Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History

1930s

Herein is a detailed timeline of the key film milestones, important turning points, and significant historical dates or events (organized by decade) that have had a significant influence on the world body of cinema and shaped its development. For more detailed accounts of many items, also see this site's extensive narratives on Film History by Decade, Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects, and a comprehensive History of the Academy Awards.

Index to Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points

(by decade)

Pre-1900s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

1930s - Part 1

Year	Event and Significance
1930s	The most popular film genres of the time were musicals, gangster films, newspaper movies, westerns, comedies, melodramas and horror movies. Warner Bros. inaugurated the crime-gangster film, with its Little Caesar (1930) (starring Edward G. Robinson as a small-time hood) - the first talkie gangster film, and The Public Enemy (1931) (noted for James Cagney pushing a grapefruit into the face of moll girlfriend Mae Clarke).
1930s-40s	This was the era which has been predominantly referred to as "The Golden Age of Hollywood" by film critics and historians, and considered the apex of film history. (Some have extended the time period into the 50s). The "Golden Age" came to a close with the breakup of the studios and declining attendance from challenges brought by shopping centers and television.
1930	Public pressure (mainly from the Catholic Church) applied further censorship guidelines and clearly outlined what was acceptable (and unacceptable) in films within the industry. Pre-marital sex, alcoholism, immoral and criminal activity, among other subjects, led to the establishment and adoption of the Motion Picture Production Code. As head of the MPPDA, William Hays established this new code of decency, known in short as the Production Code or Hays Code.
1930	The Marx Brothers starred in Animal Crackers - it was the second of many classic Marx Brothers films (their first film was The Cocoanuts (1929), also for Paramount Studios). It was also the last of their films to be taken from one of their stage successes and the last to be filmed on the East Coast on Astoria sound stages before they transferred to Hollywood.
1930	Greta Garbo starred in her first talkie, Anna Christie, advertised with the tagline: GARBO TALKS!, and speaking her first line of dialogue with: "Give me a whisky, ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby."
1930	The first feature-length prison film was released, MGM's The Big House, starring Wallace Beery in a breakthrough role (following the death of Lon Chaney, Sr. who was scheduled to be the main lead actor).
1930	Two ex-Disney animators -- Hugh Harman (1903-1982) and Rudolf Ising (1903-1992), began to make the first cartoons for Warner Bros. They drew the 5-minute pilot film named Bosko The TalkInk Kid (1929) - the first synchronized talking animated short/cartoon (as opposed to a cartoon with a soundtrack), with a little black boy character named Bosko who actually spoke dialogue. The Bosko pilot film was the impetus for the birth of Warners Bros.' Looney Tunes. The black and white Sinkin' in the Bathtub, with Bosko in the starring role, was the earliest talking 'Looney Tune', released on May 30, 1930.
1930	The animation sequence (about a safari hunt in Africa by bandleader Paul Whiteman) created by Walter Lantz (the creator of Woody Woodpecker) in The King of Jazz (1930) was the first 2-strip Technicolor animation ever produced. It featured Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
1930	A prototype of the squeaky- and baby-voiced cartoon queen Betty Boop (voiced for most of the 30s by Mae Questel) was introduced in a Fleischer Brothers' Bimbo Talkartoon entitled Dizzy Dishes (1930) - with her appearing as a long-eared puppy dog!
1930	The movie industry began to dub in the dialogue of films exported to foreign markets.
1930	The first daily newspaper for the Hollywood film industry, The Hollywood Reporter, had its debut.
1930	British director Alfred Hitchcock's second all-talkie thriller Murder was the first film in which a character's (Sir John Menier, played by Herbert Marshall) thoughts were heard in voice-over.
1930	French director René Clair's musical romance Under the Roofs of Paris (aka Sous les toits de Paris, Fr.), was an unexpected musical hit with groundbreaking use of the new technology of sound. It was the director's first sound film.
1931	Double features emerged as a way for the unemployed and the middle-class to occupy their time.
1931	Howard Hawks' gangster film Scarface used an X motif throughout. The film was specifically targeted by the Production Code for its violence, sexual innuendo, and for its ending (that was re-edited to demonstrate that good ultimately triumphed over evil). The film was also forced to be re-named Scarface: The Shame of the Nation.
1931	The first of Universal's series of classic horror films was released: Dracula with Bela Lugosi, and Frankenstein with Boris Karloff.
1931	African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux's The Exile was the first feature-length sound film from a black director - it was advertised as the first Black American 'talkie'.
1931	The Best Picture-nominated Trader Horn, by director W.S. Van Dyke, was notable as the first non-documentary production to be filmed in Africa. Some of its jungle stock footage was later used for MGM's first Tarzan film with Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932).
1931	German director Fritz Lang's influential and suspenseful M was released (Lang's first sound film), starring Peter Lorre in a breakout role as a child serial killer. One of the earliest talkies that effectively used sound, it was also the first serious psychological crime film/melodrama about a serial killer. In the plot, Lang experimented with sound (and the striking pioneering use of leitmotif, to associate a sound with a film character) - a blind balloon salesman (Georg John) heard the killer's haunting, tell-tale whistling of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 before an off-screen killing.
1931	According to various sources, the pre-Code film A Free Soul (1931) starring Norma Shearer has a 14-minute, uninterrupted monologue scene played by Best Actor-winning Lionel Barrymore as a defense attorney in a courtroom - it was the longest take in a commercial film, accomplished by using two cameras simultaneously.
1932	Disney's short talking film Flowers and Trees was the first in the Silly Symphony series. It premiered in July of 1932 at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. It was also the first animation short to use 3-strip (or three-color) Technicolor (as was Disney's Three Little Pigs (1933)). It won the first Academy Award for Best Short Subject - Cartoon (animation).
1932	Rouben Mamoulian's pivotal musical Love Me Tonight shaped the technical language of movie musicals in the sound era, by smoothly integrating the songs into the film's plotline. It also featured the first zoom shot (into a window) and the first asynchronous sound, and also other dazzling special effects such as slow-motion, fast-motion, and split-screens.
1932	The film career of 4 year-old child star Shirley Temple (born in 1928), probably the most famous child actress in history, began when she appeared in various shorts (such as the 'Baby Burlesks' series with her first film War Babies (1932)) and in her feature film debut, The Red-Haired Alibi (1932). Fox signed five-year old Shirley to a contract in 1933. She would become one of the biggest box-office stars in the mid to late 1930s (1936-1938).
1932	Director Victor Halperin's independent, low-budget horror film White Zombie, was the first 'true' zombie film. It starred Bela Lugosi as hypnotic and sinister Haitian sugar mill owner "Murder" Legendre with zombie slaves, was deliberately made with minimal dialogue, and filmed to be visually atmospheric and expressionistic.
1932	Legendary French director Jean Renoir directed Boudu Saved From Drowning (aka Boudu sauvé des eaux, Fr.), a critique of the French bourgeoisie, in its tale of an urban bum (Michel Simon) who was rescued by a bourgeois bookselling gentleman and brought to his apartment. The story served as the basis for Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) with Nick Nolte.
1932	MGM's Tarzan, the Ape Man, was the first Tarzan talkie, and also MGM's first Tarzan film (it was the first of six MGM Tarzan films starring Johnny Weissmuller and co-star Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane, stretching from 1932-1942). It was also notable as the only MGM Tarzan film that was based upon the original "Lord of the Jungle" character in the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. This film introduced the chimpanzee Cheeta, and provided the Weissmuller yodel yell (produced by MGM's sound department), although the ape-call originated in a 1929 part-talkie serial (starring Frank Merrill). The star swimmer Weissmuller was chosen for the role, in part, because he was a gold medals winner in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics.
1933-35	Warners' producer Leon Schlesinger assembled the 'gods of animation', including Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob Clampett.
1933	Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, although minor players, made their debut and danced in their first joint movie together, RKO's Flying Down to Rio. With King Kong, this film saved RKO from bankruptcy. The couple appeared early on in a sensual, show-stopping dance number called "The Carioca" -- the dance required the dancers to touch foreheads while clapsing hands - and then execute a turn without losing forehead contact. Flying Down to Rio was most memorable for the title number, with airplane wing-dancing/walking, skimpily-attired chorus girls atop biplane wings (filmed in an airplane hangar with wind machines and a few planes hanging from the ceiling - enhanced with backdrops of Rio and Malibu Beach). The film was also notable in that the film's sexy star, Dolores Del Rio, was the first major star to wear a two-piece women's bathing suit ever seen onscreen. [Note: a brief scene showed a two-piece bathing "sun-suit" being modeled on a beach in Three on a Match (1932) a year earlier]
1933	The classic adventure-action film King Kong, a "Beauty and the Beast" tale, featured the "Scream Queen" Fay Wray, and astonishing stop-motion special effects animation from Willis O'Brien, and ending with the iconic image of Kong atop the Empire State Building. It was one of the first major films to have a life-like (stop-motion) animated central character, alongside live-action. It was the first film heavily promoted and marketed on the radio.
1933	One of the first feature-length musical scores written specifically for a US 'talkie' film was Max Steiner's score for RKO's King Kong. It was the first major Hollywood film to have a thematic score rather than background music, recorded using a 46-piece orchestra. After the score was completed, all of the film's sounds were recorded onto three separate tracks, one each for sound effects, dialogue and music. For the first time in film history, RKO's sound department head Murray Spivak made a groundbreaking sound design decision - he pitched the effects to match the score, so they wouldn't be overwhelming and so they would complement each other.
1933	The backstage drama/musical 42nd Street, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, revitalized the over-exposed musical and saved Warners from bankruptcy. The film established Berkeley as the most talented choreographer of musical production numbers.
1933	Two other Busby Berkeley productions made at the same time, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade, launched dance and musical extravaganzas with creative camera angles and innovative staging. From 1933-1937, Berkeley created musical numbers for almost every great musical produced by Warner Bros.
1933	The notorious Czechoslovakian film Ecstasy (1933) (aka Extase) with Hedwig Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr) contained nudity and sexual situations (intercourse and simulated orgasm). It was the first theatrically-released film (non-pornographic) in which the sex act was depicted (although off-screen). It was unusual at its time for depicting obvious female sexual pleasure (ecstasy) during orgasm (simulated) from the effects of oral sex. The film was, arguably, the first to depict female orgasm on-screen.
1933	Jean Vigo directed the influential social commentary film Zero For Conduct (aka Zéro de conduite, Fr.), about a full-scale rebellion in a French boys' boarding school against tyrannical authority, a film that was banned by censors until the late 1940s. The film closely resembles Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968).
1933	The Payne Fund study, Our Movie-Made Children, argued that films shaped children's behavior.
1933	Theaters began to open refreshment stands.
1933	The Screen Writers Guild was established.
1933	The first drive-in movie theater was opened on June 6th at the Camden Drive-In in Pennsauken, New Jersey with the showing of the second-run film Wives Beware (1932), starring Adolphe Menjou. It was known simply as "Drive-In Theater" although the actual name was the "Automobile Movie Theater." Admission was 25 cents for each car and an additional 25 cents for each person.
1933	The films of bawdy and buxom Mae West, such as She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel, raised the criticism of various groups over her racy, double-entendre-laden dialogue and her costumes, and hastened the move toward greater censorship the following year. The other sex goddess known as the "original blonde bombshell" -- the sensual Jean Harlow, also caused Hollywood to raise its eyebrows, especially after her appearances in Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930), Platinum Blonde (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Red Dust (1932), Red Headed Woman (1932), and Dinner at Eight (1933).
1933	Deluge was the first 'end of the world' big-budget disaster/science-fiction film (from RKO) in the sound era, featuring revolutionary visual effects to depict and simulate turbulent tidal waves hitting New York City.