1938 Top Ten List

Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks)

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock)

The Baker's Wife (Marcel Pagnol)

The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz & William Keighley)

Holiday (George Cukor)

Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard)

The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason)

Port of Shadows (Marcel Carné)

Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (Ernst Lubitsch)

Angels With Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz)

Additional 1938 Films By Rating

La Bête humaine (Jean Renoir)

Jezebel (William Wyler)

The Young in Heart (Richard Wallace)

The Buccaneer (Cecil B. DeMille)

Racket Busters (Lloyd Bacon)

Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein)

Overland Stage Raiders (George Sherman)

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): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Taurog); The Citadel (Vidor); King of Alcatraz (Florey); The Shopworn Angel (Potter); A Slight Case of Murder (Bacon); South Riding (Saville)

As yet unseen: The Dawn Patrol (Goulding); Olympia (Riefenstahl); You Can't Take It With You (Capra)

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