Showing posts with label Citizen Kane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Citizen Kane. Show all posts

Best Film Editing, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Given that this film produced Howard Hawks's only directing nomination, you might be tempted to make something of Holmes's contribution to the film's success. But Holmes was just a Warner Bros. staff editor assigned to the film, and this was his only win and only nomination. Hawks freelanced his way around the studio system, and when he was subjected to a strong-willed producer like Sergeant York's Hal Wallis, his work lost some of its edge and energy. It's an entertaining movie, but at two hours and fourteen minutes a little overlong. In other words, it could have used more editing, and I suspect that if Hawks's had had his way, some of the sentimentality and flag-waving would have been excised.

... when it should have gone to ... 

Robert Wise
Given the many visual and narrative innovations of Citizen Kane, Wise would have been an obvious choice, if an ironic one: He went on to the infamous editing chore on The Magnificent Ambersons after the studio took it out of Welles's hands. And he won two directing Oscars to Welles's none. He had begun quite literally in the mailroom at RKO, then apprenticed as a sound effects editor before working as an assistant film editor. In 1939 he became the sole editor on Bachelor Mother and My Favorite Wife. His first work as a director was, again ironically, on Ambersons, for which he was called on to reshoot certain scenes to ensure continuity in the heavily edited version. In 1944 he received his first credit as director on producer Val Lewton's stylish horror film The Curse of the Cat People, after the original director Gunther von Frisch was fired from the project. 
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Best Cinematography, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

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

Miller was an industry pioneer who began as a bit player and camera assistant while he was still in his teens, and worked as a photographer on the 1914 serial The Perils of Pauline. This was the first of his three Oscars, all of which he won for his work at 20th Century-Fox in the 1940s. How Green Was My Valley was beautifully filmed, and Miller would certainly have deserved his win for it if it weren't for the breakthrough cinematography of Gregg Toland on Citizen Kane. 

(Color) 

A remake of the 1922 melodrama starring Rudolph Valentino, about a bullfighter (Tyrone Power) under the spell of two women, played by Rita Hayworth and Linda Darnell. Director Rouben Mamoulian worked with Palmer and Rennahan in an attempt to capture the look of Spanish painting. Goya or Velazquez it isn't, but much of it is quite handsome. Unfortunately, the story is dated and dull. 

Tyrone Power in Blood and Sand
Linda Darnell and Tyrone Power in Blood and Sand
 
Rita Hayworth and Tyrone Power in Blood and Sand 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Welles lines up a shot as Toland waits
 As a novice filmmaker, Orson Welles found in Toland both a teacher and a willing experimenter. The visual richness, the dramatic lighting, the deep-focus compositions are all Toland achievements that Welles used in in a fresh and inventive way. Toland won only one Oscar, for Wuthering Heights, out of a total of six nominations. He had begun his career as an apprentice to George Barnes, and at the time of his death in 1948, from a heart attack at the age of forty-four, he was the highest-paid director of photography in Hollywood.
Orson Welles in the foreground, Joseph Cotten in the middle ground, and Everett Sloane in the distance

Dramatic back-lighting in one of Citizen Kane's more expressionistic scenes

Agnes Moorehead as Kane's mother signs his fate as the boy plays with a sled outside

The elderly Kane in Xanadu's hall of mirrors

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Best Writing, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

The nominees were ... 
(Original Screenplay) 
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Original Screenplay)
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Original Screenplay) 

Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz
In 1971 Pauline Kael generated controversy with her New Yorker essay "Raising Kane," which was later reprinted in The Citizen Kane Book. In it, she attempted to extend greater credit for the film's artistic success to Mankiewicz, claiming that the screenplay is largely his. To some extent, Kael's argument is a riposte to the so-called auteur critics, whose chief American spokesman was Andrew Sarris, who see the director as the chief "author" of a film, and to whom Welles is one of the great heroes. Director Peter Bogdanovich led the charge against Kael, and one of the bases of the anti-Kael position was the observation that nothing else in Mankiewicz's career as a screenwriter is as good as Kane. Mankiewicz, the older brother (by eleven years) of writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz, was a former journalist who came to Hollywood in 1926, and proceeded to persuade other journalists, chief among them Ben Hecht, to move there too. In a telegram, Mankiewicz famously told Hecht, "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots." Welles himself credited Mankiewicz with an "enormous" contribution to the screenplay, including the "Rosebud" device that sets the narrative in motion. Welles said that they argued, however, over the name of the central character, Mankiewicz fearing that "Kane" would be seen as a clumsy biblical allusion. John Houseman, Welles's former Mercury Theater associate, was one of those who gave Mankiewicz chief, if not sole, credit for the screenplay, but Houseman and Welles had a great falling-out, and Welles bore a grudge against Houseman until his dying day. The controversy will never be resolved, though the prevailing evidence now seems to favor Welles over Mankiewicz, but in the end it's of interest only to partisans and ideologues. 

(Original Story) 

The confusion over story and screenplay credits continued this year, with Here Comes Mr. Jordan winning in both categories. Segall, who had been a contract writer for MGM and and RKO, created the story of Here Comes Mr. Jordan first as a play called Heaven Can Wait, which is the title Warren Beatty used when he remade Here Comes Mr. Jordan in 1978. (To add to the confusion, there is an unrelated 1943 Ernst Lubitsch film also called Heaven Can Wait.) Except for the 1952 film Monkey Business, with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe, Segall's other screenwriting efforts are forgettable.

(Screenplay) 

Buchman and Miller's version of Segall's story is brisker but more sentimental than the 1978 version written by Warren Beatty and Elaine May, who kept the names of the characters but changed the central one, Joe Pendleton, from a boxer to a quarterback. In this version, Pendleton, played by Robert Montgomery, dies in a plane crash and is whisked off to heaven by a busybody angel (played by Edward Everett Horton) who then discovers that he harvested Pendleton's soul prematurely:  He was supposed to survive the crash. Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains) is the angel in charge of sorting things out, which involves returning Pendleton to Earth, but in the body of another man, a millionaire. Buchman was one of the star writers at Columbia, having been nominated previously for the screenplay of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In 1942 he became vice-president of production at Columbia, second only to Harry Cohn, but in 1951 he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He admitted that he had belonged to the Communist Party, but refused to name names of other party members, was found guilty of contempt of Congress and blacklisted. He moved to southern France, where in 1960 20th Century Fox put him in charge of the European division of the studio. Miller, who had been a screenwriter since 1927 and had previously been nominated for his work on The Criminal Code, signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. in 1934, and is otherwise best known for his work on the screenplay of The Adventures of Robin Hood.

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Story) 

Nightclub entertainer Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) hides out from the mob with a houseful of mostly elderly bachelor professors at work on an encyclopedia. The youngest of the lot, linguistics professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) wants to use her command of the vernacular as a source for his entry on slang, but of course falls in love with her and winds up saving her from her gangster boyfriend, played by Dana Andrews. The idea of Cooper as a professor strikes some as ludicrous, but he handles the role with great charm. Howard Hawks directed, and if it doesn't seem as lively as some of his other films, it's probably because he was under the obsessive eye of producer Sam Goldwyn. Wilder, who was under contract to Paramount, was hired for the film in a trade deal: Goldwyn got Wilder in exchange for allowing Cooper, one of Goldwyn's contract players, to appear in Paramount's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Wilder had written the story much earlier, while he was still in Germany, and called on Monroe to help him Americanize it. They sold it to MGM, but eventually it fell into Goldwyn's hands. Wilder and Charles Brackett reworked the story into a screenplay, playing on the likeness of the seven elderly professors to Walt Disney's seven dwarfs.  

Henry Travers, Oscar Homolka, Gary Cooper, Leonid Kinskey, Tully Marshall, S.Z. Sakall, Richard Haydn, and Aubrey Mather are awakened by Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire. 
(Screenplay) 

Humphrey Bogart and John Huston
It comes as a shock today to realize that not only did The Maltese Falcon receive only three nominations (picture, supporting actor, and screenplay) but that it won none of them. Huston started writing in the early 1930s, selling stories to H.L. Mencken's American Mercury and Esquire, among other publications, and when his father, Walter, decided to try acting in movies with the advent of talking pictures, John followed him to Hollywood. Although he worked on a number of scripts, he grew disillusioned with screenwriting and took off for the bohemian life in Europe. After a series of escapades, including one in which the car he was driving killed a pedestrian, he decided to settle down and returned to Hollywood in 1937, determined to become a director as well as a writer. His work earned him a contract with Warner Bros. and an Oscar nomination for Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. Eager to keep Huston under contract as a writer, Warners agreed to let him direct a property they already owned: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon had been filmed twice before, under the same title in 1931 with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels, and as Satan Met a Lady in 1936 with Warren William and Bette Davis. But it took Huston's screenplay and direction to bring out its wonderfully strange essence. It also helped that Huston cast all the right people, Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook Jr. among them.   
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Best Director, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
John Ford, How Green Was My Valley. 

 With this award, Ford became the first director to win two consecutive Oscars, a feat equaled only by Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve, and only the second (the first was Frank Capra) to have won three directing awards. At this point, the war interrupted Ford's Hollywood career. He went to work, with the commission of lieutenant commander in the navy, producing documentaries in support of the war effort, two of which, The Battle of Midway and December 7th, won Oscars. After the war, his work was dismissed by contemporary critics as evidence of a decline in talent, but it's now seen by many critics and film historians as his finest period, including such great Westerns as My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, and The Searchers, all of which, it now seems shocking to observe, received no Oscar nominations.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
Orson Welles, Citizen Kane. 

 Of course. Welles was the first person to receive simultaneous nominations as producer, actor, director, and writer. (The only other one is Warren Beatty, who did it twice, for Heaven Can Wait and Reds.)  Dubbed "the boy wonder" by the publicity machine, Welles came to Hollywood after a critically successful theatrical career and a famous stint on radio that included the War of the Worlds broadcast on Halloween 1938 that had much of the nation believing that Martians had landed in New Jersey. Still in his mid-twenties, he was given carte blanche by RKO, a major if troubled studio. But although Citizen Kane is one of the acknowledged cinematic masterpieces, Welles's career turned out to be a case of too much too soon. His battle with William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate on whose life Kane is clearly based, is the stuff of legends, many of which were spun by Welles. He claimed that the negative of his film would have been burned if he had not carried a rosary to a meeting with the chief Hollywood censor, Joseph I. Breen. At a key moment, Welles said, he let the rosary fall from his pocket, giving Breen the impression that Welles was really a nice Catholic boy. It's not quite clear from the anecdote why Breen would have had the power to destroy the negative in any case, but Hearst's desire to see the film destroyed or banned was very real. And Welles's taking on the publisher was seen by many in Hollywood as proof of his arrogance and untrustworthiness. Though his subsequent career is illuminated by flashes of brilliance, nothing ever came together again for him as superbly as Kane did.    

Welles, in a wheelchair because of a broken ankle, directs Dorothy Comingore in the opera scene from Citizen Kane

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Best Picture, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
How Green Was My Valley. In any other year this might have been an obvious and welcome choice, a classic example of Hollywood filmmaking, with remarkable sets created under the supervision of Richard Day, eloquent camerawork by Arthur Miller, and a screenplay by Philip Dunne that leaves no handkerchief unwrung. Director John Ford, who collected his third Oscar for the film, labors a bit under the strict supervision of producer Darryl F. Zanuck, but he still gets the most out of a strong cast, especially Donald Crisp, Sara Allgood, Maureen O'Hara, and the young Roddy McDowall. Even then, there are more memorable films from this year, including The Maltese Falcon, a career-maker for director John Huston and actors Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet, and Preston Sturges's sublime The Lady Eve. But all of the movies of 1941 stand in the shadow of one landmark.

... when it should have gone to ...
Citizen Kane
Well, obviously. Orson Welles's debut feature placed first in Sight & Sound's decennial poll of the greatest movies of all time in 1962, and held on to that standing for the next four polls. In 2012 it dropped to second place behind Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (a film that Welles disliked), but it remains something of a touchstone for movie buffs. Its innovations -- Gregg Toland's deep-focus camerawork, the often expressionistic camera angles, the crisply edited storytelling -- have been imitated so often by now that contemporary viewers sometimes wonder what all the fuss was about. It is perhaps the Hamlet of movies: It sometimes seems like a collection of quotations. Moreover, the film is surrounded by myths and legends: Welles's famously troubled subsequent career, Hollywood's unease at the way the film paralleled the career of the immensely powerful William Randolph Hearst, the box-office failure and the disappearance of the film until it was rediscovered by French critics and re-released in 1956. All of these serve as something of a distorted lens through which the film continues to be viewed. Still, it's a long way from being of more historical than artistic interest.

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