Best Picture, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

The nominees were ... 

• Blossoms in the Dust 
• Citizen Kane 
• Here Comes Mr. Jordan 
• Hold Back the Dawn 
• How Green Was My Valley 
• The Little Foxes 
• The Maltese Falcon 
• One Foot in Heaven 
• Sergeant York 
• Suspicion 

... when they should have been ...

• Ball of Fire  
• Citizen Kane 
• The Devil and Miss Jones 
• Dumbo 
• Fantasia 
• How Green Was My Valley 
• The Lady Eve  
• The Maltese Falcon  
• Sergeant York 
• Suspicion 

And the Oscar went to ...
How Green Was My Valley. In any other year this might have been an obvious and welcome choice, a classic example of Hollywood filmmaking, with remarkable sets created under the supervision of Richard Day, eloquent camerawork by Arthur Miller, and a screenplay by Philip Dunne that leaves no handkerchief unwrung. Director John Ford, who collected his third Oscar for the film, labors a bit under the strict supervision of producer Darryl F. Zanuck, but he still gets the most out of a strong cast, especially Donald Crisp, Sara Allgood, Maureen O'Hara, and the young Roddy McDowall. Even then, there are more memorable films from this year, including The Maltese Falcon, a career-maker for director John Huston and actors Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet, and Preston Sturges's sublime The Lady Eve. But all of the movies of 1941 stand in the shadow of one landmark.

... when it should have gone to ...

Citizen Kane

Well, obviously. Orson Welles's debut feature placed first in Sight & Sound's decennial poll of the greatest movies of all time in 1962, and held on to that standing for the next four polls. In 2012 it dropped to second place behind Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (a film that Welles disliked), but it remains something of a touchstone for movie buffs. Its innovations -- Gregg Toland's deep-focus camerawork, the often expressionistic camera angles, the crisply edited storytelling -- have been imitated so often by now that contemporary viewers sometimes wonder what all the fuss was about. It is perhaps the Hamlet of movies: It sometimes seems like a collection of quotations. Moreover, the film is surrounded by myths and legends: Welles's famously troubled subsequent career, Hollywood's unease at the way the film paralleled the career of the immensely powerful William Randolph Hearst, the box-office failure and the disappearance of the film until it was rediscovered by French critics and re-released in 1956. All of these serve as something of a distorted lens through which the film continues to be viewed. Still, it's a long way from being of more historical than artistic interest.