The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

87. 1939 - Only Angels Have Wings

Only Angels Have Wings
Columbia Pictures

Honourable Mentions: Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Gunga Din

A filmmaker with an imperious influence, Howard Hawks was one of the most prolific directors working in Hollywood as it made its transition from silent cinema to talkies, adjusted to the Hays Code, and then navigated the post-war years.

By 1939, he'd already directed a number of hits, including The Dawn Patrol, Scarface, and Bringing Up Baby, but his greatest work from that decade was Only Angels Have Wings, a romantic drama co-led by Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Rita Hayworth.

Centred around an airfreight company in a remote South American village and the life-or-death antics of the pilots in its employ, Only Angels Have Wings is one of Hawks' most visually breathtaking works, with the director maintaining the standard he set for aerial sequences on The Dawn Patrol through a combination of real aerial photography and clever miniature work. It also boasts a standout performance from Grant, who eschews the screwball antics of his earlier collaborations with Hawks for something much darker and inward-looking.

So many of Hawks' films were devoted to untangling the rituals of masculinity and romance, a formula he arguably perfected with 1959's Rio Bravo, but which was beautifully rendered with Only Angels Have Wings two decades earlier.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.