The DVD Report #162: June 29, 2010

By the time of the 1944 Oscars in March, 1945, the end of World War II was in sight. Only one of the year’s five Best Picture nominees dealt directly with the war.

The big winner was of course Leo McCarey’s Going My Way, which won seven of the ten Oscars it was nominated for including Best Picture, Director, Actor (Bing Crosby) and Supporting Actor (Barry Fitzgerald).

Bing Crosby was at the time the most popular star in show business thanks to his best-selling recordings, radio programs and films. His charming and sincere portrayal of the easy going parish priest may not have been ground-breaking acting but he made audiences of the day feel warm and cuddly. Fitzgerald as the grumpy older priest, however, was the revelation. The Irish born character actor won the New York Film Critics award for Best Actor and was nominated for both Best Actor and Supporting Actor for the same performance, the first and only time that has happened – the Academy quickly adapted new rules to prevent a reoccurrence.

The film itself is a bit episodic with Crosby’s singing and sparring with Fitzgerald interspersed with singing by Rise Stevens and the Robert Mitchell Boy Choir and a great happy tear-inducing ending. If it seems a bit simplistic by today’s standards it was the right film for the right time.

Today’s more cynical critics and audiences consider Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity the best of the nominated films. The suspense thriller was nominated for seven Oscars but won none. Barbara Stanwyck as the wife who dupes insurance salesman Fred MacMurray into murdering her husband was the only acting nominee. The exclusion of both MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson as his inquisitive boss seems more than a bit unfair. MacMurray is generally the one cited as most likely to have benefitted from a single supporting nomination for Fitzgerald.

At the time, however, Going My Way’s toughest competition was thought to be Darryl F. Zanuck’s production of Wilson, directed by Henry King. The film about the U.S. President who reluctantly brought his country into World War I and then spent the rest of his life trying to organize the League of Nations to prevent future wars, was Zanuck’s dream project. He was so hurt by the film’s loss that when he won for Gentleman’s Agreement three years later he said “this doesn’t make up for past mistakes.” Star Alexander Knox was inconsolable in his loss as well, reportedly remarking “I can’t believe I lost to a crooner.”

The only Best Picture nominee dealing directly with the ongoing war was David O. Selznick’s production of Since You Went Away, directed by John Cromwell. Zelznick envisioned the nearly three hour film about the American home front as another Gone With the Wind. It wasn’t, but it was good enough to receive nine nominations and one win – for Max Steiner’s score.

Claudette Colbert was the mother of two daughters, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple, whose husband is off fighting the war. It featured Joseph Cotton as a family friend, Monty Woolley as a boarder, Robert Walker as Woolley’s grandson and a host of others. Colbert, Jones and Woolley all won nominations for their performances.

The fifth nominee was Georg Cukor’s Gaslight, a remake of the similarly titled 1940 British gothic thriller, which proved that Cukor could direct a suspense film as well as Hitchcock.

Ingrid Bergman won her first Oscar as the woman slowly being driven mad by her husband. Charles Boyer won his third nomination as the husband and 18 year-old Angela Lansbury in her film debut won her first nomination playing a surly maid. Joseph Cotton, Dame May Whitty and Barbara Everest also had prominent roles. If the film has a flaw it’s that Bergman seems much too intelligent to be fooled by Boyer’s suavity as long as her character is, but it’s a masterful performance nonetheless.

Otto Preminger also found himself deep in Hitchcock territory with the film version of Vera Caspery’s Laura about a detective’s infatuation with the portrait of a murdered socialite. The film was nominated for five Oscars and won one for Joseph LaShelle’s haunting black-and-white cinematography. Gene Tierney in the title role, Dana Andrews as the obsessed detective and Oscar nominated Clifton Webb as a venomous gossip columnist headed the cast which also included Vincent Price and Judith Anderson. Shockingly, David Raksin’s classic music score was not nominated although the main theme with words added would soon become one of the biggest film inspired hits of all time.

Hitchcock himself was represented by Lifeboat for which he received his second Best Director nomination. The film, which takes place entirely at sea in lifeboat was also nominated for John Steinbeck’s original story and its cinematography. None of the actors were nominated, although Tallulah Bankhead won the New York Film Critics award for her portrayal of an acerbic newspaper columnist. Walter Slezak, William Benidx, John Hodiak, Mary Anderson, Hume Cronyn, Henry Hull and Canada Lee co-starred.

Nominated for four Oscars, Vincente Minnelli’s valentine to Judy Garland, Meet Me in St. Louis failed to win any, but child star Margaret O’Brien took home a special Oscar as the best juvenile performer of the year largely in tribute to her performance as Garland’s little sister.

Mary Astor, Marjorie Main, Leon Ames, Tom Drake and Harry Davenport were also prominent in the musical which introduced such soon to be standards as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, “The Boy Next Door” and “The Trolley Song”. The latter was singled out as a Best Song nominee, losing to Going My Way’s “Swinging on a Star”.

The year’s two best laugh out loud comedies were Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek both of which won Oscar nominations for their writing. The former featured Eddie Bracken as a manufactured war hero. The latter concerned a mysterious small town pregnancy involving Bracken, Betty Hutton and Diana Lynn.

The year’s most popular action film was Mervyn LeRoy’s accurately told Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo featuring Spencer Tracy as ace flyer Jimmy Dolittle. It was nominated for its cinematography and special effects and won for the latter.

All of the films mentioned thus far have long been available on DVD with the exception of Wilson. The Warner Archive Collection has recently made available Clarence Brown’s The White Cliffs of Dover and Tay Garnett’s Mrs. Parkington.

Based on Alice Duer Miller’s poem, The White Cliffs of Dover opens with star Irene Dunne reciting the poem as she awaits the arrival in the hospital where she is a nurse of her injured son. The film then tells in flashback of the life of the American born woman who marries a British officer during a whirlwind courtship at the outbreak of World War I. Nominated for George Folsey’s meticulous cinematography the film might have as easily been nominated for its marvelous art direction and costume design as well as for the performances of Dunne and Gladys Cooper as her mother-in-law. The once in a lifetime cast also includes Roddy McDowall, Alan Marshall, Frank Morgan, Dame May Whitty, C. Aubrey Smith, Van Johnson, Peter Lawford and Elizabeth Taylor.

The best thing about Mrs. Parkington,which was nominated for Best Actress Greer Garson and Best Supporting Actress Agnes Moorehead, is its casting. Walter Pidgeon, Gladys Cooper, Edward Arnold and Cecil Kellaway are also on board in this rather oddly constructed “woman’s picture” in which an 80 year-old Garson reflects on her earlier life while her relatives wait for her to die so they can latch onto her money.

Not on DVD in the U.S., Clifford Odets’ morose None But the Lonely Heart is an important film if for no other reason than it contains one of only two Oscar nominated performances by Cary Grant and the performance that won Ethel Barrymore a much deserved Oscar as his poverty stricken mother.

New DVD releases worth your time include Michael Heneke’s Oscar nominated The White Ribbon and Jon Amiel’s Creation with Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as Charles and Emma Darwin. I forgot to mention last week that Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station with Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren in their Oscar nominated turns as Leo Tolstoy and his wife Sofya is now available and well worth a look.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 29, 2010)

The DVD Report #161: June 22, 2010

World War II continued unabated in real life and on the screen in 1943. The Oscar race was once again dominated by films about war.

The 1942 New York Film Critics Award winner, Noel Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, was not eligible for Oscar consideration then because it did not open in Los Angeles until 1943, receiving just one other nomination for Coward’s screenplay.

A fictionalized recounting of Lord Montbatten’s famed sea battle early in the war, it was a propaganda film par excellence. Coward, John Mills and Joyce Carey headed the cast.

The year’s eventual winner, Casablanca, had opened in New York in October, 1942 and was an also-ran in that year’s New York Film Critics balloting but didn’t factor at all in the National Board of Review’s voting. Its popularity, however, grew with the fortuitous meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin on January 23, 1943, the film’s purposely timed national release date.

The film’s golden clichés were golden then but no one seemed to mind. It wasn’t, however, until the film’s re-emergence in revival houses and on TV in the 1960s that it attained the vaunted place in film history it retains today. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt and the rest of the cast were at their professional peaks and continue to entrance audiences as times go by.

Casablanca won three of its eight nominations, Bogie losing to Paul Lukas in Watch on the Rhine and Rains to Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier. Bergman, nominated for For Whom the Bell Tolls rather than Cassblanca, lost to Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette.

Based on Lillian Hellman’s play of the same name, Watch on the Rhine centered on a character not unlike Paul Henreid’s in Casablanca. Oscar voters likely felt morally bound to give the award to an actor playing a patriot who puts his life on the line over a cynic. While Lukas’ performance is certainly good, it in no way compares to Bogie’s iconic portrayal of Rick in Casablanca.

Bette Davis had the secondary role of Lukas’ wife while Lucile Watson, who like Lukas, was repeating her Broadway role, all but steals the film as Davis’ mother. Lukas’ win was the only one out of the film’s four nominations which also included one for Watson as well as one for Dashiell Hammett’s screenplay.

The first film to win the Golden Globe for Best Picture, The Song of Bernadette with its twelve nominations, had gone into the Oscar ace as the early favorite but had to be content with the four awards it won for Cinematography, Art Direction and Musical Score in addition to Jones’ win for Best Actress.

Directed by Henry King, from Franz Werfel’s best-selling novel, the story of the French peasant girl who sees visions of the Virgin Mary was the most popular religious film made up to that time. Jones, previously in films as Phyllis Isley (her real name) was “introduced” as Jones in Bernadette. While she is certainly touching in her performance, many feel she was outclassed by the three actors who had to make do with nominations: Anne Revere as her mother, Charles Bickford as her parish priest and especially Gladys Cooper as the doubting nun who becomes her devoted servant and protector.

Using as its comic source the over-crowding in wartime Washington, D.C., George Stevens’ The More the Merrier is a perfectly timed comedy about a woman who sublets her apartment to old geezer who in turn sublets to a young man and proceeds to play Cupid. Jean Arthur, Charles Coburn and Joel McCrea were perfectly cast in those roles with Arthur receiving her only Best Actress nomination and Coburn winning on the second of his three. Coburn’s win was the only one out of six nominations which included one for Stevens. McCrea, alas, was not nominated and would remain one of Hollywood’s most overlooked performers in terms of Oscar.

The Best Supporting Actress Oscar went to Katina Paxinou, the legendary star of the Greek theatre, for her portrayal of the fiery revolutionary, Pilar, in Sam Wood’s film of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Set during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, For Whom the Bell Tolls also starred Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman and Akim Tamiroff, all in Oscar nominated roles. Paxinou’s Oscar, though, was the only one awarded from its total of nine nominations.

Set in small town America during the war, Clarence Brown’s The Human Comedy was nominated for five Oscars and won one for William Saroyan’s original story.

Best Actor nominee Mickey Rooney had what was perhaps the best role of his career as the telegraph messenger for whom the war hits close to home. Frank Morgan, James Craig, Marsha Hunt, Fay Bainter, Butch Jenkins, Donna Reed, Van Johnson and Robert Mitchum co-starred.

Nominated for three Oscars,Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait had nothing to do with the war, but the droll comedy was very much about life and death opening with a very funny scene in which the devil (Laird Cregar) sends an old lady (Florence Bates) straight to hell. Gene Tierney, Don Ameche, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Spring Byington and Eugene Pallette had the other major roles in the film version of the play Birthday. It’s not to be confused with Heaven Can Wait, the play whichwas the basis for the 1941 Oscar nominee Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which would be remade as Heaven Can Wait in 1978. 

One of the better bio-pics of the era, Mervyn LeRoy’s Madame Curie was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Actress Greer Garson and actor Walter Pidgeon.

Originally intended as a vehicle for Greta Garbo, it was given to Garson after Garbo’s early retirement and Garson’s continuing popularity, especially when paired with Pidgeon.

The rare western to be nominated for Best Picture, William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident based on Walter van Tilburg Clark’s novel, was also that rare Best Picture nominee that received no other nominations. At a minimum, it should have received one for Lamr Trotti’s screenplay and one each for lead actor Henry Fonda and supporting player Dana Andrews. Harry Morgan, Anthony Quinn, Frank Craven and Jane Darwell were also quite memorable in the shocking tale of a lynch mob that stalks and hangs three innocent men (Andrews, Morgan, Quinn). Fonda is the conscience of the mob, Conroy the take-no-prisoners head of the mob and Darwell, playing against type, a blood thirsty old lady.

All except The Human Comedy is available on DVD. Casablancais also available on Blu-ray.

Among the films Oscar overlooked were Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite among his many films with Joseph Cotton as a serial killer and Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge and Henry Travers as his unsuspecting family members; Jean Renoir’s This Land Is Mine about resistance fighters in an unnamed German occupied country, obviously France, with Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, George Sanders, Walter Slezak and Una O’Connor; John M. Stahl’s film of Arnold Bennett’s play The Great Adventure, renamed Holy Matrimony,with Monty Woolley as the reclusive artist masquerading as his dead butler and Gracie Fields as the housekeeper he marries; Fred M. Wilcox’s Lassie Come Home,the ultimate tale of a boy and his dog, with an all-star cast including Roddy McDowall, Donald Crisp, Edmund Gwenn, Nigel Bruce, Elsa Lanchester and Elizabeth Taylor and Howard Hawks’ Air Force, the year’s best film about men in war, with John Garfield, Gig Young, Harry Carey, Arthur Kennedy, James Best and John Ridgely among the men.

All but This Land Is Mine and Holy Matrimony are available on DVD in the U.S. This Land Is Mine is available in Region 2 (the U.K. and other countries).

New DVDs include the Iraq War drama, Green Zone with Matt Damon; the 9/11 drama, Remember Me with Robert Pattinson and Emilie de Ravin and the long awaited restored version of 1954’s A Star Is Born with Judy Garland and James Mason albeit still with missing footage replaced by stills in several scenes. All three are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 22, 2010)

The DVD Report #160: June 15, 2010

World War II raged on the screen in 1942 just as it raged in reality. No less than half of the year’s Best Picture contenders were about the war, culminating in an astonishing total of thirty nominations and ten wins.

The British home-front in the early days of the war served as the primary location for Mrs. Miniver, allegedly Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite film as it helped win the nation’s support of the war in Europe even though it was released seven years after America’s entry into the war.

The film played an astonishing twelve weeks at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, the nation’s largest theatre and premiere showplace where films generally played one or two weeks. It eventually received twelve nominations and won six Oscars including Best Picture, Director (William Wyler), Actress (Greer Garson) and Supporting Actress (Teresa Wright).

Although the film has its fair share of action sequences, the focus of the film is on three women: the gentle middle-aged wife of the title played by Garson, her town’s imperious aristocratic dowager (Oscar nominated Dame May Whitty) and Whitty’s liberal minded grand-daughter (Wright). The men, though secondary characters, are also well played by Oscar nominated Walter Pidgeon as Garson’s husband, Richard Ney as her eldest son and Oscar nominated Henry Travers as the cherubic stationmaster.

Although it caused quite a sensation when Garson married the fourteen years younger Ney a few months after the Oscars, the scandal did nothing to mar her continuing popularity as MGM’s biggest star of the 1940’s.

Garson’s second film in Oscar’s sights that year was one that had nothing to do with the war. Random Harvest, which also played twelve weeks at Radio City Music Hall was based on James Hilton’s novel of the same name. Garson, a Hilton veteran having won her first Oscar nomination for his Goodbye, Mr. Chips, was paired opposite another Hilton veteran, Ronald Colman who had starred in the film version of Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

The film, a sentimental tale of an aristocrat who suffers from amnesia, marries small town dance hall sensation Garson and then recovers his original identity on a trip to London, forgetting all about Garson, is completely engrossing. The film’s second and third acts in which Garson comes back into his life are no less so. The film received seven nominations including Best Picture, Director, Actor (Colman) and Supporting Actress (Susan Peters).

With eight nominations and three wins, Yankee Doodle Dandy was the second most honored film touching on the war. Though essentially the biography of song and dance man, George M. Cohan, the film focused lots of attention on his writing for and participation in World War I and ended with his appearance before President Roosevelt at the start of the World War II. Unfortunately Cohan died before he could contribute much to the war effort. Fortunately, however he lived long enough to witness James Cagney’s celebrated impersonationof him.

The film’s wins included one for Cagney as Best Actor, while nominations included those for Best Director (Michael Curtiz) and Supporting Actor (Walter Huston).

Re-titled The Invaders for American audiences, Michael Powell’s 49th Parallel won a Best Original Story Oscar for his partner, Emeric Pressburger. Though the two worked in tandem co-writing and co-directing most of their films together, this was the only one in which they received separate credits for the two disciplines, ironic because Powell himself never won an Oscar.

The film about Nazi sailors stranded in Canada who must make their way to the then neutral U.S. featured, among others, Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier and Glynis Johns.

Nominated for three Oscars including one for Monty Woolley as the old curmudgeon who ends up protecting a group of children from the Nazis, The Pied Piper gave U.S. audiences a glimpse of what the war was like for both young and old in Europe. Roddy McDowall, Anne Baxter and Peggy Ann Garner co-starred.

The first nominated film about U.S. involvement in the war was appropriately Wake Island about the marine held island attacked by the Japanese the same day they attacked Pearl Harbor. Though historically inaccurate – the marines did not fight to the last man, the few left alive after the admiralty abandoned rescue, surrendered to the Japanese – the film is nevertheless a rousing one that helped solidify support for the war.

Director John Farrow won the New York Film Critics Award as well as one of the film’s four Oscar nominations that included one for William Bendix as Best Supporting Actor. Although it may have been unique at the time, time has not proved kind to the film which has been copied so many times that even the original now seems like one big cliché, not the least of which is the clowning of Bendix and Robert Preston in the midst of the fighting.

Oscar didn’t have much of a funny bone this year. Such great and enduring comedies as Sullivan’s Travels; The Palm Beach Story; To Be or Not to Be and Woman of the Year were nixed for Best Picture consideration while the more serious The Talk of the Town was the only comedy/drama nominated for Best Picture.

Nominated for seven Oscars, the story of a schoolteacher who must choice between a professor and an escaped convict, it was nevertheless exceedingly well played by its three stars, Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman and Cary Grant as the respective characters. George Stevens was nominated for his direction of this over Woman of the Year.

Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons based on Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1912 novel was every bit as innovative and thrilling as his Citizen Kane but doesn’t have quite the same reputation, in part because RKO took over the film from Welles while he was in Mexico on another project. Editor Robert Wise was given the task of filming additional scenes to make the film more coherent while copious scenes shot by Welles were abandoned. The film nevertheless received four nominations including one for Supporting Actress Agnes Moorehead for her acclaimed portrayal of Aunt Fanny which had won her a Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics. Joseph Cotton, Dolores Costello, Tim Holt and Anne Baxter co-star.

Nominated for ten Oscars, and winner of one for Best Editing, The Pride of the Yankees provided Best Actor nominee Gary Cooper with one of his most iconic roles as baseball great Lou Gehrig and made Best Actress nominee Teresa Wright the first actress to win three acting nominations in two years, a feat that wasn’t to be repeated until Emma Thompson did it again in 1994.

Yankees’ director Sam Wood was nominated as Best Director for his other film in the year’s Best Picture line-up, the melodramatic Kings Row, one of that film’s three nominations.

Kings Row is best remembered for the scene in which Ronald Reagan wakes up to find his legs gone and utters the famous line, “where’s the rest of me?” Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Betty Field and Charles Coburn as the sadistic surgeon co-star.

Kings Row was one of three major films scheduled for release in December, 1941 which were delayed until 1942 because of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The others were Sullivan’s Travels and The Man Who Came to Dinner, neither of which received any Oscar nominations.

Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture, all are available on DVD in the U.S. except The Pied Piper and The Magnificent Ambersons, which is available in several Region 2 versions including one from Great Britain.

In addition to the previously mentioned Sullivan’s Travels; The Palm Beach Story; To Be or Not to Be; Woman of the Year and The Man Who Came to Dinner, other films of note that failed to register as Best Picture contenders include Bambi; Holiday Inn; For Me and My Gal; Journey for Margaret; My Sister Eileen and The Major and the Minor. Unlike The Pied Piper and The Magnificent Ambersons, they’re all been released on DVD in the U.S., although Bambi, and To Be or Not to Be which are currently on moratorium, may be hard to find.

New DVD releases of note include the Blu-ray debuts of Darkman and the original 1987 version of The Stepfather.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 15, 2010)

The DVD Report #159: June 8, 2010

1941 is remembered as the year in which How Green Was My Valley beat Citizen Kane for the Oscar, a travesty in many people’s eyes but not mine. Both were great films, Valley the better of the two in my humble opinion.

The front-runner in terms of nominations was Sergeant York which received 11 nominations, followed by Valley’s 10, 9 each for Kane and The Little Foxes, 7 for Here Comes Mr. Jordan, 6 for Hold Back the Dawn, 4 for Blossoms in the Dust, 3 each for The Maltese Falcon and Suspicion and a lone Best Picture bid for One Foot in Heaven. All but Hold Back the Dawn and One Foot in Heaven are available on DVD in the U.S.

The popularity of Sergeant York is understandable as the title character was the most decorated soldier of World War I, a conscientious objector who was slow to fight. It was an inspiring story told at the start of America’s entry into World War II with Gary Cooper starring in one of his most iconic performances and the one that would bring him his first Oscar. Prolific director Howard Hawks won his only Best Director nod for the film, though in retrospect it wasn’t even his best film of 1941 – that would be Ball of Fire with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck in a sophisticated spoof of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for which Stanwyck won a Best Actress nomination. Cooper and Stanwyck were also brilliantly teamed in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe this year and Stanwyck even more successfully opposite Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve.

Taken from the first half of Richard Llewellyn’s novel, How Green Was My Valley was another John Ford masterpiece, winning his second Best Director Oscar in a row, his third career win, as well as his third New York Film Critics Award in a row, his fourth overall. Timeless in its appeal, the story of a Welsh coal mining family that loses many of its members to the mines, is told from the perspective of the youngest son, brilliantly played by Roddy McDowall with Donald Crisp in a great Oscar winning portrayal of his father, Sara Allgood in an equally great Oscar nominated portrayal of his mother with top billed Walter Pidgeon and Maureen O’Hara in what was actually a secondary story of the town minister and the only girl in a family of boys. The film won five of the ten Oscars it was nominated for.

The only Oscar that Citizen Kane won was for its screenplay, co-written by Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz, though ever since they started compiling lists of the Greatest Films of All Time in the 1950s it has ranked at or near the top. There are several reasons for that, chiefly however they revolve around Gregg Toland’s innovative cinematography and the brazenness of the story itself, a thinly veiled study of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst who tried to suppress it.

Welles is brilliant, of course, as the central character who dies in the opening scene, his life story then told by various people in flashback. Welles’ stock company, including Joseph Cotton, Everett Sloane, Ray Collins Ruth Warrick and Agnes Moorehead is in top form as is newcomer Dorothy Comingore whose character is patterned after Hearst’s mistress, screen legend Marion Davies.

A legendary Broadway smash hit starring Tallulah Bankhead, Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes was brought to the screen by producer Samuel Goldwyn and director William Wyler with no expense spared. The only thing missing was Bankhead, but she isn’t missed because Bette Davis plays the willful cold faded beauty to perfection, with marvelous support from Herbert Marshall as her weak husband, Patricia Collinge as her sad, alcoholic sister-in-law and Teresa Wright as her slow to open her eyes daughter. Davis, Collinge and Wright were all nominated for their unforgettable performances.

Not as well known today as its 1978 remake, Heaven Can Wait, Alexander Hall’s 1941 version called Here Comes Mr. Jordan is actually the better film thanks to a sparkling cast headed by Oscar nominated Robert Montgomery as the prizefighter who dies before his time and is brought back in the body of a factory owner. James Gleason was also nominated for his wonderful performance as Montgomery’s slow witted trainer. Claude Rains in the title role as the representative from Heaven, Evelyn Keyes and Rita Johnson co-star.

An interesting early look at Mexico-U.S. border problems, Mitchell Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn scripted by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett paints an interesting picture of a European émigré, played by Charles Boyer, who marries plain Olivia de Havilland (her first leading role nomination) in order to gain entry into the U.S. Paulette Goddard co-stars.

Greer Garson won her second Oscar nomination for what is still one of her best remembered and best loved films. Blossoms in the Dust is based on the true story of Edna Gladney who ran a home for foundlings and successfully fought the Texas legislature to have the stigma of illegitimacy removed from birth certificates. Walter Pidgeon, Marsha Hunt and Felix Bressart co-star. This was the first of eight films in which Garson and Pidgeon were successfully co-starred.

John Huston made his directorial debut with The Maltese Falcon, the third and most successful film version of Dashiell’s Hammett’s classic mystery. Whereas the emphasis was on the mystery in the first two version, the emphasis here was on character development and what characters they were as played by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, Mary Astor as Bridget O’Shaunnessey, Sydney Greenstreet as the Fat Man, Kasper Gutman, Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, Elisha Cook, Jr. as Wilmer the gunsel and Lee Patrick as Effie the secretary. Walter Huston has a cameo.

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s least regarded films thanks to a tacked on happy ending, Suspicion nevertheless boasts nail-biting suspense and great performances from Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine and Nigel Bruce. Fontaine won an Oscar for a performance highly reminiscent of the one she gave in the prior year’s Rebecca.

Fredric March has one of his best roles as the Methodist minister in Irving Rapper’s One Foot in Heaven as did Martha Scott as his wife. The supporting cast featured some of Hollywood’s best actors including Frankie Thomas, Gene Lockhart, Beulah Bondi, Harry Davenport and Laura Hope Crews in her last credited role.

Other films of note that were outside of Oscar’s Best Picture sights this year include the aforementioned Ball of Fire; Meet John Doe and The Lady Eve as well as William Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy better known as The Devil and Daniel Webster with Oscar nominated Walter Huston as the Devil and Edward Arnold as Webster; George Stevens’ Penny Serenade with Cary Grant in his first Oscar nominated role (though he is better in Suspicion and non-nominated Irene Dunne is better here); Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra which made Bogie a star at long last when George Raft turned down the starring role; Gabriel Pascal’s film of George Bernard Shaw’s sly Major Barbara with Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, Sybil Thorndike and Deborah Kerr; Alexander Korda’s majestic That Hamilton Woman with Vivien Leigh as Lady Hamilton, Laurence Olivier as Lord Nelson and Gladys Cooper as Lady Nelson; George Waggner’s horror classic, The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney, Jr., Claude Rains and Maria Ouspenskaya and two from Disney, Bambi and Fantasia, which had the oddest release schedule of any Disney film – 1940 in New York, 1941 in Los Angeles and 1942 in the rest of the country. The Disney films are on moratorium but can still be found on DVD. The others are more readily available though beware of public domain copies of Meet John Doe and Penny Serenade.

New DVD releases include Shutter Islandon Blu-ray and DVD and the Blu-ray debut of Happy Together.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 8, 2010)

The DVD Report #158: June 1, 2010

Almost as impressive as the year that preceded it, all ten films nominated for Best Picture of 1940 are available on DVD.

Two of Hollywood’s most legendary directors, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, both had two films nominated for Best Picture and they themselves were both nominated for Best Director. Hitchcock’s Rebecca beat Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath in the Best Picture race but Ford beat Hitchcock in the Best Director race.

Based on a bestselling novel by Daphne du Maurier, and produced by Gone with the Wind’s David O.Selznick, Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film faithfully followed du Maurier’s narrative while incorporating both the visual splendor associated with Selznick and the nail-biting suspense associated with Hitchcock. Joan Fontaine had her first major role as the Second Mrs. de Winter through whose eyes the story is told. Laurence Olivier was her mysterious husband, Maxim de Winter, Judith Anderson the malevolent housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. They were all brilliant and all nominated for Oscars. Outstanding support was provided by George Sanders, Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce, Reginald Denny, C. Aubrey Smith, Florence Bates and Leo G. Carroll. Despite its 11 nominations, the film won only two Oscars, for Best Picture and Best Cinematography.

Ford’s film had an even stronger pedigree. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath not only won the Pulitzer Prize, it was instantly and universally acclaimed as “the great American novel”. Ford’s film was, to many, even better. Henry Fonda had the role of his career as Tom Joad, the itinerant everyman and Jane Darwell was his equal as earth mother Ma Joad. Darwell won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, but Fonda had to make do with a nomination, his first and only one until his eventual win for On Golden Pond forty-one years later when he was on his deathbed. Alas, Ford and Darwell’s Oscars were the only ones the film won out of its seven nominations.

Hitchcock’s second nominated film was Foreign Correspondent, a more typical Hitchcock entry with Joel McCrea as the lone wolf operating against a hornet’s nest of spies. Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall and Edmund Gwenn also star, with Albert Basserman securing one the film’s six nominations as Best Supporting Actor.

Ford’s second nominated film was The Long Voyage Home, a somber tale of men at sea from several short Eugene O’Neill plays with John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Barry Fitzgerald, John Qualen and Mildred Natwick among the players, the latter making her screen debut as a prostitute. The film was also nominated for six Oscars. Ford won the New York Film Critics Award jointly for this and The Grapes of Wrath while Grapes took sole honors for Best Picture.

Lesser known Sam Wood also had two films nominated for Best Picture. Wood had been a nominee the previous year for Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which had also been nominated for Best Picture, and would see two films nominated in the same year again two years hence with The Pride of the Yankees and Kings Row, securing a Best Director nod for the latter. This year he was nominated for his direction of Kitty Foyle, a woman’s picture that time has not been kind to, but was popular enough at the time to win Ginger Rogers a Best Actress Oscar as a working girl torn between a dedicated doctor and a rich businessman. Guess which one she choses?

Wood’s other nominated film was the still enduring Our Town. The film version of Thornton Wilder’s expands the play’s minimalist setting to provide fuller flesh and blood characters as played by Martha Scott, an Oscar nominee for Best Actress, William Holden, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi and Guy Kibbee. Frank Craven recreated his legendary stage role of the narrator. The film is in the public domain so DVD versions vary in quality.

Kitty Foyle received a total of five nominations and Our Town six.

Another film receiving six nominations was George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Hepburn, whose films of the 1930s were mostly box office disappointments returned to the screen in triumph in a role tailor made for her unusual personality by playwright Philip Barry. They loved her in the stage version and they loved her again on film. Grant, Stewart, Ruth Hussey, Mary Nash, Roland Young, John Halliday and Virginia Weidler were pretty wonderful too, with Stewart and Hussey, along with Hepburn all winning acting nominations. Stewart won in part for having lost the previous year for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and in part for the sum total of his 1940 releases which also included Destry Rides Again; The Shop Around the Corner and The Mortal Storm. Cukor was nominated for his direction.

William Wyler who directed Bette Davis to an Oscar in Jezebel directed her to another nomination in The Letter, for which he received his third nomination as well. Previously made in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels, who was also nominated for her performance, the source material is a play by W. Somerset Maugham who wrote it for Gladys Cooper who would play Davis’ mother in Now, Voyager for which both she and Davis would receive Oscar nominations in two years. This highly atmospheric version was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, with one going to James Stephenson as Davis’ attorney who defends her against a murder charge. Hebert Marshall and Gale Sondergaard co-star.

A dull by comparison Davis vehicle, All This, and Heaven Too was the ninth nominated film. It received a total of three nominations including one for Barbara O’Neil as the shrill wife of Charles Boyer. It’s O’Neil’s death that sets the tragic melodrama in motion.

Last, but certainly not least, Charlie Chaplin finally made a talkie! His The Great Dictator was a spoof of Hitler and Mussolini played by Chaplin and Jack Oakie, both of whom were nominated for their performances. The DVD has been discontinued but can be still be found at exorbitant prices.

Missing from Oscar’s short list were a number of classic films that have stood the test of time far better than a Kitty Foyle or an All This, and Heaven Too. They include the three other major James Stewart films, George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again with a magnificent performance by Marlene Dietrich, who like Hepburn, was regaining her prominence in Hollywood; Ernst Lubitch’s The Shop Around the Corner with a luminous Margaret Sullavan and Stewart as fellow shop clerks who detest each other during the day but are unknowingly secret pen pal lovers at night and Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm, one of the first Hollywood films to take on the Nazis, again with Sullavan and Stewart and their Shop co-star Frank Morgan herein giving one of the great performances of all time as Sullavan’s father, a beloved professor who runs afoul of the Nazis.

Then there were Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, his hilarious gender send-up of The Front Page with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant; Mervyn LeRoy’s updated version of Waterloo Bridge with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor; Robert Z. Leonard’s film of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier, Mary Boland and Edna May Oliver; Disney’s second full length animated feature, Pinocchio; Ludwig Berger, Michael Powll and Tim Whelan’s thrilling The Thief of Bagdad with Conrad Veidt and Sabu; Rouben Mamoulian’s equally thrilling The Mark of Zorro with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Basil Rathbone; Michael Curtiz’s grand swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk with Tyrone Power and Flora Robson; William Wyler’s The Westerner with Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan in his third Oscar winning performance, this time as legendary Judge Roy Bean; Garson Kanin’s hilarious My Favorite Wife with Irene Dunne, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott and Mitchell Lesien’s lovely Remember the Night with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi and Elizabeth Patterson All are available on DVD but beware public domain copies of His Girl Friday. The official Columbia (Sony) version is the only one to watch.

New DVD releases include the 2010 versions of Alice in Wonderland and Wolfman on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 1, 2010)