Showing posts with label How Green Was My Valley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label How Green Was My Valley. Show all posts

Best Art Direction, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

 A new refinement on the award designated both an art director and a set decorator (at first called "interior decoration"), though the two have always been tandem nominations, i.e., both for the same film. Studios were allowed to submit one nomination for a black-and-white film and one for a color film; for some reason, Republic withdrew its nomination of a Judy Canova comedy called Sis Hopkins before the voting took place.

The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
 And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
How Green Was My Valley, art direction, Richard Day, Nathan Juran; interior decoration, Thomas Little. 

Nathan Juran
To film the Welsh mining town of the Richard Llewellyn novel on which the movie was based, Day's design crew built one, or at least parts of it, in Malibu Creek State Park in California. This was the third of Day's seven Oscars and the first of Little's six. Both of them headed their respective departments, art direction and set decoration, at 20th Century-Fox. It was the only win for Juran, whose career was interrupted by service in World War II. He worked again with Day and Little, earning another nomination for The Razor's Edge, but in 1952 he moved from art direction to just plain directing, mostly of low-budget Westerns and sci-fi, including Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (which he directed under the pseudonym "Nathan Hertz"). In the 1960s he moved into television, directing episodes of "Lost in Space" and "Land of the Giants," among other series. 

Filming a scene for How Green Was My Valley on the set of the Welsh town built in a California state park


Maureen O'Hara in How Green Was My Valley
(Color) 
Blossoms in the Dust, art direction, Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary; interior decoration, Edwin B. Willis.

Greer Garson plays Edna Gladney, founder of an orphanage in Fort Worth, Texas, who has to battle snobs and prudes in her efforts to find homes for children born out of wedlock. It's a rather icky biopic, but it gets a high-gloss Technicolor treatment from MGM. As usual, Gibbons shares credit for what was mostly the work of McCleary, the associate art director. This was his first win out of his nominations, and he would win again for Patton thirty years later. It was the first of eight wins for Willis, the head of the set decorating department at MGM.
Greer Garson as Edna Gladney in Blossoms in the Dust

Gladney finds suitable parents for an orphan ... 

... but also has to put up with disapproving women.
 
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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 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 Supporting Actor, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

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

Crisp was born in Scotland and came to the United States in 1906. He began his acting career on stage, but moved into film work in 1908, as both actor and director. One of his most memorable early performances was as Lillian Gish's abusive father in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, and he played Gen. Ulysses Grant in Griffth's The Birth of a Nation. He continued to direct until 1930, when he became one of the most durable character players in Hollywood, making his last appearance in 1963 in Spencer's Mountain. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

What a great age for character actors this was. Ball of Fire was full of them: Sakall, Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers, Tully Marshall, Leonid Kinskey, Richard Haydn, Aubrey Mather. So was The Lady Eve: Demarest, Coburn, Eugene Pallette, Eric Blore, Melville Cooper. And even in The Maltese Falcon, Greenstreet had to shine in the company of Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr. The film provided a definitive role for Greenstreet, who as Mary Astor noted, never "did a picture later in which that evil, hiccupy laugh wasn't exploited." It was his first film, too. He had been on stage since 1902 in England and then in America, but refused to make movies until he was sixty-two years old. His great scene in The Maltese Falcon comes at the end, when his smug, sinister façade crumbles at his discovery that the falcon is a fake. The teaming of Greenstreet and Lorre was so irresistible that they made eight more films together.
Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon
 

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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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