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.