1933 Hit Parade

The federal government imposed a new gasoline tax to fund roadmaking.

Among popular films:
    42nd Street
   
Duck Soup directed by Leo McCarey starring the Marx Brothers
   
Flying Down to Rio starring Dolores Del Rio, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire
   
Footlight Parade starring James Cagney and Joan Blondell
   
Gold Diggers of 1933 starring Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell and Dick Powell
   
King Kong starring Fay Wray
   
Little Women directed by George Cukor and starring Katherine Hepburn and Joan Bennett
   
Queen Christina starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert
   
She Done Him Wrong starring Cary Grant and Mae West.

Fiction included Erkstine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited, James Gould Cozzens The Last Adam, Josephine Herbst’s Pity is Not Enough, Meyer Levin’s The New Bridge, and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonleyhearts.

Popular Songs included:  “I Like Mountain Music” by Frank Weldon and James Cavenaugh, “Lazybones” by Hoagey Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, “Let’s Fall in Love” by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, “Love is the Sweetest Thing” by Ray Noble, “It’s Only a Paper Moon” by Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg and Billy Rose, “Sophisticated Lady” by Duke Ellington, Irving Mills and Mitchell Parish, “Stormy Weather” by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler.

Darryl Zanuck of Warner Brothers organized 20th Century Pictures.

Disney produced the animated Three Little Pigs with the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” by Frank E. Churchill.

Frequency modulations (FM) permitted radio reception without static.

Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

January 24:  Noel Coward’s Design for Living opened at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theater.

March:  Frances Perkins became the first woman cabinet member when President Roosevelt named her secretary of labor.

March 5:  President Roosevelt declared a four-day national bank holiday.

March 9:  Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act.

May:  The New Deal Legislation was passed.

May 27:  The Century of Progress World’s Fair opened in Chicago; fan dancer Sally Rand performed.

June 6:  The first drive-in movie theater opened in Camden, New Jersey by Richard M. Hollingshead Jr.

October:  Esquire, the first magazine for men, was published.

October 24:  Mulatto by Langston Hughes opened at New York’s Vanderbilt Theater.

December 5:  The prohibition of the sale of alcohol was repealed, despite six southern states which remained dry.