IMDb's 1930s Top 50

The Tramp struggles to live in modern industrial society with the help of a young homeless woman.

City Lights is the first silent film that Charlie Chaplin directed after he established himself with sound accompanied films. The film is about a penniless man who falls in love with a flower girl. The film was a great success and today is deemed a cult classic.

M is German director Fritz Lang’s masterpiece that illustrates the portrait of a child murderer that has caused an entire city to begin rioting. The film is based on actual events.

The lives of numerous people over the course of 20 years in 19th century France, weaved together by the story of an ex-convict named Jean Valjean on the run from an obsessive police inspector, who pursues him for only a minor offense.

Gone With The Wind is, when adjusted for inflation, the most successful film of all times and the height of Hollywood studio films.

A World War I veteran and aspiring engineer tries to re-enter civilian life. After being unwillingly caught up in a robbery, he suffers the intolerable conditions of a Southern chain gang, struggling to clear his name and prove his worth.

Young Dorothy finds herself in a magical world where she makes friends with a lion, a scarecrow and a tin man as they make their way along the yellow brick road to talk with the Wizard and ask for the things they miss most in their lives. The Wicked Witch of the West is the only thing that could stop them.

A naive man is appointed to fill a vacancy in the US Senate. His plans promptly collide with political corruption, but he doesn't back down.

Comic romance between a down-to-earth newspaper reporter and a spoiled runaway heiress.

A young soldier faces profound disillusionment in the soul-destroying horror of World War I. Together with several other young German soldiers, he experiences the horrors of war, such evil of which he had not conceived of when signing up to fight. They eventually become sad, tormented, and confused of their purpose.

At a family reunion, the Cooper clan find that their parents' home is being foreclosed. "Temporarily," Ma moves in with son George's family, Pa with daughter Cora. But the parents are like sand in the gears of their middle-aged children's well regulated households. Can the old folks take matters into their own hands?

Grand Illusion is a classic war film from French director Jean Renoir created without using images from the first World War.

An adventure film about a film crew in search of a monster on a remote island. The crew finds King Kong and decides to take him back to New York as a money making spectacle. The film is a masterpiece of Stop-Motion in filmmaking history and inspired a line of King Kong films.

Robin Hood (Errol Flynn) fights nobly for justice against the evil Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone) while striving to win the hand of the beautiful Maid Marian (Olivia de Havilland).

Comedy-mystery featuring Nick and Nora Charles: a former detective and his rich, playful wife. They solve a murder case mostly for the fun of it.

Childhood chums Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connelly grow up on opposite sides of the fence: Rocky matures into a prominent gangster, while Jerry becomes a priest, tending to the needs of his old tenement neighborhood.

Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is a comedic drama about a Parisian aristocrat. The film was released shortly before the start of World War II.

After World War I, Armistice Lloyd Hart goes back to practice law, former saloon keeper George Hally turns to bootlegging, and out-of-work Eddie Bartlett becomes a cab driver. Eddie builds a fleet of cabs through delivery of bootleg liquor and hires Lloyd as his lawyer. George becomes Eddie's partner and the rackets flourish until love and rival...

Fifth Avenue socialite Irene Bullock needs a "forgotten man" to win a scavenger hunt, and no one is more forgotten than Godfrey Park, who resides in a dump by the East River. Irene hires Godfrey as a servant for her riotously unhinged family, to the chagrin of her spoiled sister, Cornelia, who tries her best to get Godfrey fired. As Irene falls ...

Fritz Lang directed this sequel to his nearly four-hour Dr. Mabuse silent of 1922. The film opens with Detective Hofmeister (Karl Meixner) spying on the activities of a criminal syndicate. Not realizing he has been seen, Hofmeister is attacked by the thugs and later turns up out of his mind.

Trouble in Paradise is one of the most important films of Actor, Producer, and Director Ernst Lubitisch, and his personal favorite of all the films he’s made. A story of two thieves who fall in love and begin doing jobs together under the employment of a beautiful woman who stirs up the relationship.

Throughout the late 19th-century and early 20th-century, Mr Arthur Chipping rises from a shy, nervous teacher to the beloved, revered headmaster of Brookfield School, with his life and career shaped by his love for his wife and his unwavering dedication to his students.

A spoiled brat who falls overboard from a steamship in the 1920s gets picked up by a New England fishing boat, where he's made to earn his keep by joining the crew in their work.

Stagecoach is a western film from director John Ford. John Wayne stars as The Ringo Kid and would become world famous from the film.

Bringing Up Baby is an American screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.

Bride of Frankenstein begins where James Whale's Frankenstein from 1931 ended. Dr. Frankenstein has not been killed as previously portrayed and now he wants to get away from the mad experiments. Yet when his wife is kidnapped by his creation, Frankenstein agrees to help him create a new monster, this time a woman.

A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

Alice, the only relatively normal member of the eccentric Sycamore family, falls in love with Tony Kirby. His wealthy banker father, Anthony P. Kirby, and his snobbish mother, strongly disapprove of the match. When the Kirbys are invited to dinner to become better acquainted with their future in-laws, things do not turn out the way Alice had hoped.

Longfellow Deeds lives in a small town, leading a small town kind of life. When a relative dies and leaves Deeds a fortune, Longfellow moves to the big city where he becomes an instant target for everyone. Deeds outwits them all until Babe Bennett comes along. When small-town boy meets big-city girl anything can, and does, happen.

A sly business manager and two wacky friends of two opera singers help them achieve success while humiliating their stuffy and snobbish enemies.

A mentally retarded giant and his level headed guardian find work at a sadistic cowboy's ranch in depression era America.

When a prisoner barely survives a lynch mob attack and is presumed dead, he vindictively decides to frame the mob for his murder.

Paris, France, 1482. Frollo, Chief Justice of benevolent King Louis XI, gets infatuated by the beauty of Esmeralda, a young Romani girl. The hunchback Quasimodo, Frollo's protege and bell-ringer of Notre Dame, lives in peace among the bells in the heights of the immense cathedral until he is involved by the twisted magistrate in his malicious pl...

Set against the conditions leading up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, French doctor Alexandre Manette serves an 18-year imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, followed by his release to live in London with the daughter he has never met.

A stern Russian woman sent to Paris on official business finds herself attracted to a man who represents everything she is supposed to detest.

An unemployed showgirl poses as Hungarian royalty to infiltrate Parisian society.

When a major newspaper accuses wealthy socialite Connie Allenbury of being a home-wrecker, and she files a multi-million-dollar libel lawsuit, the publication's frazzled head editor, Warren Haggerty, must find a way to turn the tables on her. Soon Haggerty's harried fiancée, Gladys Benton, and his dashing friend Bill Chandler are in on a scheme ...

Two young brothers become the leaders of a gang of kids in their neighborhood. Ozu's charming film is a social satire that draws from the antics of childhood as well as the tragedy of maturity.

César runs a bar along Marseilles' port, assisted by his 23-year-old son, Marius. Friends since childhood, Fanny and Marius love each other, but Marius has a secret wanderlust: every ship's whistle stirs a longing for foreign lands. When M. Panisse seeks Fanny's hand in marriage and when a departing clipper needs a deckhand, Marius and Fanny mus...

After Fanny's boyfriend leaves her and sails away, she finds out she's pregnant.

Dr. Frankenstein, an obsessed scientist, creates a living being from parts of exhumed corpses. The movie revolves around this monster and his struggle to live again.

Scarface is a brutal gangster film from 1932 from director Howard Hawks that depicts the fall of a Chicago gangster.

The Lady Vanishes is a crime thriller from Alfred Hitchcock from 1938 about a train ride in which mysterious events take place.

Rufus T. Firefly is named the dictator of bankrupt Freedonia and declares war on neighboring Sylvania over the love of his wealthy backer Mrs. Teasdale, contending with two inept spies who can't seem to keep straight which side they're on.

Errol Flynn leads a group of slaves to freedom and piracy.

Showman Jerry Travers is working for producer Horace Hardwick in London. Jerry demonstrates his new dance steps late one night in Horace's hotel, much to the annoyance of sleeping Dale Tremont below. She goes upstairs to complain and the two are immediately attracted to each other. Complications arise when Dale mistakes Jerry for Horace.

Wealthy Mary Haines is unaware her husband is having an affair with shopgirl Crystal Allen. Sylvia Fowler and Edith Potter discover this from a manicurist and arrange for Mary to hear the gossip. On the train taking her to a Reno divorce Mary meets the Countess and Miriam (in an affair with Fowler's husband).

A young man in love with a girl from a rich family finds his unorthodox plan to go on holiday for the early years of his life met with skepticism by everyone except for his fiancée's eccentric sister and long-suffering brother.

A poor factory worker, visiting the Tokyo son she has skimped to educate, finds even a college degree doesn't make a difference in Depression era Japan.

A spirited heiress wishing to break into theatre on her own merit arrives at a boardinghouse where aspiring young actresses and showgirls are brought together through their cynicism and disappointments.