There was an article in my local paper today about the seventy-fifth anniversary of all of the great movies of 1939, including The Wizard of Oz. In fact, what caught my eye was the still of the Fab Four on the yellow brick road. I noticed that it came from the Akron Beacon Journal, and decided to poke around online to see if it was on the Web. Sure enough, I found it.
So what do you think was the best year for American movies?
1 comment:
I feel like Gone With the Wind is a big part of the reason 1939 gets singled out so often as a banner year for film, but I'm just not a fan of that particular movie. It's tough to get behind something that paints such a rosy, sentimental view of the antebellum south. Also, I find Scarlett O'Hara to be a really unlikeable heroine. If I didn't know better, I'd think the movie was attempting to draw some sort of parallel there- treating the end of something as horrible as slavery like a tragedy while simultaneously attempting to make the audience feel sympathetic towards a woman who is herself rather horrible. However, that would be giving the movie and Margaret Mitchell too much credit.
On the other hand, I admit that 1939 did produce several other movies that I think are great, such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, The Women, Another Thin Man, Love Affair (better than the remakes), and of course The Wizard of Oz.
It's really hard to say what I'd personally consider to be the best year for movies, though. It's all so subjective, and I don't usually keep track of when every movie came out. You could look at pretty much any year and find plenty of of quality films.
For instance, a number of movies I like a lot came out in 1989: Field of Dreams, The Little Mermaid, Batman, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Abyss, and When Harry Met Sally. But I'd have to basically look through the top movies of every year before I could arrive at a truly well-informed opinion.
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