10 Best Picture Oscar Winners That Aged Terribly
3. How Green Was My Valley? (1941)
If you haven’t heard of How Green Was My Valley (HGWMV), then don’t worry. It’s a movie that only really exists in our consciousness today as the answer to a particularly difficult pub quiz question. That question being ‘what film inexplicably beat out Citizen Kane for the Best Picture award in 1941’?
HGWMV was a perfectly fine John Ford film of an earlier era. But that’s part of the problem – it feels incredibly old-fashioned film in every single way. Even by 1941 standards, HGWMV was filmed in a style that was becoming tired. The acting is theatrical, the sets are theatrical, the direction is theatrical, and it is lousy with John Ford’s sentimentality.
It’s like something grandparents watch while muttering about how today’s filmmakers are all just interested in sex and violence.
Unfortunately, what makes it feel really dated though is the inescapable knowledge that Citizen Kane was made at the same time. Cinema might have still been a relatively young industry in 1941, but its evolution had been impressively efficient.
By the time HGWMV was released, audiences were already familiar with the tropes, images, and narratives on the big screen. In contrast, presented a turning point in cinema that would challenge both audiences, and filmmakers alike until the present day. The timelessness of the two films really cannot be any starker because of this.
If HGWMV wasn’t competing alongside Citizen Kane, it might not feel like so anachronistic, and terribly ancient. But it did, and because of that, it’s impossible today to see it as anything other than a generic old film, that is thoroughly undeserving of its award.