This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

It's weird to think that "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," a movie so iconic that half the politicians I've ever interviewed cite it as one of their favorites, didn't win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Neither did "The Wizard of Oz," a beloved classic whose dialogue and songs can be easily quoted by most anybody.

Nor, for that matter, did "Stagecoach," John Ford's gorgeous and exciting Western that made John Wayne a household name and Monument Valley a location recognized around the world.

There's a simple reason those movies were not Best Picture Oscar winners: They all were released in 1939, and the competition was too intense.

"The Wizard of Oz," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "Stagecoach" wer nominated for Best Picture that year. So were the Bette Davis weepie "Dark Victory," the school drama "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," the tragic romance "Love Affair," the cross-cultural comedy "Ninotchka," and adaptations of "Of Mice and Men" (with Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr.) and "Wuthering Heights" (with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon).

But they all lost the trophy to "Gone With the Wind," which some statisticians say is the most-watched movie in history (if you adjust box-office figures for inflation).

This year marks 75 years since 1939, often considered the greatest year Hollywood ever had.

What happened? Why was 1939 the "golden year" when the magic hit all over Hollywood?

The reasons range from cosmic coincidence to historical influences and include matters of talent, timing and technology.

In terms of history, 1939 was a year when America's economy was slowly rising from the Great Depression, and Hollywood benefited as much from that economic rise as anybody. Budgets were rising, and with them the quality of films.

The drumbeat of war in Europe also had its effect on American filmmaking. A lot of talented European film directors, many of them Jewish, had left their home countries because of the growth of Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire — culminating in the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, launching the start of World War II.

Movie technology also was improving. Look at a movie from the mid-1930s — even a marvel like "King Kong" — and you notice how grainy the film stock looks, and how stilted the audio sounds. That was filmmaking in the years just after synchronized sound, introduced in 1927 with "The Jazz Singer."

Though a technological breakthrough, "talkies" were actually a step backward for camerawork. With cameras now yoked to unwieldy sound-recording equipment, the days of fast-moving shots and open-air studios were history. It took years for Hollywood to make the sound technology as portable and as fluid as the cameras, and 1939 was when it all started to come together.

The other technical breakthrough that came into its own in 1939 was color film. Technicolor may have been invented in 1916, but the process — and others like it — didn't become truly viable until the 1930s. Even then, because of the Depression, color often wasn't affordable, except for short animated films. (Disney, for one, was an early adopter, both in shorts and in its early animated features.)

"Gone With the Wind" was the first color movie to win Best Picture, and won a special Oscar for the use of color. Another nominee that year, "The Wizard of Oz," famously could only obtain a certain amount of color film stock — which is why the Kansas scenes at the movie's start and finish were sepia-toned black and white.

It was too good to last, though. The growing war in Europe and the Pacific would, two years later, bring in the United States. Hollywood hunkered down, with its stars and filmmaking resources given over to the war effort.

Watching the movies of 1939 today — and besides those Oscar nominees, the list includes "Gunga Din," "Only Angels Have Wings," "The Women," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Golden Boy" — causes a viewer to reflect on what feels dated and what still resonates in these films.

"Gone With the Wind," particularly, feels dated in its depiction of African Americans and in its wistful nostalgia for the racist attitudes of the Deep South. On the other hand, it gave a great actress like Hattie McDaniel a role of a lifetime and made her the first African-American performer to win an Oscar.

Sometimes, 1939 movie politics are so retro as to be cool again. Take "Ninotchka," with Greta Garbo as a humorless Soviet attaché who's wooed by an American playboy (Melvyn Douglas). The take on Communism in '39, when the world was more worried about Hitler than Stalin, is funnier and less pedantic than the 1957 musical remake, "Silk Stockings," produced at the height of the Cold War.

The delights to be found in these 1939 movies are many, and worth checking out again. They also raise an uncomfortable question: What movies that came out this year will people still be watching in 2089, 75 years from now?

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket, or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/seanpmeans. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.