Riders of Destiny, his first of many for Monogram Pictures, is notable for a number of reasons. For the next decade, until John Ford resurrected him in 1939 as a bona fide screen presence in Stagecoach, Wayne became a matinee idol in numerous entertaining though mostly forgettable B-movie oaters. Smith has major sentimental overtones and desire for a fantastical world, as Stewart’s character displays a fortitude and integrity we wish all politicians had.- Nathan SpicerĪfter the box office failure of Raoul Walsh’s major studio epic The Big Trail in 1929, a movie intended to make the young John Wayne a Western star, the budding actor dusted off his chaps and fled to smaller independent studios to hone his craft. But unlike All The King’s Men, the main character isn’t corrupted by politics, but rather defies and decries the corruption. He’s the leader of a Boy Scout troop before being recruited to the Senate by a team that believes he’ll do whatever he’s told-specifically, allow the building of a dam that will make said team rich. Similar to All The King’s Men (and not just because it’s incredibly old), this film chronicles the tale of Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart). You might be surprised how deeply the work of Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor, Yasujiro Ozu, and many more still resonate almost 100 years later. Others that may have fallen out of contemporary conversation require revisiting. Some remain the most influential movies of their type, like King Kong and It Happened One Night. Some movies from the 1930s remain household names today, classics for nearly a century like The Wizard of Oz and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The 1930s were a time of screwballs, musicals, Universal Monsters and the looming conservative crackdown of the Hays Code. Talkies, even some in Technicolor, navigated responses to hardship that reveled in high escapism, genre symbolism and the strict idealism of Soviet socialist realism. ![]() As the Great Depression hit Hollywood and beyond, the booming silent era of the 1920s morphed in both sensory technology and theme.
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