BLACHEFAN

George Washington Carver at Tuskegee Institute (1937) C. Allen Alexander, an African American surgeon from Michigan, convinced George Washington Carver to allow him to shoot 16 mm color footage of the famed botanist and inventor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Alexander wisely shot the film using gloriously resilient Kodachrome, ensuring the colors remain stunningly vibrant and rich. The 12 minutes of fascinating amateur footage include scenes of Carver in his apartment, office and laboratory, as well as images of him tending flowers and displaying his paintings. Also included is footage of a Tuskegee Institute football game and the school's marching band and majorettes. The National Archives has digitized the film as part of its multi-year effort to preserve and make available the historically significant film collections of the National Park Service.

Trance and Dance in Bali (1936-39) The Library holds extensive materials collected by famed anthropologist Margaret Mead, including the exhibit titled Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture. Husband and wife anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead ventured to the island of Bali (now Indonesia) in 1936 to document the country's culture including such behaviors as parent-child interactions, artists at work, and ritual performances and ceremonies in which participants meditate to reach a half-conscious state in order to commune with spirits of ancestors. When possessed by these spirits, those involved may perform unusual acts such as eating glass or fire, until they are brought out of the trance by a shaman. While Mead and Bateson's field work is still considered groundbreaking for illustrating how film could be used as a research tool, it has been criticized, particularly for not accounting sufficiently for the role of religion in Balinese culture.

Swing Time (1936) The sixth of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals features dance numbers set to six Jerome Kern tunes including "Never Gonna Dance," "A Fine Romance," and "The Way You Look Tonight." "Swing Time" is considered by many critics to be the duo's best film, thanks not only to the Jerome Kern score, but to the direction of the well-respected and perfectionist George Stevens, adept in helming any genre. Astaire, a painstaking craftsman in his own right, preplanned even the slightest gesture in his dances. Rogers was a performer, not a creator, but was willing to rehearse until her feet bled -- and did.

Show Boat (1936) James Whale's direction of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical, which was based on an Edna Ferber novel, is brilliant, at times because of its boldness, at others because of its restraint. The depiction of "Old Man River" proves among the film's greatest strengths in its pairing of Paul Robeson's heartfelt rendition of the spiritual-inspired showstopper with an expressionistic and inventive montage sequence. Irene Dunne as Magnolia and Allan Jones as Gaylord Ravenal are the young lovers torn apart by gambling. As the alcoholic torch singer Julie, Helen Morgan's performance is moving and sadly prescient. Helen Westley and Charles Winninger are delightful as Magnolia's domineering mother and henpecked father. The 1950s remake has lush Technicolor but not the heart and soul. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/show_boat.pdf

Rose Hobart (1936) Joseph Cornell, an artist in the "assemblage" movement, combined fragments of found objects into three-dimensional collages and encased them in glass boxes. An avid film buff, Cornell brought his passion for cinema to the assemblage movement by randomly splicing together found footage, including segments of a 1931 "B" picture titled "East of Borneo," which starred, among others, actress Rose Hobart. Cornell created – without ever touching a camera – a 19-minute distillation that he would project at a slower speed and through a deep blue filter while playing a recording of Nestor Amaral's "Holiday in Brazil." The film premiered in December 1936 at the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. A guest at the debut, Salvador Dalí became outraged, claiming the idea of merging collage and film as his own and deriding Cornell to "stick to making boxes" and give up films. Traumatized by the event, the reclusive Cornell rarely exhibited his films again, though he did continue to experiment with the medium until his death in 1972. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/rose_hobart.pdf

Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) Wildly popular during the 1930s, Popeye's impact was matched only by Mickey Mouse, his chief rival for cartoon supremacy. This classic by renowned animators Max and Dave Fleischer features lush three-dimensional sets, Technicolor, and was twice the length of normal eight-minute cartoons.

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) Pare Lorentz, a film critic in his early career, wrote and directed this short documentary illustrating the result of out of control agricultural development which contributed to the Dust Bowl. Lorentz was hired as a consultant for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program to document conditions and educate the public. Lorentz exceeded the agency's budget by several times in creating a picture that audiences would find both artistically and thematically compelling. Few theater chose to screen the film initially, but after greater promotion by the administration and Lorentz himself, "The Plow That Broke the Plains" was generally well received. Its impact on farming practices may be difficult to gauge, but it unquestionably impacted John Ford in his film adaptation of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf

My Man Godfrey (1936) In one of her greatest roles, Carole Lombard sparkles as a dizzy but good-hearted heiress in Gregory La Cava's comedic take and sometimes caustic commentary on the Great Depression. William Powell portrays Godfrey with knife-edged delivery, the forgotten man whom Lombard has turned into the family butler. Pixilated mother Alice Brady, beleaguered father Eugene Pallette, and snarky sister Gail Patrick round out the cast of one of the most exemplary screwball comedies of the 1930s. The cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff is a shimmering argument for the supremacy of black and white film. Do not confuse this classic with the pitiful 1957 remake.

Modern Times (1936) Despite its loose structure, this film -- Charlie Chaplin's last silent -- coherently and comically denounces the industrialization of everyday life. Chaplin achieves a near-perfect balance of humor and pathos, and his scenes with Paulette Goddard, in particular, reflect genuine warmth and maturity. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/modern_times.2.pdf

Master Hands (1936) Henry Jamison "Jam" Handy pioneered the corporate promotional film in the early 1920s, and his Jam Handy Organization, officed in Detroit, claimed General Motors among its chief clients. Handy originally created "Master Hands" to promote Chevrolet products to existing and prospective stock holders, but its success lasted for decades, including a stint as a wartime morale booster and later as a training film. It portrays factory workers as masters over the raw materials they bend to their will, as emphasized by Samuel Benavie's score and cinematographer Gordon Avril's artsy lighting and composition. The Jam Handy Organization continued producing films into the 1960s, amassing some 7,000 films over 40 years. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/master_hands.pdf

Fury (1936) In Fritz Lang's taut drama, Spencer Tracy plays an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime. After being attacked by a mob, Joe's girlfriend (Sylvia Sidney) convinces him to take the higher road and let the judicial system take its course. Based on the story "Mob Rule" by Norman Krasna, "Fury" was the first film Lang made in the United States. Although the film's dark, gritty story departed from MGM's usual glamorous fare, the film was a hit with audiences, performed well at the box office, and won an Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/fury.pdf

Flash Gordon Serial (1936) This science fiction serial, told in 13 episodes, was the first screen adaptation of the comic-strip "Flash Gordon," created in 1934 by Alex Raymond to compete with another sci-fi comic, "Buck Rogers." Buster Crabbe portrayed the title character who journeys to the planet Mongo and encounters the evil emperor Ming the Merciless (Charles B. Middleton). Unusually ambitious in both budget and production values, the Universal serial used recycled sets, costumes and stock music from the studio's famous horror films, and was an immediate smash with audiences. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/flash_gordon.pdf

Dodsworth (1936) In this highly acclaimed adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel, Walter Huston plays Sam Dodsworth, a good-hearted, middle-aged man who runs an auto manufacturing firm. His wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton) is obsessed with the notion that she's growing old, and she eventually persuades Sam to sell his interest in the company and take her to Europe. He agrees for the sake of their marriage, but before long Fran has begun to think of herself as a cosmopolitan sophisticate and thinks of Sam as dull and unadventurous. Craving excitement, Fran begins spending her time with other men and eventually informs Sam that she's leaving him. Sam meets an attractive widow (Mary Astor) who seems to understand Sam in a way his wife does not. When Fran returns to Sam after being rejected by her suitor's family, Sam gives in, but in a short time he comes to his senses and returns to the widow. "Dodsworth" was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Huston), and Best Supporting Actress (Maria Ouspenskaya), though only art director Richard Day walked away with an Oscar.

Top Hat (1935) The fourth pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first with a screenplay written specifically for them, "Top Hat" is the quintessential Astaire-Rogers musical, complete with a contrived story of mistaken identity, romance, dapper outfits, art deco sets, plenty of dazzling dance numbers and an array of wonderful songs, including perhaps the most famous Astaire-Rogers duet, "Cheek to Cheek." This effervescent musical proved the perfect tonic for Depression-era audiences, even if it was merely a reworking of the dance team's earlier "The Gay Divorcee." The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/top_hat.pdf

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) Charles Laughton, known for such serious roles as Nero, King Henry XIII and later as the 1935 Captain Bligh, takes on comedy in this tale of an English manservant won in a poker game by American Charlie Ruggles, a member of Red Gap, Washington's extremely small social elite. Laughton, in understated valet fashion, worriedly responds: "North America, my lord. Quite an untamed country I understand." However, once in America, he finds not uncouth backwoodsmen, but rather a more egalitarian society that soon has Laughton reciting the Gettysburg Address, catching the American spirit and becoming a successful businessman. Aided by comedy stalwarts ZaSu Pitts and Roland Young, Laughton really shows his acting range and pulls off comedy perfectly. It didn't hurt that Leo McCarey, who had just worked with W.C. Fields and would next guide Harold Lloyd, was in the director's chair. McCarey, who could pull heartstrings or touch funny bones with equal skill, started his long directorial career working with such comedy icons as Laurel & Hardy and created several beloved American films.

A Night at the Opera (1935) When the Marx Brothers moved to MGM, director Sam Wood was tasked by studio exec Irving Thalberg to rein in the anarchy the brothers had perpetrated at Paramount. No longer the focal point of the picture, they served as comic relief to the musical romance between Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones. As the business-savvy Thalberg might have predicted, the film was the highest grossing of all the Marx Brothers comedies, but also signaled their artistic decline. Though no longer at the reins, they still delivered plenty of frenetic fun, as evidenced by the hilarious stateroom scene, and subjected Margaret Dumont and Sig Ruman to endless indignities.

Naughty Marietta (1935) Cinema's first pairing of sensational singing duo Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, who captivated audiences with songs such as "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life." In order to avoid a prearranged marriage, a beautiful and rebellious French princess (MacDonald) swaps identities with her maid and escapes to colonial New Orleans, where she finds true love with a gallant sea captain (Eddy). Directed by W.S. Van Dyke and based on a popular 1910 operetta by Victor Herbert, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, and sound engineer Douglas Shearer won an Academy Award for his work.

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) Director James Whale took his success with "Frankenstein," added humor and thus created a cinematic hybrid that perplexed audiences at first glance but captivated them by picture's end. Joined eventually by a mate (Elsa Lanchester), the Frankenstein monster (Boris Karloff reprising his role and investing the character with emotional subtlety) evolves into a touchingly sympathetic character as he gradually becomes more human. Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorious is captivatingly bizarre. Many film historians consider "Bride," with its surreal visuals, superior to the original. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/bride_frank.pdf

The Informer (1935) Courtesy of Warner Bros. This marks the 11th film directed by John Ford to be named to the National Film Registry, the most of any director. "The Informer" depicts with brutal realism the life of an informant during the Irish Rebellion of 1922, who turns in his best friend and then sees the walls closing in on him in return. Critic Andre Sennwald, writing in the New York Times, praised Ford's direction: "In his hands 'The Informer' becomes at the same time a striking psychological study of a gutter Judas and a raw impressive picture of the Dublin underworld during the Black and Tan terror." Ford and cinematographer Joseph August borrowed from German expressionism to convey the Dublin atmosphere. To this point, Ford had compiled a solid workmanlike career as he learned his craft. "The Informer" placed him in the top echelon of American film directors and over the next 20 years he crafted numerous other classics, from the 1939 "Stagecoach" through the 1962 "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."

Becky Sharp (1935) Actress Miriam Hopkins had a long and successful movie career, appearing in many classics, including "Trouble in Paradise" and "Design for Living." However, it is as this film's titular heroine that she received her only Academy Award best-actress nomination. Based upon Thackeray's novel "Vanity Fair," "Becky" is the story of a socially ambitious woman and her destructive climb up the class system. "Becky Sharp" merits historical note as the first feature-length film to utilize the three-strip Technicolor process, which, even today, gives the film a shimmering visual appeal. The lengthy, complicated restoration process of "Becky Sharp" by the UCLA Film and Television Archive marked one of the earliest archival restorations to garner widespread public attention. Partners in this painstaking effort included the National Telefilm Associates Inc., Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, Cineteca Nazionale (Rome), British Film Institute, The Film Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Paramount and YCM Laboratories.

Twentieth Century (1934) A satire on the theatrical milieu and its oversized egos, "Twentieth Century" marked the first of director Howard Hawks' frenetic comedies that had leading actors of the day "make damn fools of themselves." In Hawks' words, the genre became affectionately known as "screwball comedy." Hawks had writers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who penned the original play, craft dialogue scenes in which lines overlapped as in ordinary conversations, but still remained understandable, a style he continued in later films. This sophisticated farce about the tempestuous romance of an egocentric impresario and the star he creates did not fare well on its release, but has come to be recognized as one of the era's finest film comedies, one that gave John Barrymore his last great film role and Carole Lombard her first. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/20th_century.pdf

The Thin Man (1934) Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett, W.S. Van Dyke's "The Thin Man" introduced American audiences to Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy), a married couple who solves mysteries with the help of their dog, Asta (Skippy). The film received multiple Academy Award nominations, including those for Best Actor, Best Directing, Best Writing (Adaptation) for Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and Outstanding Production (the equivalent of today's Best Picture). The popularity of "The Thin Man" spawned a number of sequels, resulting in a series of six films starring the Charleses, as well as a radio series in the 1940s and a television series in the 1950s.

Tarzan and His Mate (1934) A rather steamy pre-Production Code Tarzan film, the second and generally considered the finest in the series, has Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) and Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan) battling poachers and living a carefree life in the jungle. Jane's scanty costumes and "nude" swimming scene (performed by a double) rankled Production Code bigwigs, and the numerous sequels that followed would reflect more family-friendly sensibilities. Cedric Gibbons, who was responsible for the art direction on many lavish MGM films, began the picture as director, but was replaced by the more seasoned director Jack Conway during the shoot.

Punch Drunks (1934) Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard – better known as the Three Stooges – reached their cinema heyday at Columbia Pictures between 1933 and 1959, following a career in vaudeville starting in 1925 as Ted Healy and His Stooges. "Punch Drunks," the second of nearly 200 short subjects in which the team starred, is one of the few scripted solely by the trio. It finds the boys in the world of professional boxing with Moe and Larry attempting to turn waiter Curly into a heavyweight champ. The boxing ring proved the perfect background for the Stooges' trademark super violent, cartoonlike slapstick.

Our Daily Bread (1934) During the heart of the Great Depression, as the nation's capital experimented with New Deal programs to solve the nation's ills, most Hollywood productions remained escapist. A radical exception to the rule, King Vidor's "Our Daily Bread," faced the problem of unemployment head-on by dramatizing an experiment in cooperative farming that proposed pooling resources collectively as an alternative to individualistic competition for jobs. After all the studios passed on his idea, Vidor financed the film himself with borrowed funds. Criticized for its purportedly socialist ideas and also for its seemingly fascistic traits, "Our Daily Bread" remains a document that embodied political contradictions that marked widely divergent contemporary assessments of the New Deal itself. In its widely acclaimed climactic ditch-digging sequence, the film presents images celebrated muscular working-class manhood that also marked public art of the period, which addressed anxieties about the masculinity during times of economic crisis.