A Day in the Country (Une Partie de Campagne) 1937 **

Well, maybe not an entire day—more like 40 minutes—but time, like age, is a matter of attitude anyway. This 1936 French short film was directed by Jean Renoir about a year before his The Rules of the Game made him a top tier director. This was supposed to be a full-length film, but Renoir encountered some sort of mental block that led him to leave the film unfinished for ten years. In 1946, he turned the surviving footage into a short film. Full-length...

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L’Atalante (1934) **

Consult countless lists of the greatest films of all time and you will find this 1934 French classic. Considered to be director Jean Vigo’s masterpiece, L’Atalante is a surrealist love story for the ages. It is also a testament to Vigo’s artistic passion—he was deathly ill as he made it, often directing from a stretcher. He died shortly after filming was completed and could not edit the film himself. Instead, the editing task fell to some overenthusiastic...

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Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes) 1933 *1/2

This 1933 documentary by Luis Bunuel is strange, but not unwatchable. Filmed in a poor region of Spain known as Las Hurdes Altas, this documentary presents the dire conditions faced by the region’s inhabitants through a surrealist lens. Hence, why I found this movie disturbingly strange at times. I just don’t know how one can effectively use surrealism to document the true hardships of a people without violating the documentarian’s unspoken code...

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Zero for Conduct (Zero De Conduite) 1933 *1/2

I am not a big fan of surrealism and this 1933 French film is pretty darn surreal. Under 45-minutes long, this Jean Vigo film was based on his own childhood experiences in a French boarding school. Vigo examines the struggle between freedom and authority. He uses his own unique style of poetic realism to create an allegory about the way the lower rungs of society view those who hold all the power. It must have been a thinly veiled allegory, because...

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The Bitch (La chienne) 1931 **

This controversial 1931 French drama was director Jean Renoir’s first sound film. Filmed primarily on location in Renoir’s hometown of Montmartre, this film finally brought Renoir the recognition he was denied as a silent film director. Stark and unrelenting (and, oh, so French), this film showcases both Renoir’s visual and spatial acuity, as well as his ability to avoid oversentimentality while unflinchingly staring at human baseness. This film...

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The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) **1/2

Although hailed by many film critics as director Frank Capra’s masterpiece , The Bitter Tea of General Yen is not his most popular film—that would be It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). As a matter of fact, most people wouldn’t believe this was a Capra film if they happened upon it after the opening credits. I read somewhere that Variety said this was the best von Sternberg movie von Sternberg never made and was unlike any other Capra film due to its...

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The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies De Cherbourg) 1964 ****

Before her role in director Jacques Demy’s 1964 classic musical, Les Parapluies De Cherbourg, Catherine Deneuve was best known for giving birth to Roger Vadim’s illegitimate son. In a way, this was good preparation for her portrayal of an unmarried, 17-year-old who finds herself pregnant by a boyfriend serving in the Algerian War. Just twenty-years old when this film made her an international star, Deneuve’s melancholic performance was greatly enhanced...

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Queen Christina (1933) ***

It is difficult to understand how this 1933 racy (this means erotic by 1930s standards) romantic drama ended up being a box-office failure. Here you have one of the most beautiful women in the world, Greta Garbo, playing an amorous 17th century Swedish queen who risks her crown for love. In addition, you have John Gilbert playing her tragic lover—the same John Gilbert she jilted at the altar in 1926. Anyone who read the film magazines back then...

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Freaks (1932) **

The title of this classic 1932 film is not what one might call politically correct. There are few films in all of cinema that can be classified in the horror realism genre (one might think of The Blair Witch Project or the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but they are severely flawed wannabes). Yet, director Tod Browning’s Freaks is one of those few films that blends realism with horror. The freaks in the film’s title are actual 1930s carnival...

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Duck Soup (1933) **

People have many reasons why they either like or dislike the Marx Brothers. I would not classify myself as one of their biggest fans. Yet, of all their films, this 1933 classic is most probably my favorite. Perhaps it has something to do with my being a historian—the film is a political satire of fascism. Thinking the film was a personal attack on his leadership, Mussolini banned it in Italy. But if you push the historical aside for a moment, there...

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She Done Him Wrong (1933) **1/2

“Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” When this now-famous line fell from Mae West’s heavily lined lips in this 1933 film, she and Hollywood (specifically Paramount) had no idea what and whom they were inviting into their world. Laced with double entendres galore, and supported (both figuratively and literally) with overt sexuality (not to mention white slavery), this was the film that just went too far in the eyes of Catholics and the Hays...

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