For a special section devoted to the 1930s, the Spanish magazine Miradas de Cine, conducting a poll for its 89th issue, asked me to select my 15 favorite films of that decade and also to pick five that I thought were overrated. Here are my choices (listed chronologically):

favoritas:

Laughter (d’Arrast) • City Lights (Chaplin) • M (Lang) • La nuit du carrefour (Renoir) • Ivan (Dovzhenko) • Umarete wa mita keredo (Ozu) • Love Me Tonight (Mamoulian) • Scarface (Hawks) • Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch) • Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (Milestone) • L’Atalante (Vigo) • Judge Priest (Ford) • King Kong (Cooper & Schoedsack) • Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey) • Zangiku monogatari (Mizoguchi)

sobrevaloradas:

The Front Page (Milestone) • 42nd Street (Bacon) • Swing Time (Stevens) • Bringing Up Baby (Hawks) • Ninotchka (Lubitsch) [8/11/09]

Postmortem, July 13, 2023: How could I have left out Man’s Castle (Borzage), my favorite Depression movie, not to mention Queen Christina (Mamoulian) — both recently seen in fine restorations at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna? Well, in the latter case, I’d already picked my favorite Mamoulian feature. so another one, even a concerto for Garbo. would have seemed a mite excessive.And what about Vampyr (Dreyer), Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor), Jewel Robbery (Dieterle)? The rethinking continues.