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This is a tough one. Noir is one of my favorite genres, and that's the 40's. Some fine films about World War II, whether combat, thriller, comedy or drama. Citizen Kane and the best of the early Orson Welles belongs to the 40's. Also, the best (indeed most) of Preston Sturges; some great early Billy Wilder; great stuff from up and comers, from Huston to Kazan to Mankiewicz. For all that, I don't think of the specifically Hollywood 40's as particularly larger than life; many of the great stars of the period (Bogart, Davis, Hayworth, Turner), yes, but not so much the decade as a whole. Important as movies were back then, I think it's far to say that World War II was even bigger; and after that came the Cold War.

As to the 30's, well, the Depression was big, too, and it paralyzed much of the nation; yet in those years, maybe because movies were so important, Hollywood rose to the occasion and assumed (or maybe I should say retained, from the 20's) a larger than life status that was big enough to fight off those Depression blues. Movies were bigger than radio in the 30's, as it took time for average people with limited incomes to acquire a radio; by the tail end of the decade radio was beginning to assume a status akin to what television achieved ten years later, as a living-room alternative to movies. In time, radio and the movies achieved a parity; but the newer medium never came close to replacing the older one. There was rivalry, to be sure, but because radio wasn't visual it didn't carry anywhere near the theat that television had from the get-go. Indeed, most of the major radio networks had state of the art west coast studios by the second half of the 30's, as they wanted to use Hollywood talent and also see some of their talent give the movies a shot. Bottom line: Hollywood pretty much owned the mass media 30's (not the case by the 40's).

Why am I carrying on like this? Just thinking out loud, so to speak, rambling toward a conclusion, which is that I find the 30's a more interesting decade for films than the 40's. I'm not so sure it produced a better quality of film, and I'm not going to carry on about the superiority of, say, 30's super-productions (Mutiny On the Bounty, Lives Of a Bengal Lancer, San Francisco, Lost Horizon, Gunga Din) over similarly big, ambitious films from the 40's (How Green Was My Valley, Mrs. Miniver, Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Duel In the Sun ) . At a personal level I feel more for the 40's. I think I understand the mentality, what was going on, why certain films got made. As to the 30's, it's too big for me to wrap my mind around. It's easy to see why people went for Van Johnson and June Allyson, to understand why Going My Way was such a big hit, why people liked the Hope and Crosby pictures, the Abbott and Costello ones, the Betty Grables. When it's the 30's it's like OMG! There was so much going on! Take 1931, the year when two major genres emerged almost simultaneously, the gangster film and the horror film. So there's Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, Dracula and Frankenstein, with the first two coming from one studio, the last two another. In each case the second film was the bigger hit, made the bigger star. At around the same time audiences were becoming familiar with the names of Robinson, Cagney, Lugosi and Karloff they were becoming acquainted with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. In comedy, the Marx Brothers were riding high already, with Laurel and Hardy not far behind. The best picture winner at the Oscars for that year was the western epic Cimarron, starring the still hot silent he-man star Richard Dix and newcomer Irene Dunne. A huge box-office draw at the time was child actor Jackie Cooper. Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler were at the top of their game that year, too, with Will Rogers also coming on strong. That's a whole lotta stuff goin' on in one year; and that's just off the top of my head.

The Hollywood of the 30's is so fascinating, what with so much happening, so many things,--whether films trends, stars--compressed into one year (1933: King Kong and 42nd Street, The Invisible Man and Cavalcade, Duck Soup and She Done Him Wrong!). There was so much going on, so much creativity, so many genres up and down, then up again; careers that seemed so promising one year falling apart just a few short years down the rode (think of where Kay Francis, Constance Bennett, Phillips Holmes, Ann Harding and Warner Baxter stood in the Hollywood hierarchy of 1933, then look where they were five years later). The early, pre-Code 30's was quite grim and yet colorful in its downbeat way, while the middle part of the decade was much brighter, more full of action, romance and spectacle. In the early 30's Dressler and Harlow were top box-office; by the mid-30's Shirley Temple had conquered all, with Alice Faye coming up fast. The 30's was a decade that produced some weird (and on these boards much beloved) horror stuff like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Old Dark House, Dr. X, Freaks, The Mummy, Murders At the Zoo and The Island Of Lost Souls and Mickey and Judy, Dr. Kildare, Captains Courageous, You Can't Take It With You and The Wizard Of Oz. Was there ever another decade so diverse, so rich, so multi-faceted in the movies it produced, the genres it spawned? There was the wildly popular Thin Man series and the almost as popular Frankenstein one. Crazy, man! Then there are those films that are either lost or hard to find; things like Ingagi, The Bat Whispers, Air Devils, Wharf Angel. So as I think about it I prefer the 30's, which seems much larger than life than the more routine, conformist, artistically ambitious 40's. There seems so much more to the Hollywood of 1930-39. It may only have been a decade but it feels like a century. As to which decade produced the best films, I dunno, haven't done the math. The 30's probably has the edge, especially in terms of originality.