World War II raged on the screen in 1942 just as it raged in reality. No less than half of the year’s Best Picture contenders were about the war, culminating in an astonishing total of thirty nominations and ten wins.

The British home-front in the early days of the war served as the primary location for Mrs. Miniver, allegedly Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite film as it helped win the nation’s support of the war in Europe even though it was released seven months after America’s entry into the war.

The film played an astonishing twelve weeks at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, the nation’s largest theatre and premiere showplace where films generally played one or two weeks. It eventually received twelve nominations and won six Oscars including Best Picture, Director (William Wyler), Actress (Greer Garson) and Supporting Actress (Teresa Wright).

Although the film has its fair share of action sequences, the focus of the film is on three women: the gentle middle-aged wife of the title played by Garson, her town’s imperious aristocratic dowager (Oscar nominated Dame May Whitty) and Whitty’s liberal minded grand-daughter (Wright). The men, though secondary characters, are also well played by Oscar nominated Walter Pidgeon as Garson’s husband, Richard Ney as her eldest son and Oscar nominated Henry Travers as the cherubic stationmaster.

Although it caused quite a sensation when Garson married the fourteen years younger Ney a few months after the Oscars, the scandal did nothing to mar her continuing popularity as MGM’s biggest star of the 1940’s.

Garson’s second film in Oscar’s sights that year was one that had nothing to do with the war. Random Harvest, which also played twelve weeks at Radio City Music Hall was based on James Hilton’s novel of the same name. Garson, a Hilton veteran having won her first Oscar nomination for his Goodbye, Mr. Chips, was paired opposite another Hilton veteran, Ronald Colman who had starred in the film version of Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

The film, a sentimental tale of an aristocrat who suffers from amnesia, marries small town dance hall sensation Garson and then recovers his original identity on a trip to London, forgetting all about Garson, is completely engrossing. The film’s second and third acts in which Garson comes back into his life are no less so. The film received seven nominations including Best Picture, Director, Actor (Colman) and Supporting Actress (Susan Peters).

With eight nominations and three wins, Yankee Doodle Dandy was the second most honored film touching on the war. Though essentially the biography of song and dance man, George M. Cohan, the film focused lots of attention on his writing for and participation in World War I and ended with his appearance before President Roosevelt at the start of the World War II. Unfortunately Cohan died before he could contribute much to the war effort. Fortunately, however he lived long enough to witness James Cagney’s celebrated impersonationof him.

The film’s wins included one for Cagney as Best Actor, while nominations included those for Best Director (Michael Curtiz) and Supporting Actor (Walter Huston).

Re-titled The Invaders for American audiences, Michael Powell’s 49th Parallel won a Best Original Story Oscar for his partner, Emeric Pressburger. Though the two worked in tandem co-writing and co-directing most of their films together, this was the only one in which they received separate credits for the two disciplines, ironic because Powell himself never won an Oscar.

The film about Nazi sailors stranded in Canada who must make their way to the then neutral U.S. featured, among others, Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier and Glynis Johns.

Nominated for three Oscars including one for Monty Woolley as the old curmudgeon who ends up protecting a group of children from the Nazis, The Pied Piper gave U.S. audiences a glimpse of what the war was like for both young and old in Europe. Roddy McDowall, Anne Baxter and Peggy Ann Garner co-starred.

The first nominated film about U.S. involvement in the war was appropriately Wake Island about the marine held island attacked by the Japanese the same day they attacked Pearl Harbor. Though historically inaccurate – the marines did not fight to the last man, the few left alive after the admiralty abandoned rescue, surrendered to the Japanese – the film is nevertheless a rousing one that helped solidify support for the war.

Director John Farrow won the New York Film Critics Award as well as one of the film’s four Oscar nominations that included one for William Bendix as Best Supporting Actor. Although it may have been unique at the time, time has not proved kind to the film which has been copied so many times that even the original now seems like one big cliché, not the least of which is the clowning of Bendix and Robert Preston in the midst of the fighting.

Oscar didn’t have much of a funny bone this year. Such great and enduring comedies as Sullivan’s Travels; The Palm Beach Story; To Be or Not to Be and Woman of the Year were nixed for Best Picture consideration while the more serious The Talk of the Town was the only comedy/drama nominated for Best Picture.

Nominated for seven Oscars, the story of a schoolteacher who must choice between a professor and an escaped convict, it was nevertheless exceedingly well played by its three stars, Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman and Cary Grant as the respective characters. George Stevens was nominated for his direction of this over Woman of the Year.

Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons based on Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1912 novel was every bit as innovative and thrilling as his Citizen Kane but doesn’t have quite the same reputation, in part because RKO took over the film from Welles while he was in Mexico on another project. Editor Robert Wise was given the task of filming additional scenes to make the film more coherent while copious scenes shot by Welles were abandoned. The film nevertheless received four nominations including one for Supporting Actress Agnes Moorehead for her acclaimed portrayal of Aunt Fanny which had won her a Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics. Joseph Cotton, Dolores Costello, Tim Holt and Anne Baxter co-star.

Nominated for ten Oscars, and winner of one for Best Editing, The Pride of the Yankees provided Best Actor nominee Gary Cooper with one of his most iconic roles as baseball great Lou Gehrig and made Best Actress nominee Teresa Wright the first actress to win three acting nominations in two years, a feat that wasn’t to be repeated until Emma Thompson did it again in 1994.

Yankees’ director Sam Wood was nominated as Best Director for his other film in the year’s Best Picture line-up, the melodramatic Kings Row, one of that film’s three nominations.

Kings Row is best remembered for the scene in which Ronald Reagan wakes up to find his legs gone and utters the famous line, “where’s the rest of me?” Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Betty Field and Charles Coburn as the sadistic surgeon co-star.

Kings Row was one of three major films scheduled for release in December, 1941 which were delayed until 1942 because of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The others were Sullivan’s Travels and The Man Who Came to Dinner, neither of which received any Oscar nominations.

Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture, all are available on DVD in the U.S. except The Pied Piper and The Magnificent Ambersons, which is available in several Region 2 versions including one from Great Britain.

In addition to the previously mentioned Sullivan’s Travels; The Palm Beach Story; To Be or Not to Be; Woman of the Year and The Man Who Came to Dinner, other films of note that failed to register as Best Picture contenders include Bambi; Holiday Inn; For Me and My Gal; Journey for Margaret; My Sister Eileen and The Major and the Minor. Unlike The Pied Piper and The Magnificent Ambersons, they’re all been released on DVD in the U.S., although Bambi, and To Be or Not to Be which are currently on moratorium, may be hard to find.

New DVD releases of note include the Blu-ray debuts of Darkman and the original 1987 version of The Stepfather.