Top 10 Films of 1939

Critics are rarely unanimous about anything, but the majority agree that the Hollywood studio system reached its peak in 1939. Indeed, many even claim it as cinema's annus mirabilis. So, let Cinema Paradiso take you on a guided tour through the films and faces that lit up the silver screen eight decades ago.

Tinseltown was clearly feeling good about itself in 1939, as Irving Cummings's Hollywood Cavalcade chronicled its recent history from the pie-flinging days of early slapstick to the coming of sound following the success of Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927). Playing himself, Buster Keaton directed the knockabout sequences, as producer Darryl F. Zanuck sought to mythologise the exiled film colony that had gone on to conquer the world. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen would burnish the legend in Singin' in the Rain (1952), while Peter Bogdanovich ladled on the nostalgia in Nickelodeon (1976). But, back in 1939, everyone in Hollywood was basking in the glow radiated by a studio system that had perfected the efficient and profitable mass production of popular entertainment.

A Combination of Factors

In 1939, Hollywood was dominated by the Big Five studios: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, 20th Century-Fox and RKO Radio Pictures. Alongside this quintet were the so-called Little Three of Columbia, Universal and United Artists, while Republic and Monogram were far and away the biggest operators among the minor companies on Poverty Row. What gave the majors their dominance was a business model known as vertical integration that enabled them to produce, distribute and exhibit their pictures without resort to outside agencies. The smaller studios didn't own their own theatre chains and, as a consequence, they weren't able to guarantee outlets through a process called block-booking.

With 80 million tickets being sold in the United States in 1939 alone, there were plenty of patrons to go round and Hollywood produced 365 features over the course of the year to pander to their differing tastes. And this figure didn't include the newsreels, serials and various live-action and animated shorts that formed part of a typical night out, as even though America had emerged from the Great Depression, audiences still demanded value for money. This meant that a good deal of routine material was churned out and 1939 proved no exception. But it also saw the release of an unusual number of superior pictures, from which a record 19 have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Filmgoers in the bigger cities also got to see some of the British imports that made it across the Atlantic. But a combination of Isolationism and cine-protectionism meant that few foreign-language features reached US screens, even when they were classics in the making like Marcel Carné's Le Jour se lève and Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu. Despite being home to migrants from across Europe, the USA was reluctant to show many films from Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, as the authorities didn't want to spread their propagandist messages. Moreover, as Japanese cinema was still a closely guarded secret, few even knew about masterpieces like Kenji Mizoguchi's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums.

The rise of authoritarianism in Europe had forced many film-makers to flee and, by 1939, they had started to master their new language and find their feet within the studio system. Their freedom of expression was somewhat limited by the Production Code, but only the odd feature might have been improved by a little more political, sexual or psychological frankness. Such was the quality of Hollywood's output this year that 10 titles were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Each one is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso, along with so much more.

Thrills and Spills

Several 1939 crime films followed patterns established earlier in the decade. Five years had passed since William Powell and Myrna Loy had first played sleuthing socialites Nick and Nora Charles and they returned to juggle parenthood with cracking the case of a murdered industrialist in WS Van Dyke's Another Thin Man.

George Sanders also added a dash of suavity to the role of Leslie Charteris's troubleshooter, Simon Templar, as he latches on to a dangerous San Francisco hoodlum in John Farrow's The Saint Strikes Back and delves into a currency scam in John Paddy Carstairs's The Saint in London. Intriguingly, Sanders often played the cad and Peter Lorre was similarly no stranger to villainous roles. But he found himself on the right side of the law in travelling to Egypt to track down the Queen of Sheba's priceless crown in Norman Foster's Mr Moto Takes a Vacation, which has not worn well because of the decision to cast a Hungarian actor as the Japanese detective.

By contrast, the 14 mysteries solved by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson have stood the test of time. The bulk of the series was made by Universal, but the first two were produced by 20th Century-Fox. Adapted from one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most enduringly popular novels, Sidney Lanfield's The Hound of the Baskervilles took the Baker Street duo to Dartmoor to investigate a family curse, while Alfred L. Werker's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes saw them pursuing Professor Moriarty (George Zucco) after the theft of the Crown Jewels.

Rathbone revisited the setting for the tense finale in Rowland V. Lee's Tower of London, which harked back to the Wars of the Roses to show how Richard, Duke of Gloucester enlisted the help of the sinister Mord (Boris Karloff) to secure the throne of England in succession to his brother, Edward IV (Ian Hunter). Lee also recruited Rathbone and Karloff for Son of Frankenstein, which is set 25 years after James Whale's 1931 take on Mary Shelley's Gothic chiller to show how Baron Wolf von Frankenstein attempts to restore the family name by reviving his father's creature. He is abetted by the faithful hunchback, Ygor, who is memorably played by Bela Lugosi, who also headlined Ford Beebe's serial, The Phantom Creeps, as Dr Alex Zorka, who conducts a series of dastardly experiments of his own after finding a meteorite in Africa.

Humphrey Bogart also dabbled in horror in 1939, as he played a boffin's loyal assistant in Vincent Sherman's The Return of Doctor X. Indeed, this was a busy year for Bogie, who was still very much a second-string star, even in a more traditional inner-city crime saga like Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties, which returned to the bootlegging days of Prohibition for what would be Cagney's last gangster movie for a decade. Into the breach stepped young toughs like John Garfield, who excels as the boxer wrongfully accused of murder in They Made Me a Criminal, which was directed by Busby Berkeley, who was taking a break from musicals like Babes in Arms, which launched a series of 'putting on a show' vehicles for Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.

The Great Outdoors

Five-time Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller returned to the MGM jungle for Richard Thorpe's Tarzan Finds a Son! This was the fourth of his 12 outings in the loincloth, although the story in which Tarzan, Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan) and Cheeta take in a foundling owed little to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Africa also provided the setting for both Henry King's Stanley and Livingstone, a biopic of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone that starred Spencer Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke, and Zoltan Korda's The Four Feathers, a lavish adaptation of AEW Mason's boy's own adventure that starred John Clements as the disgraced member of the Feversham family who turns out not to be a coward after all when he signs up for a military expedition to 1880s Egypt.

Another scion finds redemption after letting the side down in William Wellman's take on PC Wren's Beau Geste, which starred Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston as the siblings serving in the Maghreb in the French Foreign Legion. There was more imperial derring-do in George Stevens's Gunga Din, a reworking of a Rudyard Kipling story that saw Cary Grant join forces with Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who would lose his silent icon father during 1939 after he suffered a heart attack at the age of just 56. Indeed, actress Mary Pickford would lose two ex-husbands this year, as Irish actor Owen Moore also passed away at the age of 52.

Grant would essay a very different kind of action man opposite Jean Arthur in Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings, which centres on the heroics of an airmail crew in South America. Yet, Grant never made a Western, despite being roommates with one of the titans of the genre, Randolph Scott, who made his colour debut as a marshall sympathetic to sibling fugitives Jesse (Tyrone Power) and Frank (Henry Fonda) in Henry King's Jesse James. Scott would also join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as he reunited with Shirley Temple in Walter Lang's Susannah of the Mounties after they had proved so effective together in Allan Dwan's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938).

Scott's career might have taken a very different turn if he hadn't been pipped by Leslie Howard to the role of Ashley Wilkes in Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind, as producer David O. Selznick's fabled adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's bestseller remains one of the most revered pictures made in Hollywood during its golden age. A much-publicised search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara had fascinated film fans for almost two years before Selznick discovered Vivien Leigh, who had been forging a solid reputation on stage and screen in Britain. Indeed, it was a good year for Selznick the talent spotter, as he also brought Ingrid Bergman to California to play the piano teacher who bewitches violinist Leslie Howard in Gregory Ratoff's Intermezzo, which was a remake of the 1936 Gustaf Molander melodrama that had made Bergman a star in her native Sweden.

Like compatriot Greta Garbo, Bergman had worked in Germany, whose most iconic acting export, Marlene Dietrich, made something of a comeback in 1939 after resisting entreaties from propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to become the poster girl of Nazi cinema. She played gloriously against type as Frenchy in George Marshall's frontier comedy, Destry Rides Again, in which she famously had a barroom catfight with Una Merkel.

But the Western genre was transformed forever when John Ford discovered Monument Valley in Utah while filming Stagecoach, which plucked John Wayne from routine oaters to become Ford's ultimate man of action, just as Henry Fonda emerged as his man of principle in Drums Along the Mohawk, in which he teams with Claudette Colbert to play a couple whose bid to settle in rustic New York invokes the wrath of the local Native American tribes. However, Fonda proved even more impressive as the Kentucky lawyer making his way out of the backwoods in Ford's Young Mr Lincoln.

Laughter and Song

Some of the giants of wisecrack comedy were approaching the twilight of their screen careers in 1939. Groucho, Chico and Harpo adopted the guises of J. Cheever Loophole, Tony Pirelli and Punchy to help save a big-top show from bankruptcy in Edward Buzzell's At the Circus, which memorably includes Groucho singing 'Lydia the Tattooed Lady'. The smell of the sawdust is equally strong in George Marshall and Edward F. Cline's You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, which sees WC Fields on peak form as circus proprietor Larsen E. Whipsnade, whose struggles to make ends meet are not helped by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his smart alec doll, Charlie McCarthy.

This breezy romp can be found on a double bill with Six of a Kind (1934), which was directed by Leo McCarey. He gained invaluable experience directing shorts for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who wind up joining the Foreign Legion to help the latter recover from heartbreak in A. Edward Sutherland's The Flying Deuces. Laurel was famously born in Cumbria and another comic export who took a step towards confirming his place among the new generation of Hollywood funnymen was Kent-born Bob Hope, who trotted out his famous scaredy-cat routine in Elliott Nugent's The Cat and the Canary, which co-starred Paulette Goddard, who just happened to be married to another exiled English comic, Charlie Chaplin, who was working on the lampoon of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini that would be eventually be released as The Great Dictator (1940).

As screwball comedy started to slip out of vogue, it was replaced by the more sophisticated wit on show in Mitchell Leisen's Midnight and Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka. The latter rather stole the show, as MGM advertised their story of a Communist commissar to lets her hair down during a trip to Paris with the immortal strapline, 'Garbo Laughs!' But there's also much to admire about the former's Oscar-winning screenplay, which was penned by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and sees blue blood John Barrymore and hard-up Don Ameche both fall for Claudette Colbert, a Hungarian countess who is really a showgirl down on her luck.

Mistaken identities had played a key role in the RKO career of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. But it came to an end with the somewhat prosaic HC Potter biopic, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. With Hollywood's greatest dancing team going their separate ways, there was a window for novelty acts to make their mark, such as former Olympic skater Sonjia Henie, who plays a teacher who lands the lead in a big studio movie that stars needy crooner Rudy Vallee and is being promoted by sharp tack publicist Tyrone Power in Sidney Lanfield's Second Fiddle.

While Henie never quite made the same splash as MGM's Aqua Queen, Esther Williams, so Deanna Durbin never fully emerged from the shadow cast by Judy Garland. her co-star in the 1936 short Every Sunday. Yet, without the 'Little Miss Fix-It' musicals that Durbin made over the next few years, Universal Studios would not have survived the Depression. Henry Koster's Three Smart Girls (1936) proved so popular that Durbin got to reprise the role of Penny Craig in Three Smart Girls Grow Up. And quite a fuss was made when she got her first screen kiss from Robert Stack in First Love, which was also directed by Koster for producer Joe Pasternak, who would move on to MGM, where he would get his own film unit alongside Louis B. Mayer's nephew, Jack Cummings, and Arthur Freed, a lyricist who had moved into an executive role as an associate producer on Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz.

Freed would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture with An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958) which were directed by Vincente Minnelli, who would become the second husband of Judy Garland, whose performance as Dorothy Gale in MGM's lavish adaptation of L. Frank Baum's beloved stories was capped by her rendition of the Oscar-winning song, 'Over the Rainbow'. Freed persuaded the front office not to cut the song, as it was felt it slowed down the monochrome action in Kansas before the twister transports Dorothy and her pet dog Toto into a Technicolor wonderland. The year also saw another famous voyage into the unknown reach the screen, as brothers Dave and Max Fleischer demonstrated that Walt Disney wasn't alone in being capable of making feature animations with their glorious version of Jonathan Swift's timeless satire, Gulliver's Travels.

Bette Bounces Back

Bette Davis had set her heart on landing the role of Scarlett O'Hara and her performance as Julie Marsden in William Wyler's Jezebel (1938), which was set in the antebellum South, was intended to show Selznick and the rest of Hollywood what they would be missing. She was rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Actress and received a further nomination for a towering display as dying heiress Judith Traherne in Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory. Humphrey Bogart, Ronald Reagen and George Brent were among her admirers, with the latter returning in Goulding's adaptation of Zoe Akins's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Old Maid, another melodrama with a Civil War setting that charts the stormy relationship between Charlotte Lovell and her niece, Tina (Jane Bryan).

The year also saw Davis holding court in regal guise as Queen Elizabeth I opposite Errol Flynn in Michael Curtiz's The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and as Empress Carlotta alongside Paul Muni in William Dieterle's tale of imperial misadventure, Juarez. Dieterle also guided Charles Laughton through his heartbreaking turn as Quasimodo in a striking monochrome adaptation of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which had the distinction of being the first film shown at the Cannes Film Festival. However, the event was cancelled after German troops marched into Poland in September 1939.

Among the year's other notable literary adaptations was Walter Lang's Technicolor retelling of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Little Princess, which provided a more mature role for Shirley Temple, as the orphan maltreated by strict boarding school headmistress Mary Nash, and William Wyler's version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, which teams Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as the doomed lovers, Heathcliff and Cathy.

Cinema Paradiso customers will also need to keep their hankies at the ready as Carole Lombard and James Stewart battle overwhelming odds to keep their romances alive in John Cromwell's Made For Each Other. Fresh from her split with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers also found herself with her back to the wall, as the jobless out-of-towner who is adopted by tycoon Walter Connolly to teach his ungrateful family a few lessons in Gregory La Cava's 5th Avenue Girl and as the shopgirl mistaken for an unmarried waif by boss's son David Niven in Garson Kanin's Bachelor Mother.

Barbara Stanwyck gave a landmark performance of her own as the savvy Lorna Moon, who finds herself torn between near-bankrupt boxing manager Tom Moody (Adolphe Menjou) and promising pug Joe Bonaparte (William Holden) in Rouben Mamoulian's fine adaptation of Clifford Odets's Golden Boy.

This was very much the year of the underdog, as Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr. struggled to find work at the height of the Depression in Lewis Milestone's deeply moving version of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and as James Stewart's junior senator Jefferson Smith uncovers graft on Capitol Hill in Frank Capra's masterly political parable, Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Yet, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor went to Robert Donat for his beautifully judged performance as English schoolmaster Arthur Chipping in Sam Wood's Goodbye, Mr Chips, which was made by MGM at Repton School and Denham Studios. Modest as ever Donat joked, 'As soon as I put the moustache on, I felt the part, even if I did look like a great Airedale come out of a puddle.'

Meanwhile, Back in Blighty

With the cream of its acting talent scooping awards in Hollywood, British cinema should have been thriving. But the exodus would continue, with Alfred Hitchcock relocating to California after the Cornish smuggling saga, Jamaica Inn, his first adaptation of a Daphne Du Maurier novel, which paired Charles Laughton and emerging Irish star, Maureen O'Hara. Another small village would succumb to scandal in Paul L. Stein's Poison Pen, a simmering melodrama about murky motives and malevolent missives that featured such sterling performers as Flora Robson, Ann Todd and Robert Newton.

The latter would also play a struggling novelist who tries to ditch his grim past in Harold French's ingenious thriller, Dead Men Are Dangerous, while Stein would direct Raymond Massey as the chief suspect in the 'Moon Maniac' murder case in Black Limelight. Dark deeds were Tod Slaughter's stock-in-trade and he is on eye-rollingly good form in George King's The Face At the Window, a tale a lycanthropic mayhem set in 1880s Paris that is available to Cinema Paradiso users as part of the Tod Slaughter Triple Feature, which also includes King's The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936) and David MacDonald's It's Never Too Late to Mend (1937).

Crime fiction in Britain during this period was dominated by Edgar Wallace and two films drew on his prolific canon during 1939. A plot to sabotage the Suez Canal lies at the heart of Walter Forde's The Four Just Men, while Derrick De Marney uncovers a bid to nobble a promising racehorse in Reginald Denham's Flying 55. Jack LaRue plays another man with a hidden past in Norman Lee's Murder in Soho, while, across the capital, Thorold Dickinson coaxes performances out of some of the finest footballers of the decade in The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, a wittily teasing whodunit that brings Scotland Yard's Leslie Banks to Highbury.

The nearby Highbury Studios afforded Roy Boulting the chance to direct his second feature, Inquest, a courtroom thriller that is available to rent in a double bill with Thomas Bentley's Three Silent Men (1940). Bentley also directed the Stanley Lupino comedy, Lucky to Me, which can be found on a British Comedies of the 1930s double with Lupino Lane's Letting in the Sunshine (1933). Henry Edwards's The Lad (1935) similarly makes up the numbers with The Mysterious Mr Davis, the story of a silent business partner that is all the more unmissable because it features an eccentric cameo by Alastair Sim and because it was directed by Claude Autant-Lara, who became one of the cornerstones of the French film industry.

Compatriot Marcel Varnel had long been part of the British cine-scene and he points The Crazy Gang in the direction of the Red Gulch gold rush in The Frozen Limits and heads down to Turnbottom Round with Will Hay for Ask a Policeman, as Sergeant Dudfoot and his assistants, Albert (Graham Moffat) and Harbottle (Moore Marriott), stumble across a gang of smugglers. Varnel would go on to direct several George Formby pictures, but the Lancashire lad is in the capable hands of Anthony Kimmins for Trouble Brewing and Come On, George, which each has a horsey feel, as Formby pursues some racetrack counterfeiters and finds himself aboard a narky nag named Maneater that he's been told is a gentle creature called The Lamb.

Formby spent much of his career at the Associated Talking Pictures studio at Ealing and three 1939 comedies can be found among the Ealing Rarities collection. Robert Stevenson's Young Man's Fancy (Vol.8) rather bizarrely lands aristocrat Griffith Jones and Irish human cannonball Anna Lee in the 1870 Siege of Paris and the City of Light also provides the setting for Oswald Mitchell's Old Mother Riley in Paris (1938). It's paired with the same director's Old Mother Riley, MP (1939), which sees Arthur Lucan rise rapidly through the political establishment to become Minister for Strange Affairs.

Completing the Ealing trio is the Walter Forde duo of Cheer Boys Cheer (Vol.9) and Let's Be Famous (Vol.10), which both feature Irish comic Jimmy O'Dea. Centring on the rivalry between two breweries, the former has been identified as the template for the postwar Ealing comedies. It has also been cited as a satire on Anglo-German relations in the run-up to the Second World War, which had also been anticipated by such flag-wavers as Michael Powell's The Spy in Black, with Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson, and Maurice Elvey's Q Planes, which sees Hobson team up with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson in a lively thriller about a missing aircraft.

Producer Alexander Korda anticipated the debt that the nation would owe to the Royal Air Force in The Lion Has Wings, which appeared shortly after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939 and featured such stars as Ralph Richardson and Merle Oberon in an anthology with segments directed by Korda, Michael Powell, Adrian Brunel and Brian Desmond Hurst. But the most evocative British picture of the year was Humphrey Jennings's documentary, The First Days, which captured the mood in Britain during the Phoney War.