The Feature That Won An Oscar For Best Documentary (Short Subject)

Gregg Toland's 'December 7th' is now available in its original 80 minute form, but it was cut down and released as a half-hour short, which received an Academy Award in 1944.

Researching old documentaries can be a confusing but enlightening endeavor. Take the Best Documentary Feature category, for instance. Many sources point to the 15th Academy Awards as the first year of that category and four films as its inaugural winners. Yet two of those films were shorts because that year the Oscars recognized documentaries of any length in a single category called Best Documentary, with each winner named as receiving a “special award.” The following year, Best Documentary (Feature) made its actual debut, with Desert Victory taking home the Academy Award. That same ceremony saw a film that’s now available as a feature win the Oscar for Best Documentary (Short Subject): Gregg Toland and John Ford’s December 7th.

If you want to watch this “short subject” film and you look up its availability on, say, JustWatch, the first two streaming platform options presented (JustWatchTV and HBO Max) and the digital rental/purchase TVOD version (via Prime Video) show a runtime of around 80 minutes. This is how I learned that December 7th was originally a feature-length documentary. However, the version shown to a limited audience with certain security clearance and then screened for Motion Picture Academy members was condensed to 32 minutes. The original cut was preserved and eventually made available to the public in 1991. A VHS release offered only the “banned for 50 years” full-length version, while a decade later, DVD copies included both cuts. Now, depending on where you look, either the feature or the short (the latter being the option available on Tubi, Artiflix, and the Internet Archive) pops up without the other.