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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.

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