Best Drama Movies of 1929

Mary, a poor farm girl, meets Tim just as word comes that war has been declared. Tim enlists in the army and goes to the battlefields of Europe, where he is wounded and loses the use of his legs. Home again, Tim is visited by Mary, and they are powerfully attracted to each other; but his physical handicap prevents him from declaring his love for her. Deeper complications set in when Martin, Tim's former sergeant and a bully, takes a shine to Mary.

A stenographer who works for a lawyer falls in love with and marries a wealthy young man. His family has the marraige annulled, after which she gives birth to a child. Her former boss helps her out to ensure the child's welfare, which starts gossip that she is a "kept woman."

A con man with his beautiful accomplice and a hostage steals a half million dollars worth of diamonds but finds they're all lost in the desert without water.

A young Chinese woman, working in the kitchen at a London dance club, is given the chance to become the club's main act.

A black laborer turns preacher after accidentally killing a man.

Prime Minister of Great Britain Benjamin Disraeli outwits the subterfuge of the Russians and chicanery at home in order to secure the purchase of the Suez Canal.

A fisherman and a rising lawyer who grew up as brothers fall in love with the same woman.

This first cinematic version of the classic book is a part-talkie, although the only surviving print is silent (housed in the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY). It is a straight-forward telling of the intermingled lives of a group of strangers doomed to die in a collapsing bridge accident. The Art Direction, paltry and unremarkable, surprisingly won an Oscar over the far more remarkable work nominated in THE IRON MASK. The special effect scene of the lovers plummeting with the bridge into the chasm is unforgettable and remarkably done.

Flashback story of an escape from the lonely, high-security Dartmoor Prison. A jealous barber's assistant is enraged by the attentions that his manicurist girlfriend pays to a customer. He threatens the customer with an open razor and lands in jail.