It’s been nearly eighty years since audiences first beheld Lewis Milestone’s film of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, yet the anti-war classic remains as powerful today as it was then.

The film’s narrative follows a young German student, who with six of his classmates, joins the Kaiser’s Army in World War I at the urging of their jingoistic professor. One by one, the young men become disillusioned by the horrors they see all around them. Right and wrong become blurred. Soldiers weep when they take a life. Some will become older and wiser very quickly, but most will be dead before their time.

The film is beautifully shot and acted, particularly by Lew Ayres, who was so moved by the concepts employed in the film that he became a conscientious objector during World War II, albeit serving admirably as a medic.

The film, which won Oscars for Best Picture and Director at the 1929/30 Academy Awards was also nominated for Best Screenplay, losing to The Big House and Cinematography to the documentary classic, With Byrd at the South Pole. It remains one of the few Best Picture winners that no one ever seems to have a beef with.

All Quiet on the Western Front is available on DVD from Universal.

The four films that were nominated in contention with All Quiet on the Western Front were The Big House; Disraeli; The Divorcee and The Love Parade.

The best of these is arguably Ernst Lubitsch’s lighter than air musical, The Love Parade, a deft charmer about European royals played by Best Actor nominee Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald in the first of several pairings.

The Love Parade was one of three legendary eligible musicals. The others were Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause and King Vidor’s Hallelujah.

Stylistically The Love Parade may be the best of the three but Applause is certainly noteworthy as the first sound film shot on location. The Helen Morgan starrer included numerous scenes on Manhattan’s bridges and atop skyscrapers. Hallelujah is noteworthy as the first musical featuring a cast entirely made up of African-Americans. Vidor won a nomination as Best Director for the latter. Alas, Applause was completely shut out of the nominations.

All three films are available on DVD. The Love Parade is available as part of Criterion’s Eclipse Series 8 – Lubitsch Musicals along with The Smiling Lieutenant; One Hour With You and Monte Carlo. Applause was released by Kino Entertainment and Hallelujah by Warner Bros. Hallelujah is technically out of print but you can still find it.

The archetypal prison film, George Hill’s The Big House is superbly acted by its entire cast, Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, Robert Montgomery and Lewis Stone among them. Best Actor nominee Beery is especially good as the viscous leader of the prison break, a role intended for Lon Chaney who died while the film was in pre-production. It revitalized character actor Beery’s career and made him a major star.

The Big House is available from the Warner Archive.

Slightly risqué, Robert Z. Leonard’s The Divorcee is a frivolous comedy-drama with Norma Shearer in her Oscar winning role as the wife who defies the double standard by entering into an affair with another man to thumb her nose at both her husband and society. Chester Morris and Robert Montgomery co-star.

The Divorcee is available from Warner Bros. as part of TCM Archives – Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 2 which also features A Free Soul; Night Nurse; Three on a Match and Female.

A fictionalized biography of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), Alfred E Green’s Disraeli was the second film version of the play with Best Actor winner George Arliss (1868-1946) who had previously starred in a silent film version of his stage success in 1921.

Arliss was not really suited to the screen. He always performed as though he were playing to the second or third balcony, but he had an unmistakable authority, and in fact once referred to himself as “the greatest living actor” under oath in a court appearance. He was the first in a long line of Oscar winners who won for playing real life people.

Disraeli has not yet been released on commercial DVD.

Nominated for three Oscars, Greta Garbo’s legendary first talkie, Anna Christie, won none. Though a bit stagey, it nevertheless earned its nods for Best Actress, Director (Clarence Brown) and Cinematography and would have been a more satisfying contender for Best Picture than either The Divorcee or Disraeli.

Garbo’s first talkie had been much anticipated. Would she prove to be as thrilling a screen presence in the new medium as she had been in the waning days of silents, or would she, like so many of her contemporaries, be all but laughed off the screen the moment she opened her mouth? Brown frames her in such a way as she enters the waterfront tavern about a half hour into the film, walks up to the bar and says her first line, that she still sends shivers down the spine of audiences who may or may not be familiar with her other films. It was immediately clear that she was here to stay.

Also making movie magic in Anna Christie was Marie Dressler, the former stage star and silent screen comedienne, who had been getting plenty of attention in minor screen roles of late. Here she had her most substantial role yet as Marthy, the waterfront hag with a heart of gold. She and Garbo together make movie magic. Not one, but two stars were reborn with this film.

Anna Christie is available on DVD as part of Warner Bros. Greta Garbo – The Signature Collection, along with Mata Hari; Grand Hotel; Queen Christina; Anna Karenina; Camille; Ninotchka and three silents, Flesh and the Devil; The Temptress and The Mysterious Lady.

Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels was justly nominated for its spectacular aerial cinematography. It’s available on DVD from Universal. The film it lost to, the superb With Byrd at the South Pole is available from Image Entertainment as part of their Milestone Collection.

Films of note which Oscar overlooked this year include City Girl; Lucky Star; The River; Pandora’s Box; Blackmail and Journey’s End.

Three of these, F.W. Murmau’s City Girl and Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star and The River are included in Fox’s sublime Murnau, Borzage and Fox Box Set, which I rated as the best DVD release of 2008. The films are reviewed at length in my DVD Report of December 16, 2008. The River is a partial reconstruction of a lost film.

G.W. Pabst was a master of the German silent cinema, producing a number of provocative films dealing frankly with social issues and sexuality, none more so than Pandora’s Box starring American actress Louise Brooks.

Brooks plays Lulu, an ambitious actress who becomes a rich man’s mistress and then turns to prostitution to support herself. She sinks lower and lower into depravity, her last client being Jack the Ripper.

The original score to Pandora’s Box has been lost. The Criterion DVD offers a choice between four scores: an orchestral score; a cabaret score; a modern orchestral score and a score composed of piano improvisations.

An important film in the development of Alfred Hitchcock’s career, Blackmail was filmed twice, first as a silent film, then as England and Hitchcock’s first talkie, though that version, the one most of us are familiar with, is actually a partial talkie in which non-English leading lady Anny Ondry’s voice is dubbed. Sara Allgood and Cyril Ritchard are the film’s best known actors and they walk away with the film.

Blackmail, which is in the public domain, has had numerous DVD releases, none of them particularly striking.

The first Anglo-American co-production, James Whale’s Journey’s End was the film version of a celebrated play that portrays the horrors of World War I in the same vein as All Quiet on the Western Front, but is not as cinematic.

Colin Clive, Ian McLaren and David Manners have the principal roles and they are each first rate. In bad need of reconstruction, this film has never been released on commercial DVD, even in light of its highly successful Tony award winning Broadway revival in 2007.

New DVD releases worth checking out includes The Blind Side featuring Sandra Bullock’s Oscar winning performance and tons of extras including interviews with the real Michael Oher and the actor who played him; Jim Sheridan’s Hollywood remake of the Danish film, Brothers and two 1950s classics making their long awaited release on Region 1 Blu-ray and standard DVD: John Huston’s The African Queen and Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life.