Good Earth

As the devoted wife of a farmer who goes from extreme poverty to great wealth, Luise Rainer won the Best Actress Oscar (her second in a row) in this adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about rural China in the early 1900s. The film, which was nominated for Best Picture, was producer Irving Thalberg's final one. Karl Freund's cinematography also took home an Oscar.