Showing posts with label 1938. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1938. Show all posts

Honorary Awards, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

 To Deanna Durbin and Mickey Rooney for their significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players setting a high standard of ability and achievement. 
Deanna Durbin

Mickey Rooney
When Durbin died this year at the age of ninety-one, there were featured obits in the larger newspapers, but most people alive today have never seen a Durbin movie. One reason may be that her light-classical soprano repertoire has long since gone out of style. Another may be that the sweet teenager she played in her most successful films has also gone out of style. In 1935 she had signed a contract option at MGM and made a short, Every Sunday, in 1936 alongside Judy Garland. But when the option expired, she accepted an offer from Universal to star in a feature, Three Smart Girls. The movie was a hit, and the series of Durbin girl-next-door musicals in the last years of the 1930s were so successful that Durbin is sometimes credited with having saved Universal from bankruptcy. In 1941, Joe Pasternak, who had produced Durbin's movies, left Universal for MGM, and Durbin, now in her 20s, began to battle with the studio over the direction of her career. Her attempts to break away from the ingenue roles, such as the oddly mistitled film noir Christmas Holiday in 1944, were not well-received by her musical fans. She made her last movies in 1948, and moved to France with her third husband.

Rooney has suffered no such career eclipse. A performer almost from birth, the son of vaudevillian Joseph Yule, he started making movies in 1926, starring in a series of dozens of shorts as Mickey McGuire, moving from silents into talkies. He signed a contract with MGM in 1934, the year in which he played the young Blackie Gallagher (the grownup character was played by Clark Gable) in Manhattan Melodrama. On loan-out to Warner Bros., he gave a remarkable performance as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935, and in 1937 he became Andy Hardy in the film A Family Affair, a role that would recur through thirteen more movies. A career that would earn him four Oscar nominations, and in 1983 a second honorary award, was just beginning. The Internet Movie Database credits Rooney with appearances in 337 films.




To Harry M. Warner in recognition of patriotic service
 in the production of historical short subjects
 presenting significant episodes in the early struggle
of the American people for liberty.
(Warner Bros.' Declaration of Independence
won the Oscar for best two-reel short of 1938.)
To Walt Disney for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon.
Shirley Temple presents Walt Disney the honorary award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: a full-size Oscar and seven miniatures
To Oliver Marsh and Allen Davey for the color cinematography of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, Sweethearts.
Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in Sweethearts. This was the last time an honorary award for color cinematography would be presented. Beginning with the 1939 awards, the cinematography awards would be divided into color and black-and-white categories.

For outstanding achievement in creating Special Photographic and Sound Effects in the Paramount production, Spawn of the North. Special Effects by Gordon Jennings, assisted by Jan Domela, Dev Jennings, Irmin Roberts and Art Smith. Transparencies by Farciot Edouart, assisted by Loyal Griggs. Sound Effects by Loren Ryder, assisted by Harry Mills, Louis H. Mesenkop and Walter Oberst.
George Raft, right, in Spawn of the North
An "Engineering Effects" award had been presented at the first Academy Awards, but outstanding special effects had not been regularly honored until this special award. Beginning with the 1939 Oscars, special effects would become a regular competitive category.  

To J. Arthur Ball for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of color in Motion Picture Photography. 
J. Arthur Ball with the Technicolor camera he devised. Ball, a pioneering color cinematographer, was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
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Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939
Hal B. Wallis with his Thalberg Award
For some reason, the Academy decided this year to announce the "nominees" for the Thalberg Award, even though the honor was bestowed by a committee rather than the general electorate of the Academy. The others considered for the Thalberg were Samuel Goldwyn, Joe Pasternak, David O. Selznick, Hunt Stromberg, Walter Wanger, and Darryl F. Zanuck. (Goldwyn and Selznick would go on later to win the award, and Zanuck had already won it. Pasternak, Stromberg, and Wanger would be left out in the cold.)  

 That Wallis should follow Zanuck as the second winner of the Thalberg seems appropriate: He had joined Warner Bros. as a publicist in 1923, and became a producer in 1931 on Little Caesar. He and Zanuck jockeyed for the position of head of production, and Zanuck won out, but when Zanuck moved on to 20th Century (later to be merged with Fox) in 1933, Wallis took over his role. He was thus a leader in making Warner Bros. a major force in the Hollywood of the 1930s and early 1940s. He left Warners in 1944 -- after a bit of a tiff with Jack Warner over the credit for producing one of the studio's most successful films, Casablanca -- and formed an independent production company. His subsequent production output was perhaps not as distinguished as it was at Warners, but he achieved financial success with the series of movies starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and with several Elvis Presley films. 
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Best Short Film, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

 The "Color" category was eliminated as unnecessary since so many short films were being made in color.

The nominees were ... 
(Cartoon) 
(One-Reel)  
(Two-Reel) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Cartoon) 

An adaptation of a story by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson, with narration by Don Wilson. 


 (One-Reel) 
That Mothers Might Live, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

 The story of Ignaz Semmelweis, the nineteenth-century Hungarian physician who stressed cleanliness in the delivery room as a way to reduce puerperal fever, which frequently killed women who had just given birth. Directed by Fred Zinnemann, with Shepperd Strudwick as Semmelweis. 

(Two-Reel) 
Declaration of Independence, Warner Bros. 

 A dramatization of the signing of the Declaration, with John Litel as Thomas Jefferson and Ted Osborne as Caesar Rodney, who cast the deciding vote in favor of revolution. 
  
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Best Film Editing, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

 The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 

This was Dawson's third Oscar, but he would have to wait sixteen years for another nomination, for The High and the Mighty. 
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Best Music, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

 Some significant changes this year: First, the Oscar no longer went to the head of the studio music department, but to the composer or arranger. And the scoring Oscar was divided into "Original Score," meaning music composed specifically for a film, and "Scoring," meaning arrangement and orchestration of music from other sources -- but usually meaning the arrangement and coordination of the songs in a musical. This division will be renamed and revised for years to come. And then there was the song category, which remained much the same, except that, like the original score and scoring categories, nominations were submitted by the studios and the larger producing companies (e.g., Hal Roach, Selznick, Goldwyn). In each case, the studios were allowed only one nominee per category, which meant that, even if a studio produced several films with half a dozen great songs, it could nominate only one of them. That's why so many memorable songs of the 1940s received no Oscar nominations. The Goldwyn Follies, for example, included two classics by George and Ira Gershwin, "Love Walked In" and "Our Love Is Here to Stay," but the studio chose to nominate the forgettable (and forgotten) title song from The Cowboy and the Lady.   

 The nominees were ... 
(Original Score) 
(Scoring) 
... when they should have been ... 

(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 

This was Korngold's first win in his own right, the studio music department having carried off the Oscar for his score for Anthony Adverse. He would go on to be nominated two more times, for The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and The Sea Hawk. 



(Scoring)
Alfred Newman, Alexander's Ragtime Band.

Alfred Newman
Newman received forty-five nominations and won nine Oscars, the most for a composer (though John Williams has him beat on nominations, with forty-eight). Newman was also the most-nominated member of the family with the most Oscar nominations: His brother Emil received one nomination, and his brother Lionel received eleven; his son David has one nomination and his son Thomas has eleven, and his nephew Randy has twenty. It's appropriate that Alfred's first Oscar was for a movie based on the music of Irving Berlin -- it has more than twenty of his songs in the score -- because Newman, who had been a Broadway conductor starting at seventeen, was brought to Hollywood by Berlin in 1930 to be musical director for the film Reaching for the Moon, for which Berlin had written the title song. Newman was snapped up by Sam Goldwyn, his primary employer until 1939, when he became music director for 20th Century-Fox. Among Newman's many compositions is one of the most familiar: the fanfare that accompanies the searchlights and art deco rooftops of the 20th Century-Fox logo.
Irving Berlin with the stars of Alexander's Ragtime Band: Alice Faye, Tyrone Power, and Don Ameche
(Song)
"Thanks for the Memory," from The Big Broadcast of 1938; music by Ralph Rainger, lyrics by Leo Robin.

 Bob Hope makes his feature film debut in this musical revue, set on an ocean liner, and, with Shirley Ross, sings the song that would become his theme song. Rainger was a staff composer at Paramount from 1930 until his death in a plane crash in 1942. Robin, also under contract to Paramount, often worked with Rainger, but also supplied the lyrics for other composers, including Jule Styne, with whom he wrote the songs for the Broadway hit Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, including "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." 

 ... when it should have gone to ... 
(Song) 
"Our Love Is Here to Stay," from The Goldwyn Follies; music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. 

 It was George Gershwin's last song, and the lyrics were added posthumously by Ira Gershwin, which would seem to make it a natural as a best-song nominee, especially after the controversy the previous year over the snubbing of Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away From Me" in favor of "Sweet Leilani." In the film, Kenny Baker sings it on the radio as Adolphe Menjou puts the moves on Andrea Leeds. But for some reason the Goldwyn studio decided to nominate the title song from The Cowboy and the Lady, which nobody remembers. 
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Best Sound, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
The Cowboy and the Lady, United Artists Studio Sound Department, Thomas T. Moulton, Sound Director. 

The original "high concept" movie: Producer Samuel Goldwyn, in need of a vehicle for contract players Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon, asked writer-director Leo McCarey for an idea. McCarey snatched the phrase "the cowboy and the lady" -- easy epithets for the screen personae of the two stars -- from thin air and improvised a story on the spot. Later, he realized he couldn't quite remember the plot he had told Goldwyn but managed to come up with an outline. Goldwyn then hired more than a dozen writers to try to produce a workable screenplay -- they included Alan Campbell, Dorothy Parker, Howard Estabrook, Gene Fowler, Lillian Hellman, Anita Loos, and Robert Riskin, and the credited screenwriters S.N. Behrman and Sonya Levien. The result never satisfied anyone, including the stars, and William Wyler, assigned to the project, managed to get himself fired from it and replaced by H.C. Potter. The film was a box-office bomb, but it won Moulton (or at least his sound department) his second consecutive Oscar. 
Merle Oberon and Gary Cooper in The Cowboy and the Lady 

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Best Art Direction, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 

Carl Jules Weyl
One of the most entertaining movies ever made, The Adventures of Robin Hood has stood the test of time far better than the one that beat it for best picture, You Can't Take It With You. Weyl's handsome fairytale-medieval sets, which photographed beautifully in Technicolor, have a lot to do with the pleasure of the movie. Weyl was a contract production designer at Warner Bros. from 1934 to 1947, but he was also a well-known Los Angeles architect, responsible for the landmark Brown Derby restaurant, among other buildings of the 1920s. This was his only Oscar, though his credits include such landmark Warners films as Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca.




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Best Cinematography, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
The Academy was still shying away from color films, so all of its nominees were black-and-white. Which is a pity because two of the most successful Technicolor films to that time were released in 1938: The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The Academy gave the last of its special awards for color films to Oliver Marsh and Allen Davey for Sweethearts. But the black-and-white nominees were for the most part a visually distinguished lot. The Great Waltz is opulent, but a little dopey, memorable only because of a sequence in which Johann Straus, played by Fernand Gravet, takes a carriage ride, and squeaky wheels, horse's hooves, birdcalls, and hunting horns inspire him to compose "Tales From the Vienna Woods." It also earned Ruttenberg the first of his four Oscars. Otherwise, the movie is notable for its casting mishaps: It attempted but failed to make Gravet (who was known in Europe as Gravey, which was too much like "gravy" for American audiences) into a star on this side of the Atlantic. Likewise, MGM had hopes for Miliza Korjus, a Polish soprano whom Irving Thalberg had signed to a ten-year contract, and publicized with the line "Korjus -- it rhymes with gorgeous." But before she could make a second film, she was seriously injured in an automobile accident and after war broke out in Europe decided to stay in Mexico while recovering. And finally, the film's leading lady was Luise Rainer, who despite her back-to-back Oscars was unhappy with the direction her career was taking at MGM and soon departed from Hollywood. 

Director Julien Duvivier and Joseph Ruttenberg on the crane for The Great Waltz
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Best Writing, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
(Original Story)
(Screenplay)
... when they should have been ... 
(Original Story) 


(Screenplay) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Original Story) 
Schary had been an actor -- he made his Broadway debut in 1930 in a play that, coincidentally, starred Spencer Tracy -- but turned to writing, first for the stage and then for the screen. The Boys Town screenplay was a turning point in his career, establishing him at MGM, where he soon became a producer. He was briefly in charge of the B-picture division of the studio in the early 1940s, but his stubbornness, compounded by his liberal political views in a studio headed by staunch Republican Louis B. Mayer, soon put him at odds with management. He went to work for David O. Selznick and for RKO, but returned to MGM in 1948 as head of production, and when Mayer was forced out in 1951 became head of the studio, though his tenure in the job lasted only five years. Griffin had worked at Universal for a year before moving over to MGM for Boys Town and then to Paramount and Columbia. She mostly worked on B-pictures and as a script polisher after her Oscar win.

(Screenplay) 
George Bernard Shaw, screenplay and dialogue; W.P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple  adaptation, Pygmalion. 

George Bernard Shaw
Because it's one of the least preachy of Shaw's plays and has a measure of romance, Pygmalion is well-suited for the screen. Producer Gabriel Pascal's later version of Major Barbara, filmed in 1941, doesn't work quite as well because its plot, characterization, and ideas are more complex. Shaw, as the Oscar citation notes, wrote additional dialogue for several scenes in Pygmalion, such as the Embassy Ball, which serve to "open up" the action beyond the stage version. He was famously miffed, however, at being nominated for the Oscar, blustering that it was "as if they had never heard of me -- and it's very likely they never have." But it's also said that visitors to his home at Ayot St. Lawrence found the statuette on display. Shaw would likely also be irritated that he has become an Oscar trivia item: He is the only person to win both an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize in Literature. (For the record, Nobelists Jean-Paul Sartre and John Steinbeck also received Oscar nominations, though neither won.)


Wendy Hiller as Eliza in Pygmalion

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Story) 

Charles Spaak
Belgian writer Spaak got into the business of writing for the movies when he was hired to be secretary to the French filmmaker Jacques Feyder in 1928. After helping convert one of Feyder's films into a stage play, he went on to write the screenplays for some of Feyder's most memorable works, including La Kermesse héroïque. He also wrote for filmmakers Julien Duvivier and Jean Grémillon, and collaborated with Jean Renoir on Les Bas fonds before working on Grand Illusion. After World War II he wrote screenplays for André Cayatte, Marcel Carné, and Philippe de Broca, among others. 

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Best Director, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
This was the last of Capra's three Oscars. He would continue to make films until 1961, and live on for thirty years beyond that. But of his subsequent work, only Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life would receive critical and popular acclaim, and the latter film was not considered a success until repeated showings on TV made it an annual Christmastime event. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Jean Renoir
The movies' great humanist, and in the opinion of Orson Welles and Charles Chaplin the greatest film director of all. (Why am I surprised that Welles and Chaplin named someone other than themselves?) Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game jockey with each other for positions on the lists of the greatest films of all time. Certainly, no Hollywood filmmaker of the time had quite the mastery of tonal variety -- from comedy to tragedy and back again -- as Renoir. It was the first foreign-language film to be nominated for best picture, although it should be noted that it received no other nominations -- not for Renoir as director, for his screenplay with Charles Spaak, for Christian Matras's cinematography, or for the performances of Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio and Erich von Stroheim. Its influence has been felt down the years, in such movies as Stalag 17 and The Great Escape, but it retains its freshness. It was almost lost during World War II, after being denounced by Goebbels, who had all French prints confiscated when the Germans invaded France in 1940. The negative was thought to have been destroyed in an air raid in 1942, but it was rediscovered in a French archive in the 1990s and a restored print was screened in 1999. 

Marcel Dalio, Jean Gabin, and Pierre Fresnay in Grand Illusion 
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