It Happened One Night
Directed by Frank Capra
1934
It helped launch the screwball comedy and left fingerprints on every romance that followed: a runaway heiress, a broke reporter, a night bus, and a blanket hung between two beds.
★ 7.7
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1934
Showing 36 works across all media from 1934
Independent People
1934 · 482 pages
Eighteen years of hired labor buy Bjartur a stretch of Icelandic moorland, and he defends his independence against weather, debt, and his own family. Laxness makes stubbornness heroic and ruinous at once.
★ 7.0
I, Claudius
1934 · 468 pages
Stammering, limping, and dismissed as an idiot, Claudius survives the Roman imperial family as it murders its way through Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, then sets down the secret history of what he watched.
★ 7.0
Tender is the Night
1934 · 317 pages
Dick Diver, a young psychiatrist, marries the rich patient he treated and spends her money charming the French Riviera. Fitzgerald tracks the exact cost of being the most delightful man in the room.
★ 6.9
L'Atalante
Directed by Jean Vigo
1934 · France
Vigo was dying at twenty-nine when he finished it and the studio hacked it apart anyway: restored, it is the most sensual thing ever filmed about being newly married on a working barge.
★ 6.8
Call It Sleep
1934 · 480 pages
Roth put the immigrant Lower East Side inside a child's skull. David Schearl is six, terrified of his father, safe only in his mother's kitchen, and the street reaches him as raw sensation.
★ 6.6
Tropic of Cancer
1934 · 336 pages
Miller in Paris, broke and writing about sex and squalor with an appetite nothing in English had matched. Grove Press fought dozens of obscenity suits before the Supreme Court cleared it in 1964.
★ 6.5
The Street of Crocodiles
1934 · 368 pages
Shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942, Schulz left stories that turn a Galician backwater into a world where his father breeds birds in the attic and the calendar grows a thirteenth month.
★ 6.5
A Handful of Dust
1934 · 273 pages
Tony Last loves his ugly Gothic house and believes his wife Brenda is content. Waugh gives her a dull London lover, kills the thing Tony cannot lose, and strands him far from England.
★ 6.5
Art as Experience
1934 · 384 pages
Art belongs in the museum only by accident, Dewey argues. The aesthetic starts in the ordinary rhythm of a creature meeting its world, an argument that pulled philosophy toward everyday and popular art.
★ 6.4
Border Town
1934 · 169 pages
Shen Congwen's river country: an old ferryman and his granddaughter work a crossing in west Hunan while two brothers from the richest family court her, one singing across the water at night.
★ 6.3
Appointment in Samarra
1934 · 240 pages
At a country club on Christmas Eve, a Pennsylvania Cadillac dealer throws a drink in the wrong man's face. O'Hara tracks the next three days with pitiless attention to who outranks whom.
★ 6.2
The Ways of White Folks
1934 · 255 pages
A Greenwich Village couple hire a young Black man as gardener and painter's model, and cannot see the person. Fourteen stories in which Hughes strips white kindness down to appetite and cruelty.
★ 6.1
Anything Goes
1934
Porter loaded the lyric with Depression-era scandal, and Ethel Merman belted it at the Alvin for eight months.
★ 5.8
Tender is the Night · 1934
The Postman Always Rings Twice
1934 · 116 pages
Thrown off a hay truck, a drifter takes work at a California diner and wants the owner's wife enough to help her kill her husband. Cain does it in a hundred scalding pages.
★ 5.3
Murder on the Orient Express
1934 · 240 pages
Snow halts the Orient Express, and an American passenger is found dead in his compartment, stabbed twelve times. Poirot has no police and no laboratory, only what the other travelers tell him.
★ 5.3