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| The Best Movie of 1932 by Brody Wilder 03/16/2026, 6:15pm PDT | ||||
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| WINNER: Shanghai Express
Jo Sternberg finally takes the top spot with this, the most crowd-pleasing effort of his career. I have never read Guy de Maupassant's Boule de Suif, first published in prehistoric year 1880, though from its many film adaptations I presume it's about a carriage packed with a cross-section of French society, who find themselves in mortal danger and must look to the lowest among them for salvation. The action has since been transposed to a stagecoach (for 1939's Stagecoach with John Wayne and 1967's Hombre with Paul Newman), a spaceship (for 2000's Pitch Black with Vin Diesel), and - most relevant to this post - a train, for 1932's Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich plays emotionally invincible superhooker Shanghai Lil. When her train of fellow expats is threatened by a brutal Chinese warlord, Lil's utilitarian approach to life may be all that can save them. If Dietrich was the Steven Seagal of romantic melodrama, this was her Under Siege (nevermind that Under Siege 2: Dark Territory was the one with the train; for the comparison to work it has to be a good movie). Sternberg and Dietrch's partnership would go darker and weirder in the years to come, but never more accessible. Not as Good as the Remake: Scarface Famous surgeon Hawkeye Pierce once said of the 1930s, "You knew where you stood in those days. Franklin Roosevelt was always president, Joe Louis was always the champ, and Paul Muni played everybody". In that decade alone, Jewish Muni tackled roles ranging from French Louis Pasteur (in The Story of Louis Pasteur) to Mexican Benito Juarez (in Juarez) to - most regrettably of all - simple Chinese peasant farmer Wang Lung (in The Good Earth). He was the godfather of method acting, and Scarface was The Godfather of Warner Bros' violent pre-code social realist pictures. Here, Muni portrays the clever rise and meteoric fall of no-bullshit Italian immigrant Tony Camonte, a performance that's over-the-top in all the right places. If you watch one gangster movie from the prohibition era, this should be the one. It's in Bill's House, and Fred's House: American Madness Frank Capra released three films in 1932: Forbidden (a romantic melodrama in which Barbara Stanwyck's mousy librarian falls for a rich married jerk), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (a romantic melodrama in which Barbara Stanwyck's repressed missionary falls for a brutal Chinese warlord - hey, they were in the papers at the time), and, least loved of all, American Madness. Starring Walter Huston as a humanist bank manager instead of Barbara Stanwyck as a victim of love, American Madness is the sort of optimistic financial procedural that's exactly my cup of noble Chinese suicide tea. When a robbery precipitates a potentially catastrophic bank run, only one man's plea to the universal spirit of communism that lives in every good citizen's heart can save the day. A climax so moving that Capra shamelessly reused it for his own masterpiece, 1946's It's a Wonderful Life. Please, Sir, May I Have Some Horror There was a brief window, between Dracula proving its financial viability and the censorship crackdown of 1934, in which the horror genre was allowed to blossom. Let's take a look at the adult-oriented monster movies of 1932. The Mummy was Universal's flagship entry in the market they'd pioneered the year before, a product-improved version of the Dracula story that just barely avoids classification as a remake. Starring Boris Karloff as the immortal lover, Imhotep sheds his bandages after the opening teaser, and spends the remainder of the picture supernaturally macking on Zita Johann in gorgeous Egyptian sets. If you have memories of a zombie-like figure shambling after his prey, you're probably thinking of one of the increasingly silly sequels. Speaking of zombies, travel book The Magic Island was a purportedly non-fictional account of Haitian Voodoo published in 1929, generally credited with introducing those ghastly creatures to the popular consciousness. In 1932 it was (as always, very loosely) adapted for the screen in White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi and his famously hypnotic eyes. One of Lugosi's finest films, though that's admittedly not saying much, this was about the best you were going to do for supernatural zombies until 1944's I Walked With a. Viral zombies, on the other hand? Stay tuned. Keeping to the tropics, Island of Lost Souls was a straightforward take on The Island of Doctor Moreau, featuring the great Sir Charles Laughton (a man whose appetite for food was only exceeded by his appetite for men) in the Marlon Brado role. A national contest was held to find the sexiest possible girl to play Lota, Panther Woman - whether they succeeded is for the reader to decide, though I will say that all of the other animal-human hybrids were effectively grotesque. Like the same year's Freaks, I could see this movie unnerving people well into the 1970s. Rounding things out, let's go back to famously gay director James Whale (assayed so masterfully by Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters) for camp classic The Old Dark House. The trope of a rainstorm forcing passing motorists to impose upon a spooky family was old hat even at this early stage, so Whale leans into the absurdity with a horror/comedy hybrid that would prefigure his work on Bride of Frankenstein. That film's Dr. Pretorius, Ernest Thesiger, appears here as an effete old man who would quite like you to have a potato. Really can't go wrong with any of these. |
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