1936 Top Ten List

Dodsworth (William Wyler)

Fury (Fritz Lang)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir)

It's Love Again (Victor Saville)

Swing Time (George Stevens)

The Man Who Could Work Miracles (Lothar Mendes)

Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin)

The Devil-Doll (Tod Browning)

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra)

Follow the Fleet (Mark Sandrich)

Additional 1936 Films By Rating

Theodora Goes Wild (Richard Boleslawski)

Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi)

The Lower Depths (Jean Renoir)

My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava)

César (Marcel Pagnol)

Redes (Emilio Gomez Muriel & Fred Zinnemann)

San Francisco (W.S. Van Dyke)

The Lonely Trail (Joseph Kane)

King of the Pecos (Joseph Kane)

The Petrified Forest (Archie L. Mayo)

Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies)

For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.

Ratings are on a needlessly precise 100-point scale.

Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are marked with if I currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit them and they get a numeral. (Lists from prior to about 1988 are especially suspect, as I compiled them long ago from memories that were in many cases already pretty dusty.)

Seen but currently unrated (and not presumptively among my top 10): After the Thin Man (Van Dyke); Camille (Cukor); Dracula's Daughter (Hillyer); The Princess Comes Across (Howard); Sabotage (Hitchcock); Secret Agent (Hitchcock); Show Boat (Whale); These Three (Wyler)

As yet unseen: Come and Get It (Hawks/Wyler); Libeled Lady (Conway); The Road to Glory (Hawks); Story of a Cheat (Guitry); Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor)

Deemed a short (and a masterpiece): "A Day in the Country" (Renoir)

I occasionally write reviews of older movies, but it happens too infrequently to file them by year.