The Academy in its fourth year of awards, honoring films released in Los Angeles between August 1, 1930 and July 31, 1931, completely snubbed the two films most of us consider the two best films of the year – City Lights and The Blue Angel, and almost completely ignored the two we consider the next best – Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. How did this happen?

Clearly the Academy was sending messages. The message to Charlie Chaplin, the writer, producer, director, composer and star of City Lights was “no more silent films”. Never mind that the film was artistically the highlight of his career. Never mind that the story of the little tramp who pays for the operation to make the blind girl see only to be rebuffed in the end, is one of the most poignant love stories in cinema history. It was a silent film. Shame on him!
City Lights was released on DVD but has been discontinued by its distributor. However, you can still find copies at Amazon and other outlets, albeit at exorbitant collectors’ prices.

The message they were sending The Blue Angel was don’t give us a hand-me-down. The version of Josef von Sternberg’s masterpiece released in the U.S. was a watered down English language version of the great German film. Not only that, it wasn’t released in the U.S. until after Marlene Dietrich’s second von Sternberg film, Morocco,which had established her persona with American audiences. Moroccowas nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Actress and Best Director.

Both The Blue Angel and Moroccoare available on DVD.

The message to Warner Bros., the studio that made both Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar and William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy,was tone down the violence. The public ate up the gangster films that established the careers of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, respectively, but nominated them only for their writing – The Public Enemy for Original Story, Little Caesar for Adapted Screenplay.

Both Little Caesar and The Public Enemy are available on DVD.

Also of note were two films directed by Howard Hawks, the aviation drama, The Dawn Patrol with Richard Barthelmess and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., which won the award for Original Story and the prison drama, The Criminal Code with Walter Huston and Phillips Holmes, which was nominated for Adapted Screenplay.

Neither has yet been released on commercial DVD, though The Dawn Patrol is owned by Warner Bros. and will likely be a future Archive release. Rights to The Criminal Code are owned by Columbia.

Instead of these fondly remembered films, the Academy nominated the adult themed western, Cimarron; the well received stage to screen transfer, The Front Page; the family movie, Skippy; the adventure film, Trader Horn and that old warhorse of a soap opera, East Lynne.

The winner, Wesley Ruggles’ Cimarron was ostensibly a western, but the story of Oklahoma settlers over a forty year period (1889-1929) veered more into the area of soap opera as it centered on the marital problems of stars Richard Dix and Irene Dunne, the latter in the first of many roles in which her character ages from a young woman to an old lady.
Cimarron, which won three of the seven Oscars it was nominated for,is available on DVD from Warner Home Video.

A fast paced, expertly done film version of the classic newspaper play, The Front Page, directed by Lewis Milestone, was brought to the screen with Pat O’Brien in his star making role as the ace reporter and Adolphe Menjou, Oscar nominated as Best Actor as his editor.
The Front Page, which failed to win any of the three Oscars it was nominated for, is in the public domain and is available from several DVD distributors. It has been remade three times, most notably by Howard Hawks as the even better His Girl Friday, a 1940 film, in which the character of the ace reporter (Rosalind Russell) was given a female slant.
His Girl Friday is also a public domain title, but its original studio, Columbia has an official release version that is a thousand times better than any of the public domain travesties of this great film out there.

None of the other three Best Picture nominees are available on commercial DVD. Rights to Trader Horn, whose sole nomination was for Best Picture, are owned by Warner Bros., who one presumes will eventually release it as part of its Archive program. The Harry Carey starrer, directed by W.S. Van Dyke, is notable as the first narrative film to be filmed on location in Africa.

An endearing film about boys and their dogs, Norman Taurog’s Skippy was nominated for four Oscars, winning Taurog one as Best Director. Jackie Cooper, who was 8 when he made the film, remains the youngest performer nominated for an Oscar in a leading role. Both he and Robert Coogan as his friend Sooky are terrific. Universal owns the rights. Perhaps one day they will see their way clear to making it available on DVD.

Though not technically a lost film, Frank Lloyd’s East Lynne,a weepie about a long suffering adulteress,has never been shown on television or released to home video. The existing print, controlled by UCLA, is missing its final reel. Ann Harding and Clive Brook are the stars of the film which did not receive any other nominations.

With Chaplin, Robinson and Cagney all snubbed, the Best Actor race was fairly tepid. Only 8 year old Cooper in Skippy had a substantial role among the nominees. Fredric March as a thinly disguised John Barrymore had to take a back seat to three women, Ina Claire, Mary Brian and Henrietta Crosman in The Royal Family of Broadway. Richard Dix, nominated for Cimarron, was missing from the film for much of its screen time. Adolphe Menjou was the second lead in The Front Page and Lionel Barrymore was one of three actors supporting Norma Shearer in A Free Soul . The others were Clark Gable and Leslie Howard. Barrymore, the most veteran of the nominees, was the winner.
A Free Soul is available from Warner Home Video as part of its Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 2. The Royal Family of Broadway is another Paramount film controlled by Universal that is not available on DVD.

The Best Actress race was a bit livelier with Marlene Dietrich nominated for Morocco; Irene Dunne nominated for Cimarron; Ann Harding nominated for Holiday (in the role played by Katharine Hepburn in the better known 1938 version); Norma Shearer nominated for A Free Soul and veteran Marie Dressler, then the nation’s number one box office star, nominated for Min and Bill.

It’s unclear who has the rights to Holiday, which has never been released on commercial DVD. It was produced by Pathe, which was acquired by RKO, but the rights may have been sold to Columbia when they remade the film in 1938. If it’s RKO, we may eventually see it released as part of the Warner Archive. If it’s Columbia, chances are it will remain unreleased.

Dressler, whose star had been in the ascendant for the last two years, was at her career peak in her early 60s. Min and Bill, a comedy-drama in which she teamed with Wallace Beery for the first time, was a huge box office success. Her role as the owner of a dockside hotel wasn’t much different from the character she played in the previous year’s Anna Christie or the one she’d play in Tugboat Annie opposite Beery in 1933, but it was everything Depression audiences wanted.
Min and Bill and Min and Bill are Warner Archive releases. Anna Christie is a Warner Home Video release.

Among new DVD releases worth checking out are An Education and Sherlock Holmes.