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: