Classic Hollywood Movies

Jean Renoir's The Southerner has no heroes or villains, only courage and optimism in the face of hostility

The Southerner, the third of the five films Renoir made in America, tells the story of the Tucker family, plantation workers who decide to grow their own cotton as tenant farmers on a piece of leased land.

Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 classic To Be or Not to Be is a testament to comedy as a force of resistance

Arguably the greatest Hollywood comedy of the sound era, To Be or Not to Be is a daring, intellectually provocative work that stands testament to the power of life-sustaining humour in face of unspeakable horror.

Gold Diggers of 1933 was a racy backstage musical — and Hollywood’s response to the Great Depression

The Warner production Gold Diggers of 1933, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, is a racy backstage musical rife with the kind of elements that the censors would veto in the following years: women in underwear and skimpy stage costumes, or as sexy silhouettes changing clothes, their bottoms spanked by men, dialogue with double entendre, and a gleefully amoral scenario.

In Fritz Lang’s 1946 classic Cloak and Dagger, a prescient and thrilling fable about the loss of innocence

In its own way, Cloak and Dagger attests to the passing of the baton from Hollywood’s left wing, in the ascendant since the Great Depression, to the conservatives, who would dominate the industry in the subsequent decade.

All that Heaven Allows: How Douglas Sirk's 1955 film critiqued an American malaise through trope of forbidden love

All That Heaven Allows is a highly moving work about the anxiety of having to live up to societal standards and the programmed fear of rejecting them