2. How Green Was My Valley - 1941
There were at least three films superior to the Oscar winner. I'm not going to sit here and say that How Green Was My Valley is a bad film, it's not. I will, however, tell you that it's in no way the equal of Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion, the classic Sam Spade detective story The Maltese Falcon, or, and this is a BIG or, Orson Welles' astounding Citizen Kane. Maybe it's hard for today's average moviegoer to fully appreciate how big a travesty this was. Film has come so far that to the uninitiated, Citizen Kane won't seem all that special. Well, allow your friends who study film and film history to educate you. There's a reason Citizen Kane sits atop AFI's list of greatest movies of all time. It changed everything about them. How we watch them, how they were acted, directed, shot, edited, etc. The list goes on. Nothing, NOTHING had come close to the production of Citizen Kane and once it hit the streets, everything changed. Orson Welles struggled to live up to the expectation he'd set with Kane but that tends to happen to young filmmakers who lay waste to those before them. Suffice it to say that without Citizen Kane, modern cinema, the type of cinema we currently enjoy, does not exist and that's something that most definitely cannot be said for How Green Was My Valley.