Awards presented March 4, 1943
The nominees were ...
And the Oscar went to ...
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| Daniel Mandell |
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| Righty Gary Cooper as lefty Lou Gehrig |
With the possible exception of
Field of Dreams, this is the most popular baseball movie of all, drenched in sentiment, pumped full of uplift. Gary Cooper plays Lou Gehrig, who was forced to retire on July 4, 1939, because he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which consequently became known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Producer Sam Goldwyn, who knew nothing about baseball, bought the story at the urging of Niven Busch, who was working for him as a story editor. Though Goldwyn was aware that sports movies rarely succeeded at the box office, he was convinced that the film would succeed after watching the newsreel of Gehrig's farewell speech in Yankee Stadium. (The real thing is simpler, less tear-jerking than Cooper's rendition of it under Sam Wood's direction.) Mandell is credited with the solution to one of the film's technical problems: Gehrig was left-handed, Cooper right-handed. So Mandell suggested that Cooper bat normally but run to third base instead of first. The images in those sequences were printed in reverse, which also necessitated reversing the insignia on the players' uniforms so they'd come out the right way on screen. His ingenious solution also explains why the film was nominated for special effects. This was the first of three Oscars for former circus and vaudeville acrobat Mandell, who became a film editor after serving in World War I, when a friend helped him get a job at MGM. He subsequently worked at Columbia before becoming Goldwyn's chief editor. He was also a favorite editor of Billy Wilder, with whom he worked on five films.
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| Cooper delivers Gehrig's farewell address |
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