Cagney's bravura performance earned him his only Academy Award for Best Actor. For Warner Bros., it became their biggest box office hit in the company's history up to that point, nominated for nine Academy Awards and winning four. The film's success also became a high point in Curtiz's career, with his nomination for Best Director. The film has been added to the Annals of Hollywood as a cinematic classic, preserved in the United States National Film Registry at the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Another patriotic Curtiz film was This Is the Army (1943), a musical adapted from the stage play with a score by Irving Berlin. While the United States was engaged in World War II, the film boosted the morale singapore email list of soldiers and the public. Among its nineteen songs, Kate Smith's rendition of "God Bless America" was one of the film's highlights. As a result of the film's numerous popular and generic elements, such as ground and air combat, recruiting, drilling, and marching, as well as comedy, romance, song, and dance, it was the most financially successful war-themed film of any kind made during World War II.
This Is the Army remains the freshest, most endearing and most moving musical tribute to the American fighter who emerged from World War II… buoyant, engaging, as American as hot dogs or the Bill of Rights… a deeply reassuring document on the state of the nation. It is, from start to finish, a great show.
– Bosley Crowther, New York Times
