1939 Was <i> Really</i> Hollywood’s Best Year

In his article “The Best Year of Our Films” (Calendar, July 11), critic Michael Wilmington asserted that 1941 was not only the first year of the Modern Era but that it was also the single greatest year in the history of the American movie industry. Well, he may be right on the first point, but the second is certainly debatable.

Not only did 1939 produce more great films than 1941--films considered classics today, 50 years later--but it also produced nearly twice as many. Film production, for that matter, was at an all-time high. The five major studios of the day (MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Century Fox, RKO) and three non-integrated outfits (Universal, Columbia, United Artists) made up what came to be called “the Big Eight,” a cartel of interdependent companies that dominated the nation’s 11th largest industry: movie making.

The Big Eight had a combined 590 actors, 114 directors and 340 writers under contract, each of whom worked an eight-hour shift every weekday, half a day on Saturday and took home a weekly paycheck. It took an average of 22 days to shoot a movie, at an average cost of $300,000. And with grosses in excess of $700 million annually, they could guarantee bankers 4 1/2 cents back on every dollar invested in production, which also made it easier to take a chance on “risky” or commercially untested material.

Because of all this, they were able to crank out an astounding 365 feature films that year, in an age when sequels and remakes were quite rare. Indeed, 329 original screenplays were written in 1939, a figure that seems almost miraculous in retrospect.

One reason Wilmington chooses 1941 as Hollywood’s greatest year is what he called the “Talent in the Room.” In 1939, the room could hardly contain all the extraordinary talents working in Hollywood. Victor Fleming directed both of the year’s most famous releases, “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Hollywood’s so-called “golden age” was made possible by the studio system created by the Big Eight, and these two motion pictures (released within six months of each other) represent that system at the peak of its power and majesty.

Frank Capra directed the second and best of his “right overcoming might” trilogy, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” William Wyler directed one of the greatest love stories of all time, “Wuthering Heights”; Ernst Lubitsch, one of the greatest tear-jerkers, “Dark Victory”; Raoul Walsh, one of the greatest gangster pictures, “The Roaring ‘20s,” and George Stevens one of the greatest adventure films, “Gunga Din.”

And John Ford directed three classics in 1939: “Stagecoach,” which revolutionized the Hollywood Western and remains one of the best in the history of the genre (it was the film Orson Welles studied every night for a month while preparing to shoot “Citizen Kane”); “Young Mr. Lincoln,” which seems to grow in stature with every passing year, and “Drums Along the Mohawk,” the quintessential film detailing the struggles of American settlers after the Revolutionary War.

Even more remarkable, perhaps, were the writers. As David Niven wisely pointed out in his book “Bring On the Empty Horses”: “Reputations and fortunes were made out of movies by producers, directors and actors, but if they had not had good screenplays to work with, they would have sat around picking their noses.”

Besides some of the greatest professional screenwriters of all time hard at work (Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, etc.), future directors such as John Huston and Billy Wilder worked on scripts in 1939, as well as famed novelists such as William Faulker and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In May of 1939, “The Day of the Locust” was published--author Nathanael West’s searing indictment of the Hollywood studio system. However, the book sold only 1,464 copies, bringing his total earnings for his last four novels (10 years’ worth of work) to a mere $1,280. Disheartened, West returned to hacking out scripts at RKO for $350 a week salary. In a letter to his publisher, he gushed: “Thank God for the movies!”

Olivier became a star in 1939. So did John Wayne. Also, Bob Hope, Judy Garland, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, William Holden, John Garfield and Greer Garson.

And as for just plain good movies of all genres--another area where Wilmington gives 1941 higher marks--1939 set the standard. There were musicals (Mickey and Judy in “Babes in Arms,” Fred and Ginger in “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle”), comedies (the Marx Brothers in “At the Circus,” Laurel and Hardy in “The Flying Deuces,” W.C. Fields in “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man”), love stories (“Intermezzo,” “Love Affair”), Westerns (“Jesse James,” “Dodge City,” “Destry Rides Again,” “Union Pacific”), horror films (“Son of Frankenstein,” “Tower of London”), mysteries (“The Hound of the Baskervilles,” “The Cat and the Canary”), action-adventures (“Beau Geste,” “The Real Glory”), literary adaptations (“Of Mice and Men,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “The Man in the Iron Mask”), historical dramas (“Juarez,” “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex”) and children’s films (“The Little Princess,” “Gulliver’s Travels”).

Of course, I haven’t even mentioned “Goodbye Mr. Chips,” “Only Angels Have Wings,” “The Women,” “Golden Boy,” “Stanley and Livingstone” or countless others.

Still, I realize that this is all very subjective and debates like this can go on forever. Just as boxing fans like to argue who would win an Ali-Dempsey match with both fighters in their prime, movie buffs like to debate which decade was better, which year, etc. But, after spending 1 1/2 years researching and writing a 300-page book about why I felt 1939 was the very apex of the Golden Age of Cinema, Wilmington’s article hasn’t changed my mind.