If there were going to be separate awards for both color and black-and-white cinematography, the art directors argued, then there should be for art direction, too. And rightly so. If you've ever seen some of the attempts to "colorize" black-and-white films undertaken in the 1980s, you can tell how a production designer needs to keep different things in mind depending on whether the film is in color or not. I recall watching the colorized version of Casablanca and being startled by the paisley blouse Ingrid Bergman wears in one scene. It's completely suitable in black-and-white, but in the color version it looked as if Bergman was being eaten alive by giant paramecia. That's why, when the costumers finally got their Oscar a decade later, the division between black-and-white and color applied to them, too.
The nominees were ...
(Black-and-White)
- Lionel Banks, Robert Peterson, Arizona
- James Basevi, The Westerner
- Richard Day, Joseph C. Wright, Lillian Russell
- Hans Dreier, Robert Usher, Arise, My Love
- Cedric Gibbons, Paul Groesse, Pride and Prejudice
- Alexander Golitzen, Foreign Correspondent
- Anton Grot, The Sea Hawk
- John Victor Mackay, The Dark Command
- John Otterson, The Boys From Syracuse
- Van Nest Polglase, Mark-Lee Kirk, My Favorite Wife
- Lewis J. Rachmil, Our Town
- John DuCasse Schulze, My Son, My Son!
- Lyle Wheeler, Rebecca
(Color)
- Richard Day, Joseph C. Wright, Down Argentine Way
- Hans Dreier, Roland Anderson, North West Mounted Police
- Cedric Gibbons, John S. Detlie, Bitter Sweet
- Vincent Korda, The Thief of Bagdad
And the Oscar went to ...
(Black-and-White)
Janeites have always been appalled by the costuming (Adrian's) and decor (Edwin B. Willis is the credited set decorator) of this version of Pride and Prejudice. It has been moved up in time so that the women can be dressed in Victorian hoops and crinolines instead of Regency styles. The result, as Pauline Kael observed, is "more Dickens than Austen." But at least that's translating one kind of greatness into another. This was the first of three Oscars for Groesse, who also won for The Yearling and Little Women and was nominated eight more times.
(Color)
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| Vincent Korda |
The youngest of the three Hungarian Korda brothers who took the British film industry by storm in the 1930s, Vincent came to Britain with Alexander and Zoltan after studying at the Budapest Academy of Art. In addition to his Oscar-winning work on The Thief of Bagdad, he received nominations for That Hamilton Woman, the 1942 Jungle Book, and The Longest Day. His work on creating the haunted atmosphere of postwar Vienna for The Third Man, however, went curiously unnominated. The extent of his design work on The Thief of Bagdad is no doubt considerable, but some of the credit also should be shared with others including William Cameron Menzies and the matte artist Peter Ellenshaw. Together, they made the film one of the greatest of motion picture fantasies.
... when it should have gone to ...
(Black-and-White)
This would have been two in a row for Wheeler, after his win for Gone With the Wind, but for some reason he was passed over in favor of the rather twee designs of the MGM Pride and Prejudice. Certainly a great deal of the credit for the success of Rebecca should go to Wheeler's designs for Manderley, the DeWinter estate haunted by Rebecca and her sinister acolyte Mrs. Danvers.
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