My sixth birthday was celebrated in August 1939, five days before the outbreak of war. By that time, I'd begun to make weekly visit to the pictures and embarked on what was to be a lifelong obsession with the cinema. I'd also committed to memory all 50 of that year's Wills series of 50 Great Film Stars cigarette cards (God knows how many packets of cigarettes my father smoked to complete my collection) and so could reel off the names and birth places of the leading movie actors and actresses of the English-speaking world.
On my birthday I'd seen Shirley Temple's first Technicolor film, The Little Princess, and that same week I saw my first Technicolor western, Jesse James, both equally unforgettable. I'd also recently seen and loved two earlier films that were still on release, Alfred Hitchcock's two greatest British pictures, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, which I have seen again and again over 70 years. He was the first director whose name I had heard of. But my favourite film of that year was the great imperial adventure yarn, The Four Feathers, one of the earliest British Technicolor productions.
The Four Feathers shaped, to an almost alarming extent, my ideas about military duty, glory and self respect in preparation for the second world war and then the cold war, during which I was to serve on the same desert terrain as the heroes of The Four Feathers.
Even at that age I had a vague glimmering that the cinema was providing me with both an escape from the world and an induction into its mysteries and complexities. What I didn't know then was that 1939 was no ordinary year for moviegoing. In 1963 the great American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, who was a film critic as well as acting as a special advisor to John F Kennedy's White House, wrote that the 1930s, the first full decade of talking pictures, was the golden age of American cinema. Nine years later, the critic and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) wrote an essay called The Best American Films of 1939. It was the year in which he was born and he pronounced it a veritable cinematic cornucopia for Hollywood. In 1989 the film historian Ted Sennett produced a book with the title Hollywood's Golden Year, 1939: A Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration.
The year 1939 wasn't a bad one for British cinema either, largely thanks to the Hungarian movie mogul Alexander Korda. He had settled here with his brothers, Vincent and Zoltan (all three had collaborated on The Four Feathers). It was also a remarkable year for French cinema with the school of poetic realism reaching its peak in Marcel Carné's Le Jour se lève. The most remarkable French film, however, and now regarded as one of the greatest half-dozen pictures ever made, was Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu. This is a devastating portrait of a corrupt nation in an advanced state of decay. Its exhibition led to riots, and it had to be withdrawn and wasn't shown in its complete form until the 1960s. Renoir, along with his two most celebrated French contemporaries, René Clair and Julien Duvivier, were to flee the Occupation and spend the war years working in America.
Several factors contributed to the peak of achievement that Hollywood reached in 1939. Movies had become the dominant form of art and entertainment in the country. As the effects of the Depression were subsiding and Roosevelt's New Deal was taking effect, there was a growing confidence throughout the nation and a buoyancy in the industry. The studio system was working to perfection, with company bosses like Louis B Mayer at MGM, Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, Harry Cohn at Columbia and Jack Warner at Warner Brothers presiding over astonishing pools of talent in the form of actors, directors, writers and technicians recruited from around the globe and placed under contract. Hollywood wasn't just American cinema, it was world cinema.
The men who controlled the business, although of limited education and most of them immigrants or sons of immigrants, had cultural ambitions that went beyond mere commerce and money-making. Yet while matters were looking up on the home front and a spirit of optimism was in the air, there was an awareness of social challenges and of impending dangers – of fascism and war – that provided the materials of drama, comedy and satire, and created an atmosphere of purpose and urgency.
So here, from a field of 40 or more contestants, are my Top Five Hollywood films of 1939, each an enduring classic:
Stagecoach
John Ford made three great films in 1939, all with historical settings. Two of them confirmed the star status of Henry Fonda (Drums Along the Mohawk, Young Mr Lincoln), while Stagecoach pulled John Wayne out of the ranks of low-budget B-westerns and made him a major star.
Stagecoach was Ford's first western of the sound era and his first to exploit the striking beauty of Monument Valley. It raised the bar overnight for cowboy pictures, and many feel it has never been surpassed. Its cross-section of frontier figures thrown together for a hazardous journey through hostile Indian country constituted a group portrait of America moving out of the Depression but into the clouds of an imminent war. Each character was carefully delineated and impeccably played, and significantly the villain was not to be found among the marauding Apaches or the outlaws that Wayne's Ringo Kid was on his way to confront at the end of the journey. He is one of the stagecoach passengers: the hypocritical banker Gatewood, defecting with his clients' money and escorted to jail by the law when the coach reaches its destination.
Ninotchka
In 1939 Ingrid Bergman made her Hollywood debut with a remake of her Swedish success Intermezzo and in 1943 was to become pre-eminent with Casablanca. But another Swede, Greta Garbo, was still Hollywood's reigning queen that year. In 1930 the posters for Anna Christie, her first sound movie, announced that "Garbo Talks!"
Nine years later, for what proved her penultimate screen appearance, MGM's publicists, rightly assuming that fans remembered the earlier film, came up with the slogan "Garbo Laughs!" Well, so did audiences the world over at Ernst Lubitsch's delightful comedy (though not in the USSR, where it was banned). Garbo plays a stern Soviet official, thawed and seduced by the democratic west as embodied by the Paris-based American Melvyn Douglas.
It is one of the finest films by a director lured to Hollywood in the mid-1920s after establishing himself in the German cinema and known for those beautifully contrived moments that became known as "the Lubitsch touch". The scintillating script was by Billy Wilder (a fugitive from Hitler's Germany) and his longtime American collaborator Charles Brackett, and it contains characteristically black Wilderesque lines, eg Garbo's statement that "the last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians". But the romantic idealism that infuses Garbo's performance prevents the film from being an anti-communist tract.
The Wizard of Oz
One of the most affecting and authentic pieces of Americana, Victor Fleming's magical musical sweeps away the orphaned Dorothy from the dusty, depressed monochrome Kansas of the 1930s to the Technicolor world of Oz and the Emerald City on the other side of the rainbow. It's a story of dangers confronted, friendships forged, dreams understood and experience absorbed. Chaos surrounded the production, but everything came out almost to perfection. Judy Garland brings a heart-rending sincerity to Dorothy. Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr and Jack Haley are unsurpassable as the dim farmhands who take on a heroic fairy tale life as the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man. Margaret Hamilton is unforgettably the stuff bad dreams are made of as the vindictive old maid who lives down the road in Kansas and the Wicked Witch of the West.
Over the years the film has grown along with the legend of Garland to become a key part of the mythology of our times, including the term "a friend of Dorothy's" meaning "gay" that began in the 1950s as a code word in the homosexual sub-culture.
Gone With the Wind
Thanks to its producer David O Selznick, no film has attracted such international attention during its preparation, had its long, hectic period in production written about so much both then and afterwards, or been so constantly before the public eye since its world premiere in Atlanta, Georgia, the setting some years earlier of its epic story.
As the embattled lovers, Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara are swept through the American civil war and its turbulent aftermath on a tide of history, heady music, unforgettable dialogue and visual extravagance. As always in its heyday, Hollywood sides with the losing south. Like The Wizard of Oz, which also bears a single credit to Victor Fleming, it was worked upon by half-a-dozen directors and had eight or nine writers contribute to the script. But it's essentially a producer's film, with Selznick using Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel to build a monument to himself. He was notably assisted by the great William Cameron Menzies, for whom Selznick created the grand title "production designer", which has now become a standard term in the film business. It is remarkable that three of the four leading roles were played by British actors – Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard and Olivia De Havilland. The fourth, Clark Gable, the greatest American star of his time, known as the King of Hollywood, was hotly tipped as an Oscar winner. But he missed out to British actor Robert Donat in Goodbye Mr Chips, an MGM production made that year in Britain. Gone With the Wind is a landmark in movie history, and only the very blasé can say of it that frankly they don't give a damn.
The Roaring Twenties
There were gangster movies in the silent era, but the genre came to loud, scorching life when the talkies arrived. Then the screeching of tyres, the rat-a-tat of machine guns, the clink of empty cartridges hitting the tarmac, the snarling of hard-bitten dialogue, speakeasy jazz bands and melodramatic music were put on the soundtrack.
The cycle of classic gangster pictures peaked in the early 30s and had more or less ended, having given way to movies that celebrated equally tough FBI agents, by the time this elegiac masterpiece appeared. The director was veteran Raoul Walsh, whose career went back to playing Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth in DW Griffith's landmark epic Birth of a Nation (1915).
The story traces the careers of three first world war veterans (James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Jeffrey Lynn) who come home from Europe with hopes of creating a new world for themselves and for America. But the battlefields are replaced by violent conflict in urban America as the trio become involved on different sides of the law in prohibition-era crime. Cagney gives one of his greatest performances as a decent man who tries to go straight as a cab driver, drifts into bootlegging and the criminal underworld, and ends up a tragic victim in search or redemption. The movie has an epic sweep that anticipated and influenced the best gangster movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of which it is fully the equal.
