Comedy is seldom rewarded by Oscar, but in 1934 not only did a comedy win Best Picture, but its two closest competitors were also comedies.

Frank Capra’s screwball classic, It Happened One Night was the first film to sweep the major Oscars for Best Picture, Actor (Clark Gable), Actress (Claudette Colbert), Director (Capra) and Adapted Screenplay (Robert Riskin), a record that was eventually tied by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs.

Its closest rivals in the Best Picture race were the comedy-mystery, The Thin Man, directed by W.S. Van Dyke, and the musical-comedy, The Gay Divorcee, directed by Mark Sandrich.

Gable and Colbert made a great team, but The Thin Man’s William Powell and Myrna Loy and The Gay Divorcee’sFred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made greater ones, at least in terms of screen immortality. Gable worked with Colbert only once more in 1940’s disappointing Boom Town,whereas Powell and Loy co-starred in twelve films together including five sequels to The Thin Man, and Astaire and Rogers made a total of ten together, all of them musicals.

There were twelve nominees for Best Picture this year, the most in Oscar history. Rounding out the list were Sidney Franklin’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street; Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra; Frank Borzage’s Flirtation Walk; Lloyd Bacon’s Here Comes the Navy; Alfred L. Werker’s The House of Rothschild; John M. Stahl’s Imitation of Life; Victor Schertzinger’s One Night of Love; Jack Conway’s Viva Villa! and Irving Cummings’ The White Parade.

Of the twelve nominated films, only five are available as regular DVD releases: It Happened One Night; The Thin Man; The Gay Divorcee; Imitation of Life and Cleopatra. Flirtation Walk is available from the Warner Archive. Presumably The Barretts of Wimpole Street; Viva Villa! and Here Comes the Navy, all of which are controlled by Warner Bros., will eventually be so released as well. One Night of Love is controlled by Columbia and The House of Rothschild and The White Parade by Fox.

Claudette Colbert had the distinction of starring in three of the nominated films, a record she holds to this day.She was the runaway heiress pursued by reporter Gable in It Happened One Night; the enterprising businesswoman in Imitation of Life and the Queen of the Nile in Cleopatra.

The quintessential screwball comedy, It Happened One Night,retains its charm, winning new fans with every generation. Imitation of Life is perhaps better known by its 1959 remake, but the original, though dated, is still essential viewing for the performances of Colbert, Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington in the first Hollywood film in which white and black actresses share the screen more or less as equals.

The DeMille version of Cleopatra, while superior to the overblown 1960s version, seems tame compared with latter day interpretations of the character, particularly in the TV series, Rome. It has, though, two scenes that will forever remain fascinating – Colbert’s bath is asses’ milk and her death by asp bite.

Myrna Loy’s long climb to movie stardom was secured with The Thin Man in which she trades barbs with suave, sophisticated William Powell with the best of them. The film’s release followed by three weeks that of Manhattan Melodrama, in which Powell and Loy were part of a triangle that included Clark Gable. That film, which won an Oscar for Best Original Story, is notorious as the film John Dillinger saw just before he was shot and killed by the FBI outside a Chicago theatre.

Manhattan Melodrama is available as part of the The Myrna Loy and William Powell Collection on DVD.

The Gay Divorcee was the second film in which Astaire and Rogers were teamed, the first in which they had star billing. The film is from a Broadway musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It is, however, the non-Porter song, “The Continental”, written for the film, which won the first Oscar for Best Song.

The collegiate musical, Flirtation Walk is one of Frank Borzage’s lesser films. It is also one of the lesser films in the canons of stars Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler and Pat O’Brien. Why the Warner Archive has seen fit to release it before either The Barretts of Wimpole Street or Viva Villa!
! is a mystery to me.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street, based on a famed stage play, is one of the great love stories of the 1930s. The first of two filmed versions, it starred Norma Shearer as Elizabeth Barrett, Fredric March as Robert Browning and Charles Laughton as Edward Moulton Barrett with a supporting cast headed by Maureen O’Sullivan and Una O’Connor that was sheer perfection. Released shortly after the imposition of the Movie Production Code, Laughton, whose incestuous minded father’s character was heavily censored, famously said of his role “they couldn’t censor the gleam in my eye.”

As notorious for an incident off screen as for anything on, Viva Villa!
! starred Wallace Beery in one of his most famous roles as Pancho Villa, with Leo Carrillo as his brother and Stuart Erwin as the reporter thorugh whose eyes the story is told. Erwin was a last minute replacement for the fired Lee Tracy who, during the film’s location shooting, urinated over the balcony of his hotel on a passing parade of military dignitaries.

The House of Rothschild was one of George Arliss’ best films, a highly entertaining film about a rather dry subject – banking. One Night of Love was a sumptuous musical fest about an aspiring opera singer played by the legendary Grace Moore. Here Comes the Navy is a serviceable service film with featuring James Cagney and Pat O’Brien in their first on-screen teaming. The White Parade is a forgotten film about nurses.

Films that Oscar might have nominated instead of Flirtation Walk, Here Comes the Navy or The White Parade include Rowland V. Lee’s The Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat in what is still the best of this oft-filmed rousing adventure; Mitchell Leisen’s Death Takes a Holiday with Fredric March in the best of several film versions of this old chestnut; Borzage’s Little Man, What Now? with Margaret Sullavan and Douglass Montgomery poignantly portraying young newlyweds; John Ford’s World War I classic, The Lost Patrol with Victor McLaglen and Boris Karloff; Ray Enright and Busby Berkeley’s delightful Dames with Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler and Joan Blondell; Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina with Greta Garbo in perhaps her greatest role; Josef von Sternberg’s divinely mad The Scarlet Empress with Marlene Dietrich, Sam Jaffe and Louise Dresser and Cedric Gibbons’ erotically charged Tarzan and His Mate with Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O’Sullivan.

All except Little Man, What Now?, which is controlled by Universal,are available on commercial DVD, though The Count of Monte Cristo seems to have been discontinued. Death Takes a Holiday is an Amazon,com exclusive.

New DVDs worth checking out include Avatar.