When I think of classics from Hollywood’s Golden Age that Oscar failed to recognize, I’m not talking about films that like The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life, modest hits that were nominated for Best Picture Oscars but failed to win the top prizes, but films that weren’t even nominated for those awards.

The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life have been fan favorites for decades to the point where there are many who wonder how they could have lost the Best Picture Oscar to the once unassailable Gone with the Wind and The Best Years of Our Lives, respectively.

I’m also not talking about foreign films which were held back by their countries of origin such as 1939’s The Rules of the Game which was banned in Nazi-occupied France or 1953’s Tokyo Story held back from U.S. release by Japan because they thought its director, Yasujiro Ozu’s films were too Japanese, which is ironic since his inspirations were American populists John Ford and Leo McCarey.

The ten films listed here were not only ignored by Oscar voters, but for the most part by audiences of their day as well. They were rediscovered in revival theaters, on television, and in subsequent home video releases.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) , directed by Carol Theodor Dreyer

Long recognized as one of the greatest films of all time, Dreyer’s classic silent film was Oscar eligible for the 1928/29 awards but was completely ignored in a year when the Oscar went to its worst winner to date, the clunky musical, Broadway Melody at the dawn of sound. Based completely on the records of the trial of the 15th Century French saint, the film is renown for its heavy reliance on close-ups of its cast none of whom wore makeup. Stage star Maria Falconetti was 35 when she played the 19-year-old martyr, a performance that many consider the greatest ever captured on film.

DINNER AT EIGHT (1933) , directed by George Cukor

Cukor’s film version of the hit Broadway play was hugely successful but suffered in compassion to MGM’s all-star-cast film of Grand Hotel which won the Best Picture Oscar the year before. Ironically, Dinner at Eight has long been considered the superior film as well it should. Marie Dressler as a retired musical comedy star, John Barrymore as a has-been stage and film star, Jean Harlow as the dingbat wife of gauche businessman Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore as a dying ship magnate, Billie Burke as his supercilious wife, and Lee Tracy as John Barrymore’s agent head the superlative cast.

SHOW BOAT (1936) , directed by James Whale

Universal gave up its intended Flo Ziegfeld biography, The Great Ziegfeld to MGM to make this, the second and best of three film versions to date of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical, originally presented on Broadway by Ziegfeld. Long suppressed by MGM’s 1952 remake, this one re-emerged in the 1970s to rapturous effect. Irene Dunne who played the lead in the show’s first touring company leads the cast with Allan Jones, Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel, and Helen Westcott in other principal roles, all of which they had previously played on stage.

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937) , directed by Leo McCarey

When Leo McCarey won his 1937 Oscar for The Awful Truth he famously said, “thanks but you gave it to for the wrong film.” This is the film he was referring to, made after the passage of Social Security but before benefits were provided. Victor Moore plays an elderly man who, unable to find work, is having his home foreclosed on. He, and his homemaker wife, Beulah Bondi, must be split up as several of their children have room for one of them, but none has room for both. Fantastic acting all around, especially by Bondi and Fay Bainter as her put-upon daughter-in-law. Ozu’s Tokyo Story was heavily influenced by it.

HOLIDAY (1938) , directed by George Cukor

A notorious flop in its day, this has been a beloved classic for decades since. A previous 1930 version was successful, but deep into the Depression, audiences were not in sympathy with Cary Grant’s character of a young man who wants to take time off from working while he’s young instead of in his old age. Ironically, in today’s world when there are more jobs available than out-of-work citizens are applying for, Grant’s character may be back in controversy. Nevertheless, the performances of Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Lew Ayres, Doris Nolan, Henry Kolker, Jean Dixon, Edward Everett Horton, Binnie Barnes, and Henry Daniell.

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940) , directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Based on a Hungarian play, this now perennial Christmas favorite was probably doomed for Oscar consideration from its release in January, the month after Christmas instead of before the holiday season in which it takes place. Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart as the co-workers who don’t know they’re secret pen pals and Frank Morgan as their boss deliver Oscar-caliber performances but the only one nominated that year was Stewart who won for his third-billed role in The Philadelphia Story. The film was remade as In the Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942) , directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Critics and audiences, for the most part, were not amused by this comedy about Nazis in Poland as World War II raged on, but Oscar voters did single out its musical score for nomination. Despite having nominating Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, a comic take on Hitler, for five Oscars including Best Actor. The actors’ branch failed to nominate any of Lubitsch’s actors, not even Carole Lombard in what has become to be considered her greatest role, one she completed shortly before her death returning from a U.S. Bonds tour. Almost as good are Jack Benny, Felix Bressart, and Sig Ruman.

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (1955) , directed by Douglas Sirk

Sirk’s 1950s films for Universal were not especially liked by the critics but they were by audiences and Oscar voters who gave major nominations to Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life but completely ignored this one that has long been a favorite of other filmmakers. Both Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Todd Haynes’ 2002 film, Far from Heaven were heavily influenced by the May-December romance of widowed Jane Wyman and her hunky gardener, Rock Hudson.

THE SEARCHERS (1956) , directed by John Ford

Long considered the greatest western ever made, Ford’s epic has inspired such disparate films as Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, and the original Star Wars. Unfortunately, it was made at a time when westerns were a television mainstay and audiences weren’t interested in going out to one unless it offered something different such as the modern Giant and the Quaker Friendly Persuasion. John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, and Natalie Wood head the cast. Ford’s last great film, The Last Hurrah, was similarly ignored two years later.

VERTIGO (1958) , directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar did nominate Hitchcock’s classic film of paranoia for its Art Direction and Sound, but neither the film, Hitchcock himself, nor James Stewart in one of his greatest performances, were nominated. Critics of the day for the most part didn’t understand it and neither did audiences. It wasn’t until 2012 that the film achieved its rightful place as one the all-time greats when it replaced Citizen Kane as the number one film on Sight and Sound’s critics’ polls of the greatest films of all time besting not only Citizen Kane, but Tokyo Story and The Rules of the Game as well.