It’s over? It’s over!
So, after doing a blog series where I watched one movie per year for a century (1919-2018, I think), I then did a blog series for every month in a decade (the 40s), and this one was one movie per week in a year (1939).
You may be noticing a pattern in the methodology here.
So… how was 1939?
Googling for “the greatest year ever for movies”, 1939 often comes up. And it was indeed a good year — perhaps because the grim reality of the 30s was finally letting up some, and the grim reality of 1940 hadn’t yet set in.
Looking over the list of movies, it’s… pretty spiffy? It was a fun project — I got to see a bunch of movies I wouldn’t otherwise have chosen to see.
I wondered whether there was going to be an obvious seasonal difference to the movies (as I watched them chronologically, one per release week in the US). And, yes, there were more blockbusters in the summer and before Xmas, but otherwise not a lot.
The impending war with Nazi Germany was not mentioned a lot: A handful of movies, at most, even alluded to the war. I was surprised at how noir some of the film noirs were — those movies became very scarce indeed when the war started.
So… there you go.
Oh, yeah:
I got the colour palette from… somewhere on the interwebs. It’s nice, isn’t it? I googled for “colours 1939”, except not in English.