The limited release of The Grand Budapest Hotel this past weekend was catnip for those of us who are fans of either a) Wes Anderson, b) classic Hollywood cinema, or especially c) all of the above. With the film being set predominantly in 1932 (or at least an alternate version thereof), this is a great time to take a look at the best films of that year, when, at least in Hollywood, Pre-Code revelry was in full swing, and any suggestion of “good taste” was treated with a condescending laugh and a pat on the back.

As a quick disclaimer, I should also note that Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express absolutely would have warranted inclusion here, but as each appeared on other recent lists, I didn’t want to be too repetitive. Now, on with the show.

10.) I Was Born, But… (dir. Yasujirô Ozu)

In light of his more mournful reputation, it can be helpful to examine Ozu’s earlier, silent films, which play more like popular comedies than outright melodrama, and which illuminate aspects of his later films that were always there, but seem perhaps less evident on first view. I Was Born, But… is not exactly a riotous comedy, but in examining lower-class struggles from the vantage point of two young boys, Ozu reveals the true heartache that accompanies dismal economic prospects, sure, but also the relatively low place such concerns hold for those in the family who have a great many other concerns than the practical problems that come along with it.

9.) Freaks (dir. Tod Browning)

After more than eighty years of circulating college campuses, midnight repertory screenings, horror movie compilations, and enough “cult film” articles to make you want to vomit, I’ll admit I often forget just how truly good a film Freaks actually is. Browning constructed a film so excruciating, so violent — not just in its content, but in its exploitative attitude — and so confrontational that it effectively ruined his career. After making fifteen films over the previous seven years, he made only four in the following seven, two of which he went uncredited for, before stopping altogether. But what a way to go.

8.) Scarface (dir. Howard Hawks)

As outrageous as Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake is, it’s hard to quite completely conceive of what it must have been like to see Hawks’s landmark film in its own time. As I noted at the start, it was very standard for films of this time to be drenched in sin, but this one felt it necessary to preface the whole affair with a disclaimer, stating that their only purpose in showing such acts is to spur some sort of action from the government (and indeed the audience!), to put a stop to all this. Ostensibly a rise-and-fall portrait, the film could not possibly be more geared towards urging on audience complicity, starting first and foremost with the casting of Paul Muni as the titular gangster, who seduces everyone in his sight, the audience apparently included. Delighting as much in the small details of being a big-time gangster — stashes of weapons and booze, defense systems, the hierarchy of the mob itself — as giant shootouts and car chases, this set the template for every such film to follow, right up to the present.

7.) Okay, America! (dir. Tay Garnett)

Based in large part on Walter Winchell (later portrayed in a much different light by Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success), Lew Ayres stars as Larry Wayne, feared gossip columnist and radio personality who is finally given an actual assignment: to cover the kidnapping of a wealthy Cabinet member’s daughter. The film anticipates stuff like His Girl Friday or Ace in the Hole by featuring a journalist who sensationalizes the tragedy at hand as much as he seeks to resolve it, and exemplifies the sort of total portrait of a profession common to the 1930s. From gangsters to politicians to cops to fellow newspapermen, there’s an authenticity to the ensemble, emboldened with the odd, otherworldly touch that seems to have informed the totality of what may not be considered the “Coen Brothers Touch.” It’s a hell of a motion picture, at once invigoratingly archetypal and playfully idiosyncratic.

6.) Boudu Saved From Drowning (dir. Jean Renoir)

And who says revelry was strictly the province of Americans? Renoir would really explode the possibilities of class struggle with his 1939 masterpiece The Rules of the Game, but he set the template with this odd, nearly parabolic film about a bourgeois couple that decides to “rescue” a homeless man, only to see all their attempts to “civilize” him blow up in their face. Casting Michel Simon as the titular tramp ensures we will be held as captive by the film as we are by societal structures.

5.) Taxi! (dir. Roy Del Ruth)

A showcase for James Cagney to indulge both his tough guy side and his dance card, Taxi! also exemplifies the growing socialist, pro-union mentality that marked a great many films from the prewar era, a trait that is at first quite unexpected for modern viewers investigating classic American cinema, but which serves only to broaden our understanding of what American-ness truly is. Here, Cagney plays a cab driver who finds that the power cabbies’ hold together against mob encroachment is much more effective than either an every-man-for-himself strategy or simply expecting police to pick up the slack. And Cagney, one of cinema’s most electric subjects, is just the man to lead them. As for the dancing? Well, you’ll just have to see for yourself.

4.) Island of Lost Souls (dir. Erle C. Kenton)

The first feature film adaptation of H.G. Wells The Island of Dr. Moreau asks maybe the central question of Pre-Code cinema: “What is the law?” I mean, when the central romance of the film revolves around a man and a panther (to be fair…a panther that has been turned into a woman), it’s time to start asking some fundamental questions about what, exactly, has lead us all to this place. One thing absolutely not in question is that this is a viscerally exciting, haunting, and truly perverted horror film, one of the best the genre has ever seen.

3.) Love Me Tonight (dir. Rouben Mamoulian)

Even beyond the casting of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, Mamoulian’s debt to Ernst Lubitsch is not only evident, but immediately acknowledged in an opening scene that nevertheless could not be more distinct from the films on which he is building. Whereas Lubitsch’s musicals took hold of a world entirely belonging to the upper class (at worst, Chevalier would be a captain or lieutenant), Mamoulian begins his in the streets of Paris, as the town wakes up and falls into a beautiful rhythm. Chevalier and MacDonald play characters, a tailor and princess respectively, sharing their true first names, which enhances the sensation that we’ve seen them go through many of these same rhythms before (and will again, in Lubitsch’s final musical, The Merry Widow), but Mamoulian shakes up the formula enough, peppering the film with his characteristic long crane shots, inventive editing, and a feel for the stuff of everyday life rendered in purely cinematic terms.

2.) Red Dust (dir. Victor Fleming)

Though best remembered now as the man who finished Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, the aspects of Fleming’s career that he could call all his own were quite notable, perhaps none more so than his still quite scandalous 1932 film. Set on a rubber plantation in French Indochina, the film uses the volatile environment to increase the sexual tension between the owner and manager (Clark Gable), a stranded prostitute (Jean Harlow), and the well-to-do wife (Mary Astor) of a newly-hired engineer. Gable, better suited to Harlow’s rough-and-tumble nature, can’t help but be drawn to Astor, more for the life she represents than for who she truly is; men seem to marry in a very self-flattering way. There’s not a lot else to the narrative, but within such a fascinating context and such dynamic characters, never mind a dash of Pre-Code naughtiness (the film’s most famous scene sees Gable fighting with a bathing, quite nude Harlow), that’s really all you need for a sweaty, sexy romantic drama.

1.) Trouble in Paradise (dir. Ernst Lubitsch)

Lubitsch’s finest film seems, at first glance, to be one of his most superficial, and indeed one cannot overstate how totally enthralling such pleasures are. The dialogue is not particularly quick, but exceedingly witty, with each of the three protagonists (Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, and Kay Francis) seeming to hold a stack of cards with tremendous one-liners on hand at all times. Lubitsch, fresh off of directing a string of musicals (his 1932 entry, One Hour With You, deserves mention here as well), infuses his comedy with a rivaling melody; one could almost dance to the sound of the picture. And I’ll be damned if it isn’t just about the sexiest film I’ve ever seen, one stacked on all sides with people dying to hop into bed with one another, endlessly talking about which, even in the Pre-Code era, they couldn’t quite bear to show. Lubitsch and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson demonstrate you needn’t do so. The talk is exciting enough. It is only at the resolution that you realize everything this style has amounted to, everything that could be dismissed as an abandonment of substance, has in fact cumulated to something quite potent, alive, and reflective of the only barrier between classes that matters most. Marshall and Hopkins play master thieves trying to con Francis out of a great deal of money, until complications — practical and emotional — ensue. The title alludes to marriage, even though none of them are married. But what on earth could be better reflective of it all?