If someone were to ask for a Ten Best of the ’20s, ’30s and early ’40s, off the top of my head I would list…oh, maybe 40 or 50 films.
Generic classics like (1) F.W. Murnau‘s Sunrise, (2) William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident, (3) Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, (4) Buster Keaton‘s The General, (5) Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, (6) John Huston‘s The Maltese Falcon plus (7) King Kong, (8) The Wizard Of Oz, (9) Bringing Up Baby, (10) Preston Sturges‘ Sullivan’s Travels and (11) The Lady Eve (12) Casablanca, (13) Gunga Din, (14) The Grapes of Wrath, (15) Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, (16) John Ford‘s The Informer, (17) Abel Gance‘s Napoleon, (18) Abbott & Costello‘s Hold That Ghost, (19) Leo McCarey‘s Duck Soup, (20) Jean Renoir‘s The Rules of the Game, (21) Sergei Eisenstein‘s Battleship Potemkin, (22) Lewis Milestone‘s All Quiet on the Western Front, (23) James Whale‘s Frankenstein and (24) The Bride of Frankenstein, (25) Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth, (26) Ernst Lubitsch‘s Trouble in Paradise plus (27) My Man Godfrey, (28) Que Viva Mexico!, (29) The Twentieth Century, (30) The Philadelphia Story, (31) Sherlock, Jr., (32) Tod Browning‘s Freaks, (33) I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang, (34) Shadow of a Doubt, (35) The Public Enemy,(36) Michael Curtiz‘s Robin Hood, (37) Hawks‘ Scarface, (38) Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy, (39) Selznick/Fleming’s Gone With The Wind and (40) Hitchcock’s Rebecca and (41) Lifeboat.
I know, of course, that most under-40s regard movies released in the ’80s as quite old and half-forgotten, and films from Hollywood’s golden era of freewheeling creativity (from 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate until the end of that cycle when Sorcerer bombed and Star Wars became a massive hit)…most Millennial-Zoomers haven’t seen very many of these, and you can totally forget about films from the late ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s (including Hud). Which leaves the films from the ’20s, ’30s and early ’40s totally in the dust.
So as futile as this sounds, I’m asking which of the above 40, if any, have been seen by any Millennials or Zoomers…which of these films have made any kind of impression of any kind? The likely answer, I realize, is “damn few.” Less than ten, I would guess.