Clark Gable

Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

7/10

It speaks volumes about the vast cultural impact of Gone With The Wind that, when I was a kid, it still enjoyed some status as a reference point. We recognised the line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”, even if we didn’t really know where it came from. This was over forty years after its release and yet it still had a popular legacy.

Despite all this, I did not actually see the film for quite a long time. Even when I got older and got into watching classic films, I never quite felt the pull to make me want to get the VHS, or later the DVD, of this film. It took until the 21^st century, and a screening at London’s prestigious British Film Institute cinema for me to finally resolve to see it.

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10/10

It Happened One Night is an Academy Award winning film that still has a high profile for a production made in the Thirties. It’s one of those movies that can be safely recommended to those who are interested in early classic cinema, and its the first film so far from all the Oscar winners that I was already a massive fan of.

But revisiting a few old friends is going to be part of this journey, and so it was joyous to dig out my own copy of this and put it in for the umpteenth time. And, unsurprisingly, it’s still brilliant. Rewatching it is also a reminder of why it’s hard to find anything new to say that hasn’t been said dozens of times before in the 92 years since it was a hit. This isn’t a complicated film: what it does is really quite simple. But it just does it so, so well.

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