Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, USA) – Song, dance, witticisms and a flimsy plot about show business. Hey, this formula might have future! (Multiple female leads who talk about other things than men: Not so much of a future.) Watched it all.

Shanghai Express (1932, USA) – Marlene Dietrich is all decadent on the Beijing-Shanghai train, which carries its all-white passengers through some tedious little civil war or whatever. Ah, the golden age of cinema. Watched: 19 minutes.

Freaks (1932, USA) – Good idea: Cast a movie with misshapen humans, pretend you’re doing it to educate the world about their plight. Bad idea: Make it really really boring. (This has been another Good idea / Bad idea). Watched: 14 minutes.

Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933, Germany) – Leni Riefenstahl’s clumsy precursor to Triumf des Willes. Makes marching in a Nazi rally look not at all fun. Watched: 30 minutes. IMDB reviewers say you shouldn’t downrate a film just because it’s Evil.

Bureau of Missing Persons (1933, USA) – Violent cop learns manners from the kind, public spirited folks at the Bureau of Missing Persons. Could be the pilot of a modern family-friendly cop show. Watched: 19 minutes.

20 000 Years in Sing Sing (1933, USA) – Prototype of the uplifting prison drama. With Spencer Tracy as the tough guy who isn’t so bad after all. All he needs is a bit of Loving Discipline from the wise and fatherly prison warden. Written by the warden of Sing Sing. Watched it all.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932, USA) – A hunter of big game runs his yacht across a reef of Dramatic Irony, and becomes himself the hunted on a mad Cossack’s island. Contrived and badly acted, but gets points for making the quintessential Star Trek episode 30 years ahead of time.

The Island of Lost Souls (1932, USA). Good Island of Dr. Moreau, starring .. The Panther Woman?? Yes that’s what the credits say. Anyway the manimals rebel and chant “Law no more!”, thus making some point or other.

La Chienne (1931, France) – Introduced by a puppet, who mocks the conventions of filmmaking. Watched: 18 minutes. IMDB reviewers say that with this movie, French cinema enters the pathway to genius..

The Public Enemy (1931, USA) – Gangster childhood! Starring James Cagney, as an unconvincing teenager. Remember, kids, selling beer isn’t cool.

Le Bonheur (1934, France) – Surreal allegory about happiness. Impressive, whatever. Watched: 10 minutes.

White Zombie (1932, USA) – Ooh .. I had forgotten that zombies came from voodoo! But I prefer the kind that eats brrrraaaiiiinnnsss. This movie is terrrriiiiibbbllleeeee. Okay, I’ll stop now. Watched: 10 minutesssss.

The Big Trail (1930, USA) – Westerns got better over the years. Watched: 6 minutes.

Taxi (1932, USA) – Cab drivers can be gangstahs too! Yes, but I’m tired of gangster movies. Even if this one’s got a yiddish-speaking James Cagney. Watched: 9 minutes.

Flight Commander (1930, USA) – Won the Oscar for best writing, which is a mystery I don’t care to explore. Watched: 11 minutes.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932, USA) – This is really bad, but gets WTF-points for turning Poe’s crime story into a damsel & man-in-monster-suit movie. Takes place in Paris, 1845, where people are so well-read that they’re already discussing Darwin’s theory of evolution. Watched: 30 minutes.

Scarface (1932, USA) – Say hello to my little .. oh, never mind the pun. This is actually really good, apart from the comic relief and some attempts at being respectable. Paul Muni is a crazier and better Tony than Al Pacino. Notice the glee in his eyes as he gets his first machinegun.

Hell’s Angels (1930, USA) – Bits and pieces of everything stitched together. Some parts are shot as a silent movie, others in a sort of “color”. It’s the Frankenstein monster of movies: slow, dull, and with a sickly green hue (*ba-dum-bum ching*). Academy Award nomination for strangest German acting in a movie. Watched: 30 minutes, then fast-forwarded through the stuntman-killing action scenes. Not worth it.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932, USA) – I am an important made-for-Oscar social drama. Watched: 9 minutes.

The Beast of the City (1932, USA) – The Shield: The Previous Generation. Watched it all.

Limite (1931, Brazil) – It’s not that I hate art films on principle. I just think they attract bad filmmakers. Watched: 10 minutes.

The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932, USA) – It is good that the world has a group of clumsy British archeologists to protect us from hundreds of millions of obedient and ruthless Chinamen. Watched: 18 minutes. IMDB reviewers call it “politically incorrect”, by which they mean racist.

Mata Hari (1931, USA) – Greta Garbo is a tease, for which she is shot by the French government. Good and weepy, and not true to history.

The Blood of a Poet (1933, France) – French surrealism again. Okay, I get it, it’s clever. But – why?! Watched: 10 minutes.

Smart Money (1931, USA) – Small-town gambler learns swindling and street smarts in the big city, (inoffensively named “The Big City”). Charming.

The Mummy (1932, USA) – A reawakened mummy bores archeologists to death. Watched: 14 minutes.

The Old Dark House (1932, USA) – It was a dark and stormy night, in every conceivable way. Makes up for being bad by being peculiar, which is the definition of cult. Watched all of it, and so should you.

Morocco (1930, USA) – Marlene Dietrich’s too sexy for this crappy movie. Watched: 30 minutes.

My new movie marathon is movies made in the 1930′s. Where on earth do I get them all?! Have I found some kind of buccaneers den of movies? It’s a mystery! But however it happens, I always buy the good ones. I don’t rip off artists, even when they’ve been dead (undead undead undead) for half a century.

Dracula (1931, USA) – Creaky, (meaning bad), but every overacted word out of Bela’s mouth is gold. Mad Renfield’s good too.

The Bat Whispers (1930, USA) – It’s a remake of The Bat! NOOO[dramatic fade-out]ooooo[almost gone now]ooo… Watched: 5 minutes.

The Black Camel (1931, USA) – Bela Lugosi (again?) is a psychic charlatan who gets involved with a murder investigation in Hawaii. This sounds more exciting than it is. Oh, Bela. Watched: 17 minutes.

Platinum Blonde (1931, USA) – Romantic comedy with the quips of a Groucho Marx and the satire of a P. G. Wodehouse, only much less so. Watched: 30 minutes.

Chandu the Magician (1932, USA) – Boy, those mysterious Indians sure are mysterious! Watched: 8 minutes.

Enthusiasm (1931, Soviet Union) – Confused documentary about the Soviet Union’s struggle against religion, coal shortages and good filmmaking. Workers in the Ukraine fulfill their five-year plan in four years, and then they all live happily ever after.

The Golden Age (1930, France) – Scorpions .. sick islanders attacked by battle bishops .. what? Looks good, sounds bad. Making talkies is hard, especially without a narrative. Watched: 20 minutes.