The nominees were ...
- Walter Brennan in Sergeant York
- Charles Coburn in The Devil and Miss Jones
- Donald Crisp in How Green Was My Valley
- James Gleason in Here Comes Mr. Jordan
- Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon
... when they should have been ...
- Charles Coburn in The Devil and Miss Jones
- Joseph Cotten in Citizen Kane
- William Demarest in The Lady Eve
- Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon
- S.Z. Sakall in Ball of Fire
And the Oscar went to ...
Crisp was born in Scotland and came to the United States in 1906. He began his acting career on stage, but moved into film work in 1908, as both actor and director. One of his most memorable early performances was as Lillian Gish's abusive father in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, and he played Gen. Ulysses Grant in Griffth's The Birth of a Nation. He continued to direct until 1930, when he became one of the most durable character players in Hollywood, making his last appearance in 1963 in Spencer's Mountain.
... when it should have gone to ...
What a great age for character actors this was. Ball of Fire was full of them: Sakall, Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers, Tully Marshall, Leonid Kinskey, Richard Haydn, Aubrey Mather. So was The Lady Eve: Demarest, Coburn, Eugene Pallette, Eric Blore, Melville Cooper. And even in The Maltese Falcon, Greenstreet had to shine in the company of Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr. The film provided a definitive role for Greenstreet, who as Mary Astor noted, never "did a picture later in which that evil, hiccupy laugh wasn't exploited." It was his first film, too. He had been on stage since 1902 in England and then in America, but refused to make movies until he was sixty-two years old. His great scene in The Maltese Falcon comes at the end, when his smug, sinister façade crumbles at his discovery that the falcon is a fake. The teaming of Greenstreet and Lorre was so irresistible that they made eight more films together.
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| Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon |
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