Best Supporting Actress, 1949

Awards presented March 23, 1950
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

McCambridge accepts her Oscar
McCambridge began her acting career on radio in 1938, and made several appearances on Broadway before her screen debut as Willie Stark's campaign girl Friday in All the King's Men. The Oscar gave her no great career boost, however, and a few roles in minor films and on television followed. Her most memorable role during these years was as the over-the-top villain in Johnny Guitar (1954), Nicholas Ray's eccentric Western starring Joan Crawford; the movie was a flop, but has since, in large part thanks to McCambridge and Crawford, become a cult classic. She received a second Oscar nomination for her role in Giant, but much of her later career was spent in television guest appearances, with frequent appearances on Westerns like Rawhide, Bonanza and Gunsmoke. She returned to Broadway in 1962 to play Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, replacing Uta Hagen. Her most famous role, however, was unseen: She initially received no billing for her work as the voice of the demon in The Exorcist, but sued Warner Bros. to obtain the screen credit.   
McCambridge, John Ireland, and Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men 

No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Best Supporting Actor, 1949

Awards presented March 23, 1950


The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

After studying acting in Chicago, Jagger came west, where he made his film debut opposite Mary Astor in a 1929 silent, The Woman From Hell. For the next decade he made frequent appearances in minor films, but in 1940 landed the title role in Brigham Young, which starred Tyrone Power. The part gave him substantial name recognition, and while he was never a leading man, he had a significant mainstream career as a supporting player in movies and on television for the next four decades. His last appearance was a guest shot on the TV series "St. Elsewhere" in 1985, six years before his death at the age of eighty-seven. His part in Twelve O'Clock High as a major under the command of an army air force general played by Gregory Peck earned him his sole Oscar nomination and win.    

... when it should have gone to ...  

Juano Hernandez
Hernandez plays Lucas Beauchamp, a black man accused of killing a white man in a rural Mississippi county, and targeted by a gathering mob eager to lynch him. But he has a defender in a white teenager, Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr.), who proves that Lucas is innocent. Intruder in the Dust is not one of William Faulkner's better novels, but its film adaptation is one of Hollywood's great neglected movies. Directed by Clarence Brown, a Hollywood veteran who earned five Oscar nominations without winning, from a screenplay by Ben Maddow that shows signs of close collaboration with Faulkner, and filmed by Robert Surtees in Faulkner's home town of Oxford, Mississippi, it's a movie without major stars, but a beautifully chosen cast of supporting players: David Brian as Gavin Stevens, Chick's lawyer uncle who has to be persuaded to defend Lucas; Elizabeth Patterson as the indomitable Miss Haversham, the elderly spinster who stands off the mob at the jailhouse door; Porter Hall as the dead man's father; Will Geer as the county sheriff; and the citizens of Oxford and Lafayette County, Faulkner's Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha. But the standout in the cast is Hernandez, who was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Brazil and the Caribbean before moving to the United States. He was an acrobat and a boxer, performed in vaudeville and on radio and studied Shakespeare to improve his English diction, and made his Broadway debut in the chorus of the 1927 production of Show Boat. In the 1930s he appeared in several films by the pioneering black director Oscar Micheaux that were made for primarily African-American audiences. Intruder was his first mainstream film, and he continued his career, sometimes playing Indians or Polynesians, in films and TV through the 1960s. He appeared in another Faulkner adaptation, The Reivers, in 1969, and made his last appearance in They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in 1970, the year of his death.

Lawyer Gavin Stevens (David Brian) speaks with Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) in his jail cell
Hernandez and Brian in Intruder in the Dust 
Chick (Claude Jarman Jr.) falls into a frozen creek while out hunting with Aleck (Elzie Emanuel), and is rescued by Lucas (Hernandez), who takes him to his cabin while his clothes dry. Chick tries to pay Lucas, who proudly refuses. 
WHEN WE WERE EXTRAS from Joe York on Vimeo. A documentary about the Oxford citizens who appeared in Intruder in the Dust




No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Best Actress, 1949

Awards presented March 23, 1950
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress. 

De Havilland and her Oscars
De Havilland had seen Wendy Hiller in the Broadway production of the adaptation of Henry James's novella, Washington Square, by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, and persuaded producer-director William Wyler to obtain the rights to the play and to cast her as the plain, shy Catherine Sloper. It won her a second Oscar in the last of her five nominations, but it also marked the end of the major phase of her Hollywood career. She was only thirty-three when she won for The Heiress, but she would be absent from the screen for three years, returning in 1952 to star opposite Richard Burton in My Cousin Rachel. She then made sporadic appearances in mostly forgettable films through the 1950s and early '60s. In 1964 she appeared in Robert Aldrich's Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, on which he had hoped to reteam Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, the stars of his hit What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? But after filming for a week, Crawford quit, claiming she was ill, but admitting to friends that she couldn't stand working with Davis again. De Havilland agreed to replace her. It was her last major film: Her later career consisted of guest appearances on TV series and cameo roles in such disaster movies as Airport '77 and The Swarm. 

Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift in The Heiress
De Havilland's Catherine climbs the stairs at the film's end

No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Best Actor, 1949

Awards presented March 23, 1950
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Crawford inherited the "big lug" stereotype of his fellow Oscar winners Wallace Beery and Victor McLaglen, though with somewhat less success than theirs. He is chiefly known for two film roles -- this one and Judy Holliday's junkyard-millionaire sugar daddy in Born Yesterday -- and for "Highway Patrol," the late-1950s TV series that seemed to run forever in syndication. He was the son of two vaudevillians, Lester Crawford and Helen Broderick (best-known for her wise-cracking sidekick roles in the Astaire-Rogers movies Top Hat and Swing Time), and dropped out of Harvard to become a stevedore. He got his first big break when he was cast in the role of Lenny in the 1937 Broadway adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. He went to Hollywood on the strength of his New York success, but was passed over for the part of Lenny in the film version in favor of Lon Chaney Jr. He found regular work, mostly as a B-picture heavy, until Robert Rossen chose him to play the charismatic Willie Stark -- a role that had been offered first to John Wayne. He landed his other major film role, in Born Yesterday, after Paul Douglas, who had played the part on Broadway, decided not to reprise it in the film. Although he also starred in one of the early films of Federico Fellini, Il Bidone (1955), he failed to find satisfactory work in movies, and turned to TV, where in addition to "Highway Patrol," he had a long career, mostly in guest appearances. Despite severe alcoholism, he managed to work regularly until his death in 1986.    

... when it should have gone to ...  

James Cagney and Margaret Wycherly in White Heat 
If Cagney's Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, in which he played the ultimate song-and-dance man, honored one side of his career, then he certainly should have won for White Heat, which is his gangster apotheosis, a Gangsterdämmerung. He pulls out all the stops and throws them away as Cody Jarrett, the gangster with a fixation on his mother (Margaret Wycherly), who is as ruthless and loony as he is. Directed by Raoul Walsh, everyone in this film noir with a fiery finish gives a terrific performance, even Virginia Mayo, so often the epitome of bland blondness, as Cody's moll, Verna. The movie deservedly made the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2003, but it received only one Oscar nomination, for the story by Virginia Kellogg on which it was based. 

"Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" Cagney's immolation scene in White Heat



No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Honorary Awards, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949
Pierre Fresnay as Vincent de Paul, the seventeenth-century priest whose work among the poor during the Black Death eventually led to his canonization. The French film, directed by Maurice Cloche, was one of the first to be honored by the Academy before the creation of the competitive foreign language film award.
To Monsieur Vincent, voted by the Academy Board of Governors as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during 1948.  
Ivan Jandl, with the miniature Oscar and Golden Globe
that he won for his performance in The Search
To Ivan Jandl, for the outstanding juvenile performance of 1948, as "Karel Malik" in The Search.

 Jandl was a member of a radio choir in Prague, and had appeared in radio plays and a Czech film when he was selected by director Fred Zinnemann for his role in The Search as a boy whom Montgomery Clift helps reunite with his mother in the aftermath of World War II.  He was either unable to attend the awards ceremony or was prevented from doing so by the communist government, but his miniature Oscar and the Golden Globe he was also awarded were brought to him in Prague. Stories about his life after the award are often tinged by politics, and hence may not be entirely reliable: According to one story, he was forced to withdraw from university and to work as a laborer in a quarry because of his association with the capitalist Academy. He made only three more films, the last in 1951, but later in life returned to radio work. He died in 1987, at the age of fifty. 
Sid Grauman and Gene Tierney at Tierney's handprinting ceremony in 1946
Grauman left his own prints at the Chinese Theatre 
The Chinese Theatre forecourt today
To Sid Grauman, a master showman, who raised the standard of motion picture exhibition.
To Adolph Zukor, a man who has been called the father of the feature film in America, for his services to the industry over a period of forty years
To Walter Wanger for distinguished service to the industry in adding to its moral stature in the world community by his production of the picture Joan of Arc
To Jean Hersholt in recognition of his service to the Academy during four terms as president
No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

Jerry Wald. 

Wald, center, holding his Thalberg Award, is flanked by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who accepted the best actor Oscar for Laurence Olivier, best supporting actress Claire Trevor, best actress Jane Wyman, and best supporting actor John Huston. Trevor and Wyman both won their Oscars for films produced by Wald, Key Largo and Johnny Belinda.
While studying journalism at New York University, Wald covered radio for the New York Evening Graphic, then moved into writing for radio programs and as a publicist for radio stars. In 1934 he became a writer at Warner Bros., then moved into producing in 1941. The Thalberg Award, which came rather early in his career, recognized his success with such Warner Bros. films as Mildred Pierce, Key Largo and Johnny Belinda. Wald remained at Warners until 1950, when he formed a production company with Norman Krasna and Howard Hughes. Working with the eccentric Hughes proved difficult, however, and in 1953 he accepted a deal as vice president in charge of production at Columbia under Harry Cohn. In 1956 he formed his own company, with a release agreement through 20th Century-Fox. As producer, he received two Oscar nominations, for Peyton Place and Sons and Lovers. He also produced the Academy Awards television shows in 1958 and 1959. He died of a heart attack in 1962, at the age of fifty.
No comments:
Labels: , ,

Best Documentary, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

And the nominees were ...
(Feature)
(Short Subject) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Feature) 

An account of the U.S. Navy's expedition to Antarctica in 1946-47, under the command of Adm. Richard E. Byrd. Filmed by Navy photographers, with narration by Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor and Van Heflin, all of whom served in the Navy in World War II. The music is by Bronislau Kaper. This is the sole Oscar for Dull, who had been nominated once when there was a category for assistant directors. 



(Short Subject) 
Toward Independence, United States Army. 
A scene from Toward Independence
This film about the rehabilitation of disabled veterans was directed by George L. George for the Army Signal Corps. A print is preserved in the Academy library, but the film seems to be otherwise unlocatable. 
No comments:
Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)