Best Picture: Gone With the Wind Best Director: Victor Fleming Best Actor: Robert Donat Best Actress: Vivien Leigh Best Supporting Actor: Thomas Mitchell Best Supporting Actress: Hattie McDaniel View all the Oscars® for 1939

The Year in Summary: On 15 December, one of the great films of all time, Gone With the Wind, had its world premiere in Atlanta, Georgia. It was three years in the making and cost four-and-a-half million dollars. Hollywood producers kept to their large production schedules despite the war abroad and the curtailing of foreign revenues. Television was still no real threat even though NBC inaugurated public service programs. Among the outstanding films of the year were Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach, Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, The Wizard of Oz, Young Mr. Lincoln, Juarez, Love Affair, The Women and a French film, Harvest. The 'series' films were becoming very popular on family programs. Among the many series films released at this period were "Andy Hardy," "Tarzan," "Charlie Chan" (with Sidney Toler stepping into the late Warner Oland's role), "Blondie," "The Thin Man," "Hopalong Cassidy," "Dr. Kildare," "The Cisco Kid," "Maisie," "The Jones Family," "Mr. Moto," "Torchy," "Sherlock Holmes" and "Topper." Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Carl Laemmle and Alice Brady were among death's toll. Ingrid Bergman, a Swedish actress, appeared in Intermezzo, and Greer Garson from England played in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. It was the American film debut of both these distinguished stars.

Paris, 25 January: First screening of Trois de Saint-Cyr, directed by Jean-Paul Paulin. Love becomes inextricably tangled up with heroism in Paulin's version of the archetypal colonial-cum-military adventure so greatly appreciated by the French public. Paris, January: Anti-fascist writer André Malraux has just returned from Spain. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, three years ago, he placed himself at the service of the Republican government. He has brought back with him the footage of a film made in the last few months that is entitled Sierre de Teruel. The storyline is drawn from a chapter in Malraux's novel called L'Espoir, and unfolds during the bitter fighting around the Aragonese town of Teruel. Shooting of the film, which was undertaken in extremely difficult conditions, was abandoned after the fall of Barcelona to the Nationalists. It was then then Malraux decided to return to France. Moscow, 2 February: Release of The Vyborg Side, by Grigori Kozintzev and Leonid Trauberg, the last part of the trilogy that started in 1935 with The Youth of Maxim. Billancourt, 6 February: Marcel Carné has started shooting the studio footage for Le Jour se lève (Daybreak). Carné is back working in collaboration with Jacques Prévert on this film. Madrid, 15 February: The producer G. Renault-Decker has obtained permission from the Franco government to film Christopher Columbus in Granada. Abel Gance will be directing the film in several languages. Hollywood, 23 February: The Academy Awrad ceremony is entering its second decade, and this year, the Academy's 12,000 members have voted Bette Davis Best Actress for her performance in Jezebel. Spencer Tracy scooped the Best Actor prize for his role as the crusading Father Flanagan in Boys Town. Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You won two Awards, Best Picture and the Best Director prize for Capra. The Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards went, respectively, to Walter Brennan for his work in Kentucky and to Fay Bainter for her sterling performance as Aunt Belle in Jezebel. Villars-de-Lans, 27 February: Jacques Ferder is on location in Vercors for the film la Loi du nord. The action is actually supposed to take place in the far North of Canada in the world of the trappers. Hollywood, 2 March: The fortunes of the big-budget Western, at a low ebb for several years, have been boosted by John Ford's impressive and absorbing new film Stagecoach, produced for United Artists by Walter Wanger. Adapted from an Ernest Haycos story, Stagecoach stars John Wayne as the outlawed Ringo Kid, who joins a mixed bunch of passengers for an eventful trip West. The picture's stunning exteriors, shot on location in Utah's Monument Valley, with its vast skies and its weathered sandstone bluffs, lend a new scenic grandeur to the Western and provide a spectacular backdrop to a thrilling sequence in which the stagecoach careens across salt flats pursued by an Indian was party. Sharing screen honors with Wayne, who has recently been consigned to humdrum B-Westerns, are Claire Trevor as a golden-haired whore, Thomas Mitchell playing a whiskey-sodden sawbones, John Carradine as a doomed gambler and Andy Devine as the fat, cowardly stagecoach driver, squawking with panic as the Indians close in. Moscow, 7 March: Release of the second part of Peter the Great, by Vladimir Petrov, and with Nikolas Simonov and Nikolai Cherkassov. Warsaw, 8 March: Opening of Trois valses at the Napoléon, a cinema reserved exclusively for French productions. The film was made by the German Ludwig Berger now working in Paris. Los Angeles, 17 March: Release of Love Affair, by Leo McCarey, starring Charles Boyer, Irene Dunne and Maria Ouspenskaya. Paris, 17 March: Replying to the ever-increasing demands of professionals who work with the cinema, the Daladier government has recently completed the drafting of a law concerning the reorganization of the cinematographic industry. Signed by President Albert Lebrun and prepared under the authority of Jean Zay, the Minister of Public Education, the text is being presented today to the Chamber of Deputies. It is the most important effort to date by the government to constitute a legal statute pertaining to the French film. Relatively comprehensive in scope, the text of the law deals with and defines censorship, the ownership of films, the conditions of work in the film industry, the importation and distribution of foreign films, advertising, financial arrangements, contracts and also the activities of clubs involved in the field. Epinay, 22 March: Claude Autant-Lara and Maurice Lehmann have started shooting Fric-frac in the Éclair studios. Arletty and Michel Simon are once again playing the roles that made them famous in the theater. New York, 13 April: Sam Goldwyn's production of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as gotten off to a slow start at the box office. Goldwyn made sure that the film had a turbulent time reaching the screen, suggesting innumerable new titles, including Bring Me the World and The Wild Heart, all the while referring to Brontë's original as "Withering Heights"! He also insisted on adding an up-beat ending. Two Britons, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, star as Brontë's pair of doomed lovers Cathy and Heathcliffe. Director William Wyler has coaxed a superb performance from Olivier, previously unhappy in Hollywood and over-theatrical in his approach to filming. Paris, 21 April: Premiere of Marcel L'Herbier's Entente cordiale at the Marivaux. The film is based on André Maurois' book Edward VII and His Time. Gaby Morlay interprets the role of Queen Victoria. Los Angeles, 23 April: Following hard on the heels of longtime companions Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who wed in the tiny town of Kingman, Arizona on 29 March, Tyrone Power has just married the French actress Annabella. Unlike Gable and Lombard, for three years a fixture on the Hollywood scene, Power and Annabella have known each other only a few months. They met in the summer of 1938 during the filming of Suez, in which Power played Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French engineer who built the canal of the title. At 34 the divorced Annabella is nine years older than her new husband. Hollywood, 6 May: With the war clouds gathering in Europe, Warner Brothers have taken the bold step of producing a film with an explicitly anti-Nazi message. Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring Edward G. Robinson, is based on the real-life exploits of former FBI agent Leon G. Turrou, who infiltrated a German spy network operating in America. During filming, Robinson, Jack Warner and many others connected with the picture received threatening letters. The premiere was attended by almost as many G-men as moviegoers. Warners have good reason to loathe the Nazis. They closed their Berlin office after the studio's local representative was murdered by fascist thugs. New York, 11 May: Release of Only Angels Have Wings, directed by Howard Hawks, with Jean Arthur, Cary Grant, Richard Barthelmess and Rita Hayworth heading the cast. Hollywood, 19 May: The cameras had scarcely started turning for Ninotchka, when Greta Garbo, who usually has a very good relationship with the director Ernst Lubitsch, suddenly decided he was talking too loudly. She snapped at him, in German, "Could you be so kind as to speak more softly when you address me." Lubitsch was apparently quite taken aback. Soviet Union, 1 June: Sergei Eisenstein and his cameraman Edouard Tissé have just started shooting the short documentary The Grand Canal of Fergana. Washington, 9 June: German actress Marlene Dietrich, who came to work for Paramount in 1930, has now officially become an American citizen. Paris, 9 June: Marcel Carné's new film, Le Jour se lève (Daybreak), is a rather commonplace story of tragic love, but its treatment has drawn a lot of attention. The scenario came about after Carné received a visit from his neighbor Jacques Viot. Viot suggested the plot and wrote the synopsis, which Jacques Prévert than adapted for the screen. It tells of a worker (Jean Gabin) who gets involved with the mistress (Arletty) of a shady showman (Jules Berry), and kills him in a jealous confrontation over an innocent flower seller (Jacqueline Laurent). He then barricades himself in his small room during the night as the police and crowds wait below. Most of the film is told by flashing back and forth between the past and the present. Memorable atmospheric use is made of the dark tenement set designed by Alexander Trauner, and Gabin's tragic stature is almost matched by the hypnotically suave villainy of Berry. Paris, 20 June: A special evening was held at the university in honor of Charles Chaplin on his 50th birthday. It was organized by Laure Albin-Guillot from the National Cinema Archives and Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque Française. Paris, 22 July: After Jean Renoir's new film, La Régie du jeu (The Rules of the Game), was loudly booed at its gala showing at the Colisée two weeks ago, it has been withdrawn. With a budget of 2.5 million francs, much of it from the director's own pocket, the film was eagerly awaited. Even if the critics were not unanimous, the public seems to be totally against it, despite Renoir having reduced the film by a sizable 23 minutes. Because of the poor reception of his bitter social satire, Renoir has even thought about quitting the cinema. In the meantime, however, he has departed for Italy, where he is set to make La Tosca. Hollywood, 24 July: One of Paramount Pictures' greatest box-office successes in the silent era was Beau Geste, filmed in 1926 and starring Ronald Colman in the title role. Now the same studio looks as though it will even surpass that hit of yesteryear with its spectacular remake of the P. C. Wren colonial adventure story, directed by William A. Wellman. It closely follows the earlier picture's flashback format, with its memorable opening scene of a desert fort manned by corpses. The three well-born English Geste brothers, who join the Foreign Legion to escape disgrace, are played by Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston. Althogh they seem unlikely siblings, and even more unlikely Englishmen, these three stars have made the trio of heroes believable and spirited. Brian Donlevy makes a splendidly sadistic sergeant. Only one of the brothers (Cooper) survives the sergeant, an abortive mutiny and an attack by Arab tribesmen. After again demonstrating his comic talents in his last two films, Ernst Lubitsch's Bluebeard's Eighth Wife and H. C. Potter's The Cowboy and the Lady, it is good to finally see Gary Cooper back in a full-blooded adventure yarn again. Beau Geste was filmed location in Buttercup Valley, west of Yuma in Arizona, a landscape that stands in perfectly for the Arabian desert. Brussels, 31 July: The History of the Cinematic Art, written by Carl Vincent, has been published by Trident. The book is one of the first attempts at a general history of the cinema. Cannes, 1 August: Preparations for the International Film Festival are actively underway. The supplementary funding has been voted by the municipal council to finish equipping the casino. The opening is planned for 1 September. Los Angeles, 14 August: Janet Gaynor, who was the winner of the first-ever Academy Award for Best Actress in 1929, today married top costume designer Adrian. Hollywood, 17 August: The gala premiers of The Wizard of Oz will take place tonight at Graumann's Chinese Theater. MGM has created a magical Technicolor musical fantasy, based on the famous children's story by L. Frank Baum. It is also a wonderful vehicle for a bright new star, Judy Garland. But the most expensive production in the studio's history was not made without many difficulties. Producer Mervyn LeRoy started with Richard Thorpe directing, but he stopped shooting after a few weeks, scrapping all the footage. It restarted under George Cukor, who stayed three days. Victor Fleming then took over with a new script. King Vidor completed the project, when Fleming moved on to direct Gone With the Wind. In addition, there were several problems before the right cast was chosen. MGM initially tried to get Shirley Temple to play Dorothy, but 20th Century-Fox would not loan her out. Then Universal refused to part with Deanna Durbin for one picture. Hence Judy Garland, who began her work in a fancy blonde wig, wearing heavy cherubic makeup. It was Cukor, during his brief stint on the picture, who insisted Judy look like a real Kansas farm girl. Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Tin Woodman, but the aluminum dust he was covered in coated his lungs, and he had to be hospitalized. His replacement, Jack Haley, had to wear a painful costume, and was in agony throughout. Then, too, the crowd of Munchkins, played by midgets and Lilliputians, were up to all sorts of tricks, drinking and gambling on the set.      The story follows the dream adventures of Dorothy Gale who, after being knocked unconscious during a tornado, makes her way, with her dog Toto and some bizarre companions she meets on the Yellow Brick Road, to the Emerald City to find the Wizard of Oz. The song, "Over the Rainbow," that Judy sings at the beginning, was supposed to be cut, but producer Arthur Freed argued vehemently for it to remain. We should be grateful, because it is a charming melody, touchingly delivered. A treat for all ages. Hollywood, 21 August: At the conclusion of a long and detailed series of negotiations, George Schaefer, the president of RKO, has announced that he has now signed Orson Welles to a film contract. This talented young man, who has very little prior film experience, has been offered the most remarkable terms to work for RKO as a producer, director, actor and scriptwriter on film projects of his own choosing. Although this may appear quite exceptional, Welles has already, in fact, proved the range of his abilities through his previous work in the theater and on the radio. He has, for example, shown an impressive grasp of the relatively new medium of radio, and an ability to use sound and dialogue creatively as demonstrated -- perhaps too well -- in his famous broadcast version of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds that turned this Welles into a celebrity overnight, vastly increased his radio audience and has led to his RKO contract. Paris, 24 August: The Paramount cinema has released Louise, by Abel Gance, based on the opera by Charpentier, with the American soprano Grace Moore, tenor Georges Thill, André Pernet and Robert Le Vigan in the cast. Paris, 28 August: With the threat of war approaching, a censorship law has been passed to control all printed matter, written work, radio transmissions and film projections. The law is aimed at titles such as Le Déserteur. New York, 1 September: Release of The Women, directed by George Cukor. This adaptation of Clare Boothe Luce's hit play stars Norma Shearer as the tear-stained socialite, Joan Crawford as the salesgirl husband-stealer, Rosalind Russell as the bitchy "best friend", plus Joan Fontaine, Marjorie Main, Paulette Goddard and a host of other actresses from the MGM stable. Shot in black-and-white, the film features a Technicolor fashion show sequence of outfits for every month of the year. It should be noted that not a single male appears in the film; even the dogs are bitches. Paris, 3 September: The current general mobilization of all troops and reserves, and the sudden declaration of war by the French government, has taken by surprise many of France's leading producers and directors. About 20 feature films are currenly in mid-production and will be adversely affected. London, 11 September: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's great creation, Sherlock Holmes, has a cinematic history stretching back to 1903. Now Holmes returns to the screen in 20th Century-Fox's handsome new version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Basil Rathbone, whose gimlet profile usually dispenses deadly villainy in Warner Brothers' costumers, is cast as the master detective and Nigel Bruce plays the bluff Dr. Watson, courageous to a fault but usually about three steps behind the fast-moving plot. Two more Britons head the cast list: handsome Richard Greene plays Sir Henry Baskerville, heir to a dangerous inheritance; and Lionel Atwill, heavily bearded and bespectacled in a sinister red herring role. The film is briskly paced by director Sidney Lanfield, a specialist in comedies rather than period thrillers, and the fog machine works overtime to disguise the fact that much of the outdoor action takes place on a single master set. When the production was announced, fans were alarmed by Lanfield's stated aim to "pep up the story" and make Holmes more "up to date." In fact, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a respectful version of the original. And, in Rathbone, Fox has discovered such an incisive Holmes that a sequel is inevitable. Hollywood, 5 October: After protracted negotiations with David O. Selznick, the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman left her doctor husband and baby daughter at home in Stockholm, and arrived in New York aboard the Queen Mary on 6 May. At Selznick's behest, little fanfare attended her coming, but her first American film opens today. Entitled Intermezzo: A Love Story, co-starring Leslie Howard and directed by Gregory Ratoff, it is the emotional tale of a concert violinist who falls in love with a young piano teacher and runs away with her -- a remake of the film that made Bergman a star in her native land. Washington, 20 October: Frank Capra's newly released political satire, starring James Stewart, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has been given a hostile reception by certain politicians. Hollywood, 3 November: The posters of MGM's Ninotchka bear the slogan "Garbo Laughs!" Seeking to restore Garbo's sagging popularity, the studio has cast her in a romantic comedy which guys her solemn image. The play has worked. Garbo plays a high-minded Soviet official charmingly won over to Western ways by debonair Melvyn Douglas. In adapting Melchior Lengyel's story to the screen, director-screenwriter Ernst Lubitsch and his writing colleagues Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch, have managed to produce a warm romantic comedy that still has some bitter fun at the expense of the Soviet system. The three comrades sent to Paris (Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart and Alexander Granach) succumb to the seductive comforts of the West, and commissar Razinin (charmingly played by Bela Lugosi) back in Moscow sends Comrade Yakushova (Garbo) to whip them back onto the straight and narrow road of Marxism. But she, too, falls prey to Parisian life. The scene in a working-class restaurant in which Count d'Algout (Douglas) attempts to tell her a joke about two Scotsmen is guaranteed to bring the house down, and one cannot help but detect a gleam in Garbo's eye as she tries with all her might not to laugh until the scene's hilarious conclusion. It's by no means the first time that Garbo has laughed on screen, but MGM's accountants are laughing all the way to the bank. Hollywood, 10 November: Universal's lovely, youthful singing star and most bankable asset, Deanna Durbin, has slowly but surely blossomed into young womanhood in First Love, in which she receives her first screen kiss. The lucky man is Robert Stack, making his screen debut, and that kiss has created headlines throughout the country. The major box-office star is coming up to her eighteenth birthday, and Universal Pictures has decided that Deanna should be allowed to grow up. First Kiss is a Cinderella story in which she plays an orphan adopted by a rich, uncaring family. Snubbed by relatives, and prevented from going to the gala ball, she gets to meet her Prince Charming, with the help of servants. It is now three years since Durbin started on her career in Three Smart Girls. She has continued to wow audiences with her bell-like voice and Pollyanna personality. Whether their loyalty will follow her into adulthood remains to be seen. Santa Monica, 13 December: The legendary screen star Douglas Fairbanks died yesterday at his California home at the age of 56. After making his last film, the 1934 The Private Life of Don Juan, Fairbanks distanced himself from the movies. His burial was an intimate ceremony attended by members of the family and a few faithful friends. Among them were Charles Chaplin, who closed his studio to attend, Doug's wife and son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., born in 1909 during Fairbanks' marriage to Ann Beth Sully. Faribanks was born Douglas Ullman in Denver, Colorado on 23 May 1883. When he was signed by the Triangle Corporation in 1915 he was already a successful juvenile lead on Broadway. Fairbanks quickly established himself in a series of fast-paced satirical comedies, artfully scripted by Anita Loos, which crystalized the impulses and daydreams of American moviegoers. By 1917 he had his own production company, and two years later joined Chaplin, Griffith and Mary Pickford to form United Artists. His marriage to Pickford followed, along with a string of classic roles, all of them infused with his athletic grace and abundant good humor: Zorro, Robin Hood, the Black Pirate and the Thief of Bagdad. No one exemplified better than Fairbanks the maxim that motion pictures are all about movement. Atlanta, 15 December: The most eagerly-awaited film of the year, Gone With the Wind has just been given its world premiere in the city where a great deal of the story unfolds. This was the culmination of the most intensely publicized production ever. It was introduced by the producer David O. Selznick, in the presence of the principal cast members and the author Margaret Mitchell who wrote the bestseller from which this super-production was adapted. The credited director, Victor Fleming, who considered himself neglected, was absent. It is true that Selznick appears to be the film's real director. Since June 1936, when he bought the rights to the novel for $50,000, about 15 screenwriters and four directors have been employed on it at various times. The original scenario, written by Sidney Howard who, sadly, died last June, was reworked by Ben Hecht and Scott Fitzgerald, among others, each of them working on a different colored script.      Production began in January and ended on 1 July. The first director, George Cukor, was fired scarcely two weeks into shooting after several disagreements with Clark Gable, the male lead. Fleming worked on the film until May when he left ill and exhausted, handing on the baton to Sam Wood who completed it. As for the stars, the choice of Gable as Rhett Butler was automatic, due to a poll held among the public. Casting Scarlett O'Hara proved far more problematic. Some of the biggest female stars who wanted the role had screen tests: Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Paulette Goddard, Susan Hayward and Loretta Young, among dozens of others, as well as 1,400 unknowns. Selznick was still undecided until his brother Myron introduced him to Vivien Leigh, an English actress who had had a brilliant stage career prior to appearing in a number of British films before the war. Selznick immediately fell under her charm, and courageously decided to cast her in that much sought-after role. For the sequence depicting the burning of Atlanta, Selznick ordered more than 30 acres of the old Pathé backlot of tinderbox sets to be put to the torch. Every Technicolor camera in Hollywood -- all seven of them -- was used to record the conflagration from different angles. All in all, Gone With the Wind, which runs three hours and 42 minutes plus an intermission, and cost over $4 million, is a magnificent achievement. What lifts the film into the highest category is not only its spectacular depiction of the American Civil War, but also its range of strongly drawn characters, seen especially in the central relationship between Rhett and Scarlett -- a monument to devouring passion. New York, 21 December: The film critic for the Daily Worker has been dismissed because editors thought he wasn't harsh enough in his review of Gone With the Wind. The paper considers the film to be an apology for slavery. Paris, 29 December: The Cinematographic Service for the army is to hold recreational film screenings for soldiers in the filed. Hollywood, 31 December: At year's end, the top three box-office grossers in America are Babes in Arms, Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). England, 31 December: This year's production is down to 40 films compared to 228 in 1937.