Strange Fruit
1939
A Bronx schoolteacher's poem about lynching, sung in a single spotlight, still the bravest three minutes on record.
★ 9.6
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1939
Showing 95 works across all media from 1939
The Collected Poems
1939 · 544 pages
Irish myth and fairy tale at the start, then old age, politics, and desire handled with frightening force. Yeats wrote things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and a terrible beauty is born.
★ 9.1
The Wizard of Oz
Directed by Victor Fleming
1939
Decades of television broadcasts made it what the Library of Congress calls the most-seen film in history: the switch from sepia Kansas into Technicolor Oz still lands like a door opening.
★ 9.1
Over the Rainbow
1939
MGM cut it from the film twice until Arthur Freed threatened to quit; Garland was sixteen.
★ 9.0
The Grapes of Wrath
1939 · 464 pages
The Joads lose their Oklahoma farm and drive west to California, where the promised work is a lie. Steinbeck's fury at what was done to them still comes off the page.
★ 9.0
The Rules of the Game
Directed by Jean Renoir
1939 · France
Banned in 1939, booed at its premiere, then in the top ten of every Sight and Sound poll for sixty years: Renoir turned a hunting party into a diagnosis of a doomed society.
★ 8.8
The Wizard of Oz · 1939
Body and Soul
1939
Hawkins barely states the melody, improvises two choruses instead, and the 1939 Bluebird side pointed jazz toward bebop.
★ 7.7
The Two Fridas
1939 · Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City), Mexico City
Two versions of herself hold hands with one artery running between them, clamped shut. She painted it as her marriage to Rivera fell apart.
★ 7.7
In the Mood
1939
Joe Garland's tune cut to three minutes to fit a 78, and those false endings that never quite stop.
★ 7.5
Gone with the Wind
Directed by Victor Fleming
1939
Adjusted for inflation no film has ever earned more, and it is still telling the old South's version of itself: enormous, ravishing, and not to be trusted.
★ 7.4
Somewhere over the rainbow Way up high, There's a land that I heard of Once in a lullaby.
The Wizard of Oz · 1939
Stagecoach
Directed by John Ford
1939
It made John Wayne a star, invented Monument Valley as a place in the American mind, and put nine strangers in one coach: every road movie descends from it.
★ 7.0