griggs's - Oscar-winning films: Best Picture List

The film follows two English families through love, loss and change during the turbulent period of 1899-1933. From the Boer War through Queen Victoria's death, World War I and the Depression, the upper-class Marryots and working-class Bridges never lose hope.

Ruined aristocrat John Barry more. Terminally ill clerk Lionel Barrymore. Ruthless tycoon Wallace Beery. Scheming stenographer Joan Crawford. And disillusioned ballerina Greta Garbo. Teaming them was a masterstroke whose success fostered more star-packed extravaganzas.

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When the government opens up the Oklahoma territory for settlement, restless Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) claims a plot of the free land for himself and moves his family there from Wichita.

A newspaperman, lawyer, and just about everything else, Cravat soon becomes a leading citizen of the boom town of Osage. Once the town is established, however, he begins to feel confined once again, and heads for the Cherokee Strip, leaving his family behind. During this and other absences, his wife Sabra (Irene Dunne) must learn to take care of herself and soon becomes prominent in her own right.

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Unlike most "message" films which date themselves almost immediately, Lewis Milestone's low-key unpolished and deeply-felt screen adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque anti-war novel has lost little of its original impact.

Years after its release it was still being banned in countries mobilizing for war.
The plot follows a group of young German recruits in World War I through their passage from idealism to disillusionment. As the central character Paul Baumer declares, "We live in the trenches and we fight. We try not to be killed - that's all". All Quiet is an anthology of now famous scenes: Ayres trapped in a shell crater with a man he has killed; the first meeting of the recruits and the veterans; infantrymen being mowed down to machine-gun visual rhythms; a moonlight swim with French farm girls; Ayres' pacifist speech to his astonished schoolmates; and the final shot of the soldier's hand reaching for a fatal butterfly.

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Hank (Bessie Love) and Queenie (Anita Page) Mahoney, a vaudeville act, come to Broadway, where their friend Eddie Kerns (Charles King) needs them for his number in one of Francis Zanfield's (Eddie Kane)'s shows.

Eddie was in love with Hank, but when he meets Queenie, he falls in love to her, but she is courted by Jock Warriner (Kenneth Thomson), a member of the New Yorker high society. It takes a while till Queenie recognizes, that she is for Jock nothing more than a toy, and it also takes a while till Hank recognizes that Eddie is in love with Queenie.

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Hometown best friends Jack (Charles "Buddy" Rogers) and David (Richard Arlen) compete for the affection of a gorgeous dame (Jobyna Ralston), though Jack doesn't realise that girl next door Mary Preston (Clara Bow) has eyes for him as well.

But World War I is soon upon them, so the boys are off to France to fight against the Germans. Meanwhile, Mary follows Jack into enemy lines as a nurse.