Almost as impressive as the year that preceded it, all ten films nominated for Best Picture of 1940 are available on DVD.

Two of Hollywood’s most legendary directors, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, both had two films nominated for Best Picture and they themselves were both nominated for Best Director. Hitchcock’s Rebecca beat Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath in the Best Picture race but Ford beat Hitchcock in the Best Director race.

Based on a bestselling novel by Daphne du Maurier, and produced by Gone with the Wind’s David O.Selznick, Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film faithfully followed du Maurier’s narrative while incorporating both the visual splendor associated with Selznick and the nail-biting suspense associated with Hitchcock. Joan Fontaine had her first major role as the Second Mrs. de Winter through whose eyes the story is told. Laurence Olivier was her mysterious husband, Maxim de Winter, Judith Anderson the malevolent housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. They were all brilliant and all nominated for Oscars. Outstanding support was provided by George Sanders, Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce, Reginald Denny, C. Aubrey Smith, Florence Bates and Leo G. Carroll. Despite its 11 nominations, the film won only two Oscars, for Best Picture and Best Cinematography.

Ford’s film had an even stronger pedigree. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath not only won the Pulitzer Prize, it was instantly and universally acclaimed as “the great American novel”. Ford’s film was, to many, even better. Henry Fonda had the role of his career as Tom Joad, the itinerant everyman and Jane Darwell was his equal as earth mother Ma Joad. Darwell won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, but Fonda had to make do with a nomination, his first and only one until his eventual win for On Golden Pond forty-one years later when he was on his deathbed. Alas, Ford and Darwell’s Oscars were the only ones the film won out of its seven nominations.

Hitchcock’s second nominated film was Foreign Correspondent, a more typical Hitchcock entry with Joel McCrea as the lone wolf operating against a hornet’s nest of spies. Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall and Edmund Gwenn also star, with Albert Basserman securing one the film’s six nominations as Best Supporting Actor.

Ford’s second nominated film was The Long Voyage Home, a somber tale of men at sea from several short Eugene O’Neill plays with John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Barry Fitzgerald, John Qualen and Mildred Natwick among the players, the latter making her screen debut as a prostitute. The film was also nominated for six Oscars. Ford won the New York Film Critics Award jointly for this and The Grapes of Wrath while Grapes took sole honors for Best Picture.

Lesser known Sam Wood also had two films nominated for Best Picture. Wood had been a nominee the previous year for Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which had also been nominated for Best Picture, and would see two films nominated in the same year again two years hence with The Pride of the Yankees and Kings Row, securing a Best Director nod for the latter. This year he was nominated for his direction of Kitty Foyle, a woman’s picture that time has not been kind to, but was popular enough at the time to win Ginger Rogers a Best Actress Oscar as a working girl torn between a dedicated doctor and a rich businessman. Guess which one she choses?

Wood’s other nominated film was the still enduring Our Town. The film version of Thornton Wilder’s expands the play’s minimalist setting to provide fuller flesh and blood characters as played by Martha Scott, an Oscar nominee for Best Actress, William Holden, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi and Guy Kibbee. Frank Craven recreated his legendary stage role of the narrator. The film is in the public domain so DVD versions vary in quality.

Kitty Foyle received a total of five nominations and Our Town six.

Another film receiving six nominations was George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Hepburn, whose films of the 1930s were mostly box office disappointments returned to the screen in triumph in a role tailor made for her unusual personality by playwright Philip Barry. They loved her in the stage version and they loved her again on film. Grant, Stewart, Ruth Hussey, Mary Nash, Roland Young, John Halliday and Virginia Weidler were pretty wonderful too, with Stewart and Hussey, along with Hepburn all winning acting nominations. Stewart won in part for having lost the previous year for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and in part for the sum total of his 1940 releases which also included Destry Rides Again; The Shop Around the Corner and The Mortal Storm. Cukor was nominated for his direction.

William Wyler who directed Bette Davis to an Oscar in Jezebel directed her to another nomination in The Letter, for which he received his third nomination as well. Previously made in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels, who was also nominated for her performance, the source material is a play by W. Somerset Maugham who wrote it for Gladys Cooper who would play Davis’ mother in Now, Voyager for which both she and Davis would receive Oscar nominations in two years. This highly atmospheric version was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, with one going to James Stephenson as Davis’ attorney who defends her against a murder charge. Hebert Marshall and Gale Sondergaard co-star.

A dull by comparison Davis vehicle, All This, and Heaven Too was the ninth nominated film. It received a total of three nominations including one for Barbara O’Neil as the shrill wife of Charles Boyer. It’s O’Neil’s death that sets the tragic melodrama in motion.

Last, but certainly not least, Charlie Chaplin finally made a talkie! His The Great Dictator was a spoof of Hitler and Mussolini played by Chaplin and Jack Oakie, both of whom were nominated for their performances. The DVD has been discontinued but can be still be found at exorbitant prices.

Missing from Oscar’s short list were a number of classic films that have stood the test of time far better than a Kitty Foyle or an All This, and Heaven Too. They include the three other major James Stewart films, George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again with a magnificent performance by Marlene Dietrich, who like Hepburn, was regaining her prominence in Hollywood; Ernst Lubitch’s The Shop Around the Corner with a luminous Margaret Sullavan and Stewart as fellow shop clerks who detest each other during the day but are unknowingly secret pen pal lovers at night and Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm, one of the first Hollywood films to take on the Nazis, again with Sullavan and Stewart and their Shop co-star Frank Morgan herein giving one of the great performances of all time as Sullavan’s father, a beloved professor who runs afoul of the Nazis.

Then there were Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, his hilarious gender send-up of The Front Page with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant; Mervyn LeRoy’s updated version of Waterloo Bridge with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor; Robert Z. Leonard’s film of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier, Mary Boland and Edna May Oliver; Disney’s second full length animated feature, Pinocchio; Ludwig Berger, Michael Powll and Tim Whelan’s thrilling The Thief of Bagdad with Conrad Veidt and Sabu; Rouben Mamoulian’s equally thrilling The Mark of Zorro with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Basil Rathbone; Michael Curtiz’s grand swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk with Tyrone Power and Flora Robson; William Wyler’s The Westerner with Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan in his third Oscar winning performance, this time as legendary Judge Roy Bean; Garson Kanin’s hilarious My Favorite Wife with Irene Dunne, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott and Mitchell Lesien’s lovely Remember the Night with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi and Elizabeth Patterson All are available on DVD but beware public domain copies of His Girl Friday. The official Columbia (Sony) version is the only one to watch.

New DVD releases include the 2010 versions of Alice in Wonderland and Wolfman on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.