Second-generation classics.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD

THIS YEAR MARKS the 70th anniversary of Hollywood's most celebrated season--1939. One need only note the Academy Award Best Picture nominees to underline the tariffed air of that time: "Dark Victory," "Gone With the Wind," "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," "Love Affair," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "Ninotchka," "Of Mice and Men," "Stagecoach," "The Wizard of Oz," and "Wuthering Heights." Even this extensive list missed such classics as "Beau Geste," "Drums Along the Mohawk," and "Gunga Din."

All the recent hullabaloo concerning this special milestone in cinema had us pondering what year could be picked as the runner-up. This was no easy task, but we are prepared to go with 1989. Keep in mind, though, the year comes with an asterisk--the old Hollywood has been gone for decades. While these 1989 movies are American-made, often with an iconic studio logo at the opening, many are produced independently, with an MGM or Universal merely acting as the banker or distributor, instead of the "studio as auteur" norm of the 1930s and 1940s.

Let us begin with 1989's special comedies. In the tradition of Capraesque feel-good populism, there was the renowned baseball fantasy, "Field of Dreams," in which Kevin Costner's character gets genre's signature second chance, miraculously reconnecting with a lost-through-death dad. On more realistic--but no less heartwarming--ground, Ron Howard directed the insightfully truthful "Parenthood," a multicharacter endeavor about the job that never ends.

In the realm of dark comedy, Woody Allen wrote, directed, and starred in "Crimes and Misdemeanors," which was the foundation for his later acclaimed "Match Point" (2005). Writer-director Steven Soderbergh burst on the cinema scene with his first feature, "Sex, Lies, and Videotape." On a more epic scale, Tim Button's "Batman" brought gallows humor to Gotham City by way of a stunningly noir-ish visual style and Jack Nicholson's razzle-dazzle psychotic Joker. The year even featured an inventively twisted coming-of-age dark comedy about murder masquerading as teen suicide in "Heathers."

In a reaffirmation parody disguised as an action adventure film, 1989 gave viewers "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," arguably the best of the "Indy" Saturday matinee movies--what with tans getting two additional variations on Harrison Ford's beloved title character: young Jones in flashback (River Phoenix), and Indy's equally swashbuckling archaeologist father (Sean Connery). Along more...