What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1946

The Year: 1946

What the Nominees Were: The Best Years of Our Lives, Henry V, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Razor’s Edge, The Yearling
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Hitchcock’s brilliant spy thriller Notorious and Rita Hayworth’s star turn in Gilda.

What Did Win: The Best Years of Our Lives
How It’s Aged: Beautifully. This is one of the all-time great movies, and deserves so much credit for daringly confronting the big problems facing new veterans coming home from the war, not always getting the warm reception we associate with the “greatest generation.”

What Should’ve Won: It’s a Wonderful Life

How Hard Was the Decision: It was very hard to take away the Oscar from The Best Years of Our Lives, but ultimately it couldn’t compete. I religiously rewatch It’s a Wonderful Life every year, and appreciate it more and more each time, whereas I was content to watch Best Years just once.

Director: Frank Capra
Writers: Screenplay by Capra, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Additional scenes by Jo Swerling. Based on a story by Philip Van Doren Stern
Stars: Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell and Henry Travers

The Story: Small town building-and-loan manager George Bailey is considering suicide, (not realizing that town miser Mr. Potter has stolen his bank deposit) so some blinking stars in heaven review his life story, then send oddball angel Clarence down to help. Clarence decides to show George what life would have been like if he’d never been born, which convinces him that he’s actually had a wonderful life.

Any Nominations or Wins: Its only win was for “Technical Achievement.” It lost Picture, Director, Actor, Editing, and Sound.

Why It Didn’t Win: Capra was the king of the Oscars before he went off to war, but now he had come home to a chillier environment.  His old-fashioned style was considered out-of-touch with modern postwar times.  Perhaps this movie is simultaneously too dark (concerned with suicide) and too light (a literal deus ex machina) to win big awards, especially when put up against a very worthy winner like Best Years. Famously, this movie lost money when it came out and didn’t become a legendary classic until it fell into the public domain and TV stations could run it for free during Christmastime.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is, fundamentally, one of the weirdest movies ever made. George’s non-magical life story is long enough and compelling enough to fill a movie, and the whole Clarence storyline doesn’t even start until an hour and forty minutes in, suddenly taking things in a supernatural direction. Capra’s critics always called his movies “Capra-corn”, and surely nothing is cornier than angelic intervention, but it’s a brilliant move. The angel storyline only works because the movie was already a moving and satisfying story without it.
2. Every year, when we rewatched this movie growing up, the question was, should we then rewatch the Saturday Night Live skit where Uncle Billy remembers that Potter has the money and they all go beat the crap out of him? The problem is that, once you’ve seen the skit, it’s hard not to want to see that every year, but of course, the fact that the villain gets away with his villainy is one thing that makes this movie so great. Evil does not triumph, but it doesn’t suffer any consequences either, and our knowledge of that is part of why the end is so tear-jerking.
   
   
   
3. One of the first things we hear in that movie is that Clarence the angel has "the I.Q. of a rabbit." But can we now admit that he's actually a genius? Jumping in the river is genius. Showing George what would happen if he was never born is also genius. A brilliant outside-the-box solution and it was maybe the only thing that would have worked.
   
   
   
4. Why do millions of Americans rewatch this old black and white movie every year? Because its concerns about income equality and housing insecurity are evergreen. As an internet meme always points out at Christmas time, it’s still hard for a working man to save $5000, even eighty years later.
5. The case can be made that Stewart gives the greatest film performance ever. My favorite moment: When he’s sharing the phone with Mary and says “And I don’t want to get married, ever! To anyone!” Cut to: He’s happily getting married to her. We don’t need to see everything that happens in the meantime because Stewart had it all in his voice while protesting that he didn’t want it.
   
   
   

Ah, 1946: 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1945

The Year: 1945

What the Nominees Were: Anchors Aweigh, The Bells of Saint Mary’s, The Lost Weekend, Mildred Pierce, Spellbound
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. If the Academy had cast its eye abroad the French movie Children of Paradise would surely have been a tempting pick.

What Did Win: The Lost Weekend
How It’s Aged: Billy Wilder’s story of a brutal bender is a great film and well worth watching, but it’s just a bit too melodramatic for my tastes. The heavy score (including lots of theremin!) makes things rather heavy-handed, and the somewhat happy ending feels unearned. It would have been a lot more daring if they hadn’t cut out the real reason why he was drinking from the novel: he was repressing his homosexuality.

 
What Should’ve Won: Scarlet Street
How Hard Was the Decision: I had to rewatch The Lost Weekend to make sure of my decision. It was hard to take away Wilder’s Oscar, but of course I gave him one last year, so that lets Fritz Lang sneak in this year. Those were the only two movies I seriously considered, though Mildred Pierce is great.

Director: Fritz Lang
Writer: Dudley Nichols, based on the novel “La Chienne” by Georges De La Fouchardiere and Andre Mouezy-Eon
Stars: Edgar G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea

The Story: Robinson is a meek little bank clerk, unhappily married, who wants to be a painter, but he’s always had a problem with perspective. He falls under the spell of a femme fatale who falsely assumes that his odd little paintings are worth big money. Afraid to disillusion her, he has to support her with embezzled money. Things get complicated when her no-good boyfriend discovers that the paintings are worthless, and tries to get rid of them, but then the work belatedly gets discovered by the art world. In both situations, it is Robinson’s lack of perspective that ironically makes him a valuable commodity, for a short while, but it all comes crashing down. 

Any Nominations or Wins: None whatsoever
Why It Didn’t Win: The Academy was willing to nominate Double Indemnity the previous year, but this is a much grimier noir. The always-volatile Fritz Lang, meanwhile, was never a popular man, and received little acclaim when he moved from Germany to America for the (brilliant) middle period of his career. This is certainly a stretch to say this could have won. But The Lost Weekend is also a very dark film, so I just imagined that, in my alternate reality, the Academy got even darker.

Why It’s Great:

1. I’m just going to say, this may now be my favorite Fritz Lang movie. Better than Metropolis. Better than M. Better than The Big Heat. I’ll go even further: it may be my favorite film noir! I’ve always loved it but the restored version finally reveals how perfect it really is: The script is ingenious. The performances are heartbreaking. The directing is passionate. This movie interlocks plot and theme and symbolism and character with a microscopic level of clockwork precision.
2. Joan Bennett is certainly my all-time favorite femme fatale. In many ways, she’s the most pitiless and cruel lover to ever be depicted on the screen. (He begs to paint her portrait, but she forces him to get on his knees and paint her toenails instead, sneering “they’ll be masterpieces.”) But Bennett’s astounding performance grants her a deep pool of vulnerability and, against all odds, sympathy. Her love for her secret sleazebag boyfriend Duryea is so naïve, so overpowering, that the worse she treats Robinson, the more you pity her.
   
3. Lang was known for his imperiousness on set and many today dismiss his body of work as overly cruel, but that’s not true at all. Yes, he loved to subject his characters to the worst machinations of fate, but only to show that any degree of suffering or cruelty can be humanized and understood. They say that Bertrand Russell loved mankind but hated actual people. Lang was the opposite: He hated mankind but he could sympathize with every individual person.
   
4. Fictional movies about artists always have one huge problem: the art we see onscreen never matches the lofty things we hear people say about it. This time around, Lang, who collected many great painters before they were discovered, actually commissioned beautiful, richly modernistic work from a friend named John Decker. For once it’s nice to see a movie about a fictional artist in which people onscreen praise his work and you can actually agree.
   

Ah, 1945: I’ll just show a nice-looking ad for once...

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1944

The Year: 1944

What the Nominees Were: (The number of nominees went back down to five and would stay there for another 66 years before finally expanding again in 2010.) Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Going My Way, Since You Went Away, Wilson
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Laura, another proto-noir, was easily one of the best of the year

What Did Win: Going My Way
How It’s Aged: It’s way too corny. I’ve always found Bing Crosby to be a bland leading man and this movie is no exception. Barry Fitzgerald is a great character actor, but he’s too broad for a big role like this one.

What Should’ve Won: Double Indemnity
How Hard Was the Decision: Not hard, especially when I saw that Double Indemnity was one of the five nominees, proving that it wouldn’t have been that shocking for it to win (though I know that, in reality, it probably didn’t get that close, for reasons listed below)

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on the novel by James M. Cain
Stars: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson

The Story: Shady insurance salesman Walter Neff gets seduced into killing a customer’s husband, but then they get greedy and decide to collect double by using the titular clause. Neff’s friend at the insurance agency gets suspicious and investigates. The conspirators fall out and end up dead.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Picture, Director, Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography Scoring and Sound, but won nothing.

Why It Didn’t Win: Film Noir was just being born in 1944 and the Academy was letting everyone know right away that they wanted none of it. The movie was too good not to nominate in all those categories, but it’s not surprising that it was totally shut out. When Leo McCarey was named Best Director for Going My Way, a bitter Wilder tripped him on his way to accept the award.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. When I first heard that French novelist Albert Camus (“The Stranger”) ranked Cain as one of his biggest influences, I wondered if he was pulling our leg, like later French directors insisting Jerry Lewis was America’s greatest director. But when I finally read Cain’s existentially bleak prose, I could see that he was indeed a direct ancestor of Camus’s style.
2. But we have two great noir novelists here, because Raymond Chandler co-writes the adaptation with Wilder. He does a great job adding more sparkle to Cain’s plain dialogue, but Wilder was so stunned by the horrors of Chandler’s alcoholism that he vowed to make a picture about that next. More on that next year…
3. Fred MacMurray had a good long career playing morally upright men (such as in “My Three Sons”) …with just two exceptions, both Billy Wilder movies, one near the beginning and one near the end of MacMurray’s career. Well, I’m going to pick both those movies, so you’re going to get a very skewed view of the man’s public image. He could not be more cynical here as an utterly amoral insurance man.
   
4. As the 40s began, top screenwriters Wilder, John Huston and Preston Sturges basically showed up arm-in-arm and demanded the right to direct their own scripts. The studio moguls weren’t at all sure that was a good idea, but the results were hard to argue with. Wilder’s first two movies are great, but it was with this film that he made it clear that the writer-director was here to stay …and so the true auteur was born.
5. Stanwyck is not really a naturally stunning woman, but nobody could act sexier, and she was on a tear with The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and this role. That anklet turned out to be the most incendiary wardrobe item from the peak Hollywood era.
   

Ah, 1944: Don’t be seduced by her facial soap! 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1943

The Year: 1943

What the Nominees Were: Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Heaven Can Wait, The Human Comedy, In Which We Serve, Madame Curie, The More the Merrier, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Song of Bernadette, Watch on the Rhine
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: One of Hitchcock’s great masterpieces, Shadow of a Doubt

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Casablanca
How Hard Was the Decision: Surprisingly hard, because I really love Shadow of a Doubt, but c’mon, you can’t dethrone Casablanca. I seriously considered moving Casablanca back to 1942 (when it was actually released) to free this spot up for Hitchcock, but I decided that would be too counterfactual.

Director: Michael Curtiz
Writers: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, based on the play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre

The Story: Cynical American Rick Blaine runs a nightclub in Nazi-occupied Morocco but comes into possession of some letters of transit that could get him back home. Just then, who should show up but his old lover Ilsa, now married to a resistance leader. Rick rediscovers his patriotism and reluctantly sends the lovers off together.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director and Screenplay, and lost for Actor, Supporting Actor for Rains, Cinematography, Editing and Scoring.

Why It Won:

1. The thing you always have to remind yourself of when watching movies made during the war is that they had no idea who was going to win the war. By the time the movie was released, then the ominous questions, “Can you imagine us in London?” and “How about New York?” might not be so speculative. The tremendous courage that it takes to make a movie like this cannot be overstated.
   
2. You might have noticed that, despite having this legendary movie on their resume, those are not legendary screenwriters, and indeed this movie was written by the seat of its pants, constantly being rewritten on set, buried in notes from producer Hal Wallis. So how on earth did it turn out so perfect? For once, the studio notes were spot-on, and the malleable screenwriters were right to take them. A strange alchemy resulted, the likes of which would rarely be seen again.
3. This movie is a great example of the power of reversible behavior to craft a great character. Before we ever meet Rick, we hear two times that he never drinks with his customers under any circumstances. When we meet him, we see him refuse again. Then Ilsa comes in and he instantly breaks his rule, shocking everyone. This sets us up for the bigger reversal: He has twice stated “I stick my neck out for no one” but in the end he ends up saying, “It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
   
   
   
4. It’s also a great example of writing a strong personality: Bogart’s default argument tactic is just to blandly lie. Just one example: Captain Renault asks, “What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?” Rick responds, “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.” “I was misinformed.” It’s a slap in the face to be lied to so blatantly, but Renault is simply amused.
5. (I should point out that Citizen Kane spoiled me, and now I watch every other movie and ask “Where are the ceilings??”)

Ah, 1943:

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1942

The Year: 1942

What the Nominees Were: 49th Parallel, King’s Row, The Magnificent Ambersons, Mrs. Miniver, The Pied Piper, The Pride of the Yankees, Random Harvest, The Talk of the Town, Wake Island, Yankee Doodle Dandee
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be and Julien Duvivier’s anthology film Tales of Manhattan

What Did Win: Mrs. Miniver
How It’s Aged: It’s pretty treacly. There was a war on and this was unabashed propaganda for the stiff-upper-lip British housewives who were keeping calm and carrying on. But most of the movie is actually about an utterly uninteresting rose-growing contest? Not a movie anyone would watch today if it hadn’t won Best Picture.

What Should’ve Won: To Be Or Not to Be

How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard, maybe the hardest in this entire project. There were simply no universally acclaimed movies in 1942. Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons is probably the greatest movie of the year, but it’s so clearly cut down from a longer, better movie, against Welles’s wishes, that it almost seems wrong to honor it. I was inclined toward Tales of Manhattan, which I dearly love, but it runs into the problem of dated depictions of Black people. I don’t find the movie racist, but star Paul Robeson did condemn the movie, and I didn’t want to put myself in a place where I had to disagree with him! That left To Be or Not to Be, which I decided to rewatch and loved, though it’s not really meaty enough to be a Best Picture in most years. But in this year with no strong candidates, I decided to give it an unlikely win.

(To be clear, the best movie released in 1942 was Casablanca, which had its premiere in December, but it didn’t get a wide release until 1943, so it was nominated, and won, for that year. I was tempted to move it back to 1942 to avoid having to make this hard choice, but I decided to defer to the Academy and leave it in 1943.)

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writer: Edwin Justus Mayer from a story by Melchior Lengyel
Stars: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack

The Story: Jack Benny plays hammy Shakespearean actor Joseph Tura in pre-war Poland, with Carole Lombard as his loving-but-cheating wife. Robert Stack (17 years before “The Untouchables”) plays her dashing airman lover. When Hitler invades, they all three get caught up in a plot that eventually forces the married couple to go undercover as Nazis to save a bunch of airmen and get everybody out of the country safely.

Any Nominations or Wins: Just one nomination, for Best Score, which it lost

Why It Didn’t Win: With the world engulfed in war, Hollywood was understandably in full-on propaganda mode, and none other than Winston Churchill had declared, “Mrs. Miniver is propaganda worth a hundred battleships.” How could they not congratulate themselves for that? And they wouldn’t have been likely to give it to a somewhat breezy comedy that made light of the Nazi menace. Nevertheless, I’ve decided that, in my little world, they could have. (When Benny hosted the Oscars in 1944, he quipped, “It seems to me that to get a nomination a picture must have no laughs, and they tell me I’ve come pretty close to that a few times already.”)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Benny was a dependably funny actor in the rare chances he got to be a leading man, but this movie exists as a showcase for the real star: Lombard. Beautiful, sophisticated and always very charming, even when she was shown cheating on perfectly good husbands, Lombard was the female Cary Grant. Tragically, she would die before this film was released, in a plane crash on the way home from a trip to sell War Bonds. Hollywood’s first and most unlikely life lost in the war effort.
   
2. At the beginning, the troupe is putting on “Hamlet” by night and rehearsing a play about Hitler during the day. This cleverly sets up why they have perfect Nazi uniforms ready to go when they have to begin their impersonations.
   
3. This semi-serious material stretches the limits of the famously light “Lubitsch Touch.” There’s a long period where Stack becomes the main character and there are no jokes. Benny completely disappears from 21:50 to 43:56 in the runtime! But it works wonderfully. This was a serious time, and things could only get so light. Once the plot gets in gear and the Nazi impersonations begin, the “Touch” reasserts itself and the film resumes its tightrope walk of making us laugh at the words “Heil Hitler.” (A phrase that is spoken at least 50 times in this movie!)
4. Benny, in disguise, can resist asking various Nazis if they have ever heard of the great actor Joseph Tura. He’s upset that none of the Nazis have heard of him, until he finally meets one who has seen him perform: “What he did to Shakespeare, we are doing now to Poland.” He wishes he hadn’t asked.
   
   
   

Ah, 1942: 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1941

The Year: 1941

What 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
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: There are good movies there but the bench was very deep in one of Hollywood’s best years. Other greats that weren’t considered: Capra’s Meet John Doe, Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, Hitchcock’s Suspicion and not one but two masterpieces from Preston Sturges: The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels.

What Did Win: How Green Was My Valley
How It’s Aged: It’s old-fashioned. It’s pleasant to watch, but it’s sentimental and creaky. Not one of John Ford’s best movies, by any measure.

What Should’ve Won: Citizen Kane
How Hard Was the Decision: Not at all. Most strangers on the street will tell you that Citizen Kane should have beaten How Green Was My Valley for Best Picture. (Of course, if you know anything about me, you know how hard it was for me not to give it to Sullivan’s Travels)

Director: Orson Welles
Writers: Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles (But there’s a lot of contention about whether they actually deserve to share credit. David Fincher made a whole movie about the controversy called Mank, that I thought was bullshit. Even if everything in that movie was true, I still say that Welles deserves equal co-writing credit. Turning a sprawling 300 page drunken first-draft manuscript into a tightly focused 120 page brilliant screenplay is co-writing.)
Stars: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton and Dorothy Comingore

The Story: A newsreel journalist tries to figure out why a famous man’s last word was “Rosebud.” In the stories he gathers, we see Charles Foster Kane inherit a goldmine from a roomer in his parents’ boarding house, get taken away off his sled to go live under the supervision of a bank, decide “it would be fun to run a newspaper,” become a huge success, run for governor but get caught with his mistress, marry her, try to turn her into a successful opera singer, build a huge estate, and die alone. At the end, they’re throwing his junk on the fire and we see that Rosebud was the name on the sled.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Picture, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay, Interior Decoration, Cinematography, Editing, Score and Sound Recording, winning only for the screenplay.

Why It Didn’t Win: The character of Kane was very similar to real-life newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst with one big difference: Hearst was very much not dead. Indeed, Heart’s media empire launched a campaign against the film, led by Louella Parsons, one of the most powerful gossip columnists in Hollywood. Welles had practically been run out of town on a rail by the time the Oscars came around. Worse still: the movie lost money at the box office.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. The secret behind this movie’s greatness is that Welles had never written, directed or starred in a movie and had no idea what he was doing. The structure is so odd: First we get Kane’s whole life story in a newsreel, including all of the movie’s big reveals, then we dive deeper into Kane’s life, but we’re still jumping around like crazy (getting the review of the opera before we see it, etc) It’s almost Pulp-Fiction-esque in its disregard for linear narrative. What it resembles more than anything is a newspaper obit of Hearst, with a summary paragraph at the beginning and then a series of overlapping in-depth interviews.
   
   
   
2. In an episode of “The Secrets of Story Podcast” that never aired, my co-host James Kennedy claimed that spite is never a good story driver, and I couldn’t come up with a good counterexample. Later I came up with two: This and “The Bear.” In this, he makes a success of his newspaper just to spite those who said he couldn’t do it, and Carmy on “The Bear” becomes a world-class chef because he’s not allowed to cook at his family’s sandwich joint. I still say it’s a good driver.
3. Another aspect of never having made a movie: Welles naively asked why we never see the ceiling in movies, at which point the studio men patiently explained to him that movies down have ceilings because that’s where you hang the lights. Welles then (spitefully) declared that you would see the ceiling constantly in his film, because that would automatically create a bizarre sensation that we were watching real life and not a movie. This is similar to what J. J. Abrams would do later with lens flare (“We’ve only ever seen lens flare in real life film and video, but movies have studiously avoided it, so if I start using it, it will feel real.”) Both examples are tricks that only work for a few years, before audiences catch on, and the anti-artifice trick becomes just another artifice. 
4. In the newsreel we see, the left denounces Kane as a fascist and the right denounces him as a communist, and indeed his politics are hard to figure. He manufactures a war in Cuba, but also sponsors muckraking trustbusters. At the time, this wouldn’t have seemed strange, because this was all true of Hearst. Viewing the movie now, without that reference to fall back on, we have to come up with an explanation that can encompass Kane’s disparate traits. Ultimately, this man, rejected by his parents as a boy, desperately wants to be loved by as many people as possible, and that’s what war and the trustbusting have in common: they rouse great emotion.
5. The biggest mark against this movie was that it made it seem like Hearst’s real life mistress Marion Davies must have been a terrible actress, because her analog Susan Alexander Kane is such a terrible singer. In reality, Davies was quite a good actress, and her films were eventually rediscovered and appreciated.
6. Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis earned the nickname “The Prince of Darkness” because of his willingness to let the screen go black occasionally, but Gregg Toland was the first to go there.  It’s amazing how much gorgeous blackness this movie is swimming in.
   
   
   

Ah, 1941:

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1940

The Year: 1940
What the Nominees Were: All This and Heaven Too, Foreign Correspondent, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator, Kitty Foyle, The Letter, The Long Voyage Home, Our Town, The Philadelphia Story, Rebecca
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Again, that’s a really great list. The Great McGinty was also a wonderful movie, and it won Original Screenplay, so it should have gotten a Picture nomination too.

What Should Have Won and Did Win: Rebecca
How Hard Was the Decision: One of the hardest decisions I had to make. The Philadelphia Story was by the same people as Holiday and it’s even better. If it had come out almost any other year, I would hand it the award. And I love The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Dictator. But Rebecca is better.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison, Adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier
Stars: Lawrence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson and George Saunders 

The Story: An unnamed heroine, serving as travelling companion to a rich widow, enters into a whirlwind romance with suicidal zillionaire Maxim de Winter in Monte Carlo. They marry and she must take over running his Cornish estate, but she cannot escape the shadow of his “beloved” first wife, Rebecca. Eventually the truth comes out: He hated Rebecca and killed her. The mad servant who loved Rebecca and hates our heroine burns down the mansion but our couple escapes to live happily ever after.

Other Nominations and Wins: It won Picture and Black and White Cinematography, it lost Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress for Anderson, Screenplay, Art Direction, Editing, Score and Special Effects.

Why It Won:

1. You may not notice on first watch that we never hear the heroine’s first name. You also might not notice that we never see Rebecca’s face, not even in flashbacks or photos or even portraits in the house. What’s the reason for these two odd choices, these two holes in the film? It turns the two women into doppelgangers of each other: The woman without a name and her other half, the woman without a face. That makes things much more disturbing and powerful. One of the most powerful moments is when the phone rings for Mrs. DeWinter, then Fontaine says “Mrs. DeWinter is dead” and hangs up, only to realize that call was probably for her, since she is, after all, the new Mrs. DeWinter (which is the closest she ever gets to a name.)
   
2. In the novel, Maxim confesses to his new wife that he killed Rebecca when she bragged of cuckolding him. Hollywood had a strict moral code at the time (enforced by Joseph Breen) that said you couldn’t make a movie about a killer who gets away with it. So, in the movie, he tells our heroine that he didn’t actually kill Rebecca: he was about to, but she tripped and died accidentally. That satisfied Breen, but we, thankfully have no reason to believe this very dubious story (which Maxim smartly tells no one except his besotted new wife). If he’s telling the truth, then this is a dumb, meaningless movie, but if he’s lying, then it’s gothic goodness. I, like every non-censor who saw the movie, enjoy it so much because I don’t believe Maxim for a second.
   
3. Hitchcock isn’t really remembered as an expressionist director, not in the same way that Fritz Lang and company were, but this movie expresses emotion through lighting in a way he didn’t usually do (shooting a whole scene through rain-streaked windows, for instance). It creates a painterly atmosphere not unlike Selznick’s previous picture Gone With the Wind, and helps explain why this was the only Hitchcock movie to win Best Picture.
   
4. Every time the heroine thinks she can escape Rebecca’s shadow, she finds another item with “R de W” embroidered on it. We realize that she will never be free to be mistress of the house until she has them all put in a bonfire and burned, but then she’d be that kind of second wife. She’s wonderfully trapped by embroidery.
5. (There was one place where Rebecca could be seen: On the poster. As a filmmaker, you can try to deny the audience something important, but Marketing won’t have that.)
   

Ah, 1940: Advice to Wives!