By the end of World War II audiences had had enough of films about the war, but by 1949 Hollywood rightfully concluded that enough time had passed to make the topic marketable again. Three hugely successful films about the war figured heavily in the 1949 Oscar race. Two of them (Twelve O’Clock High and Battleground) were in fact nominated for Best Picture along with the film version of a stage classic (The Heiress), a contemporary suspense drama (A Letter to Three Wives) and the film version of a Pultizer Prize winning novel about political corruption (All the King’s Men). The latter, which was the film with the strongest pedigree, won.

Nominated for seven Oscars, Robert Rossen’s film of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men won three. It took home awards for Best Picture, Actor (Broderick Crawford) and Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge).

Crawford played a thinly disguised version of Louisiana Governor Huey Long and newcomer McCambridge was the political operative who helped guide his career. With real life political corruption and assassinations even more unsettling than those portrayed in the film, audiences discovering it in the intervening years have not been as impressed as contemporaneous audiences were. A 2006 remake with an all-star cast opened to negative reviews and died a quick death at the box office.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ A Letter to Three Wives, which won the director an Oscar for writing as well as directing, has fared much better over the years. Audiences discovering the film for the first time today are as enthusiastic about it as their parents and grandparents were when they first encountered this film about three women who receive a letter from a fourth telling them she has run off with one of their husbands. Jeanne Crain, Ann Southern and especially Linda Darnell excel as the three women and Paul Douglas, Kirk Douglas and Jeffrey Lynn are fineas the husbands as are Connie Gilchrist and Thelma Ritter as Darnell’s mother and her card playing friend. Celeste Holm is the voice of the woman who wrote the letter.

William Wyler’s The Heiress was the film version of the play of the same name by Augustus and Ruth Goetz based on Henry James’ Washington Square. The highly atmospheric film provided Olivia de Havilland with another strong role resulting in her second Oscar for Best Actress in four years. De Havilland plays a plain, naïve, terribly shy young woman taken in by dashing Montgomery Clift who may be after her money. Ralph Richardson, in a brilliant Oscar nominated turn as her abusive father and Miriam Hopkins as her talkative aunt are the other principal players.

The film also won Oscars for its exquisite black-and-white art direction and costume design as well as for Aaron Copland’s haunting score. It had been nominated for Best Director and Black-and-White Cinematography as well.

Eschewing the blood and guts that tend to dominate war movies, Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High is a thinking man’s examination of the war. It’s framed by Best Supporting Actor winner Dean Jagger’s clear-eyed look at the men he served with years earlier. Gregory Peck, in the role that many consider the best of his career, is the young Air Force general undergoing enormous stress from having to send men into harm’s way. Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe and Millard Mitchell provide fine support.

In addition to Jagger’s win, the film was singled out by Oscar for its sound. King and Peck had to settle for nominations. Peck’s performance proved so trenchant that he won the New York Film Critics award for Best Actor the following year as the film had not been released in New York prior to the end of 1949. It was the first and only time to date that a film had won that award the year after its Oscar eligibility.

More familiar ground was covered by William A. Wellman’s Battleground. Dramatizing the plight of the ordinary foot soldier during the Battle of the Bulge, the film presented a new realism to audiences weaned on the rah-rah gung ho dynamics of films made during the war. Van Johnson, John Hodiak, Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy, Marshall Thompson, Jerome Courtland, Don Taylor and others all marched under the watchful eye of Supporting Actor nominee James Whitmore.

The film had also been nominated for its Direction and Editing and won for Story and Screenplay and Black-and-White Cinematography.

Nominated for four Oscars including Best Actor (John Wayne), Story and Screenplay, Editing and Sound, Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima was for many years the best known of the year’s big three war films. That’s because it played incessantly on TV, Wayne’s portrayal of the stalwart sergeant providing the impetus for many enlistments over the years, funny because Wayne himself sat out the real war.

Good as Wayne is in the film, and he is good, he was even better in John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, generally considered the best of the three films that formed Ford’s cavalry trilogy.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon won the only Oscar it was nominated for – Best Color Cinematography.

There was a fourth major war film released in 1949, Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave, with a screenplay by Carl Foreman based on Arthur Laurents’ play. The play had been about anti-Semitism in the military, but with that subject already played out and the new hot button racial prejudice, the central character was changed from Jewish to black. He’s played by James Edwards who, years before Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, became the first young, good looking black male lead in films. Douglas Dick, Lloyd Bridges, Frank Lovejoy, Steve Brodie and Jeff Corey co-starred.

Films dealing with race relations were almost as high profile as films about the recent war in 1949. Joining Home of the Brave were Lost Boundaries; Intruder in the Dust and Pinky.

The only one of these to figure into the year’s Oscar nominations was Pinky. Directed by Elia Kazan, the film’s strongest suit was the acting of the three leads, all of whom were nominated for Oscars.

Jeanne Crain was the proud nurse who passed for white in the North but returns to the deep South to visit grandmother Ethel Waters and stays to nurse the once powerful town matriarch, Ethel Barrymore, in her final days. That Crain, previously seen mostly in musicals and light comedies, was able to hold her own in scenes with the two Ethels, was something of a revelation for audiences of the day.

Telling the true story of a light-skinned couple, a prominent doctor and his wife, who passed for white for more than twenty years before their secret was revealed, Alfred L. Werker’s Lost Boundaries is a mostly by-the-numbers biopic until the big reveal when all hell breaks loose, but once it does and the emphasis shifts from leads Mel Ferrer and Beatrice Pearson to son Richard Hylton, the film comes startlingly alive.

Best of the lot, however, is Clarence Brown’s thrilling Intruder in the Dust in which a boy (Claude Jarman, Jr.) and an old Lady (Elizabeth Patterson) come to the aid of a falsely accused black man (Juano Hernandez) in rural Mississippi. The film’s signature scene is the one in which the elderly Patterson talks down a lynch mob. Somehow or other, this film, which had Oscar written all over it, had to settle for two Golden Globe nominations, two Writers Guild nominations and two Bafta nominations, winning the latter’s U.N. Award.

Other films of note included Carol Reed’s film about the loss of childhood innocence, The Fallen Idol, which was nominated for two Oscars – one for Reed and one for Best Screenplay by Graham Greene and Henry Koster’s Come to the Stable, which was nominated for seven Oscars including three for its actors: Loretta Young, Celeste Holm and Elsa Lanchester.

Both Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero advanced the Italian neorealist cinema of the late forties, the former winning a Special Oscar for Best Foregin Film.

All films discussed except Home of the Brave; Intruder in the Dust and Come to the Stable are available on DVD.

New films out on DVD this week include Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer with Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan; the Oscar nominated French film, A Prophet and Kim Novak and Errol Flynn box sets. The Novak set, The Kim Novak Collection, includes re-mastered versions of Picnic, Pal Joey and Bell, Book and Candle as well as new to DVD releases Jeanne Eagels and Middle of the Night. The Flynn set, TCM Spotlight: Errol Flynn Adventures, includes Desperate Journey; Edge of Darkness; Northern Pursuit; Uncertain Glory and a re-mastered Objective Burma!