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| The Best Movie of 1935 by Brody Wilder Today, 5:43pm PDT | ||||
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| WINNER: Captain Blood
In 1935, Hollywood still wasn't sure how to go about making films for adults without running foul of their new Catholic overseers. So they didn't even try. Fortunately, recording and special effects technology had advanced to the point where all-ages adventure films could now rival anything possible in the silent era - or anything possible today, for that matter. Enter my favourite pirate movie of all time: Captain Blood. Dashing Errol Flynn plays bleeding heart English doctor Peter Blood, who finds himself transported to the West Indies on trumped up charges of political subversion. Escaping slavery, Blood rallies his fellow prisoners to seize a Spanish warship and embark on a noble life of piracy. Running his ship like a communist utopia, Blood buckles swash, romances the governor's niece, and ultimately safeguards the colonial interests of the very country that turned its back on him when the hated French come a calling. If you like this sort of thing, 1940's The Sea Hawk is more of the same. Clark Heard It: Call of the Wild Your grandpa's Harrison Ford, Clark Gable, stars in this premake of the 2020 Disney CGI-fest. Not actually the story of a dog, as cultural osmosis led me to believe (though a real, live, flesh-and-blood St. Bernard does feature), this is about a prospector in Gold Rush Alaska and his adventures following a treasure map to the purported motherlode. Forced to travel with comedy relief chubbo Jack Oakie and prickly love interest Loretta Young (each have pieces of the map), masculine loner Gable eventually learns there are some things more valuable than gold. Trivia: During filming, Gable fathered a secret love child with co-star Young, surprisingly the only one we know about. Already in hot water for immorality, the studio decided to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Get Off My Boat: South Seas Modern-day pirates hijack a tramp steamer en route from Hong Kong to Singapore. Unluckily for them, the ship's captain is none other than your grandpa's Harrison Ford, Clark Gable. Slightly more psychologically complex than the premise might suggest, among the ship's passengers are two of the captain's ex-lovers, bitchy Rosalind Russell and human Jell-O mold Jean Harlow. A cracking script and confident direction make this high seas thriller more entertaining than it had any right to be. Kicked Out of the Palladium: The 39 Steps Things were hotting up across the pond, too, in the first of Hitchcock's many "wrong man" plots. Handsome Robert Donat is a surrogate for us, the audience, as he's forced to go on the run to prove his innocence in the murder of a beautiful spy he only just met. Hitchcock constructs a variety of unlikely scenarios, each a self-contained engine of escalating tension, ranging from being forced to deliver a speech for which you haven't prepared to being handcuffed to an icy blonde who hates you. Though he'd eventually get better at making his implausible setpieces seem to arise naturally from what came before (to a point - why was Cary Grant running from a biplane, again?), Hitch was nailing nail-biting suspense from the start. |
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