La Chienne could stand to be a few minutes shorter. Most films, even very good ones, could stand to be a few minutes longer. If there’s anything about La Chienne that could use tweaking, it’s the ending, or the endings, which occur in a procession of climaxes and resolutions that each trick you into thinking the film is about to end. The Old Dark House, in fact, seems like a film tailor-made for Whale’s beautifully atmospheric black-and-white visuals, all the more impressive now with modern restoration. Elevating those elements is Whale’s considerable directorial talent, employing the same Expressionist-inspired use of darkness and shadow so often praised in the better-known Frankenstein or Bride of Frankenstein. The classic tropes are all there: A dark and stormy night a group of strangers in a mansion mistaken identities disfigurement a family secret. In reality, old dark house films replete with burglars, monsters and secret passageways had been all the rage in the American film industry through the 1920s and the end of the silent era, but as with so many other genres the arrival of sound created a talkie revival, with The Old Dark House as a new ur-template: One part parody and one part sincere thriller, expanding upon the elements of films like The Cat and the Canary while attaching major stars of the day (Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton) to a familiar story. Given the name, you’d be forgiven for assuming that this long-forgotten and then rediscovered James Whale classic had created the genre we colloquially refer to as “old dark house” movies, but in reality, the Frankenstein director seems to have been making a sly commentary on the familiar Hollywood tendency toward endless repetition. A minor though significant entry in Wayne’s filmography. But neither Gene Autry nor Roy Rogers would ever sing about the “blood a-runnin’” just before showdown. None of it is laid on too thick Wayne’s character is ultimately true blue and on the side of goodness. What makes this singing cowboy more interesting than all of the yodelers who would appear on screen afterward is a simmering violence and darkness within him. And our hero is stalwart and true, here played by Wayne. Villains are dastardly, in this case a corrupt savage capitalist played by Forrest Taylor, who intends to steal all of the water from surrounding ranchers, charging them an exorbitant fee for its use. As with many of these so-called Poverty Row Westerns of the 1930s, Riders of Destiny is a brisk narrative and high on sensational plot twists. Among them-it marked Wayne’s first performance as a singing cowboy, and the movie’s action sequences are brilliantly choreographed by the legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, who also plays one of the villain’s henchmen in the picture. Riders of Destiny, his first of many for Monogram Pictures, is notable for a number of reasons. For the next decade, until John Ford resurrected him in 1939 as a bona fide screen presence in Stagecoach, Wayne became a matinee idol in numerous entertaining though mostly forgettable B-movie oaters. Smith has major sentimental overtones and desire for a fantastical world, as Stewart’s character displays a fortitude and integrity we wish all politicians had.- Nathan SpicerĪfter the box office failure of Raoul Walsh’s major studio epic The Big Trail in 1929, a movie intended to make the young John Wayne a Western star, the budding actor dusted off his chaps and fled to smaller independent studios to hone his craft. But unlike All The King’s Men, the main character isn’t corrupted by politics, but rather defies and decries the corruption. He’s the leader of a Boy Scout troop before being recruited to the Senate by a team that believes he’ll do whatever he’s told-specifically, allow the building of a dam that will make said team rich. Similar to All The King’s Men (and not just because it’s incredibly old), this film chronicles the tale of Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart). You might be surprised how deeply the work of Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor, Yasujiro Ozu, and many more still resonate almost 100 years later.
Others that may have fallen out of contemporary conversation require revisiting. Some remain the most influential movies of their type, like King Kong and It Happened One Night.
Some movies from the 1930s remain household names today, classics for nearly a century like The Wizard of Oz and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The 1930s were a time of screwballs, musicals, Universal Monsters and the looming conservative crackdown of the Hays Code. Talkies, even some in Technicolor, navigated responses to hardship that reveled in high escapism, genre symbolism and the strict idealism of Soviet socialist realism. As the Great Depression hit Hollywood and beyond, the booming silent era of the 1920s morphed in both sensory technology and theme.
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