Best Director, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940

The nominees were ... 

• Frank Capra, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 
• Victor Fleming, Gone With the Wind 
• John Ford, Stagecoach 
• Sam Wood, Goodbye, Mr. Chips 
• William Wyler, Wuthering Heights 

... when they should have been ... 

• Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky 
• John Ford, Stagecoach 
• Howard Hawks, Only Angels Have Wings 
• Alfred Hitchcock, The Lady Vanishes 
• Ernst Lubitsch, Ninotchka 

And the Oscar went to ... 

Victor Fleming, Gone With the Wind. 

It almost had to go to Fleming, even though much of the movie was directed by George Cukor, Sam Wood, and a number of second-unit directors including William Cameron Menzies. And every foot of the movie was overseen minutely by David O. Selznick. Cukor began it, but for a variety of reasons, including the fact that both Selznick and Cukor realized that he was the wrong man for so huge a project, he was replaced by Fleming, who was a close friend of Clark Gable's. Fleming had begun his career as a cameraman and became a cinematographer under the pioneers Allan Dwan and D.W. Griffith. He turned director in the 1920s, working with Douglas Fairbanks, among others. His best-known pre-GWTW films were Red Dust, Captains Courageous, and Test Pilot, all of which suggested that he was better equipped to handle action sequences than the stage-trained Cukor. But the task proved burdensome for Fleming, too, especially the constant barrage of quibbles and changes from Selznick, and for about a month in mid-filming he was replaced by Wood. Although he also received credit as the director of the second most famous movie of 1939, The Wizard of Oz, that, too, had multiple directors, including Cukor again, as well as Mervyn LeRoy, Norman Taurog, and, for the Kansas sequences, King Vidor. Fleming's post-Oscar career was relatively undistinguished.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

Ernst Lubitsch, Ninotchka. 

Ernst Lubitsch

Greta Garbo requested Lubitsch, the master of sophisticated comedy, as director of Ninotchka, and she gave one of her greatest performances for him, sometimes clearly parodying her moody, masked image in serious roles. She was insecure about her ability to play comedy, especially the scene in which she becomes drunk on champagne, and insisted on having the set closed to non-essential personnel. Contemporaries recall that she was happy with the film, but years later she told others that Lubitsch was "a vulgar little man" and that she hadn't enjoyed working with him. He had been an actor in Germany before turning director, and also wrote screenplays, which he continued to do occasionally after he came to the United States in 1922.

Garbo laughs in Ninotchka