As an artist, Alfred Hitchcock surpassed this early achievement many times in his career, but for sheer entertainment value it still stands in the forefront of his work.

The direction of this clammy 1935 horror item is credited to Louis Friedlander, which is actually Lew Landers in hiding—perhaps understandably.

Whale added an element of playful sexuality to this version, casting the proceedings in a bizarre visual framework that makes this film a good deal more surreal than the original.

Although the film is fast and consistently clever, it is more deeply flawed than any other Hitchcock film of the period, failing to find a thematic connection between its imaginative set pieces.

A curiosity of the first order.

William A. Seiter directed this 1935 release, with a light touch but not enough style to transcend the machinations of the trifling plot.

Douglas Sirk's famous 1959 remake was pure metaphysics; this version emphasizes the social content, particularly in its Depression-era attention to class nuances.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were first teamed in Flying Down to Rio, but this 1934 feature was their first effort together as stars—and it worked beautifully, with great Cole Porter songs like "Night and Day," and Con Conrad and Herb Magidson's "The Continental."

As Nick and Nora Charles, William Powell and Myrna Loy function as the most sophisticated, insolent, and healthy married couple on-screen.

Mitchell Leisen, the director, hadn't yet developed the light touch with actors he would display memorably later in the decade, though some of his trademark pictorial effects are in evidence.

This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a minimum of populist posturing.

The first screen pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Pretty jerky, and not enough of Fred and Ginger; still, it has the “Carioca.”

Ernest Schoedsack's sequel to his monster hit of 1933, rushed out the same year. The slapdash production shows in a wavering tone and a paucity of special effects. With Robert Armstrong and Helen Mack; the animation, what there is of it, is by the legendary Willis O'Brien.

The Marx Brothers' best movie (1933) and, not coincidentally, the one with the strongest director—Leo McCarey, who had the flexibility to give the boys their head and the discipline to make some formal sense of it.

James Whale's 1933 film plays more like a British folk comedy than a horror movie; it's full of the same deft character twists that made his Bride of Frankenstein a classic.

Despite its flaws, the film remains a fascinating souvenir of a vanished avant-garde.

One of the best of the Warner Brothers showbiz musicals (1933), with James Cagney turning in a dynamite performance as an enterprising producer, and Busby Berkeley contributing some of his most engaging and bizarre production numbers.

One of Jean Harlow's best pictures, this 1933 feature is a merciless satire of Hollywood, with Harlow as a movie star and Lee Tracy as her publicity agent.

Willis O'Brien did the stop-action animation for this 1933 feature, which is richer in character than most of the human cast.

This 1933 film is the best known of the Warner Brothers Depression-era musicals, though it doesn't compare in dash and extravagance to later entries in the cycle.

The dialogue slackens after the first half hour, but the stars have some fine comic moments together, and the intimate precode encounters are pretty sexy.

Intimations of dope addiction drive the compact plot, which resorts to some stiff exposition early on but careens toward a slam-bang ending.

Unaccountably, it works.

In some ways this 1932 item is the definitive MGM film, in which the direction (Edmund Goulding), screenplay (William A. Drake), and cinematography (William Daniels) all seem deliberately pale, the better to set off the glitter of the stars; they’re like jewels mounted in a deliberately neutral display case.

This 1932 release was the first Marx film to take on the Depression, and the brothers manage to satirize everything from education to prostitution and bootlegging.

Most of the film is set in an abandoned house, where enjoyably murky intrigues abound, and the last ten minutes feature a chase sequence with miniatures that is almost as much fun.

A dark, brutal, exhilaratingly violent film, blending comedy and horror in a manner that suggests Chico Marx let loose with a live machine gun.

If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film by Tod Browning.