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The 17 Most Underrated Crime Films of the 1920s
One hundred years ago, film was in its first golden era, and crime-films reigned supreme.
The 1920s were, undoubtedly, an incredible decade for crime films. In part because the 20s saw the transition between the silent era and the rise of talkies, there’s a delightful mix, here, of films from both styles of cinema. Some of the great masterpieces of the genre (many long forgotten by the average movie audience of today) exist suspended in time, one-hundred years ago.
Many of the actors and directors who would go on to become household names in the 1930s and 1940s got their start right here, and many of those who were the darlings of the silent-era screen saw this as their final hurrah before the talkies wiped their stardom off the map.
My spiel about films in the streaming era
Once upon a time, Netflix’s DVD library hosted well over 100,000 titles and sent out roughly 12 million DVDs per week. Now, with the advent of easy-to-use streaming services, the amount of content viewers have available has shrunk to the low thousands. Look up any list of “films to watch” and you’ll find a tiny selection of movies, usually curated by people all reading the same lists and commenting on the exact same hot new show or film.
But, is that all there is? With over a hundred years of incredible filmmaking on the planet, isn’t there something missed when we only pay attention to the latest and greatest? This series is dedicated to answering that question and to exploring a small handful of the unsung films from decades past. I’ll examine each decade in turn, all the way back to the earliest days of film, and I’ll be exploring every genre of film there is! From science fiction, to drama, to romance, to comedy — I’m going to cover the entirety of film history for you, bringing out the golden nuggets for you to enjoy.
