1939

Gone With The Wind
Sidney Howard
Gone With The Wind (1939) is often considered the most beloved, enduring and popular film of all time. Sidney Howard's script was derived from Margaret Mitchell's first and only published, best-selling Civil War and Reconstruction Period novel of 1,037 pages that first appeared in 1936, but was mostly written in the late 1920s. Producer David O. Selznick had acquired the film rights to Mitchell's novel in July, 1936 for $50,000 - a record amount at the time to an unknown author for her first novel, causing some to label the film "Selznick's Folly." At the time of the film's release, the fictional book had surpassed 1.5 million copies sold. More records were set when the film was first aired on television in two parts in late 1976, and controversy arose when it was restored and released theatrically in 1998...

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington
Lewis R. Foster

1938

Pygmalion
Cecil Lewis, W. P. Lipscomb & Ian Dalrymple
George Bernard Shaw (Screenplay)
Pygmalion (1938) is the non-musical film version of George Bernard Shaw's 1912 stage play, a socio-economic drama based on the Cinderella story, but actually taken from the Greek myth of Pygmalion - about a sculptor who fell in love with a marble statue of his own making. The Broadway musical remake that was inspired from this film, Lerner and Loewe's 1956 production, also led to the famous film musical My Fair Lady (1962), that would walk away with eight Oscars (out of twelve), including Best Picture. This film garnered four Academy Award nominations (with one win), including Best Picture, Best Actor (Leslie Howard), and Best Actress (Wendy Hiller). Its sole award was for Best Screenplay.
A bullying and smug bachelor, Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) of phonetics and linguistics makes a bet with Colonel George Pickering (Scott Sunderland) that he can turn an impetuous Cockney 'guttersnipe' flower girl from Convent Garden, Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller in her first screen role) into a lady within six months. To do so, he must transform her thick-accented voice, by coaching her to speak proper English with elocution lessons, teaching her manners, and drilling her so that she will be educated. "We were above that in Convent Garden...I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me; I'm not fit to sell anything else." "I'm a good girl, I am."

Boys Town
Dore Schary & Eleanore Griffin

1937

The Life Of Emile Zola
Norman Reilly Raine, Heinz Herald, & Geza Herczeg

A Star Is Born
William A. Wellman & Robert Carson

1936

The Story Of Louis Pasteur
Pierre Collings & Sheridan Gibney

The Story Of Louis Pasteur
Pierre Collings & Sheridan Gibney

1935

The Informer
Dudley Nichols

The Scoundrel
Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur

1934

It Happened One Night
Robert Riskin
It Happened One Night (1934) is one of the greatest romantic comedies in film history, and a film that has endured in popularity. It is considered one of the pioneering "screwball" romantic comedies of its time, setting the pattern for many years afterwards along with another contemporary film, The Thin Man (1934).
The escapist theme of the film, appropriate during the Depression Era, is the story of the unlikely romantic pairing of a mis-matched couple - a gruff and indifferent, recently-fired newspaper man (Gable) and a snobbish, superior-acting heiress (Colbert) - a runaway on the lam. It is a reversal of the Cinderella story (the heroine rejects her wealthy lifestyle), a modern tale with light-hearted sex appeal in which courtship and love triumph over class conflicts, socio-economic differences, and verbal battles of wit.
The madcap film from Columbia Studios (one of the lesser studios) was an unexpected runaway box office sleeper hit (especially after it began to play in small-town theaters), and it garnered the top five Academy Awards (unrivaled until 1975, forty-one years later by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) - and then again by The Silence of the Lambs (1991).) It won all five of its nominated categories: Best Picture, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), Best Director (Frank Capra), and Best Adaptation (Robert Riskin).
The film, composed mostly of a road trip (by bus, car, foot, and by thumb in locales such as bus depots or interiors of buses, and the open road) by the social-class-unmatched couple, contains some of the most classic scenes ever made: the "Walls of Jericho" scene in an auto-camp bungalow so that they can sleep in the same room out of wedlock, the doughnuts-dunking lesson, the hitchhiking scene, the night-time scene on a haystack in a deserted barn, and the dramatic wedding scene. With his good-natured, street-smart, and breezy performance, Gable influenced the un-sale of undershirts by taking off his shirt and exposing his bare chest, and bus travel by women substantially increased as a result of the film.

Manhattan Melodrama
Arthur Caesar

1932/33

Little Women
Vistor Heerman & Sarah Y. Mason

One Way Passage
Robert Lord

1931/32

Bad Girl
Edwin Burke

The Champ
Frances Marion

1930/31

Cimarron
Howard Estabrook

The Dawn Patrol
John Monk Saunders