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The 1930s The Talkies, the Growth of the Studios, and 'The Golden Age of Hollywood' Part 6 Film History of the 1930s Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 Film History by Decade Index | Pre-1920s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s |
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Directors from Foreign Shores: The first major non-American Oscar recognition was for Hungarian-born director-producer Alexander Korda's British-made costume drama entitled The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) - the ground-breaking biopic film received a Best Picture nomination and won the Best Actor award (for Charles Laughton). Consequently, the success helped to resurrect England's film industry and led to other Korda classics with his newly established London Films (an offshoot of UA Studios): The Four Feathers (1939), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), and The Jungle Book (1942), but the director was unable to garner any further Best Picture Oscars.
Following the British success of the historical-biographical film The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), other studios (both in the UK and in Hollywood) followed suit with similar biopic films - treatments of historical characters in the mid to late 30s:
William Dieterle's Best Picture-winning The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and Best Actor-winning The Story of Louis Pasteur (1937), with Paul Muni's memorable performances in both character studies, initiated a series of engrossing screen biographies of famous scientists, doctors, and inventors into the late 30s and 40s. Literary Works Made into Films:
The Greatest Year for Films Ever: 1939 1939 boasted other great classic films of enduring quality: The Roaring Twenties (1939), Destry Rides Again (1939) - Marlene Dietrich's come-back film, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Beau Geste (1939), the all-female The Women (1939), a re-make of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) with Charles Laughton, and The Old Maid (1939) with Bette Davis. As a footnote to the decade, three of the best directors in the decade of the 1970s were born in the year 1939: Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, and Peter Bogdanovich.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 
 
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From
the mid-30s onward, non-English language films were beginning to be shown
in greater numbers in the United States, including the divergent works
of Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut; Alfred Hitchcock
and David Lean; Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini and Vittorio DeSica;
Ingmar Bergman; Sergei Eisenstein; and Akira Kurosawa. Little-known British
director Alfred Hitchcock, who had already directed over a dozen films
before 1935, became more widely-known in the US with the release of his
stylish, spy-chase thrillers in the middle and end of the decade: The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), the superb thriller with an innocent
man on the run manacled to a trademark cool blonde in 
German
director Fritz Lang's first Hollywood film (after exiling himself
from his homeland due to Nazi persecution), MGM's thought-provoking, socially-aware
Fury (1936) treated the psychology of a lynch mob and its impact
on an innocent victim (Spencer Tracy). And French director Jean Renoir's
classic WWI POW drama Grand Illusion (1937) idealistically expressed
the 'grand illusion' and hypocrisy of men at war. 
Stars
appeared in any number of expensively-made films that brought classic
novels and literary works to life: 
The
most distinguished, pinnacle year in the movies has to be 1939, with many
of the greatest, most diverse and superlative movies ever produced in
one year. There were ten films nominated for Best Picture that year (not
five) for Academy Awards, and four of them were independent productions
- (1) Hal Roach's Of Mice and Men (1939), (2) Walter Wanger's 
The
other six nominated films in 1939 were MGM's big-budget