 |
| To The March of Time for its significance to motion pictures and for having revolutionized one of the most important branches of the industry -- the newsreel. |
 |
| Marlene Dietrich in The Garden of Allah |
 |
| Charles Boyer and Dietrich |
 |
| Dietrich and Basil Rathbone |
The color in The Garden of Allah is undeniably breathtaking, and it emboldened David O. Selznick to shoot Gone With the Wind in Technicolor, in which Selznick's backer, multimillionaire Jock Whitney, owned stock. Unfortunately, the film itself is a tired piece of high camp from a novel by Robert Hitchens that had been filmed twice as a silent. Marlene Dietrich plays a rich woman sojourning in the desert, where she meets and marries Charles Boyer, who turns out to be a Trappist monk who fled the monastery and is drawn back to it by pangs of conscience. Both Boyer and Dietrich regretted making the movie. "It's twash, isn't it?" Dietrich asked dialogue director Joshua Logan, who had been brought in to tame the accents of the stars. The award to Greene and Rosson was the first of a series of honorary awards to cinematographers making color films. Color had been around for years in one form or another: Greene was a pioneer who had used two-color Technicolor for a sequence in the 1925 Ben-Hur. The expense of converting to sound, and the rather limited palette of the two-color process, had deterred the studios from making color films. But when Technicolor developed its three-color process in the mid-1930s, a greater willingness to experiment with it began. Greene would win an Oscar for The Phantom of the Opera (1943) after the award became competitive. Rosson, a veteran with a career as cinematographer stretching back to 1915, never won a competitive Oscar, though he was nominated five times. Only one of his nominations, for The Wizard of Oz, was for a color film.
No comments:
Post a Comment