Battleground (1949)

Wings is my favorite war silent this side of The General, so it was about time I saw another William Wellman war flick. This came more than 20 years later -- later than anything else I've seen from Wellman, in fact -- but it still seemed likely to work for me. Even if few people in '49 wanted to see more about WWII.

The titular ground is that of the Battle of the Bulge, specifically during the Siege of Bastogne in Belgium, which places it in December 1944. It actually takes a while for any violence to turn up, and a lot of that is aerial bombing, which doesn't leave much room for honest-to-goodness battle with the focal characters, the 101st Airborne Division of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment. As war movies go, it has a low body count.

Wild Boys of the Road (1933)

Usually, when a DVD contains two feature films, I watch only the more popular one. In this case, the two films together run less than 150 minutes, and there are no extras to take up more time. Besides, WBotR has a solid IMDb rating in its own right, just a little below the other William Wellman '33 hit, Heroes for Sale.

Gas-siphoning high school pals Tommy and Eddie seem to be high on life, until they find out that their parents aren't making ends meet. They drop out and travel the country to look for employment, which isn't easy during the Depression. When they're not stowing away on freight trains, they're usually taking up residence with other teens in a place that was not meant for habitation. Their closest new acquaintance is Sally, who disguises herself as a boy.

Heroes for Sale (1933)

When you think of Hollywood fare in the early '30s, you're likely to think of musicals, romantic comedies, gangster flicks, and/or horrors. But a handful of dramas from that time rate a mention to this day, and for the most part, they do not pull punches. They mean to reflect a dreary era.

This story begins in World War I, where U.S. soldier Tom (Richard Barthelmess) nearly dies in battle. He comes home a morphine addict, and his mom dies while he's in an asylum. Things start to look up after he and neighbor Ruth (Loretta Young) fall in love and he finds success in the laundry business, but he hasn't counted on the company falling into less scrupulous hands, costing lots of jobs. And that's before the stock market crash....

Nothing Sacred (1937)

Ah, romantic comedies, possibly the biggest entertainment gambles I take. Those from the '30s may be my biggest of all, equally likely to live up to their reputation as classics or fall flat from severe dating. Still a better track record than popular modern comedies for me.

I probably should have noted in advance that director William Wellman is much better known for serious fare. You might well have assumed from the title that this movie would be serious too, and the premises do have a bit of darkness to them: A woman (Carole Lombard) diagnosed with radium poisoning gets a reporter's (Fredric March) seemingly sympathetic attention, followed by the general public's. In truth, according to the cynical reporter as the apparent main point, various people are just capitalizing on the sob story and won't remember her long. The comic part? She just discovered it was a drunken misdiagnosis but wants to use her celebrity status to leave her podunk town for NYC for a while. Not so easy to enjoy when she has to figure out how to escape the expectation of imminent death without angering millions and dragging the beloved reporter down with her.