer meets on old flame on a train that is subsequently hijacked by Chinese bandits. Impressive visual quality and characterisation.

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The Horror, the Horror!

Hollywood’s adoption of Gothic themes marked the move from expressionist fantasy to populist exploitation and reflected the conflict between creativity and commercialism. European influences produced a compromise between art and Mammon that led to some classic films and classic performances: virtually all of the great popular horror themes stem from the first half of the 1930s.

Dracula / Tod Browning

1930. BW. USA. 71 mins. DVD.

Tod Browning and Bela Lugosi here move the archetypal vampire story away from the art theatre of Nosferatu to the popular cinema that has re-worked the theme ever since. Lugosi provided the actor’s template (and the accent) that has served subsequent productions (and spoofs) well: “Children of the night. What music they make!” - you have to be Hungarian! With special features.

Dracula / Bram Stoker

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Frankenstein / James Whale

1931. BW. USA. 69 mins. DVD.

What Bela Lugosi did for Dracula, Boris Karloff does for Frankenstein’s monster — the makeup has become a cliché. This early version of the Mary Shelley novel is a little closer to the original than many re-makes, treating the monster with a degree of sympathy and compassion. James Whale was one of a number of directors who brought a degree of European sensibility to Hollywood. Gods and Monsters (1998 qv), directed by Bill Condon, is a sensitive account of Whale’s last days and his mysterious death in 1957.

Frankenstein / Mary Shelley

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Vampyr / Carl Dreyer

1931. BW. Ger/Fr. 72 mins. DVD.

Based on a Sheridan Le Fanu story rather than the usual Bram Stoker source, a man suspects that he is surrounded by vampires and has a dream of his own death. Misty and atmospheric rather than dynamic.

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The Mummy / Karl Freund

1932. BW. USA. 73 mins. DVD.

The Mummy was one of the four great popular horror themes, along with Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, to emerge from 1930s Hollywood. Few of the many re-makes have captured the atmosphere of the originals. Boris Karloff lumbers into cinema history as the revitalised Imhotep. The disc includes Mummy Dearest, an interesting featurette.

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The Old Dark House / James Whale

1932. BW. USA. 85 mins. DVD.

James Whale, in a film that stands alongside his very best, leaves a legacy of conventions and clichés that have stood cinema in good stead ever since. The shots of the foreboding exterior and the starkly lit interiors will be familiar to any devotee of the Gothic. Similarly, the plot device of a disparate group of travellers thrown together in a creaking country pile has been reworked time and again. But it is the characters and characterisations that give The Old Dark House its lasting charm and influence. The house is presided over by the bedridden 102-year-old Sir Roderick Femm, played brilliantly by actress Elspeth Dudgeon. His bizarre family consists of an atheist son, his fanatically religious sister and an older pyromaniac brother held captive in his room. Hulking around the action is the mute, scarred and psychotic butler, played to the hilt by Boris Karloff in his first real starring role. The motley bunch of stranded travellers include Raymond Massey, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Stuart and Charles Laughton and the chaos begins when the drunken butler releases the incarcerated son. Not so much a horror, more a comedy of situation and manners, the film was based on a novel by JB Priestley.

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The Invisible Man / James Whale

1933. BW. USA. 68 mins. DVD.

One of cinema’s little ironies is that Claude Rains achieved stardom in his first film, even though the title role meant that he appeared for only a short time! Technically innovative tale of a chemist who becomes a psychotic murderer after discovering a formula that renders him invisible.

The Invisible Man / H G Wells

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King Kong / Merian C Cooper

1933. BW. USA. 100 mins. DVD.

The most influential monster classic of all time. A masterpiece of stop motion animation for its day, with the giant gorilla contrasted against an erotically vulnerable Fay Wray. The climactic scene at the top of the Empire State Building is probably the most iconic and universally recognised of all film images.

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Arrival of the Gangster

The criminal world offered complex and exciting plot possibilities, but it was Prohibition in the USA that established a genre that was the first true cinematic voice of America.

M / Fritz Lang

1930. BW. Ger. 118 mins. DVD.

The seeds of film noir are planted here. Fritz Lang’s first venture into sound and one of his greatest films. Peter Lorre is unforgettable as a serial child killer brought to justice by a city’s criminals, who see that his activities are giving them a bad name. Two disc set with additional features.

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The Public Enemy / William Wellman

1931. BW. USA. 84 mins. DVD.

One of the best films to come out of Hollywood’s love affair with the corruption and gangsterism of the Prohibition era. Cagney is magnificent as his character rises from petty bootlegger to petty crime boss. Not the best guide to the etiquette of eating grapefruit!

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Scarface / Howard Hawks

1932. BW. USA. 86 mins. DVD.

With the leading character loosely based on Al Capone, this is a vivid recreation of Chicago in the 1920s and one of the most potent of the era and the gangster genre. Paul Muni excels alongside George Raft and Anne Dvorak.

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Comedy Comes of Age

Silent comedy relied on slapstick and sight gags. Talkies allowed the addition of slick fast moving dialogue. The Marx Brothers combined the best of the old with the best of the new in a kind of vaudeville of the screen where script was king.

Animal Crackers / Victor Heerman

1930. BW. USA. 99 mins. DVD.

Our introduction to the Marx Brothers. Sight gags mixed with quick-fire dialogue and one-liners: ‘One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. What he was doing in my pyjamas I’ll never know.’

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Horse Feathers / Norman Z McLeod

1932. BW. USA. 63 mins. DVD.

Groucho Marx as the corrupt and unscrupulous college principal determined to take the school football team to victory. One of the wildest Marx Brothers movies.

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Duck Soup / Leo McCarey

1933. BW. USA. 66 mins. DVD.

Groucho, as Rufus T Firefly, is made President of Fredonia on the insistence of the statuesque Mrs. Teasdale. Margaret Dumont reprises her imposing but frequently humiliated persona. The mirror sequence and the lemonade stall cameo are Marx Brothers classics.

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History & Literature

The advent of the talkies heralded the full flowering of cinema’s fascination with historical themes and period drama. Historical offerings were by no means free of distortions and fantasy; and more than a little licence was taken with some adaptations of literary classics. This said, cinema was finding a dramatic approach that was evolving to suit the medium.

The Private Life of Henry VIII / Alexander Korda

1933. BW. UK. 97 mins. DVD.

Charles Laughton gives an Oscar winning performance for his often hilarious portrayal of the much-married monarch. The film signals Alexander Korda’s interest in historical themes and was one of the first British movies to attract attention abroad.

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David Copperfield / George Cukor

1934. BW. US. 125 mins. DVD.

A successful early example of Hollywood’s flirtation with literature. Charles Dickens’s semi-biographical novel is translated to the screen by a superb cast, especially in the supporting roles: W C Fields as Micawber, Edna May as Aunt Bessie, Basil Rathbone as Murdstone and Roland Young as a convincingly unctuous Uriah Heep.

David Copperfield / Charles Dickens

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Lorna Doone / Basil Dean

1934. BW. UK. 89 mins. VHS.

A straightforward and effective version of R D Blackmore’s historical romance, shot on location on the Exmoor of the novel’s setting. A farmer falls in love with an offspring of the outlaw Doones, only to discover that she is an abducted heiress.

Lorna Doone / R D Blackmore

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The Scarlet Empress / Josef von Sternberg

1934. BW. USA. 100 mins. VHS.

Marlene Dietrich plays Catherine the Great, from her arrival at the Russian court as the innocent bride of half witted Grand Duke Peter (Sam Jaffe), to her triumphal ascent to the throne. Dietrich’s beauty is strangely ethereal throughout and erupts into magnificence in the climactic scene. Jaffe does a superb job of combining derangement with low cunning; John Lodge oozes lechery as the Imperial emissary Prince Alexei; and Louise Dresser is the Empress Elisabeth. An historical fantasy but a pictorial feast: The Scarlet Empress is a masterpiece of set design — grotesque statuary and colossal doors — and there are too many classic shots and edits to be mentioned here.

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The Documentary Moves On

In Britain the documentary movement developed in opposition to the commercial film industry. John Grierson was a driving force, having already made Drifters (1929 qv) as head of the Empire Marketing Board. Many more industrial and marketing bodies were to employ documentary film makers and use slice-of-life techniques as subtle propaganda. The vast majority of these, generally short, films are unfortunately unavailable from Amazon; but they provided a training ground for a number of notable directors and pressed home the creative possibilities of outdoor locations. The lessons learnt were employed in wartime public information films and had enormous influence on British film drama during WWII and after.

Man of Aran / Robert Flaherty

1934. BW. UK. 75 mins. DVD.

Crofting and fishing on the islands off the coast of western Ireland. More accomplished than Flaherty’s earlier Nanook of the North (1921 qv) and a step towards the maturation of the documentary. But the spare scenic magnificence of the Arrans and the ocean overpower the human interest.

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