When motion picture exhibitors first started tracking the box office draw of movie stars in 1930, the first performer to be crowned No. 1 was not one of Hollywood’s powerful leading men or glamorous leading ladies, but a dowdy old lady with the face of a bulldog, an unlikely has-been with enormous talent and a heart of gold she couldn’t hide if she tried – the venerable Marie Dressler.

Dressler was either 59 or 64, depending on which source you believe, when her old friend, screenwriter Frances Marion, called her back to Hollywood to star in the 1927 silent comedy, The Callahans and the Murphys with Polly Moran, who would become a frequent co-star. Several supporting roles later she all but stole 1930’s Anna Christie from the great Greta Garbo playing waterfront hag Marthy. Soon after, she teamed with Wallace Beery to play another waterfront hag as the beloved Min in Min and Bill,which established the box office draw which she maintained until her death in 1934. It also won her an Academy Award as Best Actress for the Oscar year 1930/31.

Until now, the only Dressler vehicles available on DVD have been Anna Christie and 1933’s Dinner at Eight, one of the first, and still the grandest, all-star-cast entertainments in which she is the indisputable star among stars that also include John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Billie Burke and a host of others in the screen adaptation of the famed George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber play. Way down in the cast list is May Robson, playing Billie Burke’s cook, who became a star in her own right at the age of 75 when MGM refused to loan Dressler out to Columbia to play Apple Annie in Frank Capra’s Depression hit, Lady for a Day.

Warner Bros. launched its archive program earlier this year, in which consumers could order on-demand DVDs made of films deemed too commercially risky to have a regular DVD release. Initially only available on the Warner Bros. website, these films are starting to become available at Amazon, TCM/Movies Unlimited and other retailers.

Among the first releases were two of Dressler’s best, 1932’s Emma, which brought her a second Oscar nomination,and 1933’s Tugboat Annie. The second wave of releases brought out Min and Bill and two Dressler-Polly Moran comedies from 1931, Politics and Reducing.

Though she won her Oscar for the rough and tumble Min and Bill in which she raises an abandoned girl whose prostitute mother tries to re-claim her years later, many consider Emma to be her finest work.

In that film, an endearing mix of broad comedy and high drama, she plays a devoted nanny whose employer, Jean Hersholt, marries her toward the end of his life, then dies suddenly leaving all his money to her. Only one of the four children she raised, wonderfully played by Richard Cromwell, stands by her while the others, including Myrna Loy, take her to court. More tragedy and tears follow until the film comes to its lovely bittersweet ending.

Tugboat Annie, in which she is reunited with Wallace Beery,is closer in tone to Min and Bill as it tells the tale of a lady tugboat captain whose son becomes a respected doctor. Robert Young and Maureen O’Sullivan co-star.

In the uproarious Reducing she packs up her brood and moves to Manhattan to help out health salon owner sister Moran, which leads to plenty of misunderstandings and a reconciliation on Thanksgiving Day. In Politics, Moran has aspirations of becoming the town’s first woman mayor but Dressler is drafted by acclamation by the local women’s group and wins the election despite the shenanigans of the local machine.

In 2008, Dressler became one of four Canadian-born stars commemorated on a Canadian stamp honoring the achievements of Canadians in Hollywood. The others were Norma Shearer, Chief Dan George and Raymond Burr.

After her death from cancer in 1934 the mantle of No. 1 star fell to another unlikely recipient, child star Shirley Temple.

Temple was one of several child stars popular in the 1930s along with others such as Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney, all three of whom can be seen together in the Warner Archive release The Devil Is a Sissy.

Other child stars such as Margaret O’Brien, Roddy McDowall and Peggy Ann Garner were popular throughout the 1940s while Natalie Wood, Bobby Driscoll and Dean Stockwell had stellar careers as child actors that bean began in the mid-1940s and lasting through the early 1950s.

Two second-generation child stars emerged in the late 1950s to great acclaim. Hayley Mills, the daughter of John Mills, in fact, won the last of the juvenile Oscars awarded child actors from time to time for essaying the title role in 1960’s Pollyanna. David Ladd, Alan Ladd’s son, won several awards for his performance in 1958’s Proud Rebel, which he all but stole from the elder Ladd and the formidable Olivia de Havilland.

While Hayley Mills was making the Walt Disney studios richer by the minute with Pollyanna, David Ladd was bringing in less coin but tugging even harder at audiences’ heartstrings with A Dog of Flanders.

Ouida’s 1852 short story has been filmed many times over the years – first as a silent, most recently in a Japanese adaptation – but never as breathtakingly lovely as here. After years of being available only in washed-out pan-and-scan bootleg prints, Koch Entertainment has lovingly restored the film to its widescreen glory.

Set in Holland and Belgium when they were one country, updated to 1900, the film is about a twelve-year-old impoverished lad who lives alone with his elderly grandfather in a rented hut. The pair makes its living by carting milk from local farmers to Antwerp for sale to the local merchants and housewives. One day they find a badly-abused dog left to die on the side of the road, bring it home and nurture it back to health.

The dog, however, though a major character, is, despite the title, not the focus of the film, which is on the boy’s aspirations to become a painter in the tradition of local legend Peter Paul Reubens.

Ladd, who later became one of Hollywood’s most successful producers, was a natural child actor. He is matched by Donald Crisp, then past 80, as his beloved grandfather and Theodore Bikel as the prickly artist who may or may not help him. The dog is played by the same canine who stole hearts in the title role of Disney’s Old Yeller three years earlier.

Koch Entertainment has also released the poignant 1977 made-for-TV movie Mary White about the last year in the life of a girl who died too young, played by Kathleen Beller. Ed Flanders plays her journalist father from whose point of view the story is told. Fionnula Flanagan plays her mother and Tim Matheson her brother.

Another real life story about life and death, though a far bleaker tale, is Winter of Frozen Dreams about the sordid killings of two men by brilliant science student by day/notorious prostitute by night Thora Birch in Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1970s. The unique location makes it interesting and the performances of Birch, Keith Carradine and Brendan Sexton III are certainly compelling, but the outcome is never in doubt.

Criterion has given a sparkling transfer to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 avant-garde thriller Made in U.S.A. One of the strangest films to come of out the French New Wave, the film is lovely to look at but dramatically uneven. For seemingly no reason other than to be cute, the characters are named after Hollywood luminaries such as Don Siegel and Richard Widmark and politicians of the day such as Robert McNamara. Godard’s wife Anna Karina and Truffaut favorite Jean-Pierre Leaud star with a cameo by Marianne Faithful as herself.

Available now in Region 2, and hopefully soon in Region 1, Jean-Marc Vallee’s The Young Victoria is a literate costume drama that is beautifully acted by Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend as the young queen and her eventual consort, Prince Albert. Paul Bettany as her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, Miranda Richardson as Victoria’s overbearing mother, Jim Broadbent as her uncle and predecessor William IV, and Harriet Walter as his wife Queen Adelaide are among the many players bringing sass and class to the supporting ranks.

Walter is an actress whose name I was not familiar with until a few months ago, but who now seems to be popping up all over the place. I first encountered her at the Tonys where she was nominated as Best Featured Actress for the revival of Mary Stuart. She played Queen Elizabeth, but was confused by those in charge of the TV cameras with Janet McTeer, nominated as Best Actress, who played the title role.

Since then I’ve caught up with her as the star of three Dorothy L. Sayers murder mysteries from 1987: Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, which comprise the Dorothy L. Sayers Mysteries DVD collection. More recently she gave a quite wonderful performance as the headmistress in the Agatha Christie: Poirot mystery Cat Among the Pigeons opposite David Suchet, which has just been released on DVD as part of Agatha Christie: Poirot Move Collection 4.

She is also one of the stars of the recently launched Law & Order: UK and has a featured role in the current big screen presentation Cheri. The busy actress, who is only 59, could emerge as the next Judi Dench. When she does, remember where you heard it from first!

-Peter J. Patrick (July 21, 2009)