They Won Best Director But Their Films Never Won Best Picture Some of the Greatest Directors in History Are On A List You Never Consider, Part 1

 

When I was growing up in the 1990s there was this constant debate among Oscar followers about the parallel between Best Picture and Best Director. The argument was always: if a film wasn't nominated for Best Director, how great a picture could it be? That debate didn't go away after Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture without a corresponding director's nod and its still prevalent to this day, though considering how the 21^st century has been going in terms of winners of Best Picture and Best Director, that debate is becoming less relevant with each year.

A couple of weeks ago, however, my corkscrew brain which is full of a ridiculous amount of Oscar trivia, decided to turn it around and ask a question I've never heard asked before: what about those directors who win the prize for Best Director and yet never had any of their movies win Best Picture?  Because that's actually a longer and more interesting list to consider and in the 21^st century it's gotten a lot longer.

So for those film connoisseurs and Oscar buffs I'd like to present an alternative. Here are ten directors who have to be considered among the greatest of all time who have one – and in some cases multiple Academy Awards for directing – yet never managed to have a single one of their iconic films win Best Picture. (There's one exception to this list but because he's so fascinating I feel compelled to include him.)

To keep this simple I'm not including directors who have won a Best Picture prize to go with their directing Oscar. These include not only Steven Spielberg, but also Oliver Stone and most recently Alexander Gonzalez Irratu.  There are also more than  a few master craftsmen from the Golden Age of Cinema who have one Directing Oscar but not a Best Picture prize to go with it, such as Leo McCarey for The Awful Truth and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter To Three Wives. As they would subsequently have films that won Best Picture (Going My Way for McCarey, All About Eve for Mankiewicz) it's hard to argue the Oscars ignored them.

Let's start with the 20^th Century

 

John Ford

 

This is the exception I mentioned at the start but it's such a fascinating one I couldn't resist.

First of all John Ford is to this point in history the only director to win four Oscars for direction. I'm relatively sure that record will stand forever. More interestingly none of the awards he won are for the westerns or he is most remembered for. One of the few he didn't win for was Stagecoach in 1939. He was never nominated for The Searchers, Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Liberty Valence and so on. The truth is Ford was one of the more versatile directors of all time and the movies he won for show that range. And that's the more interesting part.

Of the four Oscars he won for directing, three of them didn't have a corresponding Best Picture to go with it. The first was for The Informer, a movie set in 1922 about an Irish Rebel who informs on his friends. Ford won for Best Director and the film actually won four Oscars including Best Actor for Victor McLagen and Best Screenplay for Dudley Nichols. (Nichols made history when he became the first man to decline his Oscar.) But the movie lost Best Picture to Mutiny On The Bounty, an admitted masterpiece that nevertheless was the last film to only win Best Picture and no other awards.

In 1940 Ford won his second Best Director award for The Grapes of Wrath, one of the greatest films of all time to this day.  But there were a lot of great movies in 1940 and Best Picture went to Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, the only movie that great man ever made that won Best Picture.

Finally in 1952 Ford won his fourth and last directing Oscar for The Quiet Man. And it was that year the Oscars made one of the biggest blunders in its history. The movie was in competition with another now classic film High Noon which won Best Actor and three other Oscars. But that year Best Picture went to Cecil B DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth considered then and now one of the absolute worst films to win Best Picture in history. Even De Mille seemed embarrassed when he took the prize.

Now I should mention the movie Ford had a corresponding Best Picture with a Best Director prize: How Green Was My Valley. That movie was by far the biggest winner of the Oscars for 1941. You know, the year of Citizen Kane. I'm pretty sure that's one Hollywood really wishes it could take back.

 

John Huston

John Huston is without question one of the greatest hyphenates in Hollywood's history. From the beginning of his career with The Maltese Falcon until his last film The Dead, he ranks as one of the most stirring directors of all time. The Huston name was already associated with greatness when he started his career in 1941 and it still is long after his death. He was nominated for writing, directing and acting throughout a career that lasted five decades and he did win two Oscars. But in itself those two Oscars are odd.

In 1948 Huston directed one of the greatest movies of all time The Treasure of The Sierra Madre. It ranks with Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, The Asphalt Jungle and The Man Who Would Be King as his greatest films. It was recognized by critics and other groups as the Best Film of the year winning the top prizes from the New York Film Critics and the Golden Globes though oddly enough many believed Johnny Belinda was going to be the big winner on Oscar night.

It didn't seem that way going forward. Huston took the Best Director prize and Best Screenplay prize. Walter Huston took Best Supporting Actor. (Huston's other major film of 1958 Key Largo also did well with Claire Trevor winning Best Supporting Actress.) Yet the Best Picture that year was not Treasure or Johnny Belinda. Rather it was Laurence Oliver's Hamlet.

Oliver's win annoyed Hollywood because the famous Brit wasn't even in Hollywood to pick up his Oscars that year.  In truth the industry was more annoyed with Oliver then they were for the Houston family that year.  Huston shrugged it off and would be one of the most nominated writers-directors during the 1950s.

 

George Stevens

Though he's less remembered today then his contemporaries John Ford and William Wyler George Stevens is considered one of the greatest American filmmakers of the golden age of Hollywood. His career stretches practically to the era of talking films and runs the gamut, from Alice Adams and Swing Time to Gunga Din to I Remember Mama. His peak level of creativity came in the 1950s when he directed some of the greatest films of all time, A Place in the Sun, Shane, Giant and The Diary of Anne Frank all films which are considered iconic and all of which he received Best Directing nominations.

He would actually win for two of them and yet strangely enough neither won Best Picture. The first came for A Place in the Sun, his adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The film did win six Oscars that year and Stevens did win Best Director, but Best Picture went to the Gene Kelly musical An American Paris. To be fair this was a very competitive year: Place in the Sun was also competing against Streetcar Named Desire, African Queen and two other brilliant film adaptations of plays: Detective Story and Death of A Salesman.

In 1956 it was a different story. Stevens won Best Director for Giant but it was the only Oscar his film won, the first time in Oscar history that happened. (We're going to deal with the next one below.) Giant led all films in nominations with ten but this was a year of epic filmmaking.  And this year they decided to give the Oscar to a movie that was known for the showmanship of its producer Mike Todd then overall quality Around the World in 80 Days. Compared to Giant and indeed some of the other films in this category (The Ten Commandments, The King and I) 80 Days wasn't even close to the caliber of Best Picture and was nearly as much of an embarrassment in hindsight as The Greatest Show on Earth.

Stevens would slow down after his peak in the 1950s only making two more films after Anne Frank. The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965 and The Only Game in Town in 1970. He died in March of 1975 at the relatively young age of 70.

 

 

Mike Nichols

Nichols may have been the first person to get an EGOT before we knew the term existed and had three of the four when he was pretty young. By the time he was only 36 he had three of the four locked up. (He got the Emmy in 2001 for Wit and then got a second for Angels in America.) He was nominated for Best Director for his film debut when he was only thirty-five the groundbreaking Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That film won a lot of Oscars but it lost Best Picture and Director to A Man for All Seasons.

1967 is in many ways considered the birth of 'New Hollywood'. Three movies that are considered part of the vanguard of that era were the biggest nominees for Best Picture, each led by a legendary director: Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde, Norman Jewison's In The Heat of the Night and Mike Nichol's The Graduate.  Nichols would end up winning Best Director for the latter but just as with George Stevens for Giant, it would be the only Oscar that film earned in competition. It is far more difficult, however, to argue with In The Heat of The Night as the winner or the majority of the acting awards that were won by that film or Bonnie & Clyde. (Katherine Hepburn's second Academy Award for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is more questionable; she herself  would later make it clear that she thought the only reason she won was because her frequent co-star and often romantic partner Spencer Tracy had died just a few days after filming was completed.)

Nichols would never win another Oscar in competition. However considering how much of a force he was in every medium right up until the end of his life  with Charlie Wilson's War, it's hard to argue he was robbed.

 

Warren Beatty

Warren Beatty is arguably the greatest-hyphenate in the second half of the 20^th century with the exception of Woody Allen. He is the only man in history to be nominating for writing, directing, producing and acting in the same film twice. And few people have as poor a track record with the Oscars for that career. His lifetime record with the Oscars is one for fourteen. And that's not counting the fact that he was ignored by them for the stunning achievement Dick Tracy which got seven Oscar nominations, none for him.

Reds was arguably the most daring project in his entire career: a three hour and 20 minute epic that told the story of John Reed, the radical American journalist who became part of the Communist revolution in Russia and hoped to bring its spirit to the U.S. (I'm going to write about the movie for my blog someday. The film was considered a great achievement from the moment it debuted but when it was released in 1981 it came out in what was a banner year for motion pictures. Among the unquestioned masterpieces released that year that were prominent contenders for Oscars were Raiders of the Lost Ark, Arthur, Atlantic City and Chariots of Fire.

During the critics races. Reds dominated the awards in the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics. LA and the National Society of Film Critics gave their major prizes to Atlantic City. And at the Golden Globes the big winner was On Golden Pond with Reds only winning Best Director. Arthur was the big winner with four prizes while Chariots of Fire won Best Foreign film.

Reds got twelve Oscar nominations with Beatty getting four nominations and the film being nominated in every acting category. Beatty won both the Writers Guild Award and the Directors Guild award so it looked it was going to be a Reds triumph on Oscar night. And to be sure Beatty won Best Director and the film won Best Supporting Actress for Maureen Stapleton and Best Cinematography.

But the film in the envelope for Best Picture shocked the industry: Chariots of Fire. To this its unclear if this was a big mistake or a genuine correct pick: the film had done well at the box office, had done well at Cannes and some film festivals and it had become a popular favorite.

Immediately after this Beatty collaborated with Elaine May on Ishtar, which became one of the most infamous critical and box office bombs in history. He would make a few more films after that but has spent much of his life since  as Mr. Annette Bening and the stay-at-home dad to their children. I think he'd call that a fair exchange.

 

In the conclusion I'll deal with five famous directors in this century who've to this point in their careers had the same ignominy at the Oscars as the five above.