One Best Picture After Another #14: How Green Was My Valley (1941)

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?

6/10

One thing I am aiming to do with One Best Picture After Another is to try and review these films without dwelling on the other contenders that year, or to make the inevitable comparisons to films that lost that year that are now seen as superior. This seems especially relevant for How Green Was My Valley, a film that probably most gets mentioned these days – if it gets mentioned at all – as the film that beat Citizen Kane to the Best Picture Oscar. How can any film stand up against that perennial critics’ favourite?

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