Best Art Direction, 1946

Awards presented March 13, 1947

Like the cinematographers, the art directors decided to sharply reduce the number of nominees this year -- in their case, to three per category. 
The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 

The lavish decor for the movie sometimes resembles that of a very expensive Thai restaurant. Director John Cromwell had hoped for color, but the studio wouldn't spring for it. Art director Lyle Wheeler got his chance to do it over in color ten years later when it became The King and I, reusing many of the original designs. He won an Oscar for that version, too.  

(Color) 
The Yearling. Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Paul Groesse; Interior Decoration: Edwin B. Willis. 

Something of a surprise winner in this category, given that much of the film takes place out of doors and the interiors are the sparsely furnished cabins of impoverished Florida farmers. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
Alexandre Traunder

Léon Barsacq
Marcel Carné's brilliant re-creation of the nineteenth-century French theater scene was made under the harshest of conditions under Nazi occupation, including the fact that art director Alexandre Trauner was Jewish, and was forced to hide that fact from the Vichy authorities. Some of the exterior sets had to be completely rebuilt after being damaged by a storm, and throughout the filming materials were in short supply. So the fact that the film was made at all is remarkable enough. That it is truly beautiful as well is miraculous. Barsacq would later be nominated for his work on The Longest Day. Trauner would have a regular working relationship with Billy Wilder and win an Oscar for The Apartment, as well as being nominated for his work with John Huston on The Man Who Would Be King.
Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) gives Garance (Arletty) a role in his latest pantomime 






(Color) 
Henry V. Art Direction: Paul Sheriff, Carmen Dillon.

Carmen Dillon
This fine version of Shakespeare's play was originally planned as a wartime morale booster, and it shows director and star Laurence Olivier at his creative best, well-supported by Leo Genn, Felix Aylmer, Robert Newton, Max Adrian, Robert Helpmann, Ernest Thesiger, and Renee Asherson, among many others. But it's also a tribute to the creative work of Paul Sheriff, the Russian-born designer who was the mainstay of many of the British-made films of the 1940s and '50s, and Carmen Dillon, who won an Oscar for Olivier's Hamlet. She also trained many of the British designers who would follow her in the 1960s and '70s, including Oscar winners John Box, Terence Marsh, and Roy Walker. The design of Henry V is something of a tour de force, as the film begins in a re-creation of the Elizabethan Globe theater, then moves into a stylized presentation, and finally into realistic battle scenes. Some of the sets are modeled on the images from the French gothic illuminated manuscript, the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which was contemporary with the actual King Henry V. 
From the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
Banquet scene in Henry V 
The Chorus (Leslie Banks) on the stage of the Globe in Henry V
A view from the Globe stage in Henry V 
The stylized gates of Harfleur in Henry V
Laurence Olivier as Henry V 


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