Flunky, Work Hard (1931, Mikio Naruse)

Twenty-eight minutes in length, Flunky, Work Hard is the earliest surviving work by Japanese master Mikio Naruse, made just one year after his debut. If Passing Fancy by Ozu belongs to the proletarian-focused cinema on the 1930’s, then Flunky, Work Hard belongs to that tradition too while also straddling a more experimental vein in the …

Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks)

It may rarely get credited as such, but Bringing Up Baby is one of the most beautiful films in the American cinema, as well as one of its most definitive. In very few other places would the American dream of independence be so thoroughly explored and so thoroughly exalted, even with the knowledge that it …

People On Sunday (Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer, 1930)

Directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer, written by Curt Siodmak and Billy (or Billie) Wilder, shot by Edgar Schufftan and Fred Zinnemann, all while they were still young Berliners. People on Sunday is an act of democracy from a country about to plunge into the depths of something much darker. It is a …

Number 17 (Alfred Hitchcock, 1932)

The opening of Number 17, the last film Hitchcock made for the Associated British Picture Corporation, features “a delirium of continuity” (to quote Jonathan Rosenbaum) and  a montage of chilled imagery, fluid camera movement and unsettling effects that recalls comparable sequences in the films of Murnau. In these minutes we feel not so far from …