Showing posts with label 1943. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1943. Show all posts

Honorary Award, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
To George Pal, for the development of novel methods and techniques in the production of short subjects known as Puppetoons.
Born in Hungary, Pal was a pioneer in stop-motion animation. He studied architecture in Budapest, but found his métier in the movies, first in Hungary and then at the UFA studios in Berlin. The rise of the Nazis kept Pal moving westward, first to Paris and then to Hollywood, where animator Walter Lantz helped him find employment at Paramount. His skills in animation led him ultimately to special effects for live action science-fiction feature films, and he produced such classics as Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, and the 1953 War of the Worlds. He also directed, as well as produced, tom thumb, The Time Machine, and the fairytale sections of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.  
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Best Documentary, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944

At the previous year's presentation ceremony, David O. Selznick had to read out twenty-nine names of the nominees for best documentary, so the Academy decided to do something about that. This was still the era of the "propagandoc," the film made to advance the war effort. So the Academy announced a "preliminary list" of documentaries eligible for the award, but then pared the list to "official nominations." It also divided the category into short films and feature-length films for the first time. There were eight films in the preliminary long-list of feature documentaries, and twenty-one in the short film division. These were reduced to five feature nominees and seven short-film nominees. 

The nominees were ... 
(Feature) 
(Short subject) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Feature) 
Desert Victory, British Ministry of Information. 

The British campaign in North Africa against Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps, with a focus on the battle of El Alamein. The documentary, relying on footage captured from the Germans, was directed by Roy Boulting and David MacDonald, and is narrated by J.L. Hodson from his own script. 


(Short subject) 
December 7th, United States Navy. 

 This dramatization of the attack on Pearl Harbor exists in several versions: The original theatrical version was thirty-four minutes long. The one submitted for the Academy Award was twenty minutes long. A "restored version" has assembled all the footage, some of it cut by the military censors because it was too sympathetic to the Japanese-Americans of Hawaii, into an eighty-two minute cut. Produced by John Ford and directed by Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland, with a somewhat melodramatic narration, partly written by Budd Schulberg, by James K. McGuinness and Irving Pichel. The cast includes Walter Huston, Harry Davenport, and Dana Andrews. Professionally, if not a little too slickly, done, with music by Alfred Newman. Editor Robert Parrish smoothly combined newsreel and staged footage.

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Best Short Film, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
(Cartoon) 
(One-Reel)
(Cartoon)
Itchy and Scratchy ... uh, Tom and Jerry wage their usual war, but this time the mayhem is accompanied by patriotic tunes and the weapons are imitations of the real weapons being used in World War II, e.g., a cheese grater becomes a tank for Jerry, and eggs are labeled "hen-grenades." 



(One-Reel) 

 Information about this short film is scarce. It seems to have been part of a series of shorts, some of them under the rubric "Sportslight," produced by Rice, a well-known sportswriter, starting in 1921 and lasting, off and on, through 1948. The title seems to refer to combat vehicles and personnel in World War II, but I can't say for sure.  

(Two-Reel) 
Heavenly Music, Jerry Bresler and Sam Coslow, producers.

A bandleader (Fred Brady) arrives in heaven and has to prove to Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Liszt, and the like that his music will stand the test of time. Sweetly vapid program-filler. The songs are by producer Coslow, whose songwriting credits also include "My Old Flame" and "Cocktails for Two," which are probably best-known in their Spike Jones parody versions. Bresler was an orchestra conductor and became nightclub producer in the 1950s for such performers as Robert Goulet, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, and Kate Smith. He also produced such feature films as The Vikings, Major Dundee, and the 1967 Casino Royale.  


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Best Special Effects, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Crash Dive. Photographic effects by Fred Sersen; sound effects by Roger Heman.

Sersen, left, and Heman accept their Oscars
Submariners Tyrone Power and Dana Andrews are both in love with Anne Baxter, but until the war intrudes the movie is ordinary romantic fluff. The action sequences, in color, are the film's saving grace. Sersen, who had previously won for The Rains Came, became so well known for the water sequences he staged that the 20th Century-Fox studio water tank was named after him. Heman had been an assistant director for United Artists, which decided, once it was clear that talkies were here to stay, to have him trained in sound technology. When Darryl Zanuck founded 20th Century studios, he released several of its films through United Artists and took note of Heman's ability, recruiting him when the studio merged with Fox. Heman remained with 20th Century-Fox for the rest of his career. This was his only Oscar. His son, Roger Jr., followed in his footsteps and won his own Oscar for Jaws. 

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Best Film Editing, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 

Winocki (John Garfield) helps the wounded Quincannon (John Ridgely) land the plane in Air Force
In this generally exciting movie about the lives and deaths of a bomber crew during the Wake Island and Coral Sea battles, the propaganda is as thick as the flak. The excitement comes from director Howard Hawks's usual fast-paced tough-guy camaraderie; a cast that includes John Garfield, Gig Young, and Arthur Kennedy; and the cutting by Warner Bros. editor Amy, who had begun his career in silent films. He was a favorite of director Michael Curtiz because of his handling of action sequences. Amy also directed several of Warners' B pictures. 
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Best Music, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 

Newman's score is reserved and dignified, without relying on "heavenly choir" clichés. While Max Steiner's Casablanca score is more stirring, it leans heavily on other musical sources, such as the "Marseillaise" and Herman Hupfeld's "As Time Goes By." If what you're looking for is originality, Newman probably deserved the award, the third of his record-setting nine Oscars. 



(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
Ray Heindorf, This Is the Army.

 Originally a hit Broadway revue, entirely performed by soldiers, that also toured military bases, the film version supplies a frame story about Jerry Jones (George Murphy), who writes a World War I revue called Yip, Yip, Yaphank, which was an actual show written, like This Is the Army, by Irving Berlin. Comes the next war, and it's the turn of his son, Johnny (Ronald Reagan), to write his own show. The spectacle of two future California Republican politicians playing father and son is probably enough to get some people's attention, but there's also Berlin himself singing "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" and Kate Smith doing (what else?) "God Bless America." This was the second of Heindorf's three scoring awards.   

(Song) 
"You'll Never Know," from Hello, Frisco, Hello. Music by Harry Warren; Lyrics by Mack Gordon. 

 Social-climbing Barbary Coast saloon keeper John Payne and rising star singer Alice Faye fall in love in this stale musical trifle. The Oscar-winning song, performed by Faye in her most misty-eyed fashion, was a big hit because it expressed the sentiments of couples separated by the war. This was the second of Warren's three Oscars, but the only win out of nine nominations for Gordon. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
George Bassman, Roger Edens, Hall Johnson, Georgie Stoll, Cabin in the Sky. 

 We should know enough by now not to complain about the Academy's choices, especially when it comes to music, but how the hell it passed over this extraordinary musical in the nominations remains a mystery equal to the ones it later raised, when it failed to nominate any of the songs from A Hard Day's Night and Saturday Night Fever. At least it did take note of the great Arlen-Harburg song "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe." The original Broadway version had songs by Vernon Duke and John Latouche, including the title song as well as "Taking a Chance on Love" and "Honey in the Honeycomb," though they were ineligible for the Oscars. But the film also had music performed by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, and John Bubbles. And the film had to be scored by someone. Looking at the IMDb credits, I've singled out Bassman, the orchestrator; Edens, the musical adapter; Johnson, the choral arranger; and Stoll, the musical director, as the likely overlooked nominees. 



(Song) 
"That Old Black Magic," from Star Spangled Rhythm. Music by Harold Arlen; Lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

 Part commercial for Paramount, part flag-waving "salute to the boys in blue," this all-star revue on a story about a studio gatekeeper (Victor Mature) pretending to be head of Paramount. Switchboard operator Betty Hutton tries to keep Moore's son, a sailor played by Eddie Bracken, from learning the truth. Meanwhile, the studio musters its resources to put on a show for the Navy. Those resources include Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and dozens of other stars, as well as directors Cecil B. DeMille and Preston Sturges, all playing themselves. With that much talent it's a wonder that they chose the bland Johnny Johnston to sing Arlen and Mercer's hit song. This was the year that Arlen had three Oscar nominees for best song, two of them with lyrics by Mercer. Arlen, though he racked up nine nominations, won only once, for "Over the Rainbow." Mercer, on the other hand, won four Oscars and was nominated nineteen times.
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Best Sound, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
This Land Is Mine, RKO Radio Studio Sound Department, Stephen Dunn, Sound Director. 


Charles Laughton plays a meek schoolteacher in a generic European country that has been occupied by the Nazis. He's drawn into heroic resistance to the Germans by his unexpressed love for his neighbor, played by Maureen O'Hara. Melodramatic propaganda, but of a higher sort, thanks to Dudley Nichols's screenplay and a fine performance by Laughton. Still, it's perhaps the weakest film from one of the greatest directors, Jean Renoir. The award for sound seems like the Academy's attempt to honor a movie not quite good enough to be nominated in any other category. This was the first of Dunn's two Oscars. He also won a scientific and technical award.   
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Best Art Direction, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White)
(Color)
... when they should have been ... 
(Black-and-White) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
The Song of Bernadette. Art Direction: James Basevi, William Darling; Interior Decoration: Thomas Little. 

This was the only Oscar for Basevi, who began his set design career in 1924 at MGM, then moved to United Artists before landing at 20th Century-Fox in 1941. He was loaned to David O. Selznick in 1945 for Spellbound, on which he translated Salvador Dalí's designs into sets for the dream sequences. This was the second of Darling's three Oscars. Born in Hungary, he adopted his wife's maiden name as a surname in the United States. He went to work for Fox in 1922, and remained with the company when it merged to become 20th Century-Fox. Little, head of the 20th Century-Fox set decorating department, received six Oscars. 

(Color) 


Claude Rains and Susanna Foster
While the 1943 Phantom is mostly a camp-fest, it's undeniably a gorgeously designed one. This was the only Oscar for Goodman out of four nominations; he began his career in 1932 at Paramount, and moved to Universal in 1940. Golitzen was the more famous name, earning fourteen nominations with three wins, of which this was the first. He worked at first primarily with the major independent producers, Samuel Goldwyn and Walter Wanger, but joined Universal, where he became the chief art director in 1954, a job that he held for the next twenty years. Gausman worked closely with Golitzen, winning both of his Oscars on films on which they collaborated. This was the sole Oscar for Webb, also a frequent collaborator with the other three men.  


Nelson Eddy in Phantom of the Opera 



... when it should have gone to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
Cabin in the Sky. Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Leonid Vasian; Interior Decoration: Edwin B. Willis, Hugh Hunt.

Little Joe (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson) is torn between his wife, Petunia (Ethel Waters), and the glamorous singer Georgia Brown (Lena Horne). When he's wounded in a nightclub fight a battle for his soul begins between Lucifer (Rex Ingram) and the General (Kenneth Spencer). He's saved by Petunia's devotion. The racial stereotypes in director Vincente Minnelli's first film are uncomfortable today, though MGM went out of its way to avoid the controversy that had been generated by its 1936 film of The Green Pastures, consulting with members of Hollywood's black community. Say what you will about the story and the characters, the performances are wonderful. In addition to the principals the cast includes Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and the original Sportin' Life of Porgy and Bess, John Bubbles. The look of Cabin in the Sky is probably chiefly attributable to Minnelli, who began his career as a theatrical costume and set designer before becoming a stage director. He didn't have a hand in the original Broadway production, which was directed by Albert Lewis and staged by George Balanchine, but the sets for the film version are deliberately theatrical. As usual with MGM productions, Gibbons and Willis are nominated because they were department heads. Vasian, one of the studio's second-string designers, never received an Oscar nomination. Hunt, however, won for Julius Caesar and Ben-Hur, and was nominated eleven more times. 
The General sets Petunia and Joe off on the starway to heaven
Joe is tempted by Georgia Brown as the General and Lucifer look on
A screen test of the cabin set
Georgia's dressing room

Interior of the cabin 

The cabin's bedroom
     
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Best Writing, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story)
(Screenplay) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story) 

In Pal Joey (the stage version, not the censor-crippled movie), a stripper sings about what goes through her mind as she's taking off her clothes on stage: 
Zip! Walter Lippmann wasn't brilliant today.
Zip! Will Saroyan ever write a great play? 
The answer, sadly, was no. Although he won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1939 play The Time of Your Life, as well as an Oscar for this story, Saroyan is mostly forgotten today. The consensus seems to be that he was too careless, too prolific, too optimistic, too sentimental ... in other words, too much. The story of The Human Comedy, about a telegraph delivery boy in a small California town, was written by Saroyan along with a screenplay, which he sold to MGM. But the treatment was much too long for a feature film of the time, and Saroyan was fired and the rewrite handled by Howard Estabrook. Saroyan then turned the story into a novel, which is often erroneously cited as the source of the film because it was published before the film was released. The film was one of Louis B. Mayer's favorites because of its celebration of Mayer's (and Saroyan's) sentimentalized version of "family values." In 1992, a little over a decade after his death, Saroyan's Oscar turned up in a San Francisco pawnshop. 

(Original Screenplay) 

Olivia de Havilland plays a princess, exiled in the United States by the war, who falls in love with an airline pilot and after some impediments arise, marries him thanks to some intervention by no less than FDR and his dog Fala. Krasna also made his debut as a director with the film. It was his only Oscar win after three prior nominations. The film is remarkable only because it was the straw that finally broke the back of the studio contract system, under which a studio could claim that a person signed to, say, a seven-year contract must put in seven years of actual work time -- in other words, time off between and even during filming (such as weekends and holidays) could not be counted as fulfilling the contract. De Havilland claimed to be exhausted from work, and initially refused to do the film. When she was forced to do it, she sued Warner Bros., with the backing of the Screen Actors Guild, and won. The court's ruling that a seven-year contract referred to seven calendar years is still known as "the de Havilland law." 

(Screenplay) 

Julius and Philip Epstein
Howard Koch
Because of Casablanca's enduring success, authorship of the screenplay has been contested over the years. Julius and his twin brother Philip Epstein produced the first workable screenplay from the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick's, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Warner Bros. had bought the rights to the play for the then-generous sum of $20,000. Epstein later told writer Harlan Lebo, "There wasn't a world of truth in the picture. There were no Germans in Casablanca, certainly not in uniform, no letters of transit, there was nothing. And it was slapped together. For example, I don't know what would have happened if my brother and I hadn't come up with 'round up the usual suspects' for the ending. And it wasn't the result of a lot of thought, either; it was just one of those flashes." When the Epsteins, contract writers at Warners, moved on to other assignments, the script was passed around among other writers, including Wally Kline, Aeneas MacKenzie, and Lenore Coffee. Casey Robinson, who had worked closely with producer Hal B. Wallis over the years, was brought on to do major work, particularly on the love scenes, and the whole thing was handed over to Koch for a rewrite. In the end, the Writers Guild gave the screen credits to the Epsteins and Koch, excluding Robinson for reasons that have never been entirely clear. Robinson claimed at one point that he asked to have his name withdrawn because he didn't want to share screen credit with anyone. One persistent rumor about the script is that it was begun without knowing the outcome of the story, although the play ends as the film does: with Rick enabling Ilsa (called Lois in the play) to leave with Laszlo. Ingrid Bergman, who admitted that she wasn't aware that the film was based on a play, wrote in her memoirs that she was concerned about not knowing whether she would wind up with Humphrey Bogart or Paul Henreid and was told to "play it in-between," because the writers hadn't decided yet. But there is no evidence that the ending was ever in doubt, other than the role played in it by Louis (Claude Rains) and the fate of Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt). The Epstein brothers continued to work together until Philip's death in 1954. Julius had been nominated before for his work on Four Daughters with Lenore Coffee, and would receive two more nominations, for Pete 'n' Tillie and Reuben, Reuben. Koch had been nominated for his work on Sergeant York. He had begun his career as a playwright, but after two Broadway flops he began writing for radio, including the infamous "War of the Worlds" script for Orson Welles in 1937. He was hired as a Warner Bros. contract writer in 1939. Among his assignments was the 1943 film Mission to Moscow, a wartime propaganda drama that shone a favorable light on Stalin and the Soviet Union, which the United States was eager to keep as allies. Koch said that he was pressured into doing the film by studio head Jack Warner, but in 1947 Warner was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and, as a "friendly witness," was asked to testify about Mission to Moscow and other "leftist" films. In his testimony, Warner named Koch as a communist sympathizer. Blacklisted, Koch spent his later screenwriting career in England. He is sometimes confused with producers Howard W. Koch Sr. and Jr., to whom he was not related. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story) 
Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier
This delicious romantic comedy isn't seen as often as it should be, probably because its situation, a wartime shortage of housing in Washington, D.C., dates it. It was remade in 1966 as Walk, Don't Run, about the shortage of housing in Tokyo during the Olympics, but that version is memorable only because it was Cary Grant's last film. The three principals, Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn, perform at their peak of charm, but while Arthur received her only nomination and Coburn won, McCrea was once again overlooked by the Academy, even though few leading men of his day performed both comic and action roles with his finesse. Russell was a talented playwright whose other claim to fame was the book for the 1965 musical Flora the Red Menace, on which he collaborated with George Abbott. While the show was not a success, closing after eighty-seven performances, it was a debut vehicle for Liza Minnelli, who won a Tony for her performance. And it was the first Broadway show to feature the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb. Ross had been an actor, and met Arthur when he had a small role in the 1929 film The Saturday Night Kid. They married three years later, by which time he had become a production assistant at Hal Roach Studios. He was the producer of two of her features, The Devil and Miss Jones and A Lady Takes a Chance. He shared in a 1945 honorary award presented to the producers, director, writers, and cast of the short film The House I Live In, which was designed to promote racial tolerance. He also received an Oscar nomination as producer of best picture nominee The Robe.  

(Original Screenplay) 

Coward in In Which We Serve
One of the most versatile figures of the twentieth century, Coward was actor, composer, playwright, novelist, songwriter, producer, and director. He had made his first screen appearance while still in his teens in a bit part in D.W. Griffith's 1918 film Hearts of the World, and wrote his first screenplay, The Queen Was in the Parlor, in 1927. Many of his plays were adapted for the screen, including Cavalcade, the best picture winner for 1932-33. He not only wrote, but produced, directed (with David Lean), acted in, and composed the music score for In Which We Serve which tells about the lives of the crew of a torpedoed British destroyer. The result is a super patriotic opus, pulling out every stop in its paean to England (and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland), home, and duty. Coward based the story on the experiences of Lord Mountbatten, whose ship was sunk early in the war. The huge case includes Richard Attenborough and Celia Johnson in their film debuts, as well as John Mills, Bernard Miles, and Michael Wilding. It also features nine-year-old Daniel Massey, who would receive an Oscar nomination for Star!, in which he plays Noël Coward. Despite Coward's tour de force, the Oscar went to Norman Krasna's Princess O'Rourke, perhaps because Coward had been honored by the Academy for the film with an honorary award a year earlier. At that time it hadn't met the qualifications for release in the United States that would allow it to be nominated in the competitive categories.     
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