Showing posts with label Leon Shamroy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leon Shamroy. Show all posts

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

No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

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

 
No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Best Cinematography, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 

The Academy was smitten with Mrs. Miniver, and although Ruttenberg's cinematography for it strikes no one today as exceptionally innovative, the Oscar took its place among what would eventually be four, all of them won during his long tenure at MGM. 

(Color) 

Leon Shamroy
 A fairly routine swashbuckler from a novel by Rafael Sabatini, who was kind of a master in the genre. Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara star -- O'Hara in particular was a favorite of color cinematographers because of her bright red hair. This was the first of Shamroy's four wins -- a record tied only by his fellow 1942 cinematography winner, Joseph Ruttenberg. He also has the tie for most nominations -- eighteen -- with Charles B. Lang. A graduate of Columbia in mechanical engineering, Shamroy came west in 1920 and became a technician in the laboratory at Fox. He began experimenting with making movies, and in 1932 signed with Paramount. He moved to 20th Century-Fox in 1938 and spent the remainder of his career there, pioneering the studio's use of color and later its development of the wide-screen process Cinemascope.
Maureen O'Hara and Tyrone Power in The Black Swan 
... when it should have gone to ... 
(Black-and-White) 

Orson Welles and Stanley Cortez
Stanley Cortez was called Stanislaus Krantz when he was born in New York City, but in Hollywood he changed his name after his actor brother, Jacob Krantz, became a "Latin lover" movie star as Ricardo Cortez. He began as a set designer for still photographers including Edward Steichen, worked as a newsreel cameraman, and served as an assistant to such eminent cinematographers as Karl Struss, Charles Rosher, Lee Garmes, and Arthur Miller before becoming a director of photography on B-pictures at Universal. Ambersons was, in fact, his first major assignment, and he found himself following in the footsteps of Citizen Kane's cinematographer, Gregg Toland. Cortez proved equal to the task, helped along by Orson Welles's newly acquired expertise, especially in Toland's specialty, deep focus. He shared his second Oscar nomination with his mentor Lee Garmes, for Since You Went Away. They were hired after producer David O. Selznick fired the original cinematographer, George Barnes, for not photographing Claudette Colbert to his satisfaction. But Cortez's greatest work as a cinematographer, apart from The Magnificent Ambersons, is probably on The Night of the Hunter, another of those great movies inexplicably ignored by the Academy.  

Cortez's use of light and shadow is essential to the look of The Magnificent Ambersons

No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)