The DVD Report #157: May 25, 2010

Often cited as the greatest year in movie history, all ten films nominated for 1939’s Best Picture Oscar have been released on DVD. Indeed, some of them have been released over and over. For example, perennial favorites Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were both given deluxe packaging in their Blu-ray debuts late last year. Criterion’s Blu-ray of Stagecoach releases this week.

Long regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, David O. Selznick’s production of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was officially directed by Victor Fleming, but with behind the scenes help from original director George Cukor as well. Even those who dismiss the film on critical grounds can’t deny the fact that the film is the most successful of all time in terms of ticket sales. More people have probably seen the Civil War tale than any film in history with the possible exception of The Wizard of Oz.

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara, Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, Olivia de Havilland as Melanie Hamilton, Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes, Thomas Mitchell as Gerald O’Hara, Hattie McDaniel as Mammy and Butterfly McQueen as Prissy lead a cast of colorful characters that are seared in our collective memory. Leigh and de Havilland both credited clandestine meetings with the fired Cukor as having sharpened their performances. The film won a then record ten Academy Awards including Best Picture, Actress (Leigh), Supporting Actress (McDaniel), Director (Fleming), a technical award for its camera equipment and an honorary one for William Cameron Menzies for his use of color.

No less of a legendary on-going success, The Wizard of Oz, also credited to Fleming, but with the help of several other directors including Mervyn Leroy and King Vidor, was a box office disappointment in its initial release. The film was hugely successful in its 1949 and 1955 reissues after which it became a TV staple starting in 1957. While it may be true that more people have seen Gone With the Wind than The Wizard of Oz, it’s a safe bet that more people have seen The Wizard of Oz more times than they have seen Gone With the Wind. Who can resist returning again and again to Dorothy’s trip “over the rainbow”?

Judy Garland as Dorothy, Frank Morgan as the Wizard, Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, Jack Haley as the Tin Man, Billie Burke as the good witch Glinda and Margaret Hamilton as Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch of both the East and the West are characters we will always cherish. The film won just two of the eight Oscars it was nominated for, both for its music. Technically, Judy Garland’s Special Juvenile Oscar was not given for a specific film but for her work throughout the year. She also starred in Babes in Arms (available on DVD as part of the Mickey Rooney & Judy Garland Collection).

John Ford won the New York Film Critics’ award as Best Director for Stagecoach but lost the Oscar to Victor Fleming for Gone With the Wind.

Ford’s Stagecoach is often called a western for people who don’t like westerns and a John Wayne movie for people who don’t like John Wayne. It was very much a landmark of the genre, the first so-called “adult” western in which the characters, all of whom are societal outcasts, have real life problems that still resonate today.

Wayne is the Ringo Kid, falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit, Claire Trevor is Dallas, a hardboiled prostitute, and Thomas Mitchell, in his Oscar winning role, is Doc Boone, a drunk. Donald Meek, John Carradine, George Bancroft, Andy Devine and Louise Platt have problems of their own.

Mitchell, though he won his Oscar for Stagecoach, might have easily won for any of his other four films that year: Gone With the Wind; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Only Angels Have Wings or The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Frank Capra was the quintessential American director and no film was more quintessentially American than Capra’s Best Picture nominee Mr. Smith Goes to Washington which the demagogues in the U.S. Senates tried to suppress. James Stewart won the New York Film Critics Award for his astounding performance as the naïve young Senator who learns fast on his feet on the job. He won the Oscar the following year for The Philadelphia Story although it is universally believed he really won for losing for his magnificent work in this film.

Jean Arthur, Oscar nominated Claude Rains, Edward Arnold, Thomas Mitchell and Oscar nominated Harry Carey, Sr. are all unforgettable.

The man who did win the Best Actor Oscar this year was Robert Donat for another towering performance as the shy schoolmaster who rises to the top of his profession in spite of his shortcomings in Sam Wood’s Best Picture nominee Goodbye, Mr. Chips. A luminous Greer Garson won the first of her seven Best Actress nominations as Mrs. Chipping (“Chips” was a nickname) in her Hollywood film debut despite the brevity of her role. The ending of the film after all these years still has the power to make a stone weep: “I thought I heard you saying it was a pity... pity I never had any children. But you're wrong. I have. Thousands of them. Thousands of them... and all boys.”

The New York film Critics Award for Best Picture went to William Wyler’s film of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in a compromise between the factions supporting Gone With the Wind and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In addition to its Best Picture and Director nominations, it was nominated for seven other awards including Best Actor Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Best Supporting Actress Geraldine Fitzgerald as Isabella. It won for Gregg Toland’s Cinematography.

Geraldine Fitzgerald was in another Best Picture nominee, Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory featuring Bette Davis in her third Oscar nominated performance as a dying socialite. Max Steiner was nominated for his somber score but both this and his more famous score for Gone With the Wind lost to Herbert Stothart’s score for The Wizard of Oz.

A more popular tearjerker, albeit one with comedic undertones, was Leo McCarey’s Best Picture nominee Love Affair with Oscar nominated Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer and Oscar nominee Maria Ouspenskaya in the roles later played by Deborah Kerr, Cary Grant and Cathleen Nesbitt in McCarey’s even more popular 1957 remake, An Affair to Remember. Beware all DVDs of Love Affair which is in the public domain. They’re all pretty bad.

The only out-and-out comedy among 1939’s Best Picture nominees was Ernst Lubitcsch’s Ninotchka advertised with the slogan “Garbo laughs”. It worked. Not only were audiences drawn to theatres to see the usually morose Greta Garbo laugh, her fellow actors honored her with her sixth Best Actress nomination.

The tenth slot went to Lewis Milestone’s film of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men Burgess Meredith, Betty Field, Charles Bickford and Lon Chaney, Jr. as slow-witted Lennie.

Among the legendary films that didn’t make Oscar’s short list were George Cukor’s The Women with Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Mary Boland and more; William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, Thomas Mitchell, Edmond O’Brien and Cedric Hardwicke; Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings with Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Thomas Mitchell, Richard Barthelmess and Rita Hayworth; William A. Wellman’s Beau Geste with Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston, Susan Hayward and Brian Donlevy; George Stevens’ Gunga Din with Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Sam Jaffe; John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln with Henry Fonda and Alice Brady and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes with Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood and Dame May Whitty, all of which are available on DVD.

Worth checking out in addition to this week’s Blu-ray debut of Stagecoach is the 5oth Anniversary Edition of Spartacus on Blu-ray.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 25, 2010)

The DVD Report #156: May 18, 2010

Seven of 1938’s Oscar nominated films have been released on commercial DVD in the U.S. Two of the remaining three are available from the Warner Archive and since the tenth film is an MGM film, expect that to eventually be released by the Archive as well.

A comedy classic that was right up the alley of depression era audiences, Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You won Capra his second Best Picture award and his third Best Director Oscar.

Based on the now perennial Kaufman-Hart play, Capra’s film version starred Jean Arthur, James Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, Edward Arnold and Oscar nominee Spring Byington as Arthur’s mother and Barrymore’s daughter just a year after she played his wife in the not on DVD A Family Affair.

As popular as You Can’t Take It With You still is, time has been kinder still to two other 1938 screwball comedies, Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby and George Cukor’s Holiday, both starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, both considered flops in their day, neither of which was nominated. All three are essential viewing and available on DVD.

Films about Robin Hood have been popular throughout film history, none more so than Warner Bros.’ The Adventures of Robin Hood co-directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley with a cast that seemed born to play their roles. Among them were Errol Flynn as Robin; Olivia de Havilland as Maid Marian; Basil Rathbone as Sir Guy; Claude Rains as Prince John; Patric Knowles as Will Scarlett; Eugene Pallette as Friar Tuck and Alan Hale as Little John. A rare and glorious technicolor treat in its day, the film is still gorgeous to look at today. It won richly deserved Oscars for its Art Direction, Editing and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s magnificent score.

The first foreign language film nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, Jean Renoir’s brilliant Grand Illusion, a still revered anti-war film about World War I, starred Jean Gabin (the Frnech Spencer Tracy) and Pierre Fresnay as captured French officers and Erich von Stroheim as the German prison camp commandant who befriends Fresnay with whom he identifies as a fellow member of Europe’s declining aristocracy. Rich in imagery, and grandly acted, the stiff, monocled von Stroheim is a presence difficult to forget.

Legend has it that Bette Davis’ Oscar winning role of the willful Southern belle in William Wyler’s Jezebel was a consolation prize for her losing the role of Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. The legend is wrong, Warner Bros.’ records show the film was planned for her in 1935, a year before Gone With the Wind was even published.

Davis is in her element, particularly in the scene in which she ruefully wears a red dress to a white dress ball. So vivid is the image of that dress that audiences have misremembered it for decades. Legions of fans recall the film as having been in color when it was actually in black and white and the gown red only in their imaginations.

Henry Fonda, George Brent and Richard Cromwell were the men Davis twirled around her little finger. Fay Bainter won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar as her disapproving aunt.

Spencer Tracy won his second consecutive Oscar for playing the real life Father Flanagan who founded Boys Townin the film directed by Norman Taurog. Mickey Rooney, Gene Reynods, Bobs Watson, Martin Spellman, Frankie Thomas and Sidney Miller were among the boys.The Oscar engravers were a bit confused. They imprinted his Oscar with the name of “Dick” Tracy, the popular newspaper comics detective.

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion became the first British comedy nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Best Actor nominee Leslie Howard made a commanding Henry Higgins and Best Actress nominee Wendy Hiller made a delightful Eliza Dolittle in the witty classic which won Shaw a Screenplay Oscar. A best picture win, however, would have to wait for its musical remake, My Fair Lady twenty-six years later.

Reuniting Henry King, the director, and Tyrone Power, Don Ameche and Alice Faye, the stars of In Old Chicago, Fox once again hit pay dirt with Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band. No Mrs. O’Leary’s cow this time around, but the film did feature the one-of-a-kind voice of Ethel Merman belting out by then Berlin standards “Say It With Music”; “A Prety Girl Is Like a Melody”; “Blue Skies” and “Heat Wave”.

There you have the seven Best Picture nominees available on commercial DVD in the U.S.

Available through the Warner Archive are King Vidor’s The Citadel, which won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Picture, and Michael Curtiz’s popular Four Daughters.

The film version of A.J. Cronin’s best-seller, The Citadel provided Robert Donat with his best screen role to date as the crusading doctor who gets caught up in making money catering to the rich until friend Ralph Richardson is accidentally killed and wife Rosalind Russell convinces him to drop the rich clientele and go back to treating the poor and disenfranchised. In the book it was the wife who died and the friend who guided him back to his true vocation, but either way it works. Donat and Richardson forge indelible characterizations.

Michael Curtiz became the first person to be nominated as Best Director for two films in the same year for Four Daughters and Angels With Dirty Faces, a phenomenon that didn’t occur again until 2000 when Seven Soderbergh was nominated for both Erin Brockovich and Traffic, winning for the latter.

Based on Fannie Hurst’s best-selling novel, Priscilla, Lola and Rosemary Lane and Gail Page are the Four Daughters raised by widowed father Claude Rains and grandmother May Robson. Oscar nominee John Garfield is the hot head who is not entirely tamed by his marriage to the lovely Priscilla. The film was remade in 1954 at Young at Heart with Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Gig Young, Dorothy Malone and Ethel Barrymore.

Although it failed to earn a Best Picture nomination, Angels With Dirty Faces starring James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Ann Sheridan and the Dead End Kids remains an even more popular film today. Cagney’s climactic scene is one of the hallmarks of 1930s cinema and quite possibly the definitive moment of his entire career. It’s long been a DVD staple.

The tenth nominee and the one not yet available on DVD is Victor Fleming’s Test Pilot, a popular adventure film starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Myrna Loy.

1938 films of note not nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, but available on DVD, include Edmund Goulding’s The Dawn Patrol with Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone and David Niven in a stirring remake of Howard Hawks’ 1930 film of the same name and Frank Borzage’s Three Comrades about life in post-World War I Germany with a magnificent Oscar nominated performance by Margaret Sullavan as a dying girl. It’s available from the Warner Archive.

New DVDs worth checking out include Invictus and The Messenger.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 18, 2010)

The DVD Report #155: May 11, 2010

Nine of the ten films nominated for Best Picture of 1937 have been released on DVD in the U.S.

The winner, The Life of Emile Zola, directed by William Dieterle, is one of the better biopics Hollywood used to produce by the dozens, featuring Paul Muni in perhaps his finest performance as Zola.

Zola was one of France’s great writers, who was also a lawyer. About to become institutionalized as a member of France’s literary academy, the great man risked his reputation to defend Capt. Dreyfuss, the military officer falsely accused of treason. While the film tiptoes around the anti-Semitism that unjustly sent Dreyfuss to Devil’s Island, it is nevertheless made the highlight of the film at a time when anti-Semitism was again on the rise in Europe.

Nominated for ten Academy Awards, the film won three including Best Supporting Actor Joseph Schildkraut as Dreyfuss.

The other literary triumph of the year was Sidney Franklin’s film of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, also starring Muni, the previous year’s Best Actor winner, opposite Luise Rainer, that year’s Best Actress winner, who would become the first consecutive acting winner with her portrayal of the peasant Chinese wife, O-Lan. Rainer’s dialogue is kept to a minimum, her heavy Austrian accent not at all intruding on the character, her performance relying mostly on her soulful looks. Muni and the other non-Chinese actors do not fare as well but several real-life Chinese including the great Keye Luke are on hand to lend the portrayals a bit of realism.

The film’s spectacular special effects, which include a climactic locust swarming, is still admired today. The film also won an Oscar for Cinematography.

The stirring film version of Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, directed by Victor Fleming,provided Spencer Tracy with his first Best Actor Oscar. Though billed below 12 year-old Freddie Bartholomew, Tracy was a big enough star to make his supporting character of the fisherman who befriends the spoiled brat played by Bartholomew something memorable. Personally I have a problem with his Hollywood Portugese accent, but it’s nevertheless a good performance as are those of Bartholomew, Lionel Barrymore and Mickey Rooney. Great special effects, too.

The special effects in The Good Earth and Captains Courageous were nothing compared to those in Henry King’s In Old Chicago, a fictionalized story leading to the Chicago fire of 1871 that destroyed much of the city. It starred Tyrone Power, Don Ameche, Alice Faye and Alice Brady, who won an Oscar playing Mrs. O’Leary, whose cow started the fire.

Shangri-La, the utopia of Frank Capra’s film of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon was a magnificent concoction. The hidden world is stumbled upon by a group of plane crash survivors led by Ronald Colman in one of his greatest roles. Jane Wyatt, John Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Edward Everett Horton, Margo and Isabel Jewell are also quite good, but best are H.B. Warner, Oscar nominated as Shangri-La’s mountain guide and Sam Jaffe as the ancient High Lama.

The Dead End kids, later the Bowery Boys, made their debut in William Wyler’s film of Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End in support of Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, Humphrey Bogart and Oscar nominated Claire Trevor. Billy Halop, the most charismatic of the kids, played Ms. Sidney’s brother. Other Dead End kids included Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Leo Gorcey, Gabriel Dell and Bernard Punsly. Marjorie Main had a memorable cameo as Bogie’s “Ma”.

Perhaps the definitive screwball comedy, Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth was actually the third of four film versions of an old play that appeared long before the introduction of the screwball comedy in the mid-1930s. Earlier versions are presumed lost and the 1953 remake is not very good, but there is something fortuitous about the pairing of Cary Grant and Oscar nominees Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy under McCarey’s direction that makes the entire film seem fresh and spontaneous. The rest of the cast is quite good, too, especially Cecil Cunningham as Dunne’s wisecracking aunt.

McCarey won the Best Director Oscar for it, although he famously accepted his award by saying “you gave it to me for the wrong picture”. I’ll have more to say about that later.

Another well remembered comedy, albeit one with dramatic undertones, is Gregory La Cava’s film of Kaufman and Ferber’s Stage Door. It starred RKO’s most prestigious contract player, Katharine Hepburn, and the studio’s biggest box office draw, Ginger Rogers, as rival actresses in a theatrical rooming house. They were supported by a bevy of talent including Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, Adolphe Menjou, Ann Miller, Gail Patrick and Constance Collier with newcomer Andrea Leeds receiving the film’s only acting nomination.

Show business was also at the heart of William A. Wellman’s A Star Is Born, with Janet Gaynor as the rising star and Fredric March as the declining one she’s married to. Adolphe Menjou, May Robson, Lionel Stander and Andy Devine had the principal supporting roles, but it’s the crackling intensity of the star performances, both of which were nominated for Oscars, that you remember.

A Star Is Born is a public domain title so beware the quality of the DVD you find. The discontinued Image version is by far the best.

The tenth nominee, Henry Koster’s 100 Men and a Girl, the only film never made available on DVD within the U.S., was a charming Deanna Durbin musical but had no business being on a list with the other nine over such unforgettable films as Make Way for Tomorrow; The Hurricane; The Prisoner of Zenda; Camille; Stella Dallas; History Is Made at Night; Night Must Fall and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, all of which, except for History Is Made at Night and Night Must Fall, have been commercially released on DVD in the U.S. History Is Made at Night is available in a reasonably priced import edition that will play on U.S. equipment.

A lovely film about old age, Make Way for Tomorrow is the film Leo McCarey was referring to when he scolded the Academy for giving him the Oscar for the wrong film. Not as successful as The Awful Truth at the box-office, it was nevertheless critically acclaimed in its day and remains a favorite of just about everyone who has been lucky enough to see it. Beulah Bondi, Victor Moore, Thomas Mitchell and Fay Bainter all give Oscar worthy performances as respectively the elderly in-the-way couple and their eldest son and daughter-in-law.

Mitchell was instead nominated for his portrayal of an alcoholic doctor in John Ford’s The Hurricane – Oscar voters have always loved alcoholics. Good as he is, he is overshadowed by Dorothy Lamour and Jon Hall as the photogenic leads, the acting of the incomparable Mary Astor, Raymond Massey and C. Aubrey Smith, and the spectacular special effects, the best in a year of incredible effects.

The Hurricane was a Samuel Goldwyn production and as such has long been out of circulation on DVD. Amazon partners are offering new copies for $150.00!

Filmed many times, John Cromwell’s film of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda remains the definitive version of the film about a mythical king and his double. Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Mary Astor, Raymond Massey, C. Aubrey Smith and a young David Niven were all at the top of their game.

The lushest tearjerker of all time, George Cukor’s version of Alexandre Dumas fils’ oft-filmed The Lady of the Camelias is, of course, the definitive version thanks to the impeccable performance of Greta Garbo who won her third Oscar nomination opposite Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore and Henry Daniell.

The ultimate tearjerker, though, is Stella Dallas, a long-running radio soap previously filmed as a silent, this time around directed by King Vidor with Oscar nominated performances by Barbara Stanwyck as the uncouth but loving mother and Anne Shirley as her good as gold daughter.

Stella Dallas is also a Samuel Goldwyn production that was discontinued on DVD but unlike The Hurricane it can still be found at reasonable prices.

Called by Andrew Sarris the most romantic film in history, Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night is one of the director’s best, featuring pulsating chemistry between stars Jean Arthur and Charles Boyer. This is another film with spectacular special effects, its climax a Titanic-like collision of a ship and an iceberg.

A bit slow for modern audiences, Richard Thorpe’s film of Emlyn Williams’ Night Must Fall nevertheless remains intriguing for the sheer vibrancy of the acting of Oscar nominees Robert Montgomery as an “is he or isn’t he” serial killer and Dame May Whitty as the hypochondriac old lady who may be his next victim. Rosalind Russell is the woman in the middle.

The first feature length cartoon, Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs got no respect in its year of eligibility. It had to wait another year to receive its eight special Oscars – a full size one and seven miniature ones after it had proven to be a sustainable hit at the box-office.

New DVDs worth checking out include the Blu-ray debuts of M and The Karate Kid.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 11, 2010)

The DVD Report #154: May 4, 2010

The Oscars stabilized in 1936 with a strict ten picture roster nominated for Best Picture, a practice that would last through 1943 and return with the 2009 awards. The acting and directing categories were stabilized as well at five nominees each, a practice that has remained in force. Supporting acting awards were handed out for the first time.

MGM’s behemoth musical biopic, The Great Ziegfeld, directed by Robert Z. Leonard, took the Best Picture award but two other musicals, James Whale’s production of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat and George Stevens’ Swing Time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers singing and dancing to the music of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields have better stood the test of time.

Clocking in at just under three hours, The Great Ziegfeld was the longest film thus far of the talkie era. William Powell starred as the great showman and Luise Rainer and Myrna Loy were his two wives, Anna Held and Billie Burke. Rainer won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, largely on the basis of a five minute telephone scene in which she calls Ziegfeld to congratulate him on his marriage to Burke.

Needing no introduction, Show Boat is such a part of the culture that it’s unlikely that anyone drawing a breath in the last eighty three years isn’t familiar with its plot or its score. Ironically it was Ziegfeld who financed its first Broadway production in 1927.

Irene Dunne, Allan Jones, Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel and Charles Winninger, all of whom had appeared in various stage versions, headed the fabled second of its three film versions.

His music having been featured in all three of the year’s top musicals, Jerome Kern himself won an Oscar for the instant classic “The Way You Look Tonight” from Swing Time.

A second musical, Henry Koster’s Three Smart Girls Deanna Durbin’s first film, was also nominated for Best Picture. A lightweight charmer, it was actually nominated more for saving Universal from bankruptcy than for any great content, though Durbin, Charles Winninger and the rest of the cast are perfectly delightful.

The Great Ziegfeld, Swing Time and Three Smart Girls are available on DVD but Show Boat is only available as import in the U.S. Warner Bros. has been promising a deluxe package of all three versions for the last ten years but it never seems to materialize. Only the 1951 version has ever been released on DVD in the U.S.

The year’s most popular film, and the one that likely came closest to The Great Ziegfeld in winning was Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The comedy classic, starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, broke box office records wherever it played, won both the New York Film Critics and National Board of Review awards and won Capra his second Oscar for Best Director.
The year’s second most popular comedy was Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, which despite nominations for writing, directing and acting (the first to be nominated in all four acting categories), failed to win a Best Picture nod. The quintessential depression era comedy starred
William Powell as the homeless man picked up in a salvage hunt by socialite Carole Lombard who teaches her family (Alice Brady, Eugene Pallette, Gail Patrick) a thing or two as their new butler. Mischa Auer co-starred.

The Academy did nominate another much loved screwball comedy, however – Jack Conway’s Libeled Lady about a libel suit brought by Myrna Loy against Spencer Tracy’s newspaper. William Powell and Jean Harlow co-starred.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Libeled Lady and My Man Godfrey are available on DVD but beware public domain copies of the latter. Only the Criterion Edition does justice to the film.

The Great Ziegfeld wasn’t the only biography in the running. Warner Bros. had The Story of Louis Pasteur, directed by William Dieterle, with Paul Muni in the first of his “great man” roles. Legend has it that MGM’ Louis B. Mayer and Warners’ Jack Warner entered into a deal in which Mayer agreed to entreat his employees to vote for Muni as Best Actor and Warner agreed to entreat his to vote for Ziegfeld for Best Picture. Both Ziegfeld and Muni won.

The Story of Louis Pasteur is currently only available as an import in the U.S.

The year’s most spectacular film was W.S. Van Dyke’s San Franciscowith Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jeanette MacDonald singing her heart out in the ruins of the 1906 earthquake. With Special Effects that still impress today and charismatic performances by the three leads, the film was, and is, a classic of its type. Tracy and Van Dyke accounted for two of the film’s six nominations. Its only win was for Best Sound. Visual Effects was not a category back then.

Tracy’s best 1936 performance, however, was generally considered to be his portrayal of the intended lynch mob victim in Fury, Frtiz Lang’s first Hollywood film which sadly received only one nomination – for its story. Tracy’s performance in this film ran neck-in-neck with Walter Huston in Dodsworth for the New York Film Critics’ Best Actor award until a fifth ballot gave the award to Huston.

Huston’s performance in Dodsworth, generally considered his greatest ever, certainly went a long way toward earning the film its seven nominations including Best Picture and Director, William Wyler. The film, which dealt frankly with the dissolution of a marriage, was unique in its day for portraying the wife as the villain and the “other woman” as the sympathetic female. Ruth Chatterton and Mary Astor were both brilliant in those roles.

San Francisco, Fury and Dodsworth have all been released on DVD, although the latter two have been discontinued. They can, however, still be found at Amazon and other sellers.

Action films nominated for Best Picture ran the gamut from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities to Harvey Allen’s Anthony Adverse.

Ever since Franco Zeffirelli’s age appropriate 1968 version of Romeo & Juliet it’s been impossible to take George Cukor’s 1936 version with its middle-aged actors seriously, yet the film was much admired in its day. 34 year-old Norma Shearer, who was Oscar nominated for her performance, and 43 year-old Leslie Howard really do like they should be playing the parents of their teenage characters, but John Barrymore as Mercutio, Basil Rathbone who was Oscar nominated as Tybalt and Edna May Oliver as the Nurse are all fine. Legend has it that Edith Evans, initially brought to Hollywood to play the Nurse, was forced out of the film by Shearer because she felt Evans was stealing the movie from her. Some would say her replacement, Oliver, does the exact same thing.

The popular Anthony Adverse is of the type of film they don’t make anymore – a long, rich saga in which the hero (Fredric March) has adventures that take him all over the world while his wife (Olivia de Havilland) is lost to him until the final reels. The huge supporting cast includes Edmund Gwenn as March’s benefactor, Claude Rains as the villain who was married to his mother (Anita Louise) while she dallied with his father (Louis Hayward) and Gale Sondergaard as Gwenn’s duplicitous housekeeper who marries Rains.

Sondergaard won an Oscar for villainess role, the first awarded a Supporting Actress, but she doesn’t hold a candle to Blanche Yurka who was the one of screen’s all-time great malevolent villains as Madame De Farge in A Tale of Two Cities, a faithful, exciting film version of Dickens’ classic about the French Revolution. Ronald Colman had one of his best roles as Sydney Carton who makes the ultimate sacrifice for his beloved. Elizabeth Allen, Basil Rathbone and Edna May Oliver were mighty fine, too.

A Tale of Two Cities is available on DVD but Anthony Adverse is not. Romeo and Juliet was released, but has been discontinued though it can still be found.

Other 1936 films of note include Mark Sandrich’s Follow the Fleet with Astaire, Rogers and Irving Berlin’s music; William Wyler’s These Three with Merle Oberon, Merle Hopkins and Joel McCrea in the first film version of Lillian Hellman’s The Children's Hour; Charlie Chaplin’s uproarious Modern Times, his last silent film; John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island with Warner Baxter as the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth after his assassination of Abraham Lincoln; Alexander Korda’s Rembrandt with Charles Laughton as the great painter and Howard Hawks and William Wyler’s Come and Get It for which Walter Brennan won the first Supporting Actor award.

All but These Three were released on DVD but all except Follow the Fleet and The Prisoner of Shark Island have been discontinued but most can still be found.

New DVDs worth checking out include the Blu-ray releases of Doctor Zhivago and Saving Private Ryan.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 4, 2010)