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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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #106: Summer of Genre – The Western

After last month’s episode on the Knives Out mysteries, our Summer of Genre embraces today’s date and continues with that most American of genres: the Western, and the ways in which the genre is frequently used to tell, retell and revise the foundational myth of the United States of America. And since it would be silly to discuss this among jaded Europeans only, we’re bringing back a guest and Damn Fine friend for this episode: Daniel Thron, who’s been on the show to talk to us on everything from Steven Soderbergh via the films of Robert Altman and The Exorcist to the arid sandscapes of Dune, both Part One and Part Two (which means that you may just get to hear him again in a few months when Denis Villeneuve finishes his epic trilogy). Join us for a talk that starts with the classic, iconic John Ford western My Darling Clementine (1946) and then takes us all the way to 2007 for the revisionist The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the darkness of the Coen brothers’ neo-western No Country for Old Men. How do all of these films tell stories about the ever-changing, ever-same frontier that is the United States of America?

P.S.: For anyone who can’t get enough of Dan’s voice, make sure to check out CG Garage, a podcast dedicated to the movie industry.

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