Alfred Hitchcock‘s Foreign Correspondent (1940) was one of 1940’s ten Best Picture nominees. Hitchcock’s Rebecca won the Oscar, John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath should have won, but in my book Correspondent is almost equal to Wrath. And it’s much better than All This, and Heaven Too, The Great Dictator, Kitty Foyle, The Letter, The Long Voyage Home, Our Town and The Philadelphia Story.
The plane-crash sequence shows that you don’t need state-of-the-art visual effects, much less 21st Century CGI, to make an action sequence work. It’s all about what to show, and when and how to show it
