The Academy was still accepting write-ins and indicating who placed second and third. Michael Curtiz was not an official nominee, but he placed second in the voting. Henry Hathaway came in third.
The nominees were ...
- Michael Curtiz, Captain Blood
- John Ford, The Informer
- Henry Hathaway, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
- Frank Lloyd, Mutiny on the Bounty
... when they should have been ...
- George Cukor, David Copperfield
- John Ford, The Informer
- Alfred Hitchcock, The 39 Steps
- James Whale, The Bride of Frankenstein
And the Oscar went to ...
This was the first of Ford's record-setting four Oscar wins -- the others were for How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Quiet Man -- none of which, it might be noted, were for the genre with which Ford is most associated, the Western. He had followed his brother, Francis (who plays Flynn in The Informer), into the movie business in 1913, starting out as a bit player. By 1917 he had moved into directing, turning out endless Westerns during the silent era.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Alfred Hitchcock with Madeleine Carroll and Robert Donat on the set of The 39 Steps |
And so it begins, the Academy's long neglect of Hitchcock's achievement. Granted, this was still a British film, made five years before Hitchcock's American debut with Rebecca. But it's not like Americans weren't aware of Hitchcock and his movies. The first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much had also been released in the United States in 1935, and was also on the Academy's reminder list of eligible films. But Steps was Hitchcock's first major film, and it's still as freshly watchable today as it was almost eighty years ago. And it has all the classic twists and tics of a Hitchcock film (including the blond, played by Madeleine Carroll, who comes in for a fair amount of abuse). Ain't hindsight grand?
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