1933 Top Ten List

Counsellor at Law (William Wyler)

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey)

42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon)

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy)

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack)

Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon)

The Good Companions (Victor Saville)

I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles)

Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (Lewis Milestone)

Man's Castle (Frank Borzage)

Additional 1933 Films By Rating

Dinner at Eight (George Cukor)

The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts)

Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo)

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang)

The Emperor Jones (Dudley Murphy)

Midnight Mary (William Wellman)

Ladies They Talk About (Howard Bretheron & William Keighley)

Blondie Johnson (Ray Enright)

Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch)

Gabriel Over the White House (Gregory LaCava)

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): Baby Face (Green); Child of Manhattan (Buzzell); The Invisible Man (Whale); Little Women (Cukor); Queen Christina (Mamoulian); Roman Scandals (Tuttle); She Done Him Wrong (Sherman); The Silver Cord (Cromwell); Three Cornered Moon (Nugent)

As yet unseen: The Mystery of the Wax Museum (Curtiz); Picture Snatcher (Bacon)

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