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    Global Film Initiative’s Santhosh Daniel (left) and Jeremy Quist (right) mingle with Kay Sato of the SF Jewish Film Festival at the GFI Happy Hour event at Custom Lounge... more

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A year to remember: Cary Grant (left) was quite possibly never funnier than as the most feral fellow amongst three British Army buddies in "Gunga Din," which plays the Castro's 1939 series. (Photo courtesy Castro Theatre)

Experience

"The Greatest Year in Film" turns 70 at the Castro

By Dennis Harvey

What was the best year ever for painting? Music? Literature? Any answers would be arbitrary at worst, debatable at best—the truth being, of course, that these art forms are just too vast, historied and changeable for the question to be useful at all.

Yet ask when was the best year for movies (Hollywood movies, that is), and there is actually a consensus so widespread it’s gone from opinion to virtual fact. That year would be 1939, when for whatever reasons—some explicable, others just accidents of timing—Hollywood’s “golden age” went platinum, delivering so many classic features it still beggars belief they all arrived in such close proximity.

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