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

Best Music, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

And the nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
(Song) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
Brian Easdale
This was Easdale's second film score for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The previous year he had composed the score for Black Narcissus. On The Red Shoes, he was a replacement for Allan Gray, who had worked on many of Powell and Pressburger's films, but was unable to deliver a ballet score that satisfied them. Easdale had studied at the Royal College of Music, and began his film composition career on scores for propaganda and training films while serving in World War II. He scored several more films for Powell and Pressburger, as well as for Powell's notorious 1960 horror movie Peeping Tom, which was widely censored. He also composed many concert works. Although this was his only Oscar nomination, he was the first British composer to receive an Academy Award for film scoring.    

(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
Johnny Green, Roger Edens, Easter Parade. 

 Fred Astaire and Ann Miller play a successful vaudeville dance team, but when Miller decides to go solo in a new show, Astaire bets that he can take the next chorus girl he sees and turn her into Miller's replacement. That dancer happens to be Judy Garland. After some initial friction, they become a successful team, provoking Miller's jealous attempt to win him back. The plot is only a mild annoyance in this lovely trifle of a musical, which not only provides the only film teaming of Astaire and Garland but also showcases sixteen songs by Irving Berlin. (The seven songs written especially for the film were eligible for the Oscar, but none of them were nominated -- in a slate that included "The Woody Woodpecker Song.") Astaire had announced his retirement, but was persuaded out of it by producer Arthur Freed after Gene Kelly, originally set to star, broke his ankle in a volleyball game. Vincente Minnelli, then married to Garland, was going to direct, but her psychiatrist advised against their working together. Charles Walters replaced him. This was the first of five Oscars for Green, and the first of three for Edens. 



 (Song) 
"Buttons and Bows," from The Paleface. Music and lyrics by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. 
Ray Evans, Jane Russell and Jay Livingston with their Paleface Oscars
Calamity Jane (Jane Russell), an undercover agent trying to find out who's selling firearms to the Indians, marries "Painless" Potter, a tenderfoot dentist (Bob Hope), in order to conceal her identity. She spends much of the movie helping him look like a sharpshooting hero and avoiding consummating the marriage. Silly but endearing, though it drags a bit toward the end. The 1952 sequel, Son of Paleface, is better. Directed by Norman Z. McLeod. Hope sings Livingston and Evans's agreeable hit song, which won them the first of their three Oscars. Livingston and Evans met when they were in business school at Wharton, and began writing songs for the band they played in. They were nominated four more times, and also had hits with the song "To Each His Own" and the Christmas standard "Silver Bells," not to mention the theme songs for the TV shows "Bonanza" and "Mr. Ed."  
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Best Music, 1947

Awards presented March 20, 1948

The nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
(Song) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Song)
And the Oscar went to ...
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)  

This was the second of three Oscars for Rózsa, whom the Academy nominated this time as "Dr. Miklos Rozsa," honorific titles -- Rósza had studied at the University of Leipzig and the Leipzig Conservatory -- apparently mattering more than diacritical marks.

(Scoring of a Musical Picture)

Lobby card for Mother Wore Tights
You can tell from the title that it's yet another of 20th Century-Fox's string of period musicals. The studio apparently had a wardrobe full of bustles and boas and, yes, tights for stars like Alice Faye, June Haver, and in this case Betty Grable to wear while singing antique standards like "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey" and "Swinging Down the Lane," plus some new songs by Josef Myrow and Mack Gordon. This is one of the better ones, with Grable and Dan Dailey as a vaudeville team trying to raise a family and keep their act together at the same time. It won Newman the fifth of his nine Oscars. Pleasant as the movie is, however, neither it nor the other mostly forgotten musicals among the nominees suggests that Hollywood was on the brink of another great era of musicals.  

 (Song) 
"Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," from Song of the South. Music by Allie Wrubel, lyrics by Ray Gilbert. 

 This bright and cheery song gives no hint that Song of the South is the most controversial of all the movies Walt Disney produced during his lifetime, one of the few still unreleased in the United States on video. If you want to see it today, you'll have to track down one of the various foreign video releases. It's about young Johnny (Bobby Driscoll), who goes to live on an Old South plantation with his mother (Ruth Warrick) and grandmother (Lucile Watson). He's unhappy and determined to run away until Uncle Remus (James Baskett) tells him the stories of Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, and Br'er Bear. The movie is undeniably executed with finesse: The animated versions of the Joel Chandler Harris tales are wonderful, and the live-action episodes are beautifully filmed by Gregg Toland -- one of his few movies in color. But Disney naïvely failed to anticipate how post-World War II black audiences would react to racial stereotyping and the sugar-coated portrayal of the plantation South. (The setting is supposedly post-Civil War, but the plantation is seemingly unscathed by the war. It's apparently near Atlanta, but Sherman must have marched around it.) One understands the Disney people's reluctance to court controversy today, and the fact that the movie is unsuitable for the young viewers it usually serves, but it would be nice to have a Blu-ray version, perhaps with extras dealing with the controversy and the realities of post-Civil War America. That way we wouldn't be deprived of Baskett's fine performance. He received an honorary award that made him the first African-American male to be honored by the Academy for acting.      

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
Bernard Herrmann, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. 
Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
The widowed Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) moves into a seaside cottage that's haunted by the ghost of Capt. Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison). This charming sentimental romance could have gone overboard with too much whimsy or too many tears, but it manages a good balance, thanks to the leads, the engaging screenplay by Philip Dunne, the intelligent direction of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the cinematography by Charles Lang, and most of all the atmospherically romantic score by Bernard Herrmann. The Academy's blind spot to Herrmann's music is once again glaringly apparent.  



 (Song) 
"Time After Time," from It Happened in Brooklyn. Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn.
Jimmy Durante and Frank Sinatra in It Happened in Brooklyn
An agreeable little musical with Frank Sinatra as an ex-GI who wants to stop being a shipping clerk and make it as a singer, Peter Lawford as the shy heir to a dukedom, and Kathryn Grayson as a schoolteacher who wants to sing opera. Jimmy Durante is the high school janitor Sinatra shares a room with. Nothing great here except for the byplay between Sinatra and Durante, but the stars are all pleasant, and if you've ever wanted to see Sinatra and Grayson sing the Don Giovanni-Zerlina duet "Là ci darem la mano," this is your chance. Styne and Cahn were unforgivably overlooked for this song, but they shared seven nominations and won once, for "Three Coins in the Fountain." 


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Best Music, 1946

Awards presented March 13, 1947

 Nowhere did the end of studio-submitted nominees have more impact than in the music categories. For the 1945 awards there were twenty-one nominees for score of a dramatic or comedy picture, twelve for scoring a musical, and fourteen for song. This year there were only five in each category. 
The nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
Hugo Friedhofer, The Best Years of Our Lives. 

 Friedhofer began a long association with movie music as an accompanist for silent films in his native San Francisco, then became a studio musician in Los Angeles in 1929. His musicianship attracted the attention of Warner Bros. department head Max Steiner and composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and he began working as an orchestrator for them. He also composed incidental music for films, and in 1938 did his first complete score, for The Adventures of Marco Polo. Frustrated by Warners' desire to keep him primarily in the role of arranger and orchestrator, he left the studio to freelance. Alfred Newman, who had worked at the Samuel Goldwyn studios before become head of the 20th Century-Fox music department, recommended Friedhofer to Goldwyn as the composer of the score for The Best Years of Our Lives. It was his only Oscar win out of nine nominations. 

(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
Morris Stoloff, The Jolson Story. 
Morris Stoloff

Stoloff had been a violin prodigy and one of the youngest members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic before being hired by Paramount as concertmaster for its studio orchestra. In 1936 he moved to Columbia as the studio's first music director, a position that ensured him a string of Oscar nominations, even for films like The Jolson Story on which he didn't actually compose or orchestrate the score -- he racked up seventeen nominations in this position. This was the second of three wins. 

 (Song) 
"On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," from The Harvey Girls. Music by Harry Warren; Lyrics by Johnny Mercer. 
Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls
Judy Garland stars in a pleasant, brightly colored musical about the waitresses in Fred Harvey's chain of restaurants that were opened to serve passengers on the railroads spanning the United States. The prim and starchy young women compete with the saloon girls for customers, and Garland competes with Angela Lansbury for the attentions of saloon-keeper John Hodiak. This Freed Unit musical, directed by George Sidney, features Garland in fine form and a cast that includes Ray Bolger, Virginia O'Brien, Marjorie Main, Chill Wills, and Cyd Charisse. Except for the Oscar-winning song, the Warren-Mercer score is forgettable, perhaps because Hodiak couldn't sing, so no memorable love songs were written for him and Garland. (Howard Keel had yet to appear as MGM's leading man who could also sing.) It was the first of Mercer's four Oscars, and the last of Warren's three wins. 



 ... when it should have gone to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
William Walton, Henry V. 
When it comes to English music, William Walton is often looked on as a bridge between Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten. Walton broke with the stately Elgar tradition with his early works, including the collaboration with poet Edith Sitwell on Façade, which caused a storm of controversy and labeled him an avant-garde composer. But by 1937 he was so much a part of the mainstream that he was called on to compose a march for the coronation of George VI, since Elgar was dead. And when World War II broke out, he was exempted from military service so he could compose scores for British propaganda films -- the best of which was Laurence Olivier's Henry V. Walton had earlier written the score for Paul Czinner's film of As You Like It, which starred Olivier, and he would collaborate with Olivier on two more Shakespeare films, Hamlet (for which he received his second nomination) and Richard III. In all, he scored thirteen films, but he was dismissive of his work for the movies. Today, the suites that have been arranged from his film scores by others are among his most-performed works. The Henry V score, with its blend of Elizabethan-style themes and stirring mood pieces, remains one of the classics of film music.   
  
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Best Music, 1945

Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
And the Oscar went to ...  
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 

Miklos Rozsa with Oscar presenter Ginger Rogers
One of Alfred Hitchcock's less-successful films, marred by the meddling of producer David O. Selznick and his fascination with psychoanalysis: His own shrink, May Romm, receives screen credit as "psychiatric advisor." Among the mistakes was having Salvador Dalí design dream sequences that in the end had to be cut to about two minutes of screen time. Even Selznick's wife, Irene, called it "a terrible piece of junk." It's not quite as bad as that, since Hitchcock didn't take it nearly as seriously as the producer did, and it has eminently watchable stars, Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. This was the first of three wins out of sixteen nominations for Rozsa, who began his career as a screen composer with fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda in London in 1935, and moved to Hollywood in 1940. Selznick and Hitchcock wanted Bernard Herrmann to score Spellbound, but he was unavailable. Rozsa made use of the theremin, an early electronic instrument, in his score, and for the one he did for The Lost Weekend.   



(Scoring of a Musical Picture)
Georgie Stoll, Anchors Aweigh. 

 Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra play sailors who fall for the same woman, Kathryn Grayson, with predictable consequences for their friendship. Grayson's nephew is played by nine-year-old Dean Stockwell. The songs by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn are pleasant, and Kelly and Sinatra make an enormously appealing team. The choreography is by Kelly, and Sinatra proves to be a surprisingly good dancer. The movie, directed by George Sidney, was Kelly's first big hit for MGM. After his 1942 debut in For Me and My Gal, the studio seemed to be unable to find anything for him to do, so it loaned him out to Columbia for Cover Girl, in which he displayed his ingratiating athletic style of dancing for the first time on screen. Anchors Aweigh is lightweight stuff compared to later Kelly films such as An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain, and it features MGM's usual tedious appearance by pianist Jose Iturbi, but its highlight is the wonderful sequence that was suggested by Stanley Donen, in which Kelly dances with Jerry, the mouse from MGM's Tom and Jerry cartoons. This was the only Oscar for Stoll, who had been a music director and conductor for MGM   
since 1937. 


(Song)
"It Might As Well Be Spring," from State Fair. Music by Richard Rodgers; Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.

A musical remake of the 1933 film version of the novel by Phil Stong, directed by Walter Lang from a screenplay by Hammerstein, starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, and Vivian Blaine. This is the only original film musical written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, though each had collaborated with other lyricists or composers on other films. In addition to the Oscar-winning song, the score also included "It's a Grand Night for Singing" and "That's for Me." Crain's voice was dubbed by Louanne Hogan, and although Andrews had a trained voice and once thought of becoming an opera singer, he is dubbed in his only brief vocal moment by Ben Gage. This was Rodgers's only Oscar nomination and win; Hammerstein had already won for "The Last Time I Saw Paris" from Lady Be Good and received three more nominations.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Song) 
"Accentuate the Positive," from Here Come the Waves. Music by Harold Arlen; Lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

 Betty Hutton plays twins -- one smart, one silly -- who have a nightclub act but decide to do their part during the war by joining the Waves. The smart twin falls in love with Bing Crosby, and the silly twin tries to break them up by pretending to be her sister. Goofy nonsense, directed by Mark Sandrich, that is now remembered almost solely for Arlen and Mercer's classic, introduced by Crosby and Sonny Tufts in a blackface number. The minstrelsy is kind of unforgivable, but if you can tolerate it, just listen to Crosby demonstrate why he was one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. The accompanying dance number, choreographed by Danny Dare, is pretty good too. 

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Best Music, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
(Song) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
(Song)  
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
Max Steiner, Since You Went Away.

A highly accomplished homefront drama, produced by David O. Selznick with his usual obsessive attention to detail (and to Jennifer Jones, who plays one of Claudette Colbert's daughters; the other is the teenage Shirley Temple). This was the thirteenth nomination and the  third Oscar for Steiner, who would receive eleven more nominations. 

(Scoring of a Musical Picture)
Morris Stoloff, Carmen Dragon, Cover Girl.

 If this colorful musical had a better story and more chemistry between its leads, Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth, it might have been a classic, considering that it has songs by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin. The truth is, only the nominated "Long Ago and Far Away" is one of their top-drawer songs. After making his debut in For Me and My Gal in 1942, this was Kelly's first musical, made on a loanout to Columbia, which gave him free rein on the choreography, on which he was assisted by Stanley Donen. Kelly and Donen then returned to MGM and glory. Dragon achieved his greatest fame as a conductor and arranger at the Hollywood Bowl, and as a recording artist with the Bowl's symphony orchestra. His son, Daryl Dragon, was the Captain of the Captain and Tennille, stars of a hit TV variety show in the 1970s. This was his only Oscar. It was the first of three wins for Stoloff, who accumulated nineteen nominations. 

(Song)  
"Swinging on a Star" from Going My Way. Music by James Van Heusen; Lyrics by Johnny Burke.

Van Heusen changed his name from Edward Chester Babcock when he was in his teens and working as a radio announcer. He teamed with Burke in 1939, and their hit song for Tommy Dorsey, "Polka Dots and Moonbeams," launched Van Heusen's long association with Frank Sinatra. Paramount hired the team to write songs for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's Road films. This was the first of four Oscars for Van Heusen -- the other three were for songs written with Sammy Cahn. It was Burke's only Oscar, although he was nominated two more times for songs written with Van Heusen, and once each for the lyrics to melodies by James V. Monaco and Arthur Johnston. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture)
David Raksin, Laura. 

Once again, Darryl F. Zanuck's obsession with promoting Wilson led to a nomination for Alfred Newman's score, when the real hit of the year was Raksin's Laura theme and the variations on it that constitute his film score. The theme became a hit song, one of the most-recorded of all time, when Johnny Mercer's lyrics were added to it, but because the song wasn't actually in the film, it was ineligible for an Oscar. Raksin would receive two nominations, for Forever Amber and Separate Tables, but never won an Oscar. After a stint with Benny Goodman, Raksin went to Hollywood in 1935, where his first assignment was the score for Charles Chaplin's Modern Times. His work as a composer and orchestrator led to Newman's hiring him at 20th Century-Fox, and when Newman passed on the score for Laura, Raksin took on the job.   



 (Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
Georgie Stoll, Meet Me in St. Louis. 

 Stoll, a former child prodigy on the violin, began working in Hollywood in 1935 and joined the MGM music department in 1937. He became a favorite conductor of Judy Garland's after working with her on The Wizard of Oz. He received nine nominations, but his only Oscar win was for scoring Anchors Aweigh.  



 (Song) 
"Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" from Christmas Holiday. Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser.

 Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly in Christmas Holiday. Sounds like a cheerful musical treat, doesn't it? But it's a dark melodrama about a woman who escapes from a miserable marriage and becomes a nightclub "hostess" (the Production Code's word for prostitute). It was produced by Durbin's husband-to-be, Felix Jackson, as a way of changing her image from the well-scrubbed girl next door of her earlier musicals. Robert Siodmak directs from a screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz loosely based on a novel by Somerset Maugham. The song is one of the best of Loesser's earlier works, before he went on to fame as a Broadway composer. The failure to nominate it is understandable: Durbin sings it with little expression -- she has other things on her mind -- in the sleazy nightclub setting. But she later recorded it in a more romantic mode, and it has since become a standard. 
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