My Own Private Oscars: Best Cinematography, 1946

Awards presented March 13, 1947

The Academy made a somewhat radical change of rules this year, putting the several branches of the Academy, instead of the studios and production companies, in charge of the nominations. The Cinematographers Branch had done something like this before: In 1939, it allowed each studio to submit its own candidates, but then had winnowed down the nominees to only two each in the Black-and-White and Color categories. That time, at least the names in the studio "long list" were made public. Now the cinematographers chose to announce only the final two nominees in each category -- a decision that naturally caused some controversy, so the nominees were expanded to the now-customary five per category with the 1949 awards.

The nominees were ...

(Black-and-White)

(Color)

... when they should have been ...

(Black-and-White)

(Color)

Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, Hal Rosson, Duel in the Sun
Charles Rosher, Leonard Smith, Arthur Arling, The Yearling

And the Oscar went to ...

(Black-and-White)

Arthur Miller, Anna and the King of Siam.

The musical version of the story of the king and the British governess of his many children is so familiar that you feel a letdown when the songs don't come in this, the first film version, starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne. It provided Miller with the third of his three Oscars. He retired as a director of photography in 1951 because of poor health, but remained active in the industry, serving as president of the American Society of Cinematographers.

(Color)

Charles Rosher, Leonard Smith, Arthur Arling, The Yearling.

Claude Jarman Jr. in The Yearling

In one of the best of the MGM Technicolor "family films" of the 1940s, which include National Velvet and Lassie Come Home, Claude Jarman Jr. plays Jody Baxter, a boy living in the Florida backwoods, who discovers an orphaned fawn and raises it with the encouragement of his father, played by Gregory Peck. But his mother, played by Jane Wyman, struggling with the poverty in which the family lives, regards the animal as just another mouth to feed, especially after it grows and becomes more rambunctious. Some of the film was shot near the home of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who wrote the novel on which the film is based and whose own story was told in the 1983 film Cross Creek. Rosher had received the very first Oscar given for cinematography, for his work on Sunrise. In the 1940s he became a specialist in the lush Technicolor for which MGM films were noted. Smith had received three previous nominations for color cinematography; this was his only Oscar. It was also his last film: He died in October 1947. Arling received a subsequent nomination, for the black-and-white cinematography of I'll Cry Tomorrow, but this was also his only Oscar.

Jane Wyman in The Yearling

Gregory Peck and Jarman in The Yearling

... when it should have gone to ...

(Black-and-White)

Ted Tetzlaff, Notorious.

Ted Tetzlaff

Tetzlaff's only nomination was for The Talk of the Town, but his work with Hitchcock on Notorious deserved more attention from the Academy. He helped craft, for example, the tracking shot in which the camera looks down on the party at the Sebastians from a second-floor balcony and then gradually descends to a shot of the key to the wine cellar in Ingrid Bergman's hand. It's conventional to give Hitchcock the credit for imagining such an effect, but obviously he needed a cinematographer who knew how to light it and a cameraman who knew how to set it up. Tetzlaff, who had been a cinematographer since 1926, and had such credits as My Man Godfrey and The More the Merrier, was more than capable of doing Hitchcock's bidding on this and other "Hitchcockian" scenes. This was, however, his last film as cinematographer: The following year he became a full-time director, though his credits in that job are somewhat less impressive.