What Should Have Won, Part II: The 1940s

We’re in decade two of our revisionist look at the Oscars. A reminder of the rules: I can only choose films that were nominated for at least one Oscar that year (although it doesn’t have to be for Best Picture), and no foreign films are eligible.

Still with me? Okay, let’s proceed:

1940

What film won Best Picture: Rebecca
What film should have won: The Grapes of Wrath/The Philadelphia Story

1940 was a tough year to make a Best Picture choice. At least five of the nominated films were legitimate contenders and have become classics. While the Academy chose Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (the only Hitchcock film to win Best Picture, but since the producer picks up the Best Picture Oscar David O. Selznick won for the second year in a row), the New York Film Critics Circle went with John Ford’s film of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. But how can you choose between that and George Cukor’s elegant adaptation of Phillip Barry’s effortlessly sophisticated The Philadelphia Story, with a dream cast including Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant? You can’t, obviously, so I’m calling it a tie. There will be more ties as we go along.

1941

What film won Best Picture: How Green Was My Valley
What film should have won: Citizen Kane

1941 is pretty universally considered the greatest injustice in the history of the Academy Awards. While Citizen Kane is thought by almost everyone to be the greatest film of all time, the fact is that, as Andrew Sarris has noted, How Green Was My Valley is the greatest film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar (if you don’t count Sunrise, which technically didn’t win Best Picture). Nonetheless, I’m going with Orson Welles.

1942

What film won Best Picture: Mrs. Miniver
What film should have won: The Magnificent Ambersons

The Oscar went to William Wyler’s propaganda film about the stiff upper lip the Brits were keeping in the face of the Nazi onslaught, and the New York Film Critics went with another such film, Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve. But it’s clear that the best film of the year, even if its truncated form, is The Magnificent Ambersons, the Orson Welles masterpiece about the decline and fall of a once-proud American family. The biggest shame since the film was butchered by RKO is that it is still not available on DVD in America.

1943

What film won Best Picture: Casablanca
What film should have won: Casablanca

This year the Academy got it right: while the New York Film Critics shut out Michael Curtiz’s WWII epic entirely (opting instead for Watch on the Rhine), but the Oscar for Best Picture went to Warner Bros. romantic saga of star-crossed lovers in the deserts of North Africa. But shockingly, one of the greatest casts ever assembled for a Hollywood film was shut out altogether – and Ingrid Bergman wasn’t even nominated for Best Actress for her work on the film (she did get a nomination that year, but for another film entirely – For Whom The Bell Tolls). It’s too bad that the Academy can’t do what they sometimes do at Cannes, and give an award to the entire cast.

1944

What film won Best Picture: Going My Way
What film should have won: Double Indemnity

This is another incomprehensible injustice perpetrated by the Academy. While Leo McCarey’s feel-good piece of Catholic schmaltz won both the Best Picture Oscar and the award from the New York Film Critics, it’s blatantly obvious in retrospect that the best film that year was Billy Wilder’s prototypical film noir, Double Indemnity. Incredibly, the film was totally shut out at the Oscars – director Billy Wilder, writers Wilder and Raymond Chandler, cinematographer John Seitz and actress Barbara Stanwyck all lost in their respective categories – and Fred MacMurray wasn’t even nominated in his. The Academy seemed to realize that they blew it this year, because they made it up to Wilder the next year, the way they made it up to Jimmy Stewart for not giving him the Oscar for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington by giving him the award for The Philadelphia Story the next year. If Double Indemnity had any real competition for the Best Picture Oscar, it should have come from the Preston Sturges classic The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, but with Sturges gone from the studio by then (and not on the best of terms) Paramount wasn’t in much of a mood to promote him for an award.

1945

What film won Best Picture: The Lost Weekend
What film should have won: They Were Expendable

As I’ve said, the Academy made it up to Billy Wilder for the Double Indemnity debacle by giving him Best Picture for his harrowing portrayal of an alcoholic, The Lost Weekend. But had I been voting I would have given the award to a film that wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture that year (in fact, it only got two nominations – for Sound Recording and Special Effects): John Ford’s They Were Expendable. Shot while the war was still being fought, released after it was over, it was a film that was easy to neglect in the months after the surrender of the Japanese, but in retrospect it’s one of John Ford’s finest and most heartfelt films.

1946

What film won Best Picture: The Best Years of Our Lives
What film should have won: Notorious

It was probably inevitable that William Wyler’s bloated paean to returning vets should win the Best Picture Oscar the year after the war ended (it won the award from the New York Film Critics as well), but I would prefer to go with a very different film – Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Not only a suspense film but arguably the greatest love story Hitchcock ever filmed, to me it represents the zenith of Hollywood filmmaking in this era. Ben Hecht’s script, the performances of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and Hitchcock’s direction all combine to make one of the greatest film ever to come out of Hollywood. And you know what the amazing thing is? Neither the film nor any of the people I just mentioned (with the exception of Hecht) were even nominated for Oscars that year.

1947

What film won Best Picture: Gentleman’s Agreement
What film should have won: Monsieur Verdoux

Just as The Best Years of Our Lives, with its focus on the lives of returning veterans, was the natural choice in 1946, the following year saw Elia Kazan’s hymn to religious tolerance, Gentleman’s Agreement, take home the Oscar. But if you’ve seen it lately you’ll notice that while it’s well intended it doesn’t wear particularly well: it’s all too slick, too mannered for its incendiary subject matter. I would have given the Oscar to a film that, while similarly flawed, had the virtue of telling the postwar audience something they weren’t prepared to hear – Charlie Chaplin’s sardonic comedy of murders, Monsieur Verdoux. Just the notion of making an analogy between serial killing and war was probably too much for triumphant Americans, bracing for a Cold War with the Russians, to deal with at the time, but even though it may be flawed in some serious ways, the message of the film is more pertinent now than ever.

1948

What film won Best Picture: Hamlet
What film should have won: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Olivier’s Freudian adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy took home the Oscar, but I think the New York Film Critics got it right when they awarded their Best Film to John Huston’s masterpiece The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In the prosperity of the postwar era, was anyone prepared to accept Huston’s unsparing depiction of the destructive effects of human greed? Not bloody likely. But there’s no question that Olivier’s reductive Shakespeare pales besides Huston’s harrowing portrayal of what men will do to each other, and to themselves, for riches.

1949

What film won Best Picture: All The King’s Men
What film should have won: Battleground

The Academy and the New York Film Critics agreed on the merits of Robert Rossen’s adaptation of the Robert Penn Warren novel, but Rossen didn’t win either for writing or directing (those awards went to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives). But I would have given the Oscar to a far different film – William Wellman’s unsparing depiction of the Battle of the Bulge, Battleground. Maybe it came out when the audience was tired of war films, but after almost 60 years it holds up as one of the best portrayals of World War II by the generation that fought it.

That’s all for the 1940s. In a few days I’ll move on to the 1950s.

Tom Moran