A time when every film was a gem. A time when actors fit the role rather than the role being tailored for the limitations of the performer.
The years after the Depression when Pearl Harbor sounded like a MGM movie title and ended with Casablanca becoming an unpredicted hit at the box-office.
The Golden Years of Hollywood are generally regarded to be from 1935 to 1943.
Of that time, crime-writer, Raymond Chandler (who penned such classics about the exploits of a cynical private dick, Philip Marlowe) said, "Hollywood is a wonderful place. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober."
Most movie-buffs agree there will never be another era when so many stars sparkled with such grace and gusto in perfect harmony.
The films of the Golden Era stood the test of time, because they told such wonderful stories in glorious black and white and without the benefit of special effects.
It was a time when the likes of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Grant and Fred Astaire taught us how to handle a gun, a sword, a phrase and a gal. When starlets like, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck and Ginger Rogers set the trends from fashion to footwear to the rules of flirting.
In that decade between 1935 and 1943 the dream machine produced 750 movies a year everyone a gem. They were staple diet for moviebuffs of yesteryear and have since become a feast for movie-scholars of today.
Notwithstanding the on-screen charisma, it was the 24 carat off-screen exploits that gave birth to a new kind of stargazing.
Obsessed, gossip columnists (today's equivalent of the tabloids) documented every crime and misdemeanour of these screen heroes to feed to the hungry public.
If you think the stars of today have had their share of marriages and divorces, affairs both gay and straight dragged out from behind closed doors. Yesteryear stars also have their reputations tainted by scandals.
1935
In 1935 Mutiny On The Bounty was the movie to see. Starring Clarke Gable the hero seaman looked extra handsome in his officer uniform. So much so, the closet gay Charles Laughton could not bare look him in the eye for fear of muffing his lines.
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