Showing posts with label 1940. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1940. Show all posts

Honorary Awards, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941
To Bob Hope, in recognition of his unselfish services to the Motion Picture Industry

Hope, who first hosted the Oscar award ceremony in 1940, during the presentation of the 1939 awards, is known for his many jokes about never receiving an Oscar. ("Welcome to the Academy Awards, or as it's known at my house, Passover.")  In fact, Hope is one of the most-honored people in the history of the awards, having taken home four honorary awards in addition to the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. This first of his honorary citations came with a silver plaque and not a statuette, but he received one of those with his third honorary award at the 1952 ceremonies. He continued to joke about not winning one, however.

 
To Col. Nathan Levinson for his outstanding service to the industry and the Army during the past nine years, which has made possible the present efficient mobilization of the motion picture industry facilities for the production of Army Training Films.
Jack Warner, Sid Grauman, Nathan Levinson, and Ray Schrock at the inauguration of sound equipment at Grauman's Egyptian Theater in 1927.

As a representative of Western Electric, it was Levinson who invited Sam Warner to a demonstration of the company's sound recording research. Warner was so impressed that he hired Levinson to help the Warner Bros. studio make its historic move toward synchronized sound. Levinson worked on not only the 1926 Don Juan, the first feature with synchronized music and sound effects, but also the 1927 feature in which Al Jolson assures us that we haven't heard anything yet, The Jazz Singer. He spent his long career at the studio, racking up one of the longest unbroken strings of nominations in Oscar history, but receiving only one Oscar, for Yankee Doodle Dandy. He also received two technical achievement awards. He served as a major in World War I, and was later promoted to colonel, so he was always known as "Col. Levinson" at the studio. As the honorary award notes, Levinson was involved with helping the Hollywood studios prepare for the wartime mobilization of the industry long before Pearl Harbor forced the United States into the war.
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Best Short Film, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

The nominees were ... 
(Cartoon) 
(One-Reel) 
(Two-Reel) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Cartoon) 
The Milky Way, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

For the first time since the short film category was established, there was no Walt Disney cartoon nominee. The winner is a rather cutesy Rudolf Ising cartoon in which the three little kittens who lost their mittens sail off to the Milky Way in search of the milk they've been denied as punishment. It's worth noting that it beat not only the first Bugs Bunny cartoon, A Wild Hare, but also the first cartoon to feature Tom and Jerry, Puss Gets the Boot. The Disney cartoon hegemony had ended.



(One-Reel) 
Quicker 'N a Wink, Pete Smith, producer. 

 MIT professor Harold Edgerton demonstrates stroboscopic photography in this short directed by George Sidney, with the usual wise-ass narration and lame gags by Smith. The nominees London Can Take It and Siege (about the siege of Warsaw by the Nazis) demonstrate how close Hollywood was to going to war, but the Academy chose distraction over confrontation. 

(Two-Reel) 
Teddy, the Rough Rider, Warner Bros. 

 Sidney Blackmer plays Theodore Roosevelt in this Technicolor short directed by Ray Enright and photographed by Ray Rennahan. Although the winner is the most removed historically from the coming conflict, all of the two-reel nominees reflect the imminence of World War II. 
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Best Special Effects, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

 The Academy improved on its new(ish) category by singling out both visual technicians and sound technicians among the nominees.

The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
The Thief of Bagdad, photographic effects by Lawrence Butler, sound effects by Jack Whitney. 

Rex Ingram and Sabu in The Thief of Bagdad
Butler's great contribution to the special effects world is the pioneering use of chroma key compositing, the now-familiar bluescreen or greenscreen effect, in which figures perform against a blue or green backdrop, allowing them to be superimposed on another image. Butler used it to allow the genie, played by Rex Ingram, to become a giant in scenes with Abu, played by Sabu. Butler began his career with Alexander Korda, and after World War II became head of the special effects department at Columbia. Whitney, the chief sound engineer on The Thief of Bagdad, received most of his eight nominations in the sound recording category, and won a second Oscar for That Hamilton Woman.   
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Best Film Editing, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

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

Anne Bauchens
Women have had a better time of it making a name as film editors than they have as directors or cinematographers. Barbara McLean at 20th Century-Fox and Margaret Booth at MGM were revered figures, though the latter never won an Oscar and the former won hers (for Wilson) only after five previous nominations. Bauchens was Cecil B. DeMille's right-hand woman, editing every one of his films from 1918 through 1956. This was the second of her four nominations -- all of them for DeMille pictures -- and her only win. In North West Mounted Police, a Texas Ranger (Gary Cooper) teams up with the Mounties to catch the bad guy. It's silly stuff, without the jaw-dropping extravagance of DeMille's biblical epics, so there's not much left to recommend it except a watchable cast including Madeleine Carroll, Paulette Goddard, Preston Foster, Robert Preston, Akim Tamiroff, Walter Hampden, Lon Chaney Jr., and Robert Ryan.  
Gary Cooper and Lynne Overman captured by Indians in North West Mounted Police 

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Best Music, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

The nominees were ... 
(Original Score) 
(Scoring) 
(Song) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Original Score) 
(Scoring) 
(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Original Score) 

Out of place in its division, the music for Pinocchio should have been nominated and won for Scoring instead, as below.

(Scoring) 
Alfred Newman, Tin Pan Alley. 

 This Alice Faye-Betty Grable-John Payne musical was typical of 20th Century-Fox's 1940s musicals: handsome production values, pleasantly nostalgic early-20th century songs, second-rank stars. The sensational dancing of the Nicholas Brothers helps make up from the dullness of the story and the top-billed performers. It's a little hard to know what Newman did, exactly, to earn this, the second of his nine Oscars. The songs were arranged by Fletcher Henderson and the additional music was composed by Urban Thielmann. If Pinocchio had been properly placed in this category instead of "Original Score," Newman might have had one less statuette. But the work by Edens and Stoll on Strike Up the Band strikes me as a better choice among the actual nominees.  

(Song) 
"When You Wish Upon a Star," from Pinocchio; music by Leigh Harline, lyrics by Ned Washington.

Leigh Harline, Walt Disney
Ned Washington
Only the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals of the 1930s produced more memorable songs than the Disney animated films have, and they did it by hiring the finest songwriters of the day: Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and George and Ira Gershwin. Disney did it with less-celebrated songwriters such as Harline and Washington. Pinocchio's song score was the first from Disney to be recognized by the Academy. Harline was a studio veteran, having joined Disney in 1932 as an arranger and moved up to head the music department. As a lyricist, Washington also has to his credits a string of nominated songs, and won another Oscar for the lyrics to Dimitri Tiomkin's High Noon theme song. But Harline and Washington are best remembered for what has become, via Cliff Edwards's ethereal falsetto, the Disney studios' theme song.  
Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Cliff Edwards) sings "When You Wish Upon a Star" in Pinocchio



... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Score) 
Aaron Copland
There are many things wrong with the film version of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, but Copland's score is not one of them. The play had freshness and immediacy: Performed without scenery and with only a few props, it draws a theater audience into creating Grovers Corners for itself, which is why it has not only become a staple of amateur companies and high schools but also receives frequent professional revivals. The movie, however, has conventionally realistic scenery, and an awful cop-out Hollywood ending undermines the poetry of the play's last act. Copland's harmonics evoke his music for the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, and Rodeo, all of which lend an atmosphere of "Americana"entirely appropriate to Wilder's play, restoring some of the freshness lost by the film version. Although it failed to receive an Oscar in either of the categories in which it was nominated, the score is still performed in an orchestral version, and recordings of it are frequently used as intermission music for theater productions.
William Holden as George and Martha Scott as Emily in Our Town



(Scoring) 
Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith, Ned Washington, Pinocchio. 
Paul J. Smith
Though Harline, Smith, and Washington won for Original Score, their achievement was more properly for arranging and integrating the songs with the musical motifs of the film, which is what the music branch of the Academy presumably intended when they decided to divide the category. The confusion was about to be eliminated, however: Starting with the 1941 awards, the categories became "Musical Score of a Dramatic Picture" and "Scoring of a Musical Picture." But even that demanded further clarification, and with the 1942 awards, the former category became "Musical Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture." This was the sole Oscar for Smith, who had begun working as a composer at Disney on the Silly Symphonies in 1930 and remained with the studio for half a century.    


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Best Sound, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Strike Up the Band, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio Sound Department, Douglas Shearer, Sound Director. 

The second of the hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show musicals (the first was Babes in Arms) starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland is all about trying to win an appearance in a national radio band concert featuring Paul Whiteman while at the same time trying to help a fellow band member pay for an operation. It has no relationship (other than the title song) to the Broadway musical by George and Ira Gershwin. Aside from some standards from the 1920s and earlier, most of the songs are by Roger Edens and Arthur Freed. This was one of the hits produced by Freed that led to the creation of the "Freed Unit," an independent musical film production division of MGM, in 1944. It was directed by Busby Berkeley, whose MGM production numbers were always more restrained than the ones he did at Warner Bros. 


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Best Art Direction,1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

 If there were going to be separate awards for both color and black-and-white cinematography, the art directors argued, then there should be for art direction, too. And rightly so. If you've ever seen some of the attempts to "colorize" black-and-white films undertaken in the 1980s, you can tell how a production designer needs to keep different things in mind depending on whether the film is in color or not. I recall watching the colorized version of Casablanca and being startled by the paisley blouse Ingrid Bergman wears in one scene. It's completely suitable in black-and-white, but in the color version it looked as if Bergman was being eaten alive by giant paramecia. That's why, when the costumers finally got their Oscar a decade later, the division between black-and-white and color applied to them, too.

The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 

Janeites have always been appalled by the costuming (Adrian's) and decor (Edwin B. Willis is the credited set decorator) of this version of Pride and Prejudice. It has been moved up in time so that the women can be dressed in Victorian hoops and crinolines instead of Regency styles. The result, as Pauline Kael observed, is "more Dickens than Austen." But at least that's translating one kind of greatness into another. This was the first of three Oscars for Groesse, who also won for The Yearling and Little Women and was nominated eight more times. 

(Color) 

Vincent Korda





The youngest of the three Hungarian Korda brothers who took the British film industry by storm in the 1930s, Vincent came to Britain with Alexander and Zoltan after studying at the Budapest Academy of Art. In addition to his Oscar-winning work on The Thief of Bagdad, he received nominations for That Hamilton Woman, the 1942 Jungle Book, and The Longest Day. His work on creating the haunted atmosphere of postwar Vienna for The Third Man, however, went curiously unnominated. The extent of his design work on The Thief of Bagdad is no doubt considerable, but some of the credit also should be shared with others including William Cameron Menzies and the matte artist Peter Ellenshaw. Together, they made the film one of the greatest of motion picture fantasies.



 


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

This would have been two in a row for Wheeler, after his win for Gone With the Wind, but for some reason he was passed over in favor of the rather twee designs of the MGM Pride and Prejudice. Certainly a great deal of the credit for the success of Rebecca should go to Wheeler's designs for Manderley, the DeWinter estate haunted by Rebecca and her sinister acolyte Mrs. Danvers.








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Best Cinematography, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
(Black-and-White) 

George Barnes
 Barnes was a veteran cinematographer who started out as a still photographer and moved into director of photographer while working with the pioneer director Thomas Ince. During the 1920s he worked on Samuel Goldwyn's films and helped train and  launch the career of his fellow nominee Gregg Toland. He was nominated in the first year of the Oscars for two Goldwyn films, The Devil Dancer and The Magic Flame, and for Gloria Swanson's Sadie Thompson. He moved to Warner Bros. in the 1930s, providing some of the proto-noir look of that studio's films, but he also worked for Paramount and MGM. David O. Selznick tapped him for Rebecca and Spellbound, which earned him more nominations and his only Oscar. Although a specialist in the textures of light and shadow of black-and-white cinematography, he tried his hand at color as well, earning nominations for The Spanish Main and Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah.
Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) shows the new Mrs. DeWinter (Joan Fontaine) Rebecca's boudoir
Barnes's use of filtered light and shadow evoke the darkness that is Mrs. Danvers
Above and below: Angular light sources on Anderson and Fontaine
 

In this shot taken on the set of Rebecca, even Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearance benefits from Barnes's use of light. Note the suggestion that the single bulb is illuminating George Sanders in the phone booth, and Hitchcock's fear of the police is suggested by the heavy shadow cast by the bobby.
(Color) 

Georges Périnal
Périnal worked on some of the most celebrated French films of the late 1920s and early '30s, including Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet and René Clair's Sous les Toits de Paris, Le Million, and À Nous la Liberté, before being hired by producer Alexander Korda in 1933. He helped Korda advance the British film industry by shooting such films as The Private Life of Henry VIII and Things to Come, and with the advent of war and the fall of France in 1940 centered his career primarily in Great Britain. Périnal had been nominated along with Osmond Borradaile a year earlier for their color cinematography on The Four Feathers. Borradaile acted as associate photographer on The Thief of Bagdad.
Conrad Veidt as Jaffar in The Thief of Bagdad. Veidt's performance clearly inspired the treatment of the same character in the Disney Aladdin many years later. 
Rex Ingram as the Djinn in The Thief of Bagdad
June Desprez as the Princess and John Justin as Ahmad in the Thief of Bagdad. Desprez was not producer Alexander Korda's first choice for the role, but Vivien Leigh foiled his plans by going to the United States to be with Laurence Olivier and star in Gone With the Wind. 
Sabu as Abu in the Thief of Bagdad

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