Success or Snub? How Green Was My Valley (14th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

 To see part 1, click here.

Overture~Max Steiner - Sergeant York

Oh boy, am I excited for this one. The 14th Academy Awards are often regarded as one of the absolute worst snubs in the history of the institution and of the Academy giving the award away for studio politics rather than actual artistic merit. The film that How Green Was My Valley beat makes this one of the most ludicrous, asinine and just flat-out wrong decisions in the Academy’s history.

We concluded the last installment talking about Walt Disney’s legendary output in the early 40s. His studio released two of the greatest movies ever made in a single year in 1940; this year they followed up with Dumbo, the iconic story of the large-eared elephant who joins the circus. While it’s a great and enjoyable movie, it definitely sticks out as the weakest movie of Disney’s initial lineup. Disney’s first three movies (and fifth one) were all considerable groundbreakers but Dumbo really isn’t. Despite this, however, it’s still a fun animated adventure with a bizarre highlight in the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence.

But that’s not the movie we’re talking about today.

Universal Studios also released a great monster movie that year in the form of The Wolf Man. We’ve talked previously about how horror is a genre that has never been (and still isn’t) respected by the Academy and this is the best horror film that was made since Bride of Frankenstein (1935), acting as a great cautionary tale of parents refusing to listen to their children’s problems in favor of their own prestige. Along with Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolf Man was one of the big three horror icons of the Golden Age of Horror. It may not have been Best Picture worthy but it was still one of the best films of that year and Lon Chaney Jr.’s tragic portrayal of Lawrence Talbot still gets the pathos going and should’ve warranted at least a nomination for the Oscar for Best Actor.

But that’s not the movie we’re talking about today.

There was also Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe. This is the lesser-known sister film to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which, as mentioned previously, was one of the most controversial movies at the time. Meet John Doe pushes the envelope even further as it shows more of the corruption that occurs on the grassroots level and how average people can be used by these political machines to ferment society’s ills. It’s a fun watch that shows the average people going up against the political boss and it really keeps you hooked and wondering how everyone’s going to beat the bad guys in the end. Plus, the finale is probably the best-looking scene that Capra ever shot and is almost on par with Hitchcock in how hard your heart will beat while it slowly approaches its conclusion.

But that’s not the movie we’re talking about today.

Speaking of Hitchcock, in 1941 the Master of Suspense released Suspicion, a bit more of a low-budget tale coming off of Rebecca (1940) and Foreign Correspondent (1940). The movie revolves around Lina (Joan Fontaine) who marries a rich playboy named Johnnie (Cary Grant) only to discover that he’s a habitual liar, gambler and might be planning on killing her. While the film is very suspenseful, it has a very cheap and weak payoff to the story that feels like kind of a letdown compared to how good the buildup is. One would hope Hitchcock would be beyond this by now but, regardless, the movie is pretty good until the last 5 minutes. Joan Fontaine also won the Oscar for Best Actress. This makes Suspicion, along with Rebecca, one of only three movies that Hitchcock directed to ever win an Oscar (the third being when The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) won the Oscar for Best Song for "Que Sera Sera").

But that’s not the movie we’re talking about today.

The highest grossing movie of that year, and one of the big contenders at the Oscars, was Sergeant York, a biopic based on the life of the World War I hero, Alvin York (Gary Cooper), who won the Medal of Honor for capturing over 100 Germans almost single-handedly with a pistol (that’s not a Hollywood fantasy, that really happened). Gary Cooper would go on to win the Oscar for Best Leading Actor for this role which… we’ll get to that in a minute but the movie is surprisingly good. I know I just complained about how old-school biopics tend to not have 3-act structures and this leads to them aging like milk but Sergeant York avoids this trap just by virtue of the fact that Alvin York’s life (which I’m sure is not represented in a historically accurate manner at all) lends itself well to a movie. When it starts, he’s the town loser that everyone makes fun of and by the end of the film, he becomes an American hero.

Sergeant York also has a bit of an interesting historiography surrounding it. The movie was released in September 1941 and just three short months later, while it was still in theaters, Imperial Japanese planes attacked the United States base in Pearl Harbor, dragging the country into World War II. Thus, Sergeant York was unintentionally transformed into a propaganda film to drum up support for the U.S. military. There’s stories of audience members watching the movie and being so inspired by it that they went to join the Army immediately after leaving the theater. You’d think that considering how these awards took place after the US joined the war, this would’ve been the winner but apparently not.

But that’s not the movie we’re talking about today.

One of the best and most influential movies that year was The Maltese Falcon, the movie that pioneered the film noir, launched Humphrey Bogart’s career (who the American Film Institute ranked as the greatest movie star ever) and is now regarded as one of the greatest crime thrillers ever made. Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is a private investigator who is hired by the mysterious Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) to discover the murderer of her sister. From there, Spade gets roped into a massive conspiracy hunting for a lost artifact called the Maltese Falcon all while walking through a city with heavy shadows that makes everyone look more dangerous, mysterious and, most importantly, cool.

The film noir is a genre that can be somewhat hard to define and debates still rage about what really constitutes film noir and even what the first film noir was (some argue the roots of the genre go back to M (1931) and Little Caesar (1931) while others point to latter films like Fury (1936) and Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) as being the first true noirs). Most of the famous tropes of the genre were started here in The Maltese Falcon though. The cynical main character, the complex crime mystery, the femme fatale, the ruthless and murderous villains and, of course, the heavy shadows and stylized cinematography. Similar to how the 1930s were the decade of the musical after having been launched by The Broadway Melody (1929) and The Love Parade (1929), the 40s (and early 50s) became the Classic Age of American Noir, launched here by The Maltese Falcon.

But that’s not the movie we’re talking about today. No, the movie we’re talking about today is Citizen Kane.

Salaambo's Aria~Tony Bremner (comp.), Rosamond Illing (voc.)- Citizen Kane

Yes, that Citizen Kane. As in the Citizen Kane that is often regarded as the greatest movie ever made. As in the Citizen Kane that changed the art of cinema forever. As in the Citizen Kane that is so famous and ubiquitous for doing so that it’s become a turn of phrase to call other famous works “the Citizen Kane of [blank]” (e.g. The Beatles are considered the Citizen Kane of pop music, Super Mario Bros. (1985) is considered the Citizen Kane of video games etc.). As in the Citizen Kane that is literally the Citizen Kane of movies. As in the Citizen Kane that did not win the Oscar for Outstanding Motion Picture the year that it came out. Nor did it sweep the awards. Nor did it win any award except for the Oscar for Best Screenplay.

For the uninitiated, Citizen Kane is a very myopic undress of the American dream and the rich and powerful, centering around the fictional newspaper baron, Charles Foster Kane (Buddy Swan as a child, Orson Welles as an adult; Welles also directed and co-wrote the film). In a very clever framing device, the movie opens with Kane passing away of old age, muttering his last word, “Rosebud.” The whole world’s wondering what he meant by this so the tenacious reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) is hired to interview all the people who knew Kane in his life. From there, we slowly get to learn about Charles Kane, the good and the bad, alongside Thompson.

This synopsis alone is a good enough example to explain just how much Citizen Kane transformed cinema. While these slice-of-life stories were nothing new, this set-up adds so much more intrigue and unique filmmaking opportunities. For example, in previous films that were either biopics or biopic-esque, they just introduce you to the world and go through the motions of their lives and hope you find it interesting. By contrast, Citizen Kane has a great hook. We learn early on just what a big deal he is and how unusual and mysterious the word “Rosebud” is. So right away, we’re paying attention to the story because we also want to know what Rosebud means.

In addition, the movie also was a pioneer in the use of time dilation in filmmaking. Time dilation basically refers to when a movie presents a story out-of-order to make it more interesting (for modern examples, watch Pulp Fiction (1994) or Memento (2000)). While using time dilation wasn’t really a new thing, even for major Hollywood blockbusters, Citizen Kane has a bit more fun with it. For example, compare this to the musical drama, Maytime (1937). Maytime opens up with the elderly main character who tells some young children about her past. They question her and we then ripple back in time to discover how she became the way he did.

Citizen Kane plays around with time dilation a lot more by having multiple characters flashback to the past while being interviewed by Jerry Thompson. So instead of presenting Kane’s life as a cohesive whole, it’s presented in bits and pieces, each flashback exploring a different aspect of his personality. Depending on who’s remembering him, he was either a great man who built an empire out of nothing, a ruthless man who was monstrous and abusive to those around him or a sad and pathetic man who chased away all the people he loved. This makes Kane a much more complex character and invites the audience to pay attention because the film is so out-of-order that you need to stay riveted to follow it properly.

Citizen Kane also had a brand new and revolutionary style in its look. Much of the cinematography is shot from a lower angle, making Kane seem like a titanic and towering figure in most of the film. It also pioneered the use of shadows as well as actually showing the ceilings in shots, something that was highly unusual at the time, revolutionizing how sets were built from then on. The movie’s style changed so much that if you watch a movie that came out before Citizen Kane and a movie that came out after Citizen Kane, it’s almost a night-and-day difference. The aforementioned genre of film noir, in particular, seemed to take a lot from this film (the director of The Maltese Falcon, John Huston, cited Citizen Kane as a direct influence on his shooting style).

Welles also had a lot of fun with pace, speeding it up to a much more modern film pace. A film encompassing the entire life of someone like this wasn’t unusual in Hollywood, as we’ve looked at multiple 3-and-4-hour-long film epics. Citizen Kane, however, barely hits the 2-hour mark. How is this possible? By trimming all of the fat. One of the best scenes in the movie is the breakfast montage that details Kane’s deteriorating marriage to his first wife, Emily Norton Kane (Ruth Warren). Any other movie at the time would include this as a subplot to show them steadily getting on each other’s nerves before the inevitable divorce. Instead, we just see their marriage fall apart each morning at breakfast. You get the story, the emotion and understand it all within just 2 great minutes.

I could keep going on and on about how much Citizen Kane changed things, including a lot of things that you wouldn’t even think about. For example, Welles insisted on having several read-throughs with his actors before principal photography so they could have better performances (unheard of back then). Or the masterful and convincing make-up job that shows Kane at every age from 20 to 70. Or how it pioneered the use of montage to tell a story (see above).

The film has a legacy to it that can over-hype it to the modern moviegoer. Lord knows how ubiquitous it is to see some 12-year-old on social media logging on to talk about how they don’t really “get” the movie (I admittedly was once that 12-year-old). Personally, while I do love and respect the movie, I also acknowledge it’s not as infinitely rewatchable as some other phenomenal films. It’s very easy to overhype Citizen Kane in your head and come out feeling somewhat disappointed. However, its influence is still undeniable and, even if you don’t love it over 80 years later, you can still acknowledge its importance and just how much it changed for the medium.

Of course, this post isn’t about celebrating great cinema, it’s about criticizing the vapid establishment for not recognizing great cinema. And, for the record, this is not one of those things where it was a hidden gem that people only started acknowledging later; Citizen Kane was already being called the greatest movie ever made back when it came out. It was a big deal in 1941. So, how did it lose the award to a movie about an 8-year-old wandering around Wales for 2 hours?

We need to go into some backstory for this one. By the time he was 22 years old, Welles was already starting to make a name for himself. He founded the Mercury Theater performing group in 1937 and quickly gained renown for putting a brand new spin on classic plays in ways that audiences had never seen before (such as turning William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) into an indictment of contemporary fascism). He was also a mainstay actor on radio, gaining notoriety for his infamous radio play of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in 1939. A fresh-faced young actor in the prime of his life that everyone is talking about always means one thing: Hollywood wanted him and they wanted him bad.

Welles turned down numerous offers until RKO Pictures approached him with the mother of all sweetheart deals: complete creative control so long as RKO approved of the story, $100,000 up front ($1.8 million today) and 20% of all profits after the film broke $500,000. Welles, who had barely ever watched movies before, approached his new vocation with the utmost research and professionalism. He started watching every influential movie of note up to that point, taking particular influence from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Stagecoach (1939). From there, he combined everything he learned and had been tried out in the past 50 years of filmmaking to create something totally new and fresh. Most of the cast were newcomers from his old theater troupe and the crew were hand-picked as some of the best in the business.

A 26-year-old moving right on in and throwing his weight around in an unprecedented example of artistic control would be more than enough to rub the Academy crowd the wrong way, even if Welles was nothing but nice to them (and he wasn’t). In addition, the movie was also loosely based on the life of real news baron, William Randolph Hearst, who was still alive at the time. Hearst wasn’t particularly happy with the film portraying him as a ruthless monster who is obsessed with controlling how other people think and responded by starting a smear campaign about Welles’ alleged contempt for Hollywood elites, controlling them and telling them to think that Welles and his product deserve to go to Hell.

I would say that he was a man who didn’t understand irony but I think the truth is that he did and just didn’t care.

(I’m probably obligated to mention the famous Hollywood legend that Rosebud was allegedly Hearst’s pet name for his mistress’ genitals. If true, this was an even meaner mocking of Hearst by implying that Rosebud would be the last thing on his mind when he died. This story has never been confirmed, and probably never will, but if it is true, that makes this whole saga pretty hilarious.)

The only Oscar that Citizen Kane would win, as mentioned above, was the Oscar for Best Screenplay which Welles co-wrote with Herman J. Mankiewicz, who was much more of a Hollywood insider. Welles and Mankiewicz had a falling out over who deserved credit for the script as Welles tried to give Mankiewicz no credit, labeling him as a script doctor, and Mankiewicz sued to get his name credited as co-writer. This spat between the two led to a growing rumor that Mankiewicz was almost solely responsible for the script and Welles tried to rip him off. Due to Mankiewicz being part of the “in” crowd, this just fueled further anger at Welles and gave Mankiewicz the film’s sole Oscar win.

Of course, this battle between Mankiewicz and Welles was way overblown and almost certainly just some sort of professional disagreement. The common consensus today is that the two did co-write though who actually came up with the idea of Citizen Kane remains murky (Welles grew up disgusted by numerous news barons in the Chicago Political Machine that dominated his boyhood home while Mankiewicz had a personal ax to grind against Hearst after being thrown out of his social circle). However, it’s still part of the Hollywood narrative that all of Citizen Kane’s credit and genius truly belongs to Mankiewicz and Welles just got lucky. For some strange reason, this is a myth that refuses to die as it was the subject of Pauline Kael’s highly contested essay, Raising Kane (1971), and even the subject of a movie as recent as Mank (2020).

Needless to say, this is all a load of nonsense. While Mankiewicz’s contributions to the film shouldn’t be ignored and Welles may have stiffed him, this is a crystal clear example of a bunch of pretentious elites refusing to accept the fact that a maverick could actually change cinema instead of the formula that they’d been trying to perfect for 30 years. So they gave the award and prestige to John Ford who’d been around them ever since Hollywood was founded.

This hatred of Welles amongst Academy members got intense enough that every time his name was mentioned at the 14th Academy Awards ceremony, loud boos would start ringing out. This is the perfect example of the kind of situation that started this series to try to shine a light on how corrupt the Academy Awards are. Citizen Kane was something that should’ve swept the awards. At the very least, it’d be hard to argue against it deserving of the awards for Outstanding Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Leading Actor, Best Black-And-White Cinematography and Best Black-and-White Art Direction of that year. This was not a choice made based on artistic merit, it was one based on egos and studio politics.

This was such a notable snub that I didn’t even get the chance to point out some of the other interesting stuff that happened in this ceremony. For example, the race for Best Actress was a heated competition between Joan Fontaine in Suspicion, Bette Davis in The Little Foxes and Olivia de Havilland in Hold Back the Dawn. Or the fact that Dumbo’s famously heart-warming portrayal of motherhood “Baby Mine” lost the Oscar for Best Song to “The Last Time I Saw Paris” from Lady Be Good (which just seems like a ripoff of Maurice Chevalier’s “Paris, Stay the Same” from The Love Parade). Or how this was the first year to feature the Oscar for Best Documentary which went to Churchill’s Island, foretelling the early 40s trend for propaganda films to drum up support for World War II.

All this pales in comparison to the fact that Citizen Kane, the greatest movie of all time, the film that transformed cinema, the work of art that forced the American audience to examine whether or not the American dream is truly worth it, apparently wasn’t good enough to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Even if it lost to something as excellent as The Maltese Falcon, I’d still be calling this a snub. But losing to a movie as pointless and dull as How Green Was My Valley seals this as no contest. Giving How Green Was My Valley the Oscar for Best Outstanding Motion Picture of 1941 was an absolute…

SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1941:

• Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles)
• Dumbo (dir. Ben Sharpsteen)
• Here Comes Mr. Jordan (dir. Alexander Hall)
• Hold That Ghost (dir. Arthur Lubin)
• Meet John Doe (dir. Frank Capra)
• Road to Zanzibar (dir. Victor Schertzinger)
• Sergeant York (dir. Howard Hawks)
• The Maltese Falcon (dir. John Huston)
• The Wolf Man (dir. George Waggner)
• Ziegfeld Girl (dir. Robert Z. Leonard)

Favorite Heroes:

• Alvin York (Gary Cooper) (Sergeant York)
• Chuck Reardon and Fearless Hubert Frazier (Bing Crosby and Bob Hope) (Road to Zanzibar)
• Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) (The Wolf Man)
• Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) (The Maltese Falcon)
• Susan Gallagher (Judy Garland) (Ziegfeld Girl)

Favorite Villains:

• Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) (Citizen Kane)
• D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold) (Meet John Doe)
• Kaspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) (The Maltese Falcon)
• Regina Giddens (Bette Davis) (The Little Foxes)
• Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) (The Wolf Man)