Dumbo ends happily enough...but all that comes in a rushed finale; the movie is more interested in capturing the shadings and sounds of sadness (so many scenes take place in the blue night).

How Green Was My Valley thrums with an indomitable confidence in a better day, one that’s rooted in the memory that life in this valley – before the mine hollowed things out – was once very good.

There is hardly a shot in Orson Welles’ towering achivement that doesn’t employ some sort of ingenious trick involving the camera, editing, sound, staging or production design. Kane didn’t invent all of its techniques, but it’s one of the few pictures I can think of that uses almost every one in the movie playbook. The film is like a dictionary of the cinematic language.

Cukor does stage a crackerjack sleigh chase in the climax (the movies need more of those), while overall managing to capture Crawford at what feels like a crucial juncture of her career, just as the gloves were really coming off.

Yes, Meet John Doe is “talky” (if politically astute). That—along with a fairly inert romance between Stanwyck and Cooper—counts against it. But the cast commits with full hearts, especially Cooper, who creates a character both silly (there’s some great physical comedy in his reactions to being put up in a posh hotel room) and sincere.

This might be one of Bette Davis’ least sympathetic parts, which is saying something.

A bit ham-fisted in its call to arms, Foreign Correspondent also fails in trying to force a romance between McCrea and Day. But there are plenty of signature Hitchcock sequences to recommend it.

The original Scared Straight!

Given a hurtling pace by director Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday might just offer the highest laugh-to-minute ratio in film, considering there are jokes in the dialogue, delivery and actors' expressions coming at you all at once.

The Wizard of Oz is frantic, enchanting and spookily surreal.

If joy and liberation bursts from the best Astaire-Rogers films, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is defined by restriction.

Jezebel is populated almost entirely by unsavory characters, foremost among them the woman of the title.

With After the Thin Man, the best thing about the series remains the playful, boozy, flirtatious repartee between Powell and Loy (even if Nick seems a bit bossier this time around).

If Swing Time isn’t the pinnacle film in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers partnership, it surely has their pinnacle production number: Never Gonna Dance, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields.

Directed by Michael Curtiz, Captain Blood is much more than a showcase for one of Hollywood’s legends. The action sequences at sea crackle with excitement (and surprisingly intricate special effects), while the well-navigated narrative, based on a book by adventure novelist Rafael Sabatini, has the fatalistic scope of Charles Dickens.

It never really mattered what loopy plot was devised to get Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers together in their musicals – once they started dancing in each other’s arms, all contrivances fall to the wayside and you clearly see they were made for each other.

Director Alfred Hitchcock, who would remake the movie in 1956 with James Stewart, invests each scene with a blithe sense of fun.

There is pleasure in Astaire and Rogers floating, a foot apart, to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” as well as the elaborate, heavily furred gowns that the fashion setting allows.

By far the highlight is Astaire and Rogers’ impossibly fluid routine to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” in which even that formidable song knows its place and quiets down for a portion of their dance. The two are so elegantly in sync that the ill-fitting conventions of The Gay Divorcee simply melt away.

The whodunit plot is a bit laborious and uninvolving, but William Powell and Myrna Loy are so delightful together—slurrily sexy in the manner of the 1930s, when words and glances had to do all of the work—that it hardly matters.

Even for a 1933 movie musical, Flying Down to Rio is a vaudeville show shamelessly trying to pass for a feature film. Thank goodness, then, that it can get by on sheer showmanship.

Directed by James Whale, The Invisible Man is missing the gothic poeticism of his Frankenstein films, but offers its own sense of unease, especially when the invisible Griffin smashes another cop’s head with a bench. The effects in these trick shots are incredibly sophisticated for the era, as are the moments when Griffin unravels his bandages to reveal … nothing.

This may be the definitive Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical simply because the entire movie revels in the sort of things that Berkeley’s elaborate dance numbers revel in: innuendo, flirtations and flesh.

How thoroughly does Joan Crawford own Grand Hotel? She makes Greta Garbo superfluous. A star parade (and Best Picture winner), Grand Hotel unfairly encourages such comparisons.

A piercing dignity defines this infamous Tod Browning picture, in which a community of circus sideshow performers exact revenge on the trapeze beauty who exploits one of their own.

Marlene Dietrich is in full plume in Shanghai Express, literally and figuratively.

Most of the picture takes place on a luxury cruise liner – on which Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo are stowaways – and the setting makes for a wonderful comic playground. Racing up and down decks and in and out of cabins, the brothers exhibit a more sophisticated sense of staging and interplay than they did in something like Animal Crackers.

Crime may not pay, but The Public Enemy was one of the first pictures to recognize that it sure can be exciting to watch.