Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ...
(Black-and-White)
(Color)
... when they should have been ...
(Black-and-White)
(Color)
And the Oscar went to ...
(Black-and-White)
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| Harry Stradling Sr. |
Oscar Wilde's fable of the young man whose portrait becomes more hideous as he becomes more debauched receives an intelligent if occasionally heavy-handed treatment from writer-director Albert Lewin. Hurd Hatfield plays the title role, with George Sanders as Wilde's epigrammatic stand-in Sir Harry Wotton, Angela Lansbury as the innocent Sibyl Vane, and Donna Reed and Peter Lawford. This was the first of two Oscars (out of fourteen nominations) for Stradling, who began his career in American silent films but made his reputation abroad, working with Jacques Feyder and Alexander Korda, before returning to the United States in 1940. He was a major cinematographer for the next thirty years, winding up his career with four films starring Barbra Streisand, who thanked him in her Oscar acceptance speech for
Funny Girl. His son, Harry Stradling Jr., became a cinematographer, too, with two Oscar nominations of his own.
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| Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray, with the portrait behind him |
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| Hatfield and Angela Lansbury |
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| George Sanders and Hatfield |
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| Ivan Albright's picture of Dorian Gray, which was revealed in a color sequence at the end of the film. It's now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. |
(Color)
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| Shamroy receives the Oscar from D.W. Griffith |
Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) makes the serious mistake of falling in love with Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney), whom we first see on a galloping horse, scattering her beloved father's ashes as the Alfred Newman score thunders around her. Ellen is a spoiled psychopath, who will stop at nothing to hold on to the man she loves, including letting his crippled brother (Darryl Hickman) drown and falling downstairs to abort the baby she fears would distract her husband from devoting himself to adoring her. It would be twenty-two years until the Academy finally abandoned the division of the cinematography category into black-and-white and color films for lack of plausible black-and-white nominees, but Shamroy's Oscar win surely signaled the beginning of the end. Even then there were critics such as James Agee who thought that the weird and overheated story of
Leave Her to Heaven would have benefited from the moody high contrast of black-and-white, but time has proven them short-sighted. Certainly director John Stahl's overheated melodrama seemed on the face of it suitable for a film-noir treatment. Stahl had a gift for turning melodramas into films that seem substantial: He had done the trick with
Back Street,
Imitation of Life, and
Magnificent Obsession, all shot in black and white. But in a few years all three of those would be remade in color, the latter two by Douglas Sirk, the great master of Technicolor melodrama, so Shamroy's
Leave Her to Heaven today seems like a prophecy rather than a mistake. Working closely with the production designers to create a harmonious and expressive palette, Shamroy earned the third of his record-setting four Oscars, all of them for color films. He is tied with Joseph Ruttenberg for most wins, and with Charles Lang for most nominations -- eighteen.
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| Cornel Wilde and Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven |
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| Darryl Hickman drowning |
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| Tierney scatters her father's ashes |
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| Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven |
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| Vincent Price in Leave Her to Heaven |
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| Terney admires the sleeping Wilde |
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