The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum(Kenji Mizoguchi)
Ninotchka(Ernst Lubitsch)
The Spy in Black(Michael Powell)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington(Frank Capra)
The Wizard of Oz(Victor Fleming)
Stagecoach(John Ford)
Additional 1939 Films By Rating
Destry Rides Again(George Marshall)
Gone With the Wind(Victor Fleming)
The Women(George Cukor)
The Four Feathers(Zoltan Korda)
Jesse James(Henry King)
Drums Along the Mohawk(John Ford)
The Night Riders(George Sherman)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame(William Dieterle)
Young Mr. Lincoln(John Ford)
Tevya(Maurice Schwartz)
Three Texas Steers(George Sherman)
New Frontier(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.
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):First Love (Koster); Gunga
Din (Stevens); Le jour se lève (Carné); Love
Affair (McCarey); Of Mice and Men (Milestone); The Roaring
Twenties (Walsh); Stanley and Livingstone (King); Wife,
Husband and Friend (Ratoff); Wuthering Heights (Wyler)
As yet unseen:The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes (Werker); Beau Geste (Wellman)
I occasionally write reviews of older movies, but it happens too infrequently to file them by year.