Best Director, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

The nominees were ... 

• George Cukor, The Philadelphia Story 
• John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath 
• Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca  
• Sam Wood, Kitty Foyle 
• William Wyler, The Letter  

... when they should have been ... 

• George Cukor, The Philadelphia Story 
• John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath 
• Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday 
• Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca  
• Ernst Lubitsch, The Shop Around the Corner 

And the Oscar went to ... 

John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath. 

While today's critics find Ford's Oscar-winning work on big studio projects like Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley less interesting than on the films, particularly the Westerns, on which he exercised more individual control, this one is interesting because of the way Ford's humanistic vision transforms Steinbeck's novel, in which the characters are symbolic vehicles for his ideas about social justice. Ford gives them greater depth, and while this may rob the film of its political edge, it also takes the story out of the context of the Great Depression and gives it universality.

... when it should have gone to ... 

Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday. 

Howard Hawks, Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell
 on the set of His Girl Friday 

So much has been written about the long neglect of Hawks that there's not much point going into it again here. There are those who think that His Girl Friday is his greatest film, but they are the kind of people who spend their time making lists when they should be watching movies. One reason may be that it became Hawks's most widely seen film because Columbia failed to renew its copyright in 1968, which put it in the public domain, available for multiple transfers to video once the VCR became commercially available. It was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1993. It is, for sure, the greatest version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's Broadway hit The Front Page, which was first filmed in 1931, and was remade by Billy Wilder in 1974 with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. But the Hawks version, which turned Hildy Johnson into a woman, shows signs of transcending the original. It was adapted, though not very successfully, into Switching Channels in 1988, with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the Grant and Russell roles, with changed names and the action moved to a television studio. Then in 2003 playwright John Guare adapted both The Front Page and His Girl Friday into a stage version, keeping elements of both (including the sex change). It premiered in London and has subsequently crossed the Atlantic for several American productions.  

Rosalind Russell and the gentlemen of the press in His Girl Friday