Best Movies of 1929

The clock strikes midnight, the bats fly from the belfry, a dog howls at the full moon, and two black cats fight in the cemetery: a perfect time for four skeletons to come out and dance a bit.

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 jealous barber's assistant becomes enraged by the attentions the manicurist he's obsessed with and a repeat customer pay to one another.

While changing clothes in a getaway car, escaped convicts Stan and Ollie mistakenly put on each other's pants. They spend the rest of the film trying to exchange pants in various unlikely settings.

Sailors Stan and Ollie offer to buy sodas for two women they meet in a park, even though they are short on cash. Luckily Stan wins the jackpot on a slot machine and the boys have enough money to rent a boat to cruise on a lake. They soon tangle with other boaters and everyone ends up in the water.

During the Florida land boom, the Marx Brothers run a hotel, auction off some land and thwart a jewel robbery.

Stan and Ollie try to sleep in a room-for-rent. Ollie, suffering from a cold, coughs frequently, while Stan snores. Both of them have trouble falling asleep because of this. They try to solve their problems, but this results in total chaos.

Two families embark on a pleasant Sunday picnic but manage to run into a variety of issues with their temperamental automobile. Each incident requires repeated exits and reboardings by Laurel, Hardy, their wives and grouchy, gout-ridden Uncle Edgar.

Stan and Ollie arrive as new inmates at a prison after apparently taking part in a hold-up raid, a raid they tell a prison officer they were only watching. The usual mayhem ensues.

Laurel and Hardy try to entertain a female neighbor, unbeknown to Hardy’s wife.

Mickey seeks shelter from a storm in a house that turns out to be haunted. The skeletons command him to play the organ; they dance and play along.

An unimpressive but well-intentioned man is given the chance to marry a popular actress, of whom he has been a hopeless fan. But what he doesn't realize is that he is being used to make the actress' old flame jealous.

King Louis XIII of France is thrilled to have born to him a son - an heir to the throne. But when the queen delivers a twin, Cardinal Richelieu sees the second son as a potential for revolution, and has him sent off to Spain to be raised in secret to ensure a peaceful future for France. Alas, keeping the secret means sending Constance, lover of D'Artagnan, off to a convent. D'Artagnan hears of this and rallies the Musketeers in a bid to rescue her. Unfortunately, Richelieu out-smarts the Musketeers and banishes them forever.

A lighthouse keeper's wife shelters her fugitive lover.

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

The story involves Stan and Ollie as two musicians attempting to travel by train to Pottsville. It was only their second sound film, but a silent version was also made for cinemas at the time that were not equipped to show talkies.

This early example of the "backstage" musical genre tells the story of Kitty Darling, a fading burlesque star who tries to save her convent-educated daughter April from following in Mom's footsteps.

Inspired by Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris, Mickey builds a plane to take Minnie for a trip.

Stan and Ollie wreak havoc at an upper class hotel in their jobs as footman (Hardy) and doorman (Laurel). They partially undress blonde bombshell Jean Harlow (in a brief appearance) and repeatedly escort a stuffy nobleman into an empty elevator shaft.

At the conclusion of World War I, a French girl is romanced by an American doughboy even though she is promised to a French soldier who was sent to the front.

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 black laborer turns preacher after accidentally killing a man.

An unhappily married woman is caught up in scandal and murder when her affection toward a young man is misinterpreted.

A documentary about the making of L'argent, the epic silent film directed by Marcel L'Herbier. The film shows the details of many of the more complicated moving camera shots.

Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond is a British WWI veteran who longs for some excitement after he returns to the humdrum existence of civilian life. He gets what he's looking for when a girl requests his help in freeing her uncle from a nursing home. She believes the home is just a front and that her uncle is really being held captive while the culprits try to extort his fortune from him.

Capt. James Stewart pursues the bandit "The Kinkajou" over the Mexican border and falls in love with Rita. He suspects, that her brother is the bandit.

For his initial Lantz entry, Oswald enters his horse in the race as he tries to get him in shape doing exercises with the accompaniment of a pianist.

Two girls are invited by one of the girls boy-friend's tight boss for dinner. On the way they stop for a cheap ice-cream. But swinging doors, ventilators, cops and a brat make it nearly impossible to get the ice cream even close to the car where the rest are waiting.

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.

Snub Pollard and Marvin Loback find comic situations as bums, night cops and seance attendees in this silent short.

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.

The vaudeville act of Harriet and Queenie Mahoney comes to Broadway, where their friend Eddie Kerns needs them for his number in one of Francis Zanfield's shows. When Eddie meets Queenie, he soon falls in love with her—but she is already being courted by Jock Warriner, a member of New York high society. Queenie eventually recognises that, to Jock, she is nothing more than a toy, and that Eddie is in love with her.

Drawn with steaming ink, Koko and Fitz try to cool off.

Molly and Bee, sweet young 'working girls,' live in a cheap room over a New York grocery store. Molly's idol, wealthy Jack Cromwell, lives in a Long Island mansion but is markedly less happy, since his fiancée Jane won't discourage her other admirers. Fleeing in his car, Jack ends up in an urban block party where he meets you-know-who.

Passion carried an innocent boy and a worldly woman beyond the barriers of conscience.

An all-star revue featuring MGM contract players.

Handsome young fisherman Tom Roberts is among the crew of a lifeboat that rescues Frenchwoman Claire le Grange, sole survivor of a shipwreck on the treacherous Goodwin Sands. Tom's marriage to his own sweetheart, Mary, is postponed owing to injuries he sustained in the dramatic rescue, and during his convalescence he falls for the charms of the flirtatious Claire.

A man dressed as the devil scares the gang into minding their mothers.

A 1929 Fox newsreel interview with the author and spiritualist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He speaks about his greatest literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, and his work in spiritualism. Release year attributions of 1927 are incorrect. For further details see: http://www.silentera.com/PSFL/data/S/SirArthurConanDoyle1929.html

High school students led by the Girl and Boy turn from Christianity toward secret atheistic meetings. When a girl is accidentally killed by a stairway collapse, the Girl and Boy go to reform school where they are treated brutally.

Experimental documentary focusing on a day in the life of city workers, featuring montage sequences and repetition to emphasise the monotony of routine office work.

Three bank robbers on the run happen across a woman about to give birth in an abandoned covered wagon. Before she dies, she names the three bandits as her newborn son's godfathers.

A flapper unwittingly falls for the boss' son.

The short sequence, photographed by Jack E Cox, has Hitchcock trying his best to embarrass the film's Czech lead Anny Ondra, who ends up giggling and turning her back to the camera...

A Southern belle's flirtation with a working man leads to tragedy.

Phony spiritualists were given a good going-over in the early talkie melodrama Darkened Rooms. Evelyn Brent stars as Ellen, a fraudulent medium working in cahoots with genuine clairvoyant Emory Jago (Neil Hamilton). The plotline is secondary; the film's main purpose was to emulate the methods of such professional "de-bunkers" as Mrs. Harry Houdini by exposing the various tricks of the spiritualist's trade.

Stable hands Stan and Ollie are tending a thoroughbred named "Blue Boy." But when they overhear two men talking about a $5000 reward for the return of the stolen "Blue Boy," they miss the part about it being the painting, not the horse. They take the horse to the owner's house to claim the reward. The owner instructs them to put "Blue Boy" on the piano and Ollie explains, "these millionaires are peculiar."