What Should Have Won, Part I: The 1930s

Since the Academy Awards are this month, I thought I would spend February hosting a little experiment.

What kind of experiment, do you ask?

Well, pretty much everyone knows that the Motion Picture Academy almost always chooses the wrong film to win the Best Picture Oscar. You can probably think of about a dozen examples at random. So what I thought I would do is spend this month going through the Oscars decade by decade (starting in 1934, the first year that the Oscars were given out for films made in a single year) and choose what I think should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year.

First the rules: in order to win Best Picture the film has to have been nominated for an Oscar that year in at least one category (not necessarily Best Picture). Ironically, some classic films were not nominated for a single Academy Award: City Lights, Modern Times, A Face in the Crowd, Touch of Evil and Mean Streets leap to mind.

Also, to simplify things, I’m not going to consider foreign films. Only American-made films qualify for an Oscar.

Have we got the rules straight? Good.

We’ll start off with the 1930s:

1934

What film won Best Picture: It Happened One Night
What film should have won: The Gay Divorcee

Frank Capra’s film won Best Picture and Capra won the first of three best Director Oscars (and in a five-year period, something no other director has equaled) for his prototypical screwball comedy, It Happened One Night. But if I had been around and voting, I think I would have given the Oscar to the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical The Gay Divorcee. Musicals almost never win Best Picture (and when they do, it’s usually the wrong ones), but you have to think that Academy voters might have been swayed by the fact that Capra had utterly humiliated himself the year before by rushing up to the stage when presenter Will Rogers yelled out, “Come and get it, Frank!” only to realize when he was halfway to the stage that he meant Frank Lloyd, the director of the now-unwatchable Cavalcade. Ironically, Astaire-Rogers musicals made in the following two years are arguably better than The Gay Divorcee, but it’s all about timing. I might have been persuaded to give it to The Thin Man, had the filmmakers only cut the first ten minutes from the film and opened the story where the book opens, with the speakeasy scene. Those ten wretched minutes, in my opinion, cost them an Oscar.

1935

What film won Best Picture: Mutiny on the Bounty
What film should have won: Mutiny on the Bounty

This is one of the few times that the Academy got it right. Frank Lloyd’s seafaring epic, with two great performances by Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, was the clear first choice. Out of the dozen films nominated for Best Picture (and some of them are great films, such as Top Hat, Captain Blood and David O. Selznick’s adaptation of David Copperfield), this is the one I would most want to see again. By the way, I think the Academy should go back to the idea of having a dozen films nominated for Best Picture.

1936

What film won Best Picture: The Great Ziegfeld
What film should have won: Fury

Once again Selznick had an adaptation of a Dickens classic up for Best Picture (this time it was A Tale of Two Cities), and other Best Picture nominees included Libeled Lady, San Francisco and Romeo and Juliet. And while I’m tempted to go with several films, including Swing Time and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, I think I would opt for Fritz Lang’s Fury – one of the most atypically savage films ever to be released by MGM. A harrowing tale of a man falsely accused and almost lynched for a crime he didn’t commit, it has a shattering performance by Spencer Tracy as a man who’s lost everything except the desire for vengeance. Tracy was nominated that year, but not for Fury – his relatively benign Catholic priest in San Francisco earned him a nomination, but not the Oscar. Not that year, anyway. Ironically, a film I would have seriously considered for Best Picture (Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times) wasn’t even nominated for a single Oscar. I guess the Academy didn’t want to take a chance on silent pictures coming back.

1937

What film won Best Picture: The Life of Emile Zola
What film should have won: The Awful Truth

I’ll tell you a guilty secret: I’m a big fan of Warner Bros. biopics of the 1930s and 40s. Seriously – you put me in front of a TV set and put on Dispatch from Reuters and I’m in heaven. And Paul Muni hamming it up under a big bushy beard as the great French naturalist novelist is just magnificent. So why am I choosing The Awful Truth over The Life of Emile Zola? I know the Academy likes to choose Big Important Films on Big Important Topics to win Best Picture, but the fact is that sometimes it’s the smaller films that wear better, and The Awful Truth is a joy to behold. It’s the kind of sophisticated romantic comedy that they just don’t make anymore – maybe they took this kind of film for granted at the time, but they don’t make them like this anymore.

1938

What film won Best Picture: You Can’t Take It With You
What film should have won: The Adventures of Robin Hood

Capra won his second Best Picture Oscar for his adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart comedy about a house full of misfits who live the way they want to live, but the clear first choice (barring Renoir’s Grand Illusion, which received an unusual Best Picture nomination for a foreign language film) was the magnificent The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Errol Flynn as the prince of thieves cutting a colorful swath through Sherwood Forest. Great action, superb sword fighting (you can’t beat Flynn and Basil Rathbone in a sword fight) arguably the best score in the history of Hollywood (by Erich Wolfgang Korngold) and three-strip Technicolor used as it’s never been used before or since. It’s one of the most entertaining films ever, and it should have won.

1939

What film won Best Picture: Gone With the Wind
What film should have won: Gone With the Wind

1939 is universally regarded as the greatest year in the history of Hollywood, and when you look at the films nominated for Oscars that year you have to agree. The list of films released that year is dazzling – there had to have been at least half a dozen films that in any other year would have deserved to win Best Picture. But this is one of those years when the conventional wisdom was right – Gone With the Wind was the culmination of 30s filmmaking, and deserved all the Oscars it won.

In a few days I’ll take on the films from the 1940s.

Tom Moran