1935: Triumph des Willens

Riefenstahl's supposed masterpiece of propaganda filmmaking turn out to be surprisingly pedestrian. Though there are some nice shots, there's nothing that is truly spectacular apart from the sheer mass of people in some scenes. Not in the same league as Eisenstein, but recommended for fans of people marching. (5.5)

1939: Ninotchka

Beautiful but stern Russian special envoy "Ninotchka" Yakushova (Greta Garbo), while in Paris on an official mission, falls into the hands of a playboy, who, um, makes her a woman. If you can deal with this plot, it's a charming old black-and-white comedy for rainy afternoons. Garbo, by the way, laughs! (7)

1935: Mutiny on the Bounty

Solid but unexceptional narration of the well-known story. I've previously seen the 1962 version with Marlon Brando, and filming the South Seas in black and white somehow seems wrong. (6)

1930: Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris)

Clair's partially sound/partially silent romance wields lots of Old Paris charm (despite being obviously filmed in the studio), but it has extremely little plot for a ninety minute film and is accordingly slow. Not nearly as good as Le Million. (6)

1939: Midnight

Co-written by Billy Wilder, of Menschen am Sonntag fame, this movie gives us an American gold-digger stranding pennyless in a magical Paris where everyone loves speaking English, and soon attracts the interest of a variety of men, some rich, some less so. Mistaken identities, confusion. Typical, and good, example of the screwball comedy. (7)

1931: Le Million

Michel, a poor painter, has won a million in the lottery, but to collect his winnings, he needs the ticket, which is in his jacket, which his financé gives to a man who is fleeing from the police, who sells it to an opeara singer, and so on and so forth: Soon, it seems, tout Paris is chasing the jacket, and director René Clair makes this comic musical a charming little film not dissimilar to the best-know Marx Brothers movies. It starts with a great tracking shot over the roofs of Paris, which are obviously models and look all the better for it, and Le Million is a genuinely early sound film in that Clair, much like Fritz Lang in M, leaves the dialogue unheard when he doesn't need it and seems more conscious of the way sound can be used to great effect than the directors of most contemporary films. Somewhat famous is the fade-in of the roar of a sports stadium crowd when a variety of men fights over the jacket in a rugby-like manner; and when Michel's friend Prosper hears his conscience, it is a whole choir singing to him from the off. Is there a social psychological theory in there? I say yes. (7.5)

Link: Matthew Dessem's essay on the film. Contains lots of spoilers, but they don't really spoil. It's not exactly a mystery, you know.

1935: Bride of Frankenstein

While I found the original Frankenstein charmingly silly, the sequel is more charmlessly stupid in my book - there are even little people in bottles. There are also bad technical glitches. (5)

1930: Zemlja (Earth)

The film about conflicts between the old and the new in a farmer's village during the early days of the Soviet Union is not particularly exciting in terms of storytelling, but succeeds as moving pictures. The photography of nature is often lauded, yet I found the harvest scene, as rhythmic as an Eisenstein battle sequence, to be the highlight. (7)

1936: Sabotage

Not to be confused with Saboteur, the Hitchcock film about foreign agents violenty disturbing public life in London shares with other Hitchcock movies of that time a certain patchyness and technical shortcomings, but is somehow delivered with more charm to make for an entertaining bit of viewing, though it certainly is not a masterpiece. (7)

1930: Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel)

The film that made Marlene Dietrich Marlene Dietrich and chronicles the downfall of a well-respected man who falls in love with a disreputable woman suffers somewhat from the usual technical shortcomings of the day, including an uncinematic overall visual style as well as the fact that leading man Emil Jannings overplays his tragic role. (5.5)

1933: Duck Soup

Not nearly as good as A Night at the Opeara. (6.5)

1932: Vampyr

Though the recency of the sound film invention still shows in this 1932 sort-of-horror film, it manages to create a somewhat Lost-Highwayesque dreamy athmosphere and is much more convincing as an aesthetic exercise than the similarly-themed 1922 Nosferatu or 1931 Dracula, both of which are nothing but unintentionally funny today. (7)

1934: Fétiche (The Mascot)

To simplfy the dream-in-a-dream-in-a-dream-type of plot greatly, a toy dog ventures into a world inhabited by lots of strange creatures, only for a fight to break out over the orange that he brought. The reasonably charming 26-minute movie which combines stop-motion with a little conventionally shot film (6.5) was made by one Ladislas Starewicz, who, if Wikipedia is to be believed, was inspired to do stop-motion because as the

director of a museum of natural history in Kaunas [...] he made four short live-action documentaries for the museum. For the fifth film, Starewicz wished to record the battle of two stag beetles, but was stymied by the fact that the nocturnal creatures inevitably went to sleep whenever the stage lighting was turned on.

Opportunity knocks!

1936: My Man Godfrey

Though shot (or preserved?) in the grainy grey typical for 1930s films and suffering from having a social message, this screwball comedy about a rich daughter hiring a homeless man to work as a butler for her excentric family is reasonably entertaining, not least because it's occasionally funny. (6.5)

1934: The Thin Man

As you might expect from something based on a Dashiel Hammett novel, this mystery-comedy is confusing at times, but the point of the movie isn't the plot anyway, but the display of wittiness in general and the back-and-forth between William Powell and Myrna Loy in particular. Which is decently done, but Bringing up Baby this is not. (6)

1931: City Lights

Despite an overreliance on "mix-up" jokes (bars of soap instead of pieces of cheese ending up on sandwitches - that kind of thing), Chaplin's last properly silent film, the one with the flower girl and the boxing ballet, manages to entertain throughout - though it is by no means laugh-out-loud funny. Clearly better than Goldrush. (7)

1938: The Lady Vanishes

Our young English heroine, about to get married, meets an old lady while getting on a train on her way home from a vacation in fascist Italy. The old lady suddenly disappears, and it seems none of the other passengers have seen her. Together with a playboy who seems to fancy her, she goes looking for the missing woman. - Though generally the kind of thing one calls "great for rainy Sunday afternoons", Hitchcock's last but one film before leaving for Hollywood suffers from special effects that are poor even by the standards of the time and a few lengths in the screenplay. Overall an agreeable experience, though. (6.5)

1934: The Man Who Knew Too Much

The original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, later remade by Hichcock himself, for large parts looks like a filmed theatre play and lacks almost all of the production values of the 1956 version. It also lacks rhythm and is too short, almost as though the filmmakers couldn't wait to get to the final shootout, which in turn is too long. So no confrontation at the taxidermist, no child whistling "Que sera" so his mother can find him. Judged on its own merits, it seems like an o.k. movie (6), but if you've seen the second version first, the original looks like a mere sketch for the later film.

Finally, a Hitchcock movie the remake of which is better than the original.

1930: L'age d'Or

The follow-up to Chien Andalou is four times as long, has some sound (apparently added in postproduction) and doesn't seem quite as fresh as its predecessor to me. Also, you can't shock anyone nowadays with allusions to masturbation and fellatio. Fun fact (if it is a fact): "The film cost a million francs to produce and was financed by the nobleman Vicomte Charles de Noailles, who beginning in 1928 commissioned a film every year for the birthday of his wife Marie-Laure de Noailles." (6)

1931: Frankenstein

Badly acted, poorly edited and generally over the top, the original Frankenstein movie exhibits all the weaknesses you should expect from a 1930s horror picture and is a lot of fun. (unrated)