The 1920s: The 10 Best Hollywood Movies Of The Decade - Screen Rant

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The 1910s and 1920s saw the rise of Hollywood as a major film industry. The newly-emerged industry created movie studios, such as RKO, United Artists and Warner Bros. Filmmakers, writers and actors championed the rise of this industry, as Hollywood quickly became a dream machine. America, too, was seeing a steady rise of immigrants from Europe, as detailed in Charlie Chaplin's silent film, The Immigrant. This created a need for the design of the American Dream. What did it mean to be American?

Unfortunately, filmmaking of this time did not represent the racial and cultural diversity of the America of the time, but the Roaring 20s did see an explosion of female writers and directors that would not be seen again for decades to come. Actresses like Theda Bara and Gloria Swanson would also pave the way for the actresses to shine in Hollywood for decades to come.

10 The Sheik (1921)

The Sheik is a silent romantic movie starring the controversial Italian actor, Rudolph Valentino. A sex symbol at the time, Valentino was typified by his alternative look. He was the complete opposite of the macho masculinity expected of American men at the time and was rejected by American men, who were also jealous of his popularity with women.

A hit with women, Valentino played exotic parts of men in power, like Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan in The Sheik. The conventional plot follows a headstrong independent woman who falls in love with a traditional man who denies his attraction to her wildness. A typical romantic film, The Sheik (and Valentino), however, revealed a longing by American women to be seen by a society that hated and overlooked them.

9 The Kid (1921)

Another silent movie from the 20s, The Kid was Charlie Chaplin's full-length movie directorial first. Playing his iconic character, The Tramp, Chaplin finds an abandoned baby on the street and takes him home, after no one else would keep the child. The second highest-grossing movie of the year, after The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse (also starring Rudolph Valentino), the movie follows a standard Victorian plot.

Eerily similar to Oliver Twist, the abandoned child ends up in the arms of a wealthy parent/guardian, and the movie ends with everyone being rich and happy. This is not so surprising, considering Chaplin grew up impoverished in Victorian London. The movie was produced by United Artists, a production company formed by Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

8 The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse (1921)

Scene from The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse

The movie that would launch Rudolph Valentino's sex symbol status, The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse was 1921's most popular and highest-grossing movie. An anti-war movie set in World War One, the film explores a family divided by their German and French sides, torn apart by war and death. June Mathis, MGM's first female executive, wrote the film's screenplay from the 1916 novel of the same name.

The movie, unlike previous films like The Birth Of A Nation (1915), portrayed the true reality of death in wartime, and the devastation and grief that survivors face alone.

7 Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)

Sunrise was the first feature movie to use synchronized sound effects and a musical score. Directed by influential German director, F. W. Murnau, who had directed Nosferatu five years earlier, Sunrise is today considered one of the greatest movies ever made. It won three Academy Awards at the 1st Academy Awards and went on to influence other directors, like Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941).

German Expressionist influences are replete in the movie, although its plot is nonsensical. In the movie, a husband and wife spend a romantic day in the city minutes after the husband tried to murder her so that he could start a new life with his femme fatale mistress.

6 Greed (1924)

Classic Austrian-American director Erich von Stroheim adapted the great American novel, McTeague, by Frank Norris, into the 1924 classic, Greed. A silent drama, Greed is today considered one of the most important movies ever produced, although it was a box office failure upon its release.

Von Stroheim, who is known for playing Gloria Swanson's butler in Sunset Boulevard, originally created an eight-hour-long movie that had to be cut down extensively. A warning tale, Greed tells the story of a man, his wife, and her cousin whose lives are ultimately ruined and cut short by their obsession with wealth.

5 Sherlock Jr. (1924)

During the 1920s, European cinema was still ahead of Hollywood. Great artistic films, like The Trial of Joan Of Arc, were produced in Europe, while in Hollywood, the industry focused on organizing itself and deciding what type of industry it wanted to be. Europe's cinematic and artistic seriousness was heavily juxtaposed by the artistic simplicity and fun of Hollywood cinema.

Buster Keaton, for example, was experimenting with elaborate set gags and slapstick humor. He began with shorts, then moved on to longer movies. A movie that relied on special effects more than it did dialogue or cinematography, Sherlock Jr. was not well-received by audiences when it was released. More than 100 years after its release, however, Time magazine named it one of the top 100 movies of all time and a great example of "American minimalism."

4 Miss Lulu Bett (1921)

One of the most important female directors in American cinematic history, Lois Weber was a controversial figure. Feminist film critic, Molly Haskell, writes that Weber "was supposed to have made some feminist films … [but] there is evidence for supposing that her sympathies were at the very least mixed, if not blatantly opposed to feminism."

Unfortunately, Haskell argues, none of Weber's feminist works that reflected the women's suffrage movement of the decade are extant. Clara Beranger's movie, Miss Lulu Bett, however, reflected this movement, with its portrayal of female independence away from the sometimes slavery and abuse of domesticity and family. Based on the novel of the same name, which won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Drama when it was adapted into a play, Miss Lulu Bett was written by suffragist and anti-racist Zona Gale.

3 7th Heaven (1927)

Another movie produced towards the end of the silent movie era, 7th Heaven is a silent romantic drama - which were popular at the time. Janet Gaynor won the first Academy Award for Best Actress for this film and it was directed by Frank Borzage and adapted from the 1922 play by the same name.

The movie was highly acclaimed by critics and audiences alike and launched the Fox Film Corporation as an influential movie studio. The story is a melodramatic plot of family betrayal, romance, marriage, love trials, and ultimately, forever after.

2 The Ten Commandments (1923)

Director of great epics, such as Cleopatra (1949) The Ten Commandments (1956) and The Greatest Show On Earth (1952), Cecil B. DeMille was a prolific Hollywood director. The Ten Commandments was a precursor to the 1956 classic. The Biblical epic was a box office hit because of its use of Technicolor and its spectacular miraculous scene based on the parting of the Red Sea.

Written by screenwriter Jeanie MacPherson, the epic is divided into two parts: the story of Exodus and a story about two brothers who take opposing paths: one following the commandments and the other who gets joy out of breaking the commandments.

1 The Big Parade (1925)

Another war film that tells the agony of war, The Big Parade achieved the "biggest financial success of the silent era." Likewise, it was MGM's most financially profitable movie until it released Gone With The Wind (1939). Directed by King Vidor (War And Peace (1956), the story illuminates the devastation of war on ordinary soldiers. It was adapted from a story written by WW1 veteran, Laurence Stallings, who lost one of his legs in Northern France.

The movie is divided into two sections, both more than an hour long. The first section shows no combat, mirroring La Drôle de Guerre, a short period at the beginning of WW1 when soldiers did not take the war seriously and Allied citizens thought that deadly combat would never happen. The second section portrays realistic battle scenes, including the uninhabitable conditions of the trenches.

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About The Author

Hanah Johnson (50 Articles Published)

Hanah has studied the media for more than ten years. She holds a Master's degree in Mass Communications, and wrote her dissertation on the DC comic book universe. She studied Film Studies for more than three years, and has a passion for film noir and the femme fatale. She enjoys weight lifting, cake and ice cream.