The Best Year Ever for Movies

1939 is generally regarded as the greatest year ever for the movies. Why? Well, just take a look at this partial list and see how many have wound up on one or another list of the 100 greatest movies of all time:

Beau Geste
Destry Rides Again
Gunga Din
Dodge City
Hunchback of Notre Dame
Intermezzo
Only Angels Have Wings
Private Life of Elizabeth and Essex
The Roaring Twenties
The Women
The Rules of the Game

And those aren't even the movies that tagged nominations for Best Picture at the Academy Awards:

Dark Victory
Gone With the Wind
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
Love Affair
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Ninotchka
Of Mice and Men
Stagecoach
The Wizard of Oz
Wuthering Heights
(More than five movies could be nominated back then.)

Pretty amazing list if you are the type of person who doesn't consider a movie made before 1980 to be an oldie but a goodie. When AFI put out the list of nominees for their very first list of the 100 greatest American films of all time, 1939 was tied with 1942 for the most, with 11 movies represented in each year. Frankly, the inclusion of 1942 alongside 1939 as a great year for movies is a bit of mystery since only Casablanca, Cat People, and The Magnificent Ambersons have really stood the test of time as unqualified masterpieces, while a Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Pride of the Yankees simply have not aged well. There's really no argument that 1939 has to be considered the best year ever for movies. Or is there? Consider this list of rather extraordinary cinematic accomplishments:

Airplane!
Atlantic City
Berlin Alexanderplatz
The Big Red One
Breaker Morant
Caddyshack
The Empire Strikes Back
Flash Gordon
Kagemusha
Melvin and Howard
My Brilliant Career
Return of the Secaucus Seven
The Shining
The Stunt Man

And now for those that copped Oscar nominations:

Coal Miner's Daughter
The Elephant Man
Ordinary People
Raging Bull
Tess

If you take a look at my answer to the AFI list of 100 greatest movies of all time you'll see that two of my top three movies were released in 1980. In addition, I could frame a pretty decent argument that Kagemusha is the greatest movie to ever come out of Japan, that Breaker Morant is the greatest courtroom drama in film history, The Stunt Man is one of the greatest movies ever made about moviemaking, and that Airplane! may well be the funniest movie of all time. I could also go a long way toward making the case that Caddyshack belongs in any conversation about movies with the most memorable quotes. And though I don't subscribe to this particular point of view, ask most Star Wars fan to name the best movie of the saga and you'll heard The Empire Strikes Back more often than any other. The most interesting thing when conducting a comparison between the greatest year for movies of the golden age and the greatest year for movies in the post-Hays Code era is the number of comedies that make up the latter list. Is it just that they didn't make really good comedies in 1939? Of course not. Another Thin Man is probably the best of the best second sequel of all time, provides more laughs than all Adam Sandler movies combined. But I think that more effort and creativity might have gone into dramas back in 1939 than in 1980. Of course, another striking thing is the inclusion of movies that would have been low-level genre pictures in 1939. The Empire Strikes Back, The Shining and Flash Gordon obviously would not have received the same budgetary considerations and production time in 1939.

All of which proves what? Not a thing, of course. Except that if you were to compare the list of movies made in either of these years you would find more classics than if you looked at all the movies of the past ten years. And I find that depressing.

I think I'm going to go watch Airplane!