Cecil B. Demille | Brothers' Ink Productions

The best movie stunts for the decade listed for 1930-1939 as talked about in the book 100 Years of the Best Movie Stunts:

1930: Canyon Hawks

Yakima Canutt shows off his guts in this one with a buckboard ride with horses straight down the side of a hill. Crazy, but I bet it was a whole lot scarier in person.

1931: The Phantom

The prison break at the beginning of this movie is just fantastic and ends with a really great train to plane transfer. The frustrating aspect is that back then they didn’t record who the stunt man was or who the stunt pilot was. Many stunts in the movies were uncredited during this time of studio filmmaking.

1932: Air Mail

John Ford directed two films on this list during this decade, this film and Stagecoach. He was a supporter of good stunts and usually filmed them himself. Paul Mantz does some nifty flying in this picture, specifically he flies a Stearman plane through an airplane hanger.

1933: The Fighter and the Lady

Before they fought for the actual title fight for the Heavyweight belt, they fought in this feature film. Max Baer and Primo Carnera mix it up on screen here, and Max later said he beat Primo in the real fight by studying his moves for the movie.

1934: Murder in the Clouds

This decade is ripe with plane stunts and this film has them in droves. This one has some fancy aerial tricks and the stunt photographers should get just as much credit for these fantastic shots as the stunt pilots themselves.

1935: The Crusades

Cecil B. DeMille is famous for his grand epics, and this film started that process for him. It has stuntmen and actors fighting in full armor for a huge war on several fronts.

1936: Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin was a very talented skater, and shows off his chops in this movie in a nifty little bit of tension added to the fact that he was doing it right next to a missing railing. The danger was not real, but the skating sure is. He’s also got a few nifty bits with a great big machine and a little one attached to the front of his chest. Fun Stuff.

1937: Wells Fargo

Ray Bunten and Richard Farnsworth, along with a slew of other uncredited stuntmen did a lot of work on this film. It has a lot of cowboys falling off horses, wagons, rocks and just about anything that moves. The scene at the end where the Wells Fargo wagon fights Indians have at least two dozens stunts in a ten minute period.

1938: The Adventures of Robin Hood

Howard Hill was a world class Archer. It’s him doing all the fancy bow and arrow stuff in this movie. A nod also goes out to all the stuntmen that lined up to be shot in the chest by Howard!

1939: Stagecoach

This one is a classic in the stunt world. Yakima Canutt has a great stunt that he was perfecting in several movies at this time. This one actually shows the first half of the stunt and was perfected in Zorro’s Fighting Legion the same year. The nod goes to Stagecoach because it was first but really should be co-presented with the later picture.

To learn more about these films, please read about them and the great trivia behind the scenes in our book, 100 Years of the Best Movie Stunts!

Cecil B. DeMille was known for his grande spectacles. Along with the lavish sets and the grandeur of the cinematography comes these massive action scenes, with big armies fighting each other. On the movie poster, Cecil B. DeMille even says, “Cast of 10,000”. Just looking at all the stunt performers needed to make these scenes work as well as they do is mind boggling. That is why I honor these stunt performers here by acknowledging them here for the Best Movie Stunts for 1935.

DeMille had a reputation for tyrannical behavior on the set, and he despised actors who were unwilling to take physical risks. Such was the case with Victor Mature in Samson and Delilah, when Mature refused to wrestle the lion, though the lion was tame and toothless. (DeMille remarked that Mature was “100% yellow”). Paulette Goddard’s refusal to risk personal injury in a scene involving fire in Unconquered cost her DeMille’s favor and probably a role in The Greatest Show on Earth. DeMille was, however, adept at directing “thousands of extras”, and many of his pictures included spectacular set pieces, such as the parting of the Red Sea in both versions of The Ten Commandments, the toppling of the pagan temple in Samson and Delilah, train wrecks in The Road to Yesterday, Union Pacific and The Greatest Show on Earth, and the destruction of a zeppelin in Madame Satan.

Stuntman Jack Montgomery, who played a Christian cavalryman in the film, recalled in an interview the tension that existed between director Cecil B. DeMille and the dozens of stuntmen hired to do the battle scenes. The stuntmen resented what they saw as DeMille’s cavalier attitude about safety, especially as several stuntmen had been injured, because of what the stuntmen perceived as DeMille’s indifference. At one point DeMille was standing on the parapets of the castle, yelling through his megaphone at the “combatants” gathered below. One of them, who had been hired for his expertise at archery, finally tired of DeMille’s screaming at them, notched an arrow into his bow and fired it at DeMille’s megaphone, the arrow embedding itself into the megaphone just inches from DeMille’s head. DeMille quickly left the set and didn’t come back for the rest of the day. For the rest of the picture, he never yelled at the stuntmen again.

The Crusades was directed by Cecil B. De Mille for Paramount Pictures.

Things to look up (click on item to go to IMDB page):

Cecil B. DeMille

Stunt Performers Listed on IMDB:

Harold Goodwin
Chuck Hamilton
Jack Montgomery
Spike Spackman The Crusades

Check out our new Book, 100 Years of the Best Movie Stunts!

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Best Stunts of the Year List 1930-1939

Stunt Performers and the Crusades

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