Walter Pidgeon of his better known roles was in "The Dark Command", where he portrayed the villain (loosely based on American Civil War guerrilla William C. Quantrill) opposite John Wayne, Claire Trevor, and a young Roy Rogers. It was not until he starred in the Academy Award-winning Best Picture "How Green Was My Valley" (1941) that his popularity returned. He then starred opposite Greer Garson in "Blossoms in the Dust" (1941), "Mrs. Miniver" (1942) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor) and its sequel, "The Miniver Story" in 1950. He was also nominated in 1944 for "Madame
War film the "Why We Fight" propaganda series from Frank Capra; the War Department's Information-Education Division started out making training films for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy; the Army made its own through the U.S. Signal Corps, including John Huston's "The Battle of San Pietro". Hollywood made films with propaganda messages about America's allies, such as "Mrs. Miniver" (1942), which portrayed a British family on the home front; "Edge of Darkness" (1943) showed Norwegian resistance fighters, and "The North Star" (1943) showed the Soviet Union and its Communist Party. Towards the end of the war popular books provided higher quality