The Adventure of the 1930s Films

Previously on The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan: I began an odyssey through film history (See the 1920s post here)

I'm deep into a big project to watch my way through the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. I'm pleased to say I've now watched every film in the book that was released in the 1930s! It's been a fascinating journey so far, watching cinema develop in front of my very eyes and observing the world itself change too.

Whilst Charlie Chaplin was still making silent films throughout the 1930s, everyone else was now making sound films. Chaplin remained famous but the decade saw the rise of the comedy group. The Marx Brothers have both Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera on the list and I struggled with them. I enjoyed Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert a lot more and the pair exist as a middle ground between the verbal gags of the Marx Brothers and the pratfalls of the silent era.

Many of the genres of film we know and love today were refined in the 1930s. Suddenly the creature feature became a thing with Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Boris Karloff as the monster in Frankenstein and it's sequel The Bride of Frankenstein. I adored these films which take the best elements from the source material and combine it with superb gothic atmosphere and excellent performances from their stars. For a more arty take on vampires there's the French film Vampyr which notches up the atmosphere but forgets to add a plot. Perhaps most interesting was the film Freaks which is usually defined as a horror film but doesn't neatly fit into that genre. It's about a group of circus 'freaks', i.e. a group of disabled people and actually is very forward thinking in the way it treats them. I was disturbed to learn just how ableist critics were at the time and even the studio didn't let the disabled actors go to the usual studio canteen for fear of upsetting other people who were there.

The invention of sound allowed for the invention of the film musical. Many of these, like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, were grand musicals about a cast putting on a stage musical and were famous for their enormous dance numbers created by choreographer Busby Berkeley, often with incredible overhead shots. Also popular during the '30s were the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers like Top Hat and Swing Time. They were made famous for the incredible ballroom and tap dancing of the leading pair. Neither of these styles is particularly my bag but it's impossible not to admire the spectacle and skill involved in making them.

As film technologies improved it became possible to create big adventure films. There's Mutiny on the Bounty which is right up there as one of my favourites of the entire decade starring a never-better Clark Gable. Captains Courageous creates a heart-breaking father/son dynamic as part of it's adventure and the Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland films Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood have a romance at the centre surrounding my swash-buckling fun. 

Indeed, the studios with money behind them were able to push cinema further than ever before by the end of the '30s. For a start, technicolour had been invented although it largely remained only for the biggest budgeted films. Sweeping epic Gone with the Wind was made and nothing gets more Technicolor and huge as The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps most revolutionary of all was Walt Disney who had been developing animation in short films for some time but pushed what was possible with his first feature-length film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. All previous animation had been stop-motion in one way or another but suddenly the world had the bright, kinetic and funny Disney animation that we all grew up with. 

Of course, the 1930s were a disturbing place what with the rise of fascism across Europe, especially Hitler and the Nazi in Germany.  Director Leni Riefenstahl was tasked with making propaganda films for the Nazi's and two made it onto the list, Triumph of the Will showing the dark pageantry of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress and Olympia depicting the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. As a modern viewer these are really complicated to watch- Riefenstahl was clearly a hugely talented filmmaker and Olympia especially is more arty than Nazi but it's deeply uncomfortable knowing what the people shown believed and did. As the decade drew to a close it became clear that war was coming and there's perhaps a hint of cinema beginning to go more political and question ideologies with Ninotchka, a superb Greta Garbo comedy about a repressed Soviet woman finding herself in liberal Paris. 

The 1930s were a fascinating era for cinema and perhaps the most revolutionary. In the space of ten years the industry moved away from silent films and took things further than they could possible have imagined. Many of these films have huge legacies which had led to the creation of the blockbusters we see on screen today. I'm now fascinated to dive into the 1940s and see how cinema reacts to the Second World War.