Parky at the Pictures (DVD 23/2/2012)

This year, the odds look stacked in favour of Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist. But there have been surprises before and several of them are available to rent or buy on DVD and Blu-Ray. Here are just a handful of the classics and the curios that have triumphed at the Oscars.

BEST ACTOR 1933 - THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII.

More interested in sex and food than the affairs of state, Henry VIII (Charles Laughton) marries six times, and having executed Anne Boleyn (Merle Oberon) and Katherine Howard (Binnie Barnes), been widowed by Jane Seymour (Wendy Barrie) and divorced Anne of Cleves (Elsa Lanchester), he settles into disappointed old age with Catherine Parr (Everly Gregg).

Alexander Korda always claimed that he got the idea for this costume romp on hearing a London cabby singing `I'm `Enery the Eighth I Am'. However, he more than likely noticed elsewhere the resemblance between the corpulent king and Charles Laughton and commissioned screenwriters Lajos Biro and Arthur Wimperis to fashion a bawdy drama out of the events of a tempestuous reign. However, the Reformation - along with such key protagonists as Katherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More - was deemed too dull for film fare and, instead, the action concentrated on Bluff King Hal's lusty appetites and intemperate humour.

Period pictures were considered box-office poison in the early sound era and Korda struggled to raise his £60,000 budget - whose penury makes cinematographer Georges Perinal's achievement in giving Vincent Korda's ingenious sets a modicum of courtly opulence all the more remarkable. Indeed, Laughton and his co-stars were asked to defer their fees until after premiere at New York's Radio City Music Hall. Ultimately, however, the movie scooped £500,000 worldwide and made history by securing the British cinema's first Academy Award. But, more significantly, its success enabled Korda to establish London Films as a major force in the UK film industry and ensconced the heritage picture as a keystone of indigenous production until the mid-1990s.

Moreover, Laughton's Best Actor triumph alerted Hollywood to the quality of British stage acting and a minor exodus followed, as the studios sought their own star thespians. Laughton himself would deliver more effective performances over the next 30 years. But even though his flamboyant portrait was decidedly mock-Tudor, his shifts from clumsy amorousness to betrayed fury and impenitent self-pity adroitly captured the popular conception of England's most colourful monarch. He was ably abetted by his screen spouses, who included his real-life consort, Elsa Lanchester, whose gloriously unglamorous turn as the Mare of Flanders provided the film's enduring highlight.

BEST PICTURE 1934 - IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT.

Journalist Peter Warne (Clark Gable) recognises runaway heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) en route from Miami to New York and agrees to help her make her assignation with gold-digging playboy King Westley (Jameson Thomas) in return for the exclusive rights to her story.

Had anyone tried to produce a movie about the making of It Happened One Night, no one would have believed it. Things started off reasonably enough, with Robert Riskin turning Samuel Hopkins Adams's magazine story, `Night Bus', into a screenplay. But the fanciful began to set in when MGM's Louis B. Mayer offered Columbia chief, Harry Cohn, Clark Gable in compensation for Robert Montgomery's refusal to play the gruffly genial journalist. However, this was no mere act of inter-mogul philanthropy, as Mayer had grown tired of Gable's pay demands and insistence on selecting his own roles. So, he agreed to loan out his fastest-rising star because he considered him `a bad boy and I'd like to spank him'.

Less than amused by his demotion to Poverty Row, Gable reported for his first meeting with director Frank Capra fighting drunk and racially abusive. However, he eventually accepted his punishment and came to recognise the quality of the script in pre-production.

Myrna Loy, Miriam Hopkins, Constance Bennett and Margaret Sullavan, however, failed to share his enthusiasm and they all nixed the project before Claudette Colbert signed up because she had four weeks to spare before her Christmas vacation in Sun Valley. That said, she had little faith in Capra, who had directed her debut, For the Love of Mike (1927), and its failure had temporarily harmed her prospects.

But even though the lure of $50,000 (double her usual salary) assuaged her doubts, she arrived on set intent on playing the prima donna. She refused point blank to disrobe for the famous `Walls of Jericho' sequence (in which the sight of Gable's bare torso sent vest sales plummeting) and only agreed to reveal her thigh for the hitch-hiking gag when Capra threatened to use a stand-in with better legs. Consequently, she told friends, `I've just finished the worst picture in the world.'

Yet, in spite of the frictions, the film became the first to land the Big Five awards at the Oscars. But, more importantly, this fresh, fast and funny farce ushered in the screwball comedy, which remains its lasting legacy.

BEST PICTURE 1938 - YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU.

Frank Capra saw George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's Pulitzer Prize-winning play while in New York to promote Lost Horizon (1937). However, Columbia supremo Harry Cohn was less than impressed by Broadway producer Sam Harris's asking price and famously declared, `I wouldn't shell out 200 Gs for the Second Coming!'. But Capra was on such a roll that Cohn paid up and was rewarded with Capra's third Oscar for Best Director and his second for Best Picture.

In its day, this was regarded as a joyous farce about a family whose wealth lay in love, health and the good opinion of its neighbours. Yet, this is a problematic film, from both a dramatic and political perspective.

Even though he resents munitions tycoon Anthony Kirby (Edward Arnold)'s plans to purchase his land, the head of an eccentric household, Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), agrees to host a dinner party to facilitate granddaughter Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur)'s courtship Anthony Kirby, Jr. (James Stewart). However, the guests arrive a day early.

Although he added mask and toymaker Mr Poppins (Donald Meek) to reinforce the air of whimsicality, Capra made few changes to the original text, as it chimed in so precisely with his perennial theme that money couldn't buy happiness. Yet, while he shifted the emphasis on to Kirby's munitions ambitions (some later claimed as a way of warning about the coming war), Capra adopted a highly naive approach to capitalism throughout this supposedly satirical romp.

Even though he had retired 30 years earlier, Grandpa Vanderhof still lives comfortably in a mansion and, apart from Alice's income from Kirby's coffers, he seems to have no visible means of financial support. So, despite his incessant tirades against the various `isms' blighting society, one must conclude that he has a self-replenishing source of revenue, which tends to imply investments. Thus, he seems to have a stake in the very world of big business he has urged his shiftless family to reject - yet, when he finds himself in court, he appears reliant on the coppers that the townsfolk can muster.

Such clumsy plotting is compounded by the laziness of the characterisation, which reduces the Vanderhofs to buffoonish acolytes to Alice's Snow White. Her fond embarrassment about her relations and her willingness to marry into money are also conveniently glossed over.

This is often great fun, but it's also archly anarchic and inexpertly populist and prompts one to reconsider the Capra-corn canon with a new cynicism.

BEST ACTOR 1939 - GOODBYE MR CHIPS.

Charles Chipping (Robert Donat) arrives at Brookfield School as a junior master in 1870 and remains a cornerstone of the institution over the next 58 years, as boys come and go and he comes to terms with the loss of his wife, Katherine (Greer Garson), in childbirth.

Inheriting a role initially destined for Charles Laughton, Robert Donat gave the performance of his career in this charming evocation of life in an English public school. Modelling his voice and mannerisms on his wife's uncle, the distinguished architect C.F.A. Voysey, Donat overcame his chronic asthma to beat Clark Gable to Best Actor in the year that Gone With the Wind swept the Academy Awards.

The debuting Greer Garson was also nominated for her delightful display as Katherine Ellis, whom Chips meets while walking in the Austrian Alps with his colleague Max Staefel (Paul Henreid, who was billed as Von Henreid in his first English-speaking role) and who brings the old bachelor out of himself to earn the undying affection of his charges.

James Hilton wrote the original novella in just four days to meet a magazine deadline. Although some have claimed its inspiration was his own schoolmaster father, the model for Mr Chips seems to have been one W.H. Balgarnie, who taught Hilton at a private school near Cambridge. The story became popular after literary critic Alexander Woollcott championed it on his radio show and it was snapped up by MGM for production at its UK studio at Borehamwood (although Repton stood in for Brookfield, with several teachers and pupils serving as extras).

The estimable R.C. Sheriff was among those who worked on the screenplay, which not only conveys the school's spirit, but also the intrusion of real life upon an essentially enclosed community. The sequences in which the boys and masters first meet Katherine are very sweet, while Chips's mourning for both his late wife and the alumni lost in the Great War is deeply affecting, yet as admirably unsentimental as his own deathbed scene.

MGM remade the movie as a musical in 1969. Peter O'Toole landed an Oscar nomination for his efforts in the title role and Petula Clark worked hard as Katherine. But Leslie Bricusse's mediocre songs are largely redundant and the debuting Herbert Ross's direction falls into every trap that Sam Wood's had so scrupulously avoided.

BEST PICTURE 1941 - HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY.

Following The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Tobacco Road (1941), this adaptation of Richard Llewellyn's novel completed John Ford's social-consciousness trilogy, in which the decline of a single family reflected that of an entire community in the face of wider economic forces. Caught between the influence of his miner father, Morgan (Donald Crisp), and newly arrived preacher, Gryffydd (Walter Pidgeon), Welsh adolescent Huw (Roddy McDowall) witnesses the breakdown of his family and community.

This was originally planned as a four-hour Technicolor epic as Fox sought its own Gone With the Wind (1939). However, the outbreak of the Second World War prevented location shooting in the Rhondda Valley and, after director William Wyler's departure, producer Darryl F. Zanuck settled for the construction of an authentic Welsh mining set in the San Fernando Valley (which took 150 builders six months to complete to Richard Day and Nathan Juran's specifications, pushing the film's budget to $1,250,000).

Zanuck initially planned to have Tyrone Power play the older Huw. But Ford insisted on retaining Roddy McDowall throughout (although Irving Pichel provides the older voice-over), as he was keen to show the decline and depopulation of the valley through his eyes and not as a series of incontrovertible facts.

Thus, the composition of each frame, the camera angle and even the lighting was designed to approximate Huw's presence and emotions. It was a brilliant bid to recreate the `I' of the novel in filmic terms. However, many critics misunderstood Ford's motives and accused him of the reactionary sentimentality that he exhibited towards many of his other Celtic characters. But, rather than championing the stagnant values held by old man Morgan, Ford is actually denouncing his resistance to progress and castigating Huw for lacking the courage of his brothers' convictions. Indeed, by presenting events from Huw's naively tainted perspective, Ford implicates him in the tragedies and betrayals that education, unionism and religion might have prevented.

The performances are powerful throughout and Arthur Miller's deep-focus photography is exceptional. But did Ford really deserve to become the first director to win consecutive Oscars, especially when the competition included Orson Welles and John Huston for Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon respectively?

BEST PICTURE 1942 - MRS MINIVER.

Housewife Kay Miniver (Greer Garson) and her architect husband, Clement (Walter Pidgeon), survive the Home Front travails on the Second World War, while their Oxford-educated son, Vincent (Richard Ney), falls for Carol (Teresa Wright), the granddaughter of rose-growing toff, Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty).

Greer Garson hadn't wanted to make this homage to British pluck, after it was rejected by Norma Shearer. She not only felt too young to play a fortysomething housewife, but she was also on the verge of breaking her MGM contract to return home to do voluntary work. However, she ended up landing both the Oscar for Best Actress (famously making a 6½ minute acceptance speech) and a husband, as she married Richard Ney (who was 10 years her junior).

German exile William Wyler, on the other hand, had been so keen to make this adaptation of Jan Struthers's morale-boosting stories from The Times that he was prepared to take on both Louis B. Mayer and the Isolationists in Washington (who believed that Hollywood was part of a Jewish conspiracy to coerce America into war with the Third Reich). But all attempts to tone down the story's anti-Nazi elements were abandoned after Pearl Harbor occurred just before shooting began.

Yet, this is not an overtly propagandist picture. Garson's capture of wounded Luftwaffe pilot Helmut Dantine and Walter Pidgeon's participation in the Dunkirk rescue were a touch fanciful for the residents of the once-quiet village of Belham. But the depiction of the air raid and the myriad inconveniences of everyday life were credible enough. Indeed, Wyler even had a gentle dig at the British class system by having May Whitty's blue blood challenged in the rose-growing contest by stationmaster Henry Travers and allowing Richard Ney to spout some fashionable Oxbridge notions of social equality.

But Wyler's pride in the picture's authenticity was dented when came to Britain to make war documentaries and realised how much he had romanticised the whole Home Front experience. Yet, Churchill deemed the film `propaganda worth a hundred battleships' and Franklin D. Roosevelt had vicar Henry Wilcoxon's rousing sermon (which he had written with Wyler on the night before shooting and performed in one take) broadcast on Voice of America radio and translated for a leaflet drop across Occupied Europe. Moreover, its unprecedented blanket release across the States made it the biggest box-office hit of the 1940s.

BEST PICTURE 1945 - THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES.

Al Stephenson (Fredric March), Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) and Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) return to Boone City after their Second World War service and struggle to acclimatise to life with loved ones who have changed as much as they have.

Based on MacKinley Kantor's blank verse novel, Glory for Me (which was itself inspired by an article in Time magazine), this sincere, if occasionally melodramatic study of the problems facing America's returning service personnel landed eight Academy Awards, with the debuting Harold Russell becoming the first actor to win two Oscars for the same performance.

But while producer Samuel Goldwyn was instrumental in its commissioning, director William Wyler always considered this an intensely personal project, as he knew something of the psychological pressures of readjusting to civvy street, having seen action with the US Army Air Corps while making the documentaries, Memphis Belle (1944) and Thunderbolt (1945).

Like so many Hollywood veterans returning to studio duty, Wyler was determined to make a statement that proclaimed the changed nature of society. Consequently, he challenged both established visual and storytelling conventions in this audacious achievement, whose cinematic worth has always been overshadowed by its sentimental reception.

The opening segment of the film is almost devoid of plot, as Wyler concentrates on the spaces inhabited by the returning trio to show how three men of contrasting ages, classes and expectations, and who had fought very different wars (Homer had lost his arms in the Navy, Al had been a sergeant in the Army and Fred had participated in bombing raids over Germany), were temporarily more closely bonded together by the common experience of confronting the enemy than they were to the families and friends they had left behind.

However, from the moment they're deposited by taxi, the trio are shown in all the inglorious isolation involved in adjusting from combat to domesticity. What's more, America soon proves to be a land unfit for heroes and their fraught situations are made all the more uncompromising by the fact they're presented in long, deep-focus takes which both enhance the action's realism and keep the audience unwaveringly involved in it.

French theorist André Bazin hailed Best Years a masterpiece of mise-en-scène cinema and its influence would be felt around the world.

BEST PICTURE 1948 - HAMLET.

Released in the same year as Orson Welles's Macbeth, the first non-American film to win the Oscar for Best Picture remains one of cinema's finest Shakespearean adaptations, although many at the time were unhappy with the liberties taken with the text by the newly knighted Laurence Olivier. Having viewed Henry V (1945) in terms of a colourful canvas, Olivier saw Hamlet as an engraving and, thus, opted for a monochrome approach that was given an additional sombre chill by Desmond Dickinson's atmospheric photography.

Having first played the Bard's most complex hero in 1937, the 41 year-old Olivier was also aware that movie audiences were not going to tolerate the full four and a half hours and, so, he compressed the action into 155 minutes. Among the cast casualties were Fortinbras's Norwegian forces and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who not only got a film of their own in 1990 (with Tim Roth and Gary Oldman as Tom Stoppard's anti-heroes), but who also became the models for Pumbaa and Timon in The Lion King (1994), which is essentially Hamlet in animal form.

Made for £580,000, this is a decidedly Freudian interpretation of the play, with Hamlet's frustrations fuelling his Oedipal relationship with Gertrude and the sado-masochistic manner in which he treats Ophelia (Jean Simmons). But, it's also a wholly cinematic vision, with the camera prowling around the Oscar-winning sets like a combination of old Hamlet's restless spirit and his son's inconstant purpose. Indeed, Elsinore almost becomes a character in itself, as it sucks the life out of those trapped inside it.

Olivier also keeps the camera moving during the famous scenes and speeches and ingeniously interiorises the `To be or not to be' soliloquy to reinforce the impression of a man bottling up emotions he's powerless to resolve. Some critics claimed this tactic drew the play's passion, but the dignified formality of the performances only emphasise the lust, avarice, insanity and murderous intent lurking beneath the courtly façades.

BEST PICTURE 1949 - ALL THE KING'S MEN.

The easiest way to get a handle on this bitingly cynical political picture is to imagine a Mr Smith Goes to Washington in which James Stewart becomes corrupted by the very power he believed could only be used for good. Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning source novel was based on the career of just such a character, Huey Long, the `Kingfish' of Deep Southern politics in the 1920s, who so abused his position as Governor of Louisiana that he was assassinated by Baton Rouge physician, Carl Austin Weiss, in 1935.

In the book, Willie Stark's rise from small-town lawyer to state legislator is presented in a series of Kane-like flashbacks, as journalist Jack Burdern takes stock of his life and times. But director Robert Rossen relegated Burden to a supporting role (although John Ireland still attempts to act as Stark's conscience and provides the film's narration) in order to concentrate on Stark, whose rise and fall is now presented chronologically, so as not to distract the audience from the hard-hitting political realities with which they're about to be confronted.

Shooting on location in rundown Stockton, California enhanced the action's authenticity. But the whole conceit could have collapsed had the Oscar-winning Broderick Crawford (until then a character actor and occasional B-movie lead) not been able credibly to portray Stark's passage from a greenhorn doing a correspondence course to better serve his clients into a monstrous power-addled grafter.

Mercedes McCambridge similarly earned herself a Best Supporting Oscar as scheming political aide, Sadie Burke. But it's Crawford who dominates proceedings and his tour de force performance has prevented All the King's Men from dating over the intervening half century, as every subsequent era has had its own man of the people who Jekylls into a self-serving Hyde once in office and begins championing his own demagoguery over democracy.

BEST PICTURE 1950 - ALL ABOUT EVE.

With cinema losing its battle with television, it was no coincidence that two such rancorous exposés of Hollywood and Broadway as Sunset Blvd. and All About Eve should have been up against each other for the Best Picture of 1950. Eve landed 14 nominations, a record that was not equalled until Titanic in 1998. Its four female stars were all cited - Bette Davis and Anne Baxter for Best Actress and Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter for Best Supporting - and although they all lost out (to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday and Josephine Hull in Harvey, respectively), the picture was successful in six other categories, notably bagging a brace for writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Having seen his brother Herman win an Oscar for his screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941), Mankiewicz borrowed elements from its winning, flashbacking formula for this showbiz bitchfest, which sought to understand what drove aspiring actress Eve Harrington (Baxter) to clamber to the top over the corpse of her supposed idol, Margo Channing (Davis).

Based on Mary Orr's short story and radio play, The Wisdom of Eve, this has none of the enduring class of Kane, as Joseph is nowhere near as dexterous a writer as his older sibling (with too many of his stinging bon mots sounding handcrafted rather than raspingly spontaneous) nor as inventive a director as Orson Welles. But this is still a rousing and endlessly amusing melodrama whose merciless demythologising of the tawdry trappings of fame remains acutely relevant in these days of transient celebrity.

Returning to the screen after two years away and injecting each epigram with real venom, Davis (who was only cast after Claudette Colbert damaged her back) gives a magisterial performance that seems founded upon the realisation that her own time in the spotlight was short. But she could never have anticipated that the film's future star was not to be Baxter, but a cameoing Marilyn Monroe.

BEST ACTRESS 1953 - ROMAN HOLIDAY.

A good deal of opportunistic pragmatism lay behind the production of this charming inversion of the Cinderella story, which sees Princess Anne (Audrey Hepburn) slip away from her chaperons, Countess Vereberg (Margaret Rawlings) and General Provno (Tullio Carminati), and go on the lam in the Eternal City with American journalist Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) and photographer Irving Radovich (Eddie Albert). However, true love prevents Joe from publishing his scoop.

When Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted as part of the Hollywood Ten, Ian McLellan Hunter agreed to act as a front for his story idea, which was optioned by Frank Capra, who hoped to cast Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor in what amounted to a variation on his multi-Oscar-winning screwball, It Happened One Night (1934). However, financial problems at his Liberty Films company forced him to sell the property to Paramount, where a combination of political timidity (on Capra's discovering Trumbo's involvement) and a tight budget prompted him to withdraw.

After George Stevens passed, the project was offered to William Wyler, who was not only glad to make his first comedy since the mid-1930s, but was also keen to work abroad in order to exploit a tax loophole. Paramount similarly saw the advantages of a runaway production (as it had assets frozen in Italy), while Gregory Peck, who had initially been reluctant to star opposite a newcomer, recognised the value of lightening his image. Even Audrey Hepburn - who had been chosen over Jean Simmons and Suzanne Cloutier, despite the fact that none of her seven European screen roles had amounted to much - realised this was her big chance to follow up her stage success in Gigi.

However, the cynicism and hard-nosed business sense that had shaped Roman Holiday's genesis evaporated once shooting began. Wyler was as enchanted with Hepburn as he was with his glorious locations and, while he indulged his usual passion for retakes, he allowed more improvisation than usual and was rewarded with a film of such freewheeling spontaneity that it became one of Hollywood's biggest international hits of the decade. It also landed 10 Oscar nominations and became such a firm favourite of John F. Kennedy that he watched it as a pressure release at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Soviets capitulated the next day.

Witty, warm and beautifully filmed by Franz Planer and Henri Alekan, it remains an unabashed romantic delight, with Hepburn particularly luminescent.

BEST ACTRESS 1965 - DARLING.

In some ways, Darling appears to be a film 50 years ahead of its time, as only now is the public so fully aware of the luvviness and sham glamour of the fame game. But for all its dogged determination to hold up a mirror to the Swinging Sixties, this has more in common with `angry young men' movies like Room at the Top (1958) and This Sporting Life (1963) than such chic contemporary pictures as Georgy Girl and Blow-Up (both 1966).

London model Diana Scott (Julie Christie) becomes an overnight celebrity when she moves in with married TV commentator Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde), only to drift into movies and dead-end relationships with PR maven Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey) and Italian nobleman, Cesare (José de Villalonga).

Director John Schlesinger and Oscar-winning scenarist Frederic Raphael sought to shock with their discussion of promiscuity, homosexuality, infidelity and abortion. But The Wednesday Play on the BBC was then addressing similar issues with considerably more grit and insight. Indeed, there's a smug satisfaction about the cynicism and satire, which undermines potentially excruciating sequences like the suburban dinner party and the charity ball at which liggers and wannabes gorge themselves in the cause of famine relief.

Schlesinger's visual style is equally out of step with its trendy ambitions. Aping the nouvelle vague, he employs handheld camera, accelerated motion, freeze frames and jump cuts, but the Hollywood montage sequence chronicling Robert and Diana's social whirl feels like a relic from the 1930s. Moreover, the soundtrack is positively antediluvian in its avoidance of pop music.

It's as though Raphael and Schlesinger were attempting different things with the same story. The former seems content to set up celebrity clichés and caricatures solely for the amusement of knocking them down, while the latter takes a less sardonic approach by striving to show that this world of frivolity and exploitation actually damages those who can't hack its excesses and cruelties. Yet, even though the Oscar-winning Christie and the bored-looking Bogarde are ultimately casualties of the spiritedly amoral Harvey's PR machine, it's hard to feel much pity for them.