1930 Top Ten List

The Devil to Pay! (George Fitzmaurice)

All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone)

L'Âge d'Or (Luis Buñuel)

Animal Crackers (Victor Heerman)

Hell's Angels (Howard Hughes)

Holiday (Edward H. Griffith)

Monte Carlo (Ernst Lubitsch)

The Royal Family of Broadway (George Cukor & Cyril Gardner)

The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg)

Borderline (Kenneth Macpherson)

Additional 1930 Films By Rating

That Night's Wife (Yasujirō Ozu)

Ladies of Leisure (Frank R. Capra)

Morocco (Josef von Sternberg)

City Girl (F.W. Murnau)

King of Jazz (John Murray Anderson)

Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock)

Westfront 1918 (G.W. Pabst)

Under the Roofs of Paris (René Clair)

People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak & Edgar G. Ulmer)

Abraham Lincoln (D.W. Griffith)

For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.

Ratings are on a needlessly precise 100-point scale.

Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are marked with if I currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit them and they get a numeral. (Lists from prior to about 1988 are especially suspect, as I compiled them long ago from memories that were in many cases already pretty dusty.)

Seen but currently unrated (and not presumptively among my top 10): The Big Trail (Walsh); The Blue Angel (Von Sternberg); The Divorcee (Leonard); The Green Goddess (Green); Strictly Unconventional (Burton); Three Faces East (Del Ruth); The Woman Racket (Ober & Kelley)

As yet unseen: Earth (Dovzhenko); Salt for Svanetia (Kalatozov)

I occasionally write reviews of older movies, but it happens too infrequently to file them by year.