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!
