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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1935 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| RKO's and Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp (1935) was the first feature-length Technicolor film to be shot entirely in 3-strip color - a milestone film dramatizing William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair with Miriam Hopkins in the title role. | |
| The first official Mickey Mouse film in color was released, Disney's 9-minute The Band Concert. | |
| British director Alfred Hitchcock became an internationally-famous figure for his thrillers including The 39 Steps (1935) and later The Lady Vanishes (1938). | |
| Twentieth Century Pictures (founded in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck and Joseph Schenck) and the Fox Film Corporation (founded by William Fox in 1915) merged to form 20th Century-Fox, overseen by Schenck and Zanuck. | |
| Selznick International Pictures, a major Hollywood motion picture studio, was founded in 1935 by David O. Selznick, who had left MGM. Their first film production, an adaptation of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), starred Freddie Bartholomew. As an independent producer, David O. Selznick served as a "one-man" film industry with tremendous authority and power over the selection of stars and decisions of directors. | |
| The Marx Brothers starred in their first feature film for a new studio, MGM's box-office hit comedy A Night at the Opera (1935), after departing from Paramount. It was the sixth of thirteen Marx Brothers feature films, and it was their first film without Zeppo. Many consider this as the Marx Bros' best film, along with Duck Soup (1933). | |
| In 1935, the U.S. Treasury Department upheld a Commissioner of Customs decision to prohibit the import of the notorious Czechoslovakian film Ecstasy (1933) (aka Extase) with Hedwig Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr) as Eva, because it contained nudity (in a swimming scene) and was the first non-pornographic film to exhibit sexual intercourse and simulated female orgasm. This marked the first time customs laws were used to prevent a film from entering the US. | |
| The first trade paper Oscar advertisement appeared to promote MGM's coming-of-age comedy, Ah, Wilderness! | |
| Cowboy crooner Gene Autry (in his first starring film role) was featured in Mascot's influential, western/sci-fi 12-episode serial The Phantom Empire (1935) (aka Radio Ranch). It was credited for inspiring Universal's Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials. | |
| Actor William Boyd began to portray western hero Bill "Hop-along" Cassidy in sixty-six films from the mid-1930s to 1948. The first Hopalong Cassidy film was Hop-Along Cassidy (1935). Boyd was able to parlay his experience as the character of "Hopalong" into the world of television in the late 1940s - Hopalong Cassidy, network television's first Western series, aired on NBC in June of 1949, with Boyd in the lead role. | |
| Director Ralph Ince's 70 minute crime drama Murder at Monte Carlo (1935, UK), a "lost film" from Warner Brothers-First National Productions and Teddington Studios in the UK, starred Errol Flynn in an early role as Dyter, a Fleet Street journalist who investigated the suspicious death in Monte Carlo of famous mathematician Doctor Heinrich Becker (Paul Graetz). As a result of Flynn's performance, he was 'discovered' as a possible star and recruited by Hollywood, to soon appear in his breakthrough role as a swashbuckler in Captain Blood (1935). Flynn was on the road to stardom by the end of the decade, appearing in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). | |
| 14 year-old Edna Mae Durbin (aka Deanna Durbin), was discovered by MGM in 1935 and signed her first contract with the studio. In the next year, she made her first film appearance in the short subject film Every Sunday (1936). | |
| Writer-director Mikio Naruse's Wife! Be Like a Rose! (1935, Jp.) (aka Tsuma yo bara no yô ni), an early masterpiece of Japanese cinema, was the first Japanese talkie feature film to be distributed in the US and to receive a commercial release. | |
| Porky Pig made his debut in the cartoon I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935). | |
| MGM's and writer/director Bernard Mainwaring's comedy The Public Life of Henry the Ninth (1935, UK), a "lost film," was notable as the first film made by Hammer Film Productions Ltd. (then known as Hammer Productions Ltd.), later much better known for its bloody horror films in the 1950s and 1960s - becoming Britain's most profitable film studio. Its title was reminiscent of the title of the Oscar-winning film The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933, UK) - the UK's first Best Picture winner. It starred Leonard Henry (an early radio and TV star in his film debut) as the title character, an unemployed London street musician who acquired his break into show-business when he became a star cabaret entertainer at a dreary local pub known as Henry the VIII. When he first accepted the job as a potman (glass collector), because the pub owner had already gone through 8 potmen in the previous year, Henry decided to call himself "Henry the Ninth." | |
| Top Hat (1935), one of the great 1930s dance musicals, and possibly the best, most characteristic and most profitable Astaire and Rogers musical ever, was released. It contained wonderful, magical dance and song numbers (with straight-on, full-length views of the dancers without a lot of camera cuts or unusual camera angles). It was the fourth of nine films that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers appeared in for RKO (between 1933 and 1939), and it became financially-troubled RKO's greatest box-office hit of the 30s (the moneymaker brought in $3 million). Its tagline was: "They're Dancing Cheek-to-Cheek Again." | |
| In the Warner Bros.' film G-Men (1935), James Cagney didn't play the typical "tough guy gangster" as usual but took the role of a federal lawman. The film industry's new censorship laws only allowed gangsters on the screen if they were being captured or killed by FBI men. This new heroic image signaled a shift in Hollywood's portrayal of the government agent, mostly due to the propagandastic intentions of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover (who ruled the agency from 1924 until his death in 1972). | |
| One of the first major sound productions of a Shakespeare play was A Midsummer's Night Dream (1935), starring Dick Powell and Mickey Rooney. It also marked the film debut of Olivia de Havilland. It was the first Shakespeare adaptation to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Director Max Reinhardt had just produced a star-laden production of Shakespeare Under the Stars at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934, and convinced studio heads at Warners to give the film the go-ahead. The almost two-hours long film was a box-office failure, although it had the most elaborate fantasy sequences of any Hollywood talkie (except possibly Busby Berkeley's numbers) before The Wizard of Oz (1939). | |
| Pricewaterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) has managed the Academy Awards balloting process since 1935 - all but the first six years of the Oscars. | |
| One of the most famous headlines ever to appear in a print publication was "Sticks Nix Hick Pix" -- in Variety's July 17, 1935 edition of its Hollywood entertainment paper. The so-called 'slanguage' header was referring to the fact that mid-western dwelling folks (sticks) rejected (nixed) movies (pix) about rural life (hicks), and preferred more sophisticated films. | |
| Director Leni Riefenstahl's controversial, historically-important documentary film The Triumph of the Will (aka Triumph des Willens, Germ.) (1935) was an effective propagandistic effort documenting the 1934 Nazi Party Congress and rally in Nuremberg. | |
| The first Hollywood mainstream werewolf movie was Universal's Werewolf of London (1935), starring Henry Hull (as Dr. Glendon). It was followed six years later by the second werewolf film, The Wolf Man (1941) starring Lon Chaney, Jr. in the title role. | |
| The British-made Scrooge (1935), the first all-talking feature film version of the Charles Dickens classic, starring Sir Seymour Hicks as Scrooge, opened in New York City on December 13, 1935. | |
| John Ford's American film The Informer (1935) had an impressive, emotionally-moving, Academy Award-winning musical score (with an Irish flavor) written by famed composer Max Steiner, and encouraged the future development of musical soundtracks and accompaniments. | |
| MGM's Audioscopiks (1935) was the first 3D movie nominated for an Oscar, in the category of Best Short Subject, Novelty (made by Pete Smith with his commentary). The semi-documentary narrated film explained depth perception and various elements of human eyesight, and then demonstrated the effects of 3D by projecting objects at the audience: a ladder shoved out a window, a clock, a woman blowing up a balloon and performing thrusting leg exercises, a slide-tromboner, a sexy female on a swing, a skeleton sliding forward, a fire-eater stabbing forward with his flaming torch, a bottle of seltzer squirted by a soused man, a pitched baseball, and a harrowing car-ride along Riverside Drive in NYC to cross the George Washington Bridge, ending with a man firing his shot-gun. It was MGM's first film to be shot in 3-D. | |
| Dudley Nichols, the screenwriter for director John Ford's The Informer (1935), became the first winner to refuse his Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar award on political grounds, during a union boycott that was being held during the awards ceremony held in 1936. | |
| In Shirley Temple's first costume picture, The Little Colonel (1935), it featured her first tap-dance pairing between herself and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, in a famous staircase dance sequence. It was the first inter-racial dance pairing in Hollywood film history. |
