Jewel Robbery (1932)

Jewel Robbery (1932) is a pre-code comedy heist reefer-mad lad and lady gentleman thief and sexy Vienses bonbon romp and romance amoral fun and games feature directed by William Dieterle and starring William Powell and Kay Francis, based on the 1931 Hungarian play Ékszerrablás a Váci-utcában by Ladislas Fodor and its subsequent English adaptation, Jewel Robbery by Bertram Bloch.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is a screwball thirties film classic classic Howard Hawks zany heiress and hen-pecked fiancée comedy proto femme fatale use of gay reverse stereotypical gender role bumbling sexless workaholic themes of exploitation, and the impact of colonialism and the removing of animals from their natural habitat madcap fast talkin improvised and anarchic universally acclaimed seminal item of Americana as well as a semantic and semiotic artistic act of gender and social denotation starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant and May Robson and Charles Ruggles and Walter Catlett, as well as Barry Fitzgerald as Aloysius Gogarty, Mrs. Random's gardener.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) is a classic studio spectacle pathos and adventure love survival and corruption tale of technological progress and dark age tale of guilt, compulsion, and claustrophobic urban darkness and starring, Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell, Edmond O'Brien, Walter Hampden, George Zucco and George Tobias.

The Front Page (1931)

The Front Page (1931) is a journalism and media Lewis Milestone pre-code screwball death row telephony comedy classic United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" public domain brilliant early talkie perfectly transferring into screen terms a stage classic of the twenties ribald rat-a-tat dialogue movie creation which imagines into life a new American archetype, the fast-talking, hard-drinking newshound who'll do anything for a scoop, starring Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns, Pat O'Brien as Hildebrand "Hildy" Johnson, Mary Brian as Peggy Grant, Edward Everett Horton as Roy V. Bensinger, Walter Catlett as Jimmy Murphy, George E. Stone as Earl Williams, Mae Clarke as Molly Malloy, Slim Summerville as Irving Pincus, Matt Moore as Ernie Kruger, Frank McHugh as "Mac" McCue, Clarence Wilson as Sheriff Peter B. "Pinky" Hartman. 

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is a classic Universal Monsters monster classic James Whale camp horror mad scientist angry torch-wielding mob driven queer coded Breen-positive historic recreational fantasy monster horror feature film sequel from the earliest most nascent era of screen creations both bestial in demeanour and possessed of a quasi-mythic savagery, marked by both vaudeville and a brutal, subhuman force, a movie which like its creatures, groans under the weight of its own deformity and beauty, respectively, with pile-driving feminist angst clashing misogynist tropery galore. 

Island of Lost Men (1939)

Island of Lost Men (1939) is a undercover cop exotica yellowface Teutonic expatriate adventure crime romp up the dark rivers of the racists century and hard into the orienticals in more ways than just the music and the music is bullying and harassing of a certain type of perfectly exampled nature of the era, for which engaging in ridicule as a proceeding was the tone of reckoning, even for horror, in its serious moments of introspection.

What is horror? It's a bit like being stuck in a watery hole, maybe as in The Deer Hunter (1978). The young Broderick Crawford finds out in Island of Lost Men (1939). Broderick Crawford may be the most film noir aspect of this non-noir branch reform of the form.

Kid Galahad (1937)

Kid Galahad (1937) is an ingenue in the ring classic boxing sports and bellboy Humphrey Bogart is the baddie high-thirties Michael Curtiz greatest director of all time steamer with a floof performance from Bette Davis and a flouncy show from Bette Davis' own acting discovery Jane Bryan, and Wayne Morris, Wayne who is his own mystery man of film noir, which shall be laid out a little below, while this Curtiz cut is not film noir, nor even not a little or with a slight flicker of noir, which oddly made it likeable material for the main event which appears to be the 1962 starring Elvis Presley remake of the matter.

Ingenue in the ring country bumpkin with his trouser legs cut off by a near blow jobbing Humphrey Bogart must have looked good on Elvis too, because he is as much of a bellhop as he is a boxer, and Wayne Morris, mystery man of film noir is the same.

Secret Agent (1936)

Secret Agent (1936) is a wacky and serious by turns British historical continental espionage thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, and one able to pull a rather outré punch with its oddity, hilarity, dark subject matter and casual approach to high European super spy-work.

Either way the debonair humour and sophisticated violence and random fantasy involved in this type of fancy spy work is going at some point in the future, and maybe after being re-emphasised by Hitchcock in his masterpiece North By Northwest (1959) be reminiscent of the British Bond, and indeed if you were to ever ask who might have been the first British actor to play such a thing, the answer may well be that it is John Gielgud.

That is correct. Gielgud as Bond. He even does the Mrs Female Spy only one bed for Mr and Mrs Bond in a hotel room routine, so why not.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) is not just a classic but is likely the classic, classic Sherlock Holmes movie.

It is the debut movie of the most iconic Holmes on screen of them all, being Basil Rathbone. That is to say the greatest of all time, and its place in the classic film noir story.

Historical and faithful, wonderful and trend-setting, and with a noir-themed foggy soundstage, in an era just before World War, expressing the accumulated sophistication of the movie making of the 1930s, with more to commend it than simply its being a pure and fun expression of the Holmes story, as well as being the first of 14 films, which came to type a legend into the annals of cinema, drama, and noir.

Out on Fox's enormous back lots, the landscapes of Devonshire came to life  and notably there was no hint at all with any participating artist, producer nor technician, no suggestion that there would be any more Sherlock Holmes films after this one.

After landing the role, Basil Rathbone said:

"I think that Holmes is one of the greatest characters in fiction. With all the thousands of detective and mystery stories that have been written since, the name of Sherlock Holmes still stands at the head of the roster of famous sleuths. It is synonymous with the very word 'detective'. To play such a character means as much to me as ten Hamlets."