World War II continued unabated in real life and on the screen in 1943. The Oscar race was once again dominated by films about war.

The 1942 New York Film Critics Award winner, Noel Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, was not eligible for Oscar consideration then because it did not open in Los Angeles until 1943, receiving just one other nomination for Coward’s screenplay.

A fictionalized recounting of Lord Montbatten’s famed sea battle early in the war, it was a propaganda film par excellence. Coward, John Mills and Joyce Carey headed the cast.

The year’s eventual winner, Casablanca, had opened in New York in October, 1942 and was an also-ran in that year’s New York Film Critics balloting but didn’t factor at all in the National Board of Review’s voting. Its popularity, however, grew with the fortuitous meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin on January 23, 1943, the film’s purposely timed national release date.

The film’s golden clichés were golden then but no one seemed to mind. It wasn’t, however, until the film’s re-emergence in revival houses and on TV in the 1960s that it attained the vaunted place in film history it retains today. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt and the rest of the cast were at their professional peaks and continue to entrance audiences as times go by.

Casablanca won three of its eight nominations, Bogie losing to Paul Lukas in Watch on the Rhine and Rains to Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier. Bergman, nominated for For Whom the Bell Tolls rather than Casablanca, lost to Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette.

Based on Lillian Hellman’s play of the same name, Watch on the Rhine centered on a character not unlike Paul Henreid’s in Casablanca. Oscar voters likely felt morally bound to give the award to an actor playing a patriot who puts his life on the line over a cynic. While Lukas’ performance is certainly good, it in no way compares to Bogie’s iconic portrayal of Rick in Casablanca.

Bette Davis had the secondary role of Lukas’ wife while Lucile Watson, who like Lukas, was repeating her Broadway role, all but steals the film as Davis’ mother. Lukas’ win was the only one out of the film’s four nominations which also included one for Watson as well as one for Dashiell Hammett’s screenplay.

The first film to win the Golden Globe for Best Picture, The Song of Bernadette with its twelve nominations, had gone into the Oscar ace as the early favorite but had to be content with the four awards it won for Cinematography, Art Direction and Musical Score in addition to Jones’ win for Best Actress.

Directed by Henry King, from Franz Werfel’s best-selling novel, the story of the French peasant girl who sees visions of the Virgin Mary was the most popular religious film made up to that time. Jones, previously in films as Phyllis Isley (her real name) was “introduced” as Jones in Bernadette. While she is certainly touching in her performance, many feel she was outclassed by the three actors who had to make do with nominations: Anne Revere as her mother, Charles Bickford as her parish priest and especially Gladys Cooper as the doubting nun who becomes her devoted servant and protector.

Using as its comic source the over-crowding in wartime Washington, D.C., George Stevens’ The More the Merrier is a perfectly timed comedy about a woman who sublets her apartment to old geezer who in turn sublets to a young man and proceeds to play Cupid. Jean Arthur, Charles Coburn and Joel McCrea were perfectly cast in those roles with Arthur receiving her only Best Actress nomination and Coburn winning on the second of his three. Coburn’s win was the only one out of six nominations which included one for Stevens. McCrea, alas, was not nominated and would remain one of Hollywood’s most overlooked performers in terms of Oscar.

The Best Supporting Actress Oscar went to Katina Paxinou, the legendary star of the Greek theatre, for her portrayal of the fiery revolutionary, Pilar, in Sam Wood’s film of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Set during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, For Whom the Bell Tolls also starred Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman and Akim Tamiroff, all in Oscar nominated roles. Paxinou’s Oscar, though, was the only one awarded from its total of nine nominations.

Set in small town America during the war, Clarence Brown’s The Human Comedy was nominated for five Oscars and won one for William Saroyan’s original story.

Best Actor nominee Mickey Rooney had what was perhaps the best role of his career as the telegraph messenger for whom the war hits close to home. Frank Morgan, James Craig, Marsha Hunt, Fay Bainter, Butch Jenkins, Donna Reed, Van Johnson and Robert Mitchum co-starred.

Nominated for three Oscars,Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait had nothing to do with the war, but the droll comedy was very much about life and death opening with a very funny scene in which the devil (Laird Cregar) sends an old lady (Florence Bates) straight to hell. Gene Tierney, Don Ameche, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Spring Byington and Eugene Pallette had the other major roles in the film version of the play Birthday. It’s not to be confused with Heaven Can Wait, the play whichwas the basis for the 1941 Oscar nominee Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which would be remade as Heaven Can Wait in 1978.

One of the better bio-pics of the era, Mervyn LeRoy’s Madame Curie was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Actress Greer Garson and actor Walter Pidgeon.

Originally intended as a vehicle for Greta Garbo, it was given to Garson after Garbo’s early retirement and Garson’s continuing popularity, especially when paired with Pidgeon.

The rare western to be nominated for Best Picture, William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident based on Walter van Tilburg Clark’s novel, was also that rare Best Picture nominee that received no other nominations. At a minimum, it should have received one for Lamr Trotti’s screenplay and one each for lead actor Henry Fonda and supporting player Dana Andrews. Harry Morgan, Anthony Quinn, Frank Craven and Jane Darwell were also quite memorable in the shocking tale of a lynch mob that stalks and hangs three innocent men (Andrews, Morgan, Quinn). Fonda is the conscience of the mob, Conroy the take-no-prisoners head of the mob and Darwell, playing against type, a blood thirsty old lady.

All except The Human Comedy is available on DVD. Casablancais also available on Blu-ray.

Among the films Oscar overlooked were Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite among his many films with Joseph Cotton as a serial killer and Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge and Henry Travers as his unsuspecting family members; Jean Renoir’s This Land Is Mine about resistance fighters in an unnamed German occupied country, obviously France, with Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, George Sanders, Walter Slezak and Una O’Connor; John M. Stahl’s film of Arnold Bennett’s play The Great Adventure, renamed Holy Matrimony,with Monty Woolley as the reclusive artist masquerading as his dead butler and Gracie Fields as the housekeeper he marries; Fred M. Wilcox’s Lassie Come Home,the ultimate tale of a boy and his dog, with an all-star cast including Roddy McDowall, Donald Crisp, Edmund Gwenn, Nigel Bruce, Elsa Lanchester and Elizabeth Taylor and Howard Hawks’ Air Force, the year’s best film about men in war, with John Garfield, Gig Young, Harry Carey, Arthur Kennedy, James Best and John Ridgely among the men.

All but This Land Is Mine and Holy Matrimony are available on DVD in the U.S. This Land Is Mine is available in Region 2 (the U.K. and other countries).

New DVDs include the Iraq War drama, Green Zone with Matt Damon; the 9/11 drama, Remember Me with Robert Pattinson and Emilie de Ravin and the long awaited restored version of 1954’s A Star Is Born with Judy Garland and James Mason albeit still with missing footage replaced by stills in several scenes. All three are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.