Awards presented March 10, 1938
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
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| The plague of locusts in The Good Earth |
This long, expensive, but often tiresome adaptation of the novel by Pearl S. Buck (still the only American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature) is not highly regarded today, in part because of its casting of Europeans and Americans as Chinese. (There were a few Asians in small roles, most notably Keye Luke.) But its elaborate re-creations of China in California are impressive. Costumes, livestock, and even whole buildings were transported from China to a location near Chatsworth. It's curious, then, that the art direction was unnominated. The award to Freund was well-deserved. He was one of cinematography's great pioneers, with a career stretching back to 1911 in Germany, where he shot such expressionist classics as F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. He came to the United States in 1929 as a consultant for Technicolor, and soon went to work for Universal, where he shot the horror classic Dracula and directed The Mummy. He then moved over to MGM, where he also shot Camille, a film for which he deserved an Oscar nomination at least as much as for The Good Earth. In the 1950s he became a pioneer in television, most notably as the head of cinematography for Desilu: He devised the three-camera setup for "I Love Lucy" that allowed the show to be filmed before a studio audience.
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| Karl Freund pulls director Sidney Franklin in a rickshaw on the set of The Good Earth |
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| Paul Muni and Luise Rainer in The Good Earth |
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| Luise Rainer, Paul Muni and children in The Good Earth |
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| Abundant rice harvest in The Good Earth |
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