On Movies: My Favorite Movies From ‘Before My Time’

All good things, the saying goes, must come to an end, including this through-the-decades look at my favorite movies in my Blu-ray collection.

According to the colorful pie chart in the Statistics page of My Collection in my Blu-ray.com account, I don’t have too many movies from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Of the 330 feature films I own on Blu-ray disc (BD), only 0.5% are from the 1930s[1], 1.9% from the 1940s, and 0.8% from the 1950s.

Because I was born in the early 1960s and don’t get to go to many theatrical re-releases[2], I’ve seen most of the films on this final entry of the On Movies: My Favorite Movies of the _____’s series either on commercial TV, cable channels such as Turner Classic Movies, or on home media. Some – like The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Caine Mutiny –  I liked from my days as a school-age kid when Miami’s then-indie TV station WCIX-TV aired them either as part of their weeknight “Eight PM Movie” programming or in their weekend afternoon movie bloc.

Others, such as William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) or Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) had to wait until I was mature enough to appreciate the nuances of their storytelling and serious themes.

Well, that’s enough commentary! Let’s get on with the list!

• The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
• Fantasia (1940)
• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Casablanca (1942)
• It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
• The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
• The African Queen (1951)
• The Caine Mutiny (1954)
• South Pacific (1958)

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[1] And even then this is a bit inaccurate, since I bought the 75^th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray of Gone with the Wind for my mother a few years before she died. I’m not a fan of GWTW, but I didn’t have anyone to give it to. My estranged half-sister did not own a Blu-ray player at the time that Mom died, and even if she had one before I moved out of Miami nearly five years ago, I wouldn’t have handed it to her out of principle. So, I include 1939’s Gone with the Wind in my collection just because it’s in my possession, even though I rarely watch it.

[2] I’ve gone to all of the theatrical re-issues of 1977’s Star Wars, including the ones in 1979, 1981 – which is when 20^th Century Fox allowed Lucasfilm to redo the Main Title so the subtitle Episode IV: A New Hope could be added – 1982, and 1997. The only film in my list that I saw in theaters as a re-issue is Fantasia (1940).