Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies - The Best Movie of Every Year

Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies

by Brody Wilder Yesterday, 8:42pm PDT

Since COVID hit, I've managed to watch over 3700 films released between 1928 and 1967. Now I'd like to share the very best of them with you, the sole remaining Caltrops reader. Think of it as a crash course in Old Hollywood. But first, here are some ground rules (I'm not fucking around with this):

Talkies ONLY
There are some good silent films, but ain't nobody watching those. Bringing them up here would be a waste of both of our time.

English ONLY
I don't care where you're from - Canada, the United States, Great Britain or miscellaneous - we can all agree that only English counts as a language.

Feature Length
I didn't watch no 3700 Looney Tunes. Well, not recently. We can talk about those in the comments.

Speaking of comments, DO NOT REPLY DIRECTLY TO THIS POST.
I plan to make a little sub-comment for each year, starting with 1930. You can reply to that. If I catch you replying to this I will drive to your house and shoot you with the gun that I keep in my car. Don't test me.

Why am I starting with 1930?
This is more a clarification than a rule, but I'll allow it. The truth is that almost every talkie I've sen from the '20s (the other '20s) sucks dick. It's not their fault, it took people a while to get sound recording figured out. Not only did they not yet have the ability to dub audio over video shot seperately, they didn't even have boom mics! And motion picture cameras at the time were so loud they had to be encased in largely immobile soundproof booths. So what you mostly got was a static shot of people sitting around a drawing room, taking turns speaking into a teapot. On top of that, silent films rarely used a full script, meaning Hollywood hadn't developed much of a pipeline to produce their own. This caused studios to turn to plays - goddamn stage plays - and atrocious warbly high-pitched Broadway musicals for content. Not worth it.

Is there a single good talkie from the 1920s?
Yes! The Marx Brothers produced a film adaptation of their first narrative stage show, The Cocoanuts, in 1929. It's pretty great if you can put up with the scratchy audio. More anarchic and just plain funnier than their censored post-code stuff. Let's call that Best Movie #0.