Showing posts with label Best Cinematography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Best Cinematography. Show all posts

Best Cinematography, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

 And the nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White)
(Color) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Black-and-White)
    (Color) 
    (Black-and-White)

    This fast-moving and enormously influential manhunt melodrama was an eye-opener in its day because of its location shooting in New York City. If it seems routine and clichéd today it's partly because of the endless imitations in both movies and TV, including the TV series that was based on it. Arthur Fellig, the photographer known as Weegee, who was celebrated for his candid photographs, was a consultant, though director Jules Dassin's primary inspiration was the Italian neo-realist classic The Bicycle Thief. Daniels and his assistant, Roy Tripp, shot many scenes with hidden cameras -- the crowds are often actual New Yorkers, unaware that they're being filmed.  Daniels began his long and extraordinarily distinguished career in 1917 and became for his work with Erich von Stroheim -- Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives, Greed, and The Merry Widow -- and as the favorite cinematographer of Greta Garbo. This was his only Oscar, but he was nominated three more times. 

    (Color) 

    Ingrid Bergman plays the title role in an adaptation by Maxwell Anderson and Andrew Solt of Anderson's play Joan of Lorraine, in which Bergman had appeared on Broadway. Much too long and talky, it was a major box-office disappointment, the last film directed by Victor Fleming, who had seen Bergman's Broadway Joan and persuaded producer Walter Wanger to back the film. Fleming and cinematographer Valentine died shortly after the release of the film, a presage of the ill fortune that would follow others associated with the project. Bergman would become a cause célèbre when she left her husband and child for director Roberto Rossellini, shocking people who identified her with the saintly Joan and the nun in The Bells of St. Mary's. And producer Wanger would be tried and jailed two years later for shooting Jennings Lang, agent and lover of Wanger's wife, Joan Bennett. He would also be forced into bankruptcy by the film's failure. This was Valentine's only Oscar after four previous nominations. It was also the only one for Skall, who was nominated an additional nine times. Hoch, on the other hand, won three Oscars, as well as a technical achievement award. 

    ... when it should have gone to ... 
    (Black-and-White)
    Director John Huston, Ted McCord, and a young extra
    during the filming of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

    McCord was nominated for Johnny Belinda instead of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Both films were shot on location: Treasure in several locations in Mexico and the Mojave Desert, Johnny in Mendocino and Monterey. But the former seems to me the more visually exciting, as well as the more authentic in its use of location (the California settings of Johnny Belinda are supposed to be Nova Scotia). The actual nomination was one of three for McCord, who never won, but it's suggestive of his variety and adaptability that one of his nominations was for The Sound of Music, whose Austrian scenery is a long way from the harsh desert landscapes of Treasure. He had a long career, starting in the silent era at First National before it was absorbed by Warner Bros., then moving through several other studios before returning to Warners for most of his career, from 1936 through 1957.  
    Tim Holt, Walter Huston, and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
    Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
     (Color) 
    Jack Cardiff and Geoffrey Unsworth
    with the Technicolor camera

    It has been acclaimed as one of the most beautiful films ever made, and Cardiff's technical innovations -- such as manipulating the speed of the camera so that dancers seem to hover in mid-air -- were enormously influential. Even Technicolor's persnickety watchdogs, Herbert and Natalie Kalmus, who had objected during the filming to some of the things Cardiff was trying to do, later admitted that it was one of the greatest uses of the process. So why was it not nominated  for the cinematography Oscar? Cardiff later said that he had been told by cinematographer Lee Garmes that the American Society of Cinematographers, whose membership overlapped that of the Academy nominating committee, didn't want the Oscar going to a non-American cinematographer two years in a row: Cardiff had won the previous year for Black Narcissus. The snub was made more apparent by the fact that there were only four nominees for best color cinematography, whereas there were five for black-and-white. It may not be coincidental that 1948 was the year when, for the first time, the best picture Oscar went to a non-American film, Laurence Olivier's Hamlet.  

    Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes
    One of Cardiff's innovations during the filming of The Red Shoes was to suspend the camera from bungee cords, to allow greater freedom of movement.

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    Best Cinematography, 1947

    Awards presented March 20, 1948

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

    Green's work on Great Expectations is splendid, from the moody evocation of the misty moors to the shadow-haunted interiors of Miss Havisham's decaying mansion, and he and Jack Cardiff became the first British cinematographers to take the Oscars in both cinematography categories. It's worth noting, too, that the two films that won Oscars for cinematography also won for art direction, suggesting that these two visual categories are intrinsically linked. This was, surprisingly, the only nomination and win for Green, who had begun as a camera operator in the 1930s and moved into the director of photography chair during the war. He collaborated again with director David Lean the following year on Oliver Twist. In the mid-1950s he switched from cinematographer to director, heading up such notable films as The Mark, A Patch of Blue, and The Magus.  

    (Color) 

    Jack Cardiff
    The son of music hall performers, Cardiff grew up in show business, appearing in films as a child. He became fascinated with photography and art, and in 1936 became a camera operator, having impressed the Technicolor people with his knowledge of the use of color in fine art. He was a camera operator on the first British Technicolor film, Wings of the Morning, in 1937, and in 1946 graduated to cinematographer on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Stairway to Heaven (known in Britain as A Matter of Life and Death). The film featured both color and black-and-white sequences, although the monochrome sequences, which take place in the afterlife, were actually filmed in Technicolor and then only partially developed. Black Narcissus, another Powell-Pressburger film, followed, and Cardiff showed off his familiarity with the composition of classic painting in this richly designed (art director Alfred Junge also won the Oscar) and lighted film, which has been called one of the most beautiful movies ever made. It was Cardiff's only competitive Oscar win, but the Academy presented him with an honorary Oscar in 2001. Like his fellow 1947 Oscar winner, Guy Green, Cardiff turned director -- though without giving up his work as cinematographer -- and was nominated for directing Sons and Lovers in 1960. 
    Cardiff's lighting helps create the illusion that Black Narcissus was filmed on location and not in a sound stage.
    The influence of painters such as Vermeer is felt in scenes such as this one with Deborah Kerr and Flora Robson
    Sabu as the young general in Black Narcissus
    Kathleen Byron as Sister Ruth
    Kerr as Sister Clodagh
    ... when it should have gone to ...  
    (Black-and-White) 

    James Wong Howe filming Artie Dorell and John Garfield in Body and Soul
    Guy Green's Oscar for Great Expectations was well-deserved, but the Academy's failure to nominate James Wong Howe for his innovative work on Body and Soul is baffling. To give the fight sequences in the film a realism that was unprecedented, Howe put on roller skates and entered the ring with John Garfield and the other fighters. Hand-held and Steadicam work has become standard, so that Howe's action cinematography has lost some of its impact on contemporary viewers, but his ability to use light and shadow to enhance mood throughout the film is just as impressive. Every subsequent boxing film -- including Michael Chapman's cinematography for Raging Bull -- owes a debt to Howe. 





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    Best Cinematography, 1946

    Awards presented March 13, 1947

     The Academy made a somewhat radical change of rules this year, putting the several branches of the Academy, instead of the studios and production companies, in charge of the nominations. The Cinematographers Branch had done something like this before: In 1939, it allowed each studio to submit its own candidates, but then had winnowed down the nominees to only two each in the Black-and-White and Color categories. That time, at least the names in the studio "long list" were made public. Now the cinematographers chose to announce only the final two nominees in each category -- a decision that naturally caused some controversy, so the nominees were expanded to the now-customary five per category with the 1949 awards.   
    The nominees were ... 
    (Black-and-White) 
    (Color) 
    ... when they should have been ... 
    (Black-and-White) 
    (Color) 
    (Black-and-White) 

    The musical version of the story of the king and the British governess of his many children is so familiar that you feel a letdown when the songs don't come in this, the first film version, starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne. It provided Miller with the third of his three Oscars. He retired as a director of photography in 1951 because of poor health, but remained active in the industry, serving as president of the American Society of Cinematographers. 

    (Color) 

    Claude Jarman Jr. in The Yearling
    In one of the best of the MGM Technicolor "family films" of the 1940s, which include National Velvet and Lassie Come Home, Claude Jarman Jr. plays Jody Baxter, a boy living in the Florida backwoods, who discovers an orphaned fawn and raises it with the encouragement of his father, played by Gregory Peck. But his mother, played by Jane Wyman, struggling with the poverty in which the family lives, regards the animal as just another mouth to feed, especially after it grows and becomes more rambunctious. Some of the film was shot near the home of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who wrote the novel on which the film is based and whose own story was told in the 1983 film Cross Creek. Rosher had received the very first Oscar given for cinematography, for his work on Sunrise. In the 1940s he became a specialist in the lush Technicolor for which MGM films were noted. Smith had received three previous nominations for color cinematography; this was his only Oscar. It was also his last film: He died in October 1947. Arling received a subsequent nomination, for the black-and-white cinematography of I'll Cry Tomorrow, but this was also his only Oscar.  
    Jane Wyman in The Yearling 
    Gregory Peck and Jarman in The Yearling 
    ... when it should have gone to ... 
    (Black-and-White) 

    Ted Tetzlaff
    Tetzlaff's only nomination was for The Talk of the Town, but his work with Hitchcock on Notorious deserved more attention from the Academy. He helped craft, for example, the tracking shot in which the camera looks down on the party at the Sebastians from a second-floor balcony and then gradually descends to a shot of the key to the wine cellar in Ingrid Bergman's hand. It's conventional to give Hitchcock the credit for imagining such an effect, but obviously he needed a cinematographer who knew how to light it and a cameraman who knew how to set it up. Tetzlaff, who had been a cinematographer since 1926, and had such credits as My Man Godfrey and The More the Merrier, was more than capable of doing Hitchcock's bidding on this and other "Hitchcockian" scenes. This was, however, his last film as cinematographer: The following year he became a full-time director, though his credits in that job are somewhat less impressive. 
    The beginning of the famous tracking shot in Notorious 
    Ingrid Bergman waits as the shot is set up
    Director Alfred Hitchcock inspects the angle on the concluding shot
    The conclusion of the sequence 
    In another Notorious sequence, odd camera angles suggest the hangover Bergman experiences when she awakes to find Cary Grant in her bedroom

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    Best Cinematography, 1945

    Awards presented March 7, 1946
    The nominees were ... 
    (Black-and-White)
    (Black-and-White) 
    (Color)
    (Black-and-White) 

    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.
    Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray, with the portrait behind him
    Hatfield and Angela Lansbury
    George Sanders and Hatfield
    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) 

    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.
    Cornel Wilde and Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven 
    Darryl Hickman drowning
    Tierney scatters her father's ashes
    Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven
    Vincent Price in Leave Her to Heaven
    Terney admires the sleeping Wilde

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    Best Cinematography, 1944

    Awards presented March 15, 1945
    The nominees were ...
    (Black-and-White) 
    (Color) 
    And the Oscar went to ... 
    (Black-and-White) 

    Joseph LaShelle and Otto Preminger filming Laura
    Laura is probably too sumptuous to qualify as true film noir, the characteristically gritty triumph of 1940s filmmaking, but LaShelle's work on it has the noir touch: a heavy use of shadow and high-contrast lighting. Notice below, in the shot of Laura finding McPherson asleep in her living room, how the light emphasizes the glamour of Laura's portrait, in contrast to the rather washed-out real Laura in her plain hooded raincoat. Will McPherson be as fascinated by the real person as by the painted one? And the high-contrast shot as McPherson turns a lamp on Laura as he's grilling her is pure noir. LaShelle had gone to work as a lab tech at Paramount in 1920, planning to earn money for college, but he stayed on, working as an assistant to cinematographer Charles Clarke. He moved to other studios before winding up at Fox, where he worked with cinematographer Arthur C. Miller. He became a full-fledged director of photography in 1943. Laura was his first major film, and it won him his only Oscar, though he received eight more nominations. His was the only Oscar won by the film.
    The supposedly dead Laura (Gene Tierney) discovers the detective (Dana Andrews) asleep before her portrait. 
    McPherson interrogates Laura 
    (Color) 

    This was Shamroy's second Oscar, and he won another the following year, for Leave Her to Heaven, doing something in both films that was uncommon at the time: filming a drama in Technicolor. By the time he won his fourth, for the 1963 Cleopatra, color filming was commonplace, but the conventional thinking at the time was that color was suitable only for musicals and spectacles, that it would be a distraction from a drama. Today, color is almost the only thing of interest about Wilson.  

    ... when it should have gone to ... 
    (Color) 

    George Folsey
    Judy Garland was painfully self-conscious about her looks. With her snub nose and high forehead she was hardly a conventional Hollywood beauty. But she never looked more attractive than she did in Meet Me in St. Louis. It helped that she was having an affair with, and would marry, the movie's director, Vincente Minnelli, who knew exactly how he wanted her filmed. So she had not only the assistance of MGM's hair and makeup department and Irene Sharaff's costumes, but also the lighting and camerawork of Folsey. He never won an Oscar, though he was nominated thirteen times, but did receive a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1988.   Meet Me in St. Louis remains one of his landmark films, and one of the handsomest musicals to come out of the MGM production unit headed by Arthur Freed. Folsey later recalled how two of the movie's most memorable scenes were filmed. The Christmas Eve sequence, with the yard full of snowmen seen from Margaret O'Brien's bedroom window, was complexly lighted, and once it had been put in place and filmed, one of the electricians came to Folsey and told him that his readings showed it to be seriously underexposed. Instead, the results were haunting, perfectly in key with O'Brien's hysterical destruction of the snowmen. In the scene in which Tom Drake helps Garland extinguish the gaslights throughout the house, the lighting had to change as each fixture is extinguished. Instead of using dimmer switches, Folsey had Venetian blinds rigged to close in sequence. Though a classic, Meet Me in St. Louis received no Oscars.
    Lucille Bremer and Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis
    Margaret O'Brien and Garland
    Garland sings about the boy next door
    Tom Drake and Garland dim the lights 
    O'Brien, Garland, and the snowmen

     
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