Showing posts with label 1942. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1942. Show all posts

Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943
Sidney Franklin
Franklin was a "prestige" producer, known for opulent melodramas like Random Harvest and Mrs. Miniver, which were not coincidentally two of the biggest hits of 1942.
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Honorary Awards, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943
To Charles Boyer for his progressive cultural achievement in establishing the French Research Foundation in Los Angeles as a source of reference for the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry
To Noël Coward for his outstanding production achievement in In Which We Serve
Coward in In Which We Serve
To Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for its achievement in representing the American Way of Life in the production of the "Andy Hardy" series of films.

Above: Lewis Stone, Mickey Rooney, and Fay Holden in Love Finds Andy Hardy
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Best Documentary, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

 After introducing the documentary as a short-film category in the previous year, the Academy decided to open it up to features as well. It also decided that, in view of the tremendous increase in the number of films being made internationally to promote the war effort, it would open the nominations to foreign filmmakers as well. The result was a glut of nominees, and for the first and only time the Academy chose four winners, giving them "special awards" with citations. The documentary category has been rife with controversy, and perhaps making it an award for the most effective propaganda films was only the first instance.

The nominees were ... 

And the Oscar went to ... 
The Battle of Midway, United States Navy. "A special award to Battle of Midway for the historical value of its achievement in offering a camera record of one of the decisive battles of the world -- a record unique both for the courage of those who made it under fire, and for its magnificent portray of the gallantry of our armed forces in battle." 

 A professionally made documentary, though today it seems clichéd in its narrative and musical effects. It was directed by John Ford, who also shot some of the footage. The screenplay was written by Ford, Dudley Nichols, and James Kevin McGuinness; the narrators include Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, and Donald Crisp; the score is by Alfred Newman; and it was edited by Robert Parrish. 
Kokoda Front Line! Australian News & Information Bureau. "A special award to Kokoda Front Line! for its effectiveness in portraying, simply yet forcefully, the scene of war in New Guinea and for its moving presentation of the bravery and fortitude of our Australian comrades in arms." 

 Cameraman Damien Parer's footage of Australian soldiers in New Guinea is introduced by Parer and narrated by Peter Bathurst. Directed by Ken G. Hall. The footage is vivid and genuine, but the canned music track is obtrusive and sometimes inappropriate. 


Moscow Strikes Back, Artkino. "A special award to Moscow Strikes Back for its vivid presentation of the heroism of the Russian Army and of the Russian people in the defense of Moscow, and for its achievement in so doing under conditions of extreme difficulty and danger." 

 The feature-length American version, released by Republic, has a narration, spoken by Edward G. Robinson and written by Albert Maltz and Elliot Paul. (Maltz was blacklisted in 1947 as one of the Hollywood Ten who were cited for contempt of Congress for their refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.) The music score is by William Hodgson and Dimitri Tiomkin. The Soviet version, directed by Leonid Varlamov and Ilya Kopalin, won the Stalin Prize. 


Prelude to War, United States Army Special Services. "A special award to Prelude to War for its trenchant conception and stirring dramatization of the events which forced our nation into the war and of the ideals for which we fight."  

The first installment in the "Why We Fight" series, designed as a series of training films for American soliders and produced by Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak. It's a backgrounder on the causes of the war, thick with a propagandistic view of history and national character, but somewhat more sophisticated in its presentation than you might expect. The narrator is Walter Huston. The screenwriters include Julius and Philip Epstein, who would win Oscars the following year for Casablanca. 
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Best Short Film, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
(Cartoon) 
(One-Reel) 
(Two-Reel) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Cartoon) 
Der Fuehrer's Face, Walt Disney, producer.

 Donald Duck has a nightmare in which he's a citizen of "Nutzi Land," forced to work in a munitions factory and to continually salute pictures of Adolf Hitler. The only Donald Duck cartoon to win an Oscar, it was withdrawn from circulation after World War II, and not released on video until 2004. 


(One-Reel) 
Speaking of Animals and Their Families, Paramount. 

 The "Speaking of Animals" series was conceived by Warner Bros. animator Tex Avery as a series of comedy shorts combining live action and animation in which animals would appear to talk. Avery was unable to persuade Leon Schlesinger, the Warner Bros. cartoon producer, to develop the series, so he took it to Jerry Fairbanks, a producer of short subjects at Paramount. Avery worked on the first three before leaving Paramount for MGM. 

 (Two-Reel) 
Beyond the Line of Duty, Warner Bros.
Ronald Reagan narrates the story of Hewitt T. Wheeless, a Texan who joined the Army Air Force in 1935 and led an attack on the Japanese a week after Pearl Harbor for which he received the Distinguished Service Cross. 

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Best Special Effects, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Reap the Wild Wind, photographic effects by Gordon Jennings, Farciot Edouart, William L. Pereira; sound effects by Louis Mesenkop. 

Paulette Goddard, John Wayne, Ray Milland, Raymond Massey, and Susan Hayward star in this typically bombastic Cecil B. DeMille spectacle whose climactic battle with a giant squid in a hurricane won the Oscar for its special effects team. Dewey Wrigley did the impressive underwater filming. 
Paulette Goddard worries about John Wayne in Reap the Wild Wind
Ray Milland, Paulette Goddard, and Lynne Overman see trouble ahead
Stormy weather





 
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Best Film Editing, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

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

Daniel Mandell
Righty Gary Cooper as lefty Lou Gehrig
With the possible exception of Field of Dreams, this is the most popular baseball movie of all, drenched in sentiment, pumped full of uplift. Gary Cooper plays Lou Gehrig, who was forced to retire on July 4, 1939, because he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which consequently became known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Producer Sam Goldwyn, who knew nothing about baseball, bought the story at the urging of Niven Busch, who was working for him as a story editor. Though Goldwyn was aware that sports movies rarely succeeded at the box office, he was convinced that the film would succeed after watching the newsreel of Gehrig's farewell speech in Yankee Stadium. (The real thing is simpler, less tear-jerking than Cooper's rendition of it under Sam Wood's direction.) Mandell is credited with the solution to one of the film's technical problems: Gehrig was left-handed, Cooper right-handed. So Mandell suggested that Cooper bat normally but run to third base instead of first. The images in those sequences were printed in reverse, which also necessitated reversing the insignia on the players' uniforms so they'd come out the right way on screen. His ingenious solution also explains why the film was nominated for special effects. This was the first of three Oscars for former circus and vaudeville acrobat Mandell, who became a film editor after serving in World War I, when a friend helped him get a job at MGM. He subsequently worked at Columbia before becoming Goldwyn's chief editor. He was also a favorite editor of Billy Wilder, with whom he worked on five films.
Cooper delivers Gehrig's farewell address

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Best Music, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

 The Academy had ironed out most of the wrinkles in its new category names, reassuring people that scores for comedies were as welcome to be nominated as those from dramas. There still remained some problems with allowing each studio or production company to submit a nominee. Universal nominated a song called "Pig Foot Pete," which it said was in Hellzapoppin', the film version of a Broadway revue that starred Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson, and Martha Raye. The trouble was, the song wasn't in the film. It had actually been sung by Raye in Universal's 1941 release Keep 'Em Flying, an Abbott and Costello movie, and hence was ineligible for the Oscar. The Academy admits that it has no idea how this mistake happened.

The nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 

(Song) 
... when they should have been ...  
(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
Max Steiner

Between his first Oscar, for The Informer, and this one, Steiner had also composed the score for Gone With the Wind. The next year he would write the music for GWTW's chief rival for the Great Hollywood Romantic Movie, Casablanca. Interestingly, he won the Oscar for neither of them. But the unstintingly romantic score for Now, Voyager is one of his best.   



(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
Ray Heindorf, Heinz Roemheld, Yankee Doodle Dandy. 
Ray Heindorf
Heinz Roemheld
Heindorf was signed to a contract at Warner Bros. in 1932 and remained there for his entire career as a film composer, becoming head of the music department at the death of Leo Forbstein in 1948. This was the first of his three Oscars out of a total of eighteen nominations. This was Roemheld's second nomination and his only Oscar. A child prodigy on the piano, Roemheld was born in Wisconsin, but studied in Berlin. A prolific composer, his music has been used in more than 400 films.


(Song) 
"White Christmas," from Holiday Inn. Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.       
Irving Berlin
Virtually overnight, "White Christmas" became one of the most popular songs of all time. Berlin had written the song in the 1930s and set it aside, but it was a perfect fit for Holiday Inn, when Berlin himself came up with the idea for a musical set in a hotel that opens only on holidays. He was also nominated for original story for this idea. The instant popularity of the song owed much to the film's release during the first year of the United States's involvement in World War II, when it captured the mood of homesick soldiers and the families that missed them. This was Berlin's only Oscar, even though he composed dozens of great songs for the movies, notably for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals of the 1930s, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, and Carefree. A Berlin song, "Blue Skies," was one of the first ever sung on the screen, in 1927's The Jazz Singer. His last work for the movies came thirty years later, the title song for Sayonara, which had once been proposed as a Broadway musical for Berlin.     
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Best Sound, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 

And the Oscar went to ... 
Yankee Doodle Dandy, Warner Bros. Studio Sound Department, Nathan Levinson, Sound Director. 

Levinson, left, with the Oscar presented him by Y. Frank Freeman


This was the only competitive Oscar win for Levinson, who was a pioneer in the Warner Bros. efforts to bring sound to motion pictures. He was nominated seventeen times for sound and seven times for special effects. He also received an honorary award at the 1940 Oscar ceremony and two technical achievement awards, 
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Best Art Direction, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
This Above All. Art Direction: Richard Day, Joseph Wright; Interior Decoration: Thomas Little.

(Color)  
My Gal Sal. Art Direction: Richard Day, Joseph Wright; Interior Decoration: Thomas Little. 

Winning Oscars in the same year for both color and black-and-white films is something of a tour de force for the 20th Century-Fox design team. And the films were very different: This Above All is a romance set in wartime London with AWOL soldier Tyrone Power being converted to patriotism by WAAF Joan Fontaine. My Gal Sal is one of Fox's countless turn-of-the-century musicals, in which songwriter Paul Dresser (Victor Mature) falls in love with singer Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth). Naturally, he writes a song about her. In real life, Sal was a prostitute Dresser had known in his youth, but no one expects fidelity to the truth in a Fox musical biopic, even when it purports to be based on the memoirs of Dresser's brother, the novelist Theodore Dreiser. Hayworth, whose singing voice is dubbed by Nan Wynn, replaced a pregnant Alice Faye in the role. These were numbers four and five in Day's seven Oscars, and the second and third of Little's six. They were the only wins for Wright, who was nominated ten more times.  

Lobby card for My Gal Sal 
... when it should have gone to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
The Magnificent Ambersons. Art Direction: Albert S. D'Agostino; Interior Decoration: Darrell Silvera, Al Fields.

The fin de siècle sets for the Amberson mansion are among the most convincing period re-creations in an era when Hollywood had few scruples about verisimilitude. Orson Welles said that Anne Baxter's grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright, visited the set and was appalled by their gloomy clutter -- precisely what his own domestic architecture had aimed at ending. Welles had been disappointed by the snow scenes in Citizen Kane because you couldn't see the actors' breath, so he had the snow scenes in Ambersons staged in a Los Angeles icehouse, which had been used for Lost Horizon and would be used again by D'Agostino for The Thing From Another World in 1951. The Amberson mansion exterior would be reused too, in It's a Wonderful Life. D'Agostino, who took over as head of the RKO art department when Van Nest Polglase moved to Columbia, was nominated five times, but never won. Silvera had seven nominations and no wins, but Fields won for his work on Blood on the Sun. 

Sets in Welles's films usually had ceilings, providing a sense of confinement in this low-angle, deep-focus shot of Tim Holt in The Magnificent Ambersons.
Holt ascends a staircase in the Amberson mansion
Holt and Anne Baxter in the skating scene, filmed in a Los Angeles icehouse
Dolores Costello and Holt in the Ambersons' dining room

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