1. Hell’s Angels: Not only did it provide branding inspiration for the most bad ass motorcycle gang ever, but at $3.8 million, this film, produced and directed, by Howard Hughes, cost four crew members (three of them pilots) their lives. Hughes himself performed the most dangerous aerial stunt himself, crashed, and suffered a skull fracture. I remember happening upon this on TCM a winter or two ago, during the zeppelin lightening scene (the less said, the better), and I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. And then I thought, they’re actually doing this, it’s not special effects, ‘cuz it’s 1930. Also, the film that launched the career of Jean Harlow, here 18 and asking, “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?” If you ever get the chance to see this WW I flying ace film, do so. It’s magnificent. The action sequences are insane.
2. Animal Crackers: Early Marx Brothers with Groucho as big-game hunter Capt. Spaulding (“One morning, I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got in my pyjamas I don’t know“). Poor Margaret Dumont. She had to play the straight man/wealthy dowager/butt of all jokes in every one of these films.

Never Saw But Maybe, Some Day:

3. Little Caesar: Starring Edward G. Robinson as an Al Capone-like figure, this is said to be the film that launched all future gangster films. Robinson would reprise this type of character most famously in Key Largo more than a decade later. No pizzas were harmed in the making of this film.

4. The Big House: The first prison melodrama, bloody and realistic. No mention of Zihuatanejo, though.

Most of the other films had to do with either gold-digging women or loose divorcees or both. It was a popular theme at the time.