If the 21st century seems to be speeding by a bit too quickly, why not let Cinema Paradiso take you back a hundred years to a gentler time when the world was still coming to terms with both the senseless slaughter of the Great War and the rise of modernity in so many aspects of daily life?
A century on, it's hard to imagine the sense of devastation caused by a conflict that had claimed an estimated 40 million casualties. Around half of that number had been wounded, gassed or traumatised by shellshock and many found reintegrating into society an unbearable strain. Yet, while the 'Lost Generation' was mourned around the world, 1920s youth adopted a 'live for the day' attitude that saw these 'bright young things' turn the 'Roaring Twenties' into a 'Jazz Age' of novelty, decadence and optimism.
A Brave New World?
Any hopes that the War to End All Wars would bring about a much-needed decade of peace and rapprochement were quickly dashed when the Allies sought to use the Treaty of Versailles (1919) to make Germany pay for her far from conclusive defeat. The spectre of Bolshevism also cast a pall over the continent, as the United States withdrew into Isolationism following its decision not to join the League of Nations, which had been the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson.
Talking pictures were still seven years away, as the 1920s started, but one of the most impactful early offerings, Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), summed up the mood in Weimar Germany, as the students rebel against stuffed shirt teacher Emil Jannings before his life unravels after becoming obsessed with Marlene Dietrich's cabaret star. Rainer Werner Fassbinder also examined the extent to which the democratic state that had replaced Kaiser Wilhelm's authoritarian empire was doomed from the outset in his magisterial 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). Edgar Reitz's similarly charted the rise of Nazism in the early episodes of his masterly account of 20th-century German social history, Heimat (1984), while Volker Schlondörff's Oscar-winning adaptation of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1979), Menno Meyjes's Max (2002) and John Duigan's Head in the Clouds (2004) dwelt on the conditions that precipitated the events depicted in Christian Duguay's Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003), which features Robert Carlyle in the title role.
As the BBC's exceptional mini-series, Fall of Eagles (1974), points out, the Hohenzollerns were not the only dynasty to be toppled at the end of the Great War. Life in post-Hapsburg Vienna was commemorated in Anthony Bushell's The Angel With the Trumpet (1950), while Austrian author Oskar Werner is drawn into a ménage cordiale with the free-spirited French duo of Henri Serre and Jeanne Moreau in François Truffaut's nouvelle vague masterpiece, Jules et Jim (1962). The mystery surrounding a woman claiming to be one of the daughters of the murdered Tsar caused great consternation among the exiled Romanovs in Paris, as Anatole Litvak explains in Anastasia (1956), which saw Ingrid Bergman making an Oscar-winning return to the Hollywood fold after the scandal surrounding her marriage to Italian neo-realist director, Roberto Rossellini. The story has since been retold twice in animated form in Don Bluth's Anastasia (1997) and Susan and Jack Beak's Anastasia (1998), although they pale in artistry and political perspicacity beside Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso (1992), a Studio Ghibli fantasy about a high-flying pig seeking aerial dominance over the Adriatic region in the 1920s.
The consequences of the Russian Revolution were momentously recalled in David Lean's epic take on Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1965), which followed on from his equally imposing analysis of the struggle to wrest control of the Middle East from the Ottoman Turks in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The impact of the British Empire's slow decline also impinged upon Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), which follows the (mis) fortunes of Puyi (John Lone), the boy ruler of China whose Anglophile tendencies owed much to the influence of tutor Reginald Johnston (Peter O'Toole) in the period before they were driven from the Forbidden City following the 1924 Beijing Coup.
American missionary Barbara Stanwyck is captured by warlord Nils Asther in Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), which is set in Shanghai during the civil war. Catholic priest Gregory Peck receives a warmer welcome in John M. Stahl's The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), but he still has his work cut out evangelising in the face of an invading army in a sprawling adaptation of an AJ Cronin novel that earned its star an Oscar nomination. An equally tricky situation faces pilot Tom Sellick, as he helps heiress Bess Armstrong find her missing father in Brian G. Hutton's High Road to China (1983). It's daggers drawn from the get-go for this intrepid duo, but a chance meeting on the Mekong River sparks an affair between Chinese diplomat Tony Leung and French teenager Jane March in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover (1992).
The marital difficulties between doctor Edward Norton and adulterous spouse Naomi Watts are overtaken by the epidemic that strikes a remote Chinese village in John Curran's take on the W. Somerset Maugham classic, The Painted Veil (2006), which would make for a fine double bill with John Byrum's adaptation of the same writer's The Razor's Edge (1984), which takes disillusioned war veteran Bill Murray to the Himilayas in his search for spiritual enlightenment. There's little time for contemplation, however, after Ge You arrives in Goose Town, as things kick off between mobster Chow Yun Fat and bandit Jiang Wen in the latter's combustible actioner, Let the Bullets Fly (2010).
Having been in the Allied ranks during the Great War, Japan began drifting towards the militarism that would see it form part of the Axis during the Second World War and coded insights into the nation's shifting priorities can be detected in Noboru Tanaka's pinku-eiga, Watcher in the Attic (1976), and Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), which stars Ziyi Zhang in an adaptation of Arthur Golden's bestseller that won Academy Awards for John Myhre and Gretchen Rau's art direction. Colleen Attwood's costumes and Dion Beebe's cinematography. The production values are equally lavish in Kim Jee-woon's grippingly tense The Age of Shadows (2016), which is set during the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula and centres on the machinations of a resistance group seeking to smuggle explosives on a train from Shanghai. French Indochina provides the setting for Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers (2004), which follows the diverging paths taken by a couple of tiger cubs named Sangha and Kumal.
Opposition to British rule in India was beginning to gather momentum and its effects can be felt in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), James Ivory's Heat and Dust (1983) and David Lean's A Passage to India (1984). There's a similarly epic feel to Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985), an account of the East African romance between Danish writer Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) and British adventurer Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) that won seven Academy Awards. including Best Picture and Director. Russian director Sergei Bodrov takes us to the Namib Desert in what was then German South-West Africa for Running Free (1999), the story of a chestnut foal named Lucky that draws to its conclusion in the mid-1920s.
Our Jazz Age globe-trotting next takes us to Sydney, where femme fatale Rose Byrne comes between boxing promoter Hugo Weaving and prize asset Matthew Le Nevez in Jonathan Ogilvie's The Tender Hook (2008), while emotions also run high in the Janus Rock lighthouse off the Western Australian coast after Michael Fassbinder and Alicia Vikander rescue a baby from an abandoned boat in Derek Cianfrance's intense adaptation of the ML Stedman bestseller, The Light Between Oceans (2016). We end this section by alighting in South America for Alan Parker's screen version of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita (1996), which won the Oscar for Best Song, as well as earning Madonna a Golden Globe for her performance as Eva Duarte, who was plucked from backwater poverty by tango singer Agustin Magaldi (Jimmy Nail). The 1920s are also briefly glimpsed in Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), Mike Newell's ambitious interpretation of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's account of a 50-year marriage in the Colombian port of Cartagena.
Bright Young Things
Although the traditional class system was shaken by the Great War and the General Strike, deference largely remained the order of the day in 1920s Britain. Consequently, the antics of the bohemian blue bloods who were nicknamed 'the bright young things' were regarded almost indulgently by a public glad to have a distraction from the pain of loss and the drabness of everyday toil.
Five decades later, television audiences were reminded of the frivolities, as Lady Georgina Worsley (Lesley-Anne Down) brought the Jazz Age to Eaton Place in the fifth and final season of Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75). Several other small-screen series have centred on the 20s, including The House of Eliott (1991-94), The Grand (1997-98), Mr Selfridge (2013-16) and Peaky Blinders (2013-). The final episodes of Downton Abbey (2010-16) also took place at the start of the decade, although the visit of George V (Simon Jones) and Queen Mary (Geraldine James) in Michael Engler's 2019 big-screen version occurred in 1927.
Simon Jones is no stranger to the Roaring Twenties, having played Bridey in Charles Sturridge's Brideshead Revisited (1981), which was so popular that yuppies and university students started apeing the dress and mannerisms of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews as Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte. Julian Jarrold's 2008 cinematic retelling proved less influential, but it followed capably in the wake of another Evelyn Waugh adaptation, Bright Young Things (2003), which writer-director Stephen Fry reworked from the 1930 tome, Vile Bodies.
Another British author who captured the unique mood of the times was PG Wodehouse. He has been best served by television, with John Alderton and Pauline Collins teaming splendidly in Wodehouse Playhouse (1978) before Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie were impeccably cast in Jeeves and Wooster (1990-93). More recently, Timothy Spall and Mark Williams formed another admirable master-butler double act as Lord Emsworth and Beech in Blandings (2013-14). On the big screen, Norman Wisdom sought a fresh challenge by playing a milquetoast nephew falling foul of fearsome aunt Athene Seyler in Henry Kaplan's The Girl on the Boat (1962). Unfortunately, the film failed to connect with fans who preferred Norman playing loveable dolts in modern dress and Stephan Elliot's take on Noël Coward's hit play, Easy Virtue (2008), also struggled to please the critics, despite the spirited presence of Jessica Biel, Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth.
Coward was one of Britain's most visible bon viveur and Joe Stephenson has been planning a biopic for the last five years. While waiting, Cinema Paradiso users might like to check out Christopher Hampton's Carrington (1995), Marc Forster's Christopher Robin (2018), James Howes's Enid (2009) and Chanya Button's Vita & Virginia (2018) in order to learn a bit more about painter Dora Carrington, the son of Winnie the Pooh author EE Milne, children's writer Enid Blyton, and bluestockings Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. The latter was mesmerisingly played by Elizabeth Debicki opposite Gemma Arterton, although her portrayal was somewhat overshadowed by Nicole Kidman's Oscar-winning turn in Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002), as Woolf worked on his breakthrough tome, Mrs Dalloway, which was filmed in 1997 by Marleen Gorris, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role.
Daughter Joely Richardson is one of several actresses to play Constance Reid, who caused a scandal with her liaison with her war-wounded husband's gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Richardson co-starred with Sean Bean in Ken Russell's Lady Chatterley (1993), which was also the title used by Pascale Ferran in her five-time César-winning 2006 version, which teamed Marina Hands and Jean-Louis Coulloc'h (whose character was called Parkin). Two adaptations have used DH Lawrence's full title, Lady Chatterley's Lover, with Just Jaeckin's 1981 adaptation featuring Sylvia Kristel and Nicholas Clay and Jed Mercurio's 2015 BBC interpretation starring Holliday Grainger and Richard Madden.
Two more Lawrence tales with 1920s settings are available from Cinema Paradiso, Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969) and Christopher Miles's The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970). Glenda Jackson won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in the former, alongside Jennie Linden and the nude-wrestling Alan Bates and Oliver Reed. The roles Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich were taken by Rosamund Pike, Rachael Stirling, Rory Kinnear and Joseph Mawle in Miranda Bowen's 2011 BBC reworking.
Another celebrated feature that has been retooled on several occasions for the small screen is Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier took the roles of The Girl and Maxim de Winter that will soon be played by Lily James and Armie Hammer in Ben Wheatley's upcoming remake of Daphne Du Maurier's Gothic melodrama, while Kristin Scott Thomas is due to succeed Judith Anderson as the formidable Mrs Danvers. Diana Rigg relished the opportunity to menace Emilia Fox and Charles Dance in Jim O'Brien's 1997 small-screen version, which is set in 1927.
Maxim met the second Mrs De Winter on the same French Riviera that was so wittily celebrated by Jean Vigo in his avant-garde classic, A propos de Nice (1930). Adapted from the 'Marseille Trilogy' written by Marcel Pagnol, Joshua Logan's Fanny (1961) starred Leslie Caron in a musical version of the 1920s waterfront saga that Daniel Auteuil sought to revive with Marius and Fanny (both 2013). The continental dalliances are of a more rarefied nature, as Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson, Polly Walker and Joan Plowright leave a rainy London for the sun of Portofino in Mike Newell's droll adaptation of Elizabeth von Arnim's Enchanted April (1991).
By contrast, the Russia in which Jewish waif Christina Ricci grows up is a very dangerous place and she is grateful to arrive in London in 1927 at the start of Sally Potter's The Man Who Cried (2000). The same city was the playground of Quentin Crisp (John Hurt), as he explored his sexuality in the cafés of Soho in Jack Gold's The Naked Civil Servant (1975). The late 1920s also saw the young Alan Turing (Alex Lawther) discover a love of cryptography as an escape from boarding school bullying in Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game (2014), while painters Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) similarly flout convention in Tom Hooper's fact-based cross-dressing drama, The Danish Girl (2015).
Joan Plowright contributes another scene-stealing performance as she and Mia Farrow feud over newcomer Natasha Richardson in John Irvin's Widows Peak (1994) which shares a 1920s Irish setting with Neil Jordan's Michael Collins (1996) and Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), which both deal with Ireland's bid for independence, and with Brian O'Malley's atmospheric ghost story, The Lodgers (2017).
Across the Irish Sea, the focus falls on a lot of the common folk in David Lean and Noël Coward's This Happy Breed (1943), John Schlesinger's Cold Comfort Farm (1995) and Roger Mainwood's Ethel & Ernest (2016), which was animated in the style of Raymond Briggs's charming tribute to his own parents. Only the rollicking take on Stella Gibbons's 1932 novel is set exclusively in the 1920s and the decade serves as a prologue for the more dramatic events to come in a pair of Royal biopics. Madonna's W.E. (2011) and Tom Hooper's The King's Speech (2010), which respectively teamed Andrea Riseborough and James D'Arcy as Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII and the Oscar-winning Colin Firth and Helena Bonham-Carter as George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Flappers and the Flipside
The United States came of age during the 1920s and cinema played a key role in extending the global reach of American ideas, attitudes and fashions. The latter were sported by liberated young women known as 'flappers' and their role model was Clara Bow, who had earned the nickname 'The It Girl' after starring in Clarence Badger's adaptation of Elinor Glyn's groundbreaking bestseller, It (1927). Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore caught the spirit of the age in George Roy Hill's rousing musical comedy, Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967). But the Jazz Age is best epitomised by F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 tome, The Great Gatsby, which is available from Cinema Paradiso in two fascinating versions. Robert Redford and Mia Farrow were teamed as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan in Jack Clayton's 1974 adaptation and by Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in Baz Luhrmann's 2013 reworking.
Henry King's cult interpretation of Ernest Hemingway's seminal study of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises (1957), stars Tyrone Power as the war-wounded journalist whose European odyssey brings him into contact with Ava Gardner and Errol Flynn in the expatriate enclave in Paris. Prince heads for the Riviera in Under the Cherry Moon (1986) in which he plays a musician whose flirtation with socialite Kristin Scott Thomas is not appreciated by her zealously protective father, Steven Berkoff.
Songwriter Cole Porter finds himself keeping company with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, as Woody Allen pitches Hollywood screenwriter Owen Wilson into the expat milieu in the time-travelling fantasy, Midnight in Paris (2011), which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Allen is particularly fond of this period, as it also provides the backdrop for Zelig (1983), a masterly newsreel pastiche in which he plays the eponymous 'human chameleon', and Bullets Over Broadway (1994), which earned Dianne Wiest the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in a story about a gangster seeking to make his moll a stage star in much the same way that Orson Welles does with wife Dorothy Comingore in the latter part of Citizen Kane (1941). Writer-director Alan Rudolph is also fond of the 1920s, with Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) which stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker in a paean to the chic coterie of writers that gathered in New York at the elegant Algonquin Hotel.
It wasn't all glitz and glamour, however, as John Sayles described in Matewan (1987), a pugnacious account of the 1920 showdown between a union organiser and the management of the Stone Mountain Coal Company in West Virginia. Women also had it tough. Rob Marshall's 2002 musicalised version of the Maurine Dallas Watkins's play, Chicago, won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress for Catherine Zeta-Jones. Roxie and Velma Kelley are among the many women discovering that emancipation often came at a price in the 1920s. Yet Olivia De Havilland won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance as a single mother in a backwater town in Mitchell Leisen's To Each His Own (1946), while widow Myrna Loy has a bigger brood to raise in Henry Levin's Belles on Their Toes (1952), a sequel to Walter Lang's Cheaper By the Dozen (1950), which had co-starred Clifton Webb.
First love has a devastating effect upon Kansas City teenager Natalie Wood when she hooks up with the dashing Warren Beatty in Elia Kazan's screen version of William Inge's play, Splendor in the Grass (1961). Whoopi Goldberg and Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary Louise Parker also learn some harsh lessons in the 1920s segments of two sprawling sagas, Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985) and Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), which were respectively adapted from novels by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker and the Oscar-nominated Fannie Flagg. Even Disney latched on to the changing attitudes towards working women, as aspiring chef Tiana (Arika Noni Rose) negotiates the tough realities of 1920s New Orleans in Ron Clements and John Musker's The Princess and the Frog (2009).
Another modern-day fairytale starts in a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, as injured stuntman Lee Pace tells fellow patient Catinca Untaru about five mythical heroes in Tarsem Singh's The Fall (2006). The American Dream is the subject of a pair of powerful family sagas, George Stevens's Giant (1956) and Edward Zwick's Legends of the Fall (1994), which respectively focus on the conflicted kinfolk of a Texan oil tycoon and a Montana rancher. But the focus falls firmly on the corrupting nature of greed in John Huston's compelling adaptation of B. Travers's 1927 novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), which saw Huston win Oscars for his direction and writing. Moreover, he guided father Walter Huston to the Best Supporting Actor prize for his gnarled turn as a gold prospector opposite Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt.
Burt Lancaster and Shirley Jones won Oscars for their performances as a charismatic, but opportunistic, preacher and the old flame who tries to redeem him in Richard Brooks's potent adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's satirical novel, Elmer Gantry (1960). Preacher Tom Skerritt also lets his zeal run away with him in raising sons Craig Sheffer and Brad Pitt in Robert Redford's retelling of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It (1992). Breaking away is also the theme of Lasse Hallström's interpretation of the John Irving novel, The Cider House Rules (1999), as Tobey Maguire seeks something more than taking over the St Cloud's Orphanage where he was raised by kindly doctor Michael Caine, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for his empathetic performance.
By the time the decade ended. America was reeling from the dual effects of the 1919 Volstead Act that had introduced Prohibition and the 1929 Wall Street Crash, which ushered in the Great Depression. Such was the public appetite for stories about the crime wave that was sparked by bootlegging that Hollywood churned out dozens of gangster movies that exploited the new sound technology. Among the best were Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar, William A. Wellman's The Public Enemy (both 1931), Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932) and Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939).
Their influence can be felt to varying degrees on such later entries in the cycle as Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and The Cotton Club (1984), Mike Nichols's The Fortune (1975), Eddie Murphy's Harlem Nights, Howard Brookner's Bloodhounds of Broadway (both 1989), Joel and Ethan Coen's Miller's Crossing (1990) and Ben Affleck's Live By Night (2016). But true crime stories also appealed, with mob biopics like Steve Carver's Capone (1975), Robert Benton's Billy Bathgate (1991) and Richard Linklater's The Newton Boys (1998) being balanced by both law enforcement exposés like Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar (2011) and such reconstructions of notorious cases as Richard Fleischer's Compulsion (1959), Scott L. Flynn's The Gray Man (2007) and the prolific Eastwood's Changeling (2008).
The genre has often been debunked down the years, with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon donning drag to join Marilyn Monroe's jazz band after witnessing a gangland shooting in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), and Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. putting a tuneful spin on robbing the rich in Gordon Douglas's Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964). Even a couple of kidpix have got in on the criminous business, with secret agents seeking to steal a skeleton from the Natural History Museum in Robert Stevenson's One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975) and some junior hoodlums firing off their splurge guns in Alan Parker's hilarious musical, Bugsy Malone (1976).
Harking back to the bad old frontier days, Mateo Gil's Blackthorn (2011) speculates on what might have happened if Butch Cassidy (Sam Shepard) had not leapt to his death with the Sundance Kid in Bolivia in 1908. John Ford also brought a Western quality to the west coast of Ireland, as John Wayne returns to his roots in Innisfree in The Quiet Man (1952) which won the Oscar for Best Picture. Gene Hackman and Jean-Claude Van Damme seek to leave it all behind by joining the Foreign Legion in Dick Richards's March or Die (1977) and Peter MacDonald's Legionnaire (1994), while Van Damme directs his own bid to triumph at the Ghan-gheng martial arts competition in The Quest (1996) before travelling back from 1994 in an effort to prevent the Wall Street Crash in Peter Hyams's Timecop (1994).
Fun and Games
Tradition and novelty went hand in hand in the 1920s. So, while people in the frozen north remained dependent upon sledges in films like Simon Wells's Balto (1995) and Phil Weinstein's sequels, Balto: Wolf Quest (2002) and Balto: Wind of Change (2004), others were taking to the skies. James Stewart plays Charles Lindbergh on his record-breaking 1927 non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic in Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St Louis (1957), while Hilary Swank took on the role of Amelia Earhart in Mira Nair's Amelia (2009), as the 30 year-old matched the feat a year later. Part-time movie mogul Howard Hughes was as interested in building planes as he was flying and filming them, as Leonardo DiCaprio demonstrates in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), which saw Cate Blanchett make Oscar history by scooping an award for playing a previous winner, in four-timer Katharine Hepburn.
Improved transportation made it easier for sports teams and fans to get around the country and several 1920s icons have been immortalised on screen. Baseball legend Babe Ruth is played by John Goodman in Arthur Hiller's The Babe (1992), while Jim Caviezel reveals the struggles endured by golf's greatest amateur in Rowdy Harrington's Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004). Russell Crowe goes toe to toe with adversity as boxer James J. Braddock in Ron Howard's Cinderella Man (2005), while the exploits of Harold 'Red' Grange and the Duluth Eskimos inspired the American Football action in George Clooney's Leatherheads (2008). It was all about crossing the line first in Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981), however, the Oscar-winning memoir of the feats achieved by British athletes Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams at the 1924 Paris Olympics.
As one might expect of a decade dubbed 'the Jazz Age', the 1920s was also a key period for entertainment and artistry on Broadway and in Hollywood. The career of a master showman from Chicago is celebrated in Robert Z. Leonard's The Great Ziegfeld (1936), which teamed William Powell and Myrna Loy as Florenz Ziegfeld and Billie Burke, although they were upstaged by Luise Rainer's Oscar-winning turn as Anna Held. Doris Day also excels as Ruth Etting in Charles Vidor's Love Me or Leave Me (1955), which chronicles her tortured relationship with manager Martin Snyder (James Cagney). Day failed to snag an Oscar nomination, but Barbra Streisand won Best Actress for her first feature performance, as Follies sensation Fanny Brice in William Wyler's Funny Girl (1968), which co-starred Walter Pidgeon as Ziegfeld and Omar Sharif as gambler Nick Arnstein. Streisand would reprise the role opposite James Caan as Brice's entrepreneur husband, Billy Rose, in Herbert Ross's Funny Lady (1975).
Vanessa Redgrave won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her fleet-footed display as dancer Isadora Duncan in Karel Reisz's Isadora (1968). But the emphasis was more on the music in Anthony Mann's The Glenn Miller Story (1953), Melville Shavelson's The Five Pennies (1959) and Irwin Winkler's De-Lovely (2004) which respectively star James Stewart as bandleader Glenn Miller, Danny Kaye as trumpeter Red Nichols (alongside the guesting Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby) and Kevin Kline as songwriter Cole Porter, who had previously been played by Cary Grant in Michael Curtiz's factually wayward, Night and Day (1946).
Robert Walker was cast as composer Jerome Kern in Richard Whorf's Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) and Cinema Paradiso offers users two versions of Kern's landmark musicalisation of Edna Ferber's novel, Show Boat, with James Whale directing Irene Dunne and Paul Robeson in the 1936 monochrome outing and George Sidney putting Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel and Ava Gardner through their paces in MGM's 1951 colour remake. Crossing the pond, Maclean Rogers offers an insight into British music hall in the 1920s in Variety Jubilee (1943), while pianist Tim Roth gets to duet with jazz great Jelly Roll Morton (Clarence Williams III) aboard SS Virginian in Giuseppe Tornatore's The Legend of 1900 (1998).
And we stay in a continental frame of mind to see why Marion Cotillard took home the César, Lumière, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Actress for her performance as Édith Piaf in Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose (2007). Xavier Giannolli's Marguerite (2015) was inspired by the character played by the Oscar-nominated Meryl Streep in Stephen Frears's Florence Foster Jenkins (2016). Neither Piaf nor Coco Chanel would emerge from the Second World War with their reputations intact, but the fashion designer enjoyed heady success in the 1920s, as Audrey Tautou and Anna Mouglalis (with a little help from Mads Mikkelsen) respectively demonstrate in Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel (2009) and Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009).
Documents have linked Chanel with Operation Modellhut, the Nazi's plan to seize Madrid in 1943. But the Spanish capital was more peaceful back in 1922, when Salvador Dalí (Robert Pattinson), Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) became friends in Paul Morrison's Little Ashes (2008). Indeed, Buñuel partly set his adaptation of Benito Pérez Gáldos's Tristana (1970) in the Toledo of the 1920s, as ageing nobleman Fernando Ray seeks to take advantage of his innocent ward, Catherine Deneuve. Buñuel spent much of his life in Paris and Mexico City and they provide the setting for two painterly biopics, Jacques Becker's Montparnasse 19 (1958) and Julie Taymor's Frida (2002), which respectively star Gérard Philipe as Amedeo Modigliani and Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo.
Although Buñuel started making films in the 1920s, we are saving such items for another time. However, E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire (2000) gives us an excuse to mention FW Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), as this witty fantasy speculates on the possibility that Murnau (John Malkovich) might have hired a real vampire in Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe). This inclusion also allows us to slip in a few horror titles with 1920s connections, including four delves into the writings of Sax Rohmer for Don Sharp's The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), Jeremy Summers's The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967) and Jess Franco's The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968) and The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969) which all (in a regrettable piece of 'yellowfacing') star Christopher Lee in the title role. His regular stuntman, Eddie Powell, donned the bandages to take the lead in John Gilling's The Mummy's Shroud (1967), while Andy Warhol idol Joe Dallesandro found a role to sink his teeth into in Paul Morrissey's Blood For Dracula (1974).
The Expressionist style employed by Murnau and several other Germanic directors in the 1920s is periodically dusted down by modern film-makers, with Argentinian Estaban Sapir using the look to create Year XX in his futuristic saga, La Antena (2008), while compatriot Pablo Berger opted for similar stylisation in his striking reworking of the Snow White story in Blancanieves (2012). Ken Russell also did a neat job of pastiching silent imagery in Valentino (1977), a biopic of matinee idol Rudolph Valentino that stars ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev alongside Leslie Caron as Alla Nazimova and Michelle Phillips as Natasha Rambova.
Although Valentino's Latin lover won him legions of fans before his tragically early death in 1926, Charlie Chaplin was the world's biggest film star in the 1920s. His life story was retold with his trademark reverential assurance by Richard Attenborough in Chaplin (1992) before Robert Downey, Jr. passed on the role to Eddie Izzard for Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow (2004), which recalls how media tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Edward Herrmann) reacted when Chaplin flirted with his actress mistress Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst) during a cruise aboard the luxury yacht Oneida in November 1924.
Chaplin famously delayed speaking dialogue until The Great Dictator (1940), which was released 13 years after Al Jolson had made screen history with his impromptu 'Wait a minute!' speech in Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927). It has enduringly been explored by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen in Singin' in the Rain (1952) and Michel Hazanavicius in The Artist (2011).
Made as a silent, the latter won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Director, as well as earning Jean Dujardin the Oscar for Best Actor and the Palme D'Or for Uggie, the Parson Russell Terrier. The Artist is the most garlanded French film of all time, yet Singin' in the Rain drew a single Oscar nomination for Jean Hagen's peerless performance as Lina Lamont, the silent siren whose voice is so wrong for talkies that her dialogue has to be dubbed in her next starring vehicle with Don Lockwood (Kelly) by the unknown Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). Why not rent them both and see which you and your family thinks is best?
How many of these have you seen? What are your thoughts on the depiction of 1920s in film?
