Showing posts with label Richard Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Day. Show all posts

Best Art Direction, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
This Above All. Art Direction: Richard Day, Joseph Wright; Interior Decoration: Thomas Little.

(Color)  
My Gal Sal. Art Direction: Richard Day, Joseph Wright; Interior Decoration: Thomas Little. 

Winning Oscars in the same year for both color and black-and-white films is something of a tour de force for the 20th Century-Fox design team. And the films were very different: This Above All is a romance set in wartime London with AWOL soldier Tyrone Power being converted to patriotism by WAAF Joan Fontaine. My Gal Sal is one of Fox's countless turn-of-the-century musicals, in which songwriter Paul Dresser (Victor Mature) falls in love with singer Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth). Naturally, he writes a song about her. In real life, Sal was a prostitute Dresser had known in his youth, but no one expects fidelity to the truth in a Fox musical biopic, even when it purports to be based on the memoirs of Dresser's brother, the novelist Theodore Dreiser. Hayworth, whose singing voice is dubbed by Nan Wynn, replaced a pregnant Alice Faye in the role. These were numbers four and five in Day's seven Oscars, and the second and third of Little's six. They were the only wins for Wright, who was nominated ten more times.  

Lobby card for My Gal Sal 
... when it should have gone to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
The Magnificent Ambersons. Art Direction: Albert S. D'Agostino; Interior Decoration: Darrell Silvera, Al Fields.

The fin de siècle sets for the Amberson mansion are among the most convincing period re-creations in an era when Hollywood had few scruples about verisimilitude. Orson Welles said that Anne Baxter's grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright, visited the set and was appalled by their gloomy clutter -- precisely what his own domestic architecture had aimed at ending. Welles had been disappointed by the snow scenes in Citizen Kane because you couldn't see the actors' breath, so he had the snow scenes in Ambersons staged in a Los Angeles icehouse, which had been used for Lost Horizon and would be used again by D'Agostino for The Thing From Another World in 1951. The Amberson mansion exterior would be reused too, in It's a Wonderful Life. D'Agostino, who took over as head of the RKO art department when Van Nest Polglase moved to Columbia, was nominated five times, but never won. Silvera had seven nominations and no wins, but Fields won for his work on Blood on the Sun. 

Sets in Welles's films usually had ceilings, providing a sense of confinement in this low-angle, deep-focus shot of Tim Holt in The Magnificent Ambersons.
Holt ascends a staircase in the Amberson mansion
Holt and Anne Baxter in the skating scene, filmed in a Los Angeles icehouse
Dolores Costello and Holt in the Ambersons' dining room

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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 Art Direction, 1936

Awards presented March 4, 1937

The nominees were ... 

And the Oscar went to ... 
Richard Day, Dodsworth. 
Richard Day
Day's Oscar was the only one Dodsworth received, which is a bit shocking -- not that Day didn't deserve it, because he did, but because the picture should have won more. He received twenty nominations and won seven times in a fifty-year career that stretched from work as a set decorator for the persnickety Erich von Stroheim in 1919 to the art direction of Tora! Tora! Tora! in 1970, two years before his death. Unlike the much-honored Cedric Gibbons at MGM, Day was not tied down to any one studio, so most of the work credited to him was in fact his own. He did much of his work for Samuel Goldwyn, a producer much obsessed with prestige.  


  Above: scenes from Dodsworth
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Best Art Direction, 1935

Awards presented March 5, 1936

The Academy was still indicating who placed second and third. Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark came in second and Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson were third.

The nominees were ... 
 ... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
This was the first of Day's seven Oscars. He began as a set decorator for Erich von Stroheim in 1918, and so impressed that persnickety director that he stayed on until Stroheim's career began to crater after the notorious quarrel with Irving Thalberg over Greed (1924). But then Day went to work for a persnickety producer, Samuel Goldwyn, supervising the production design of thirty-seven of Goldwyn's films. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Van Nest Polglase
The phrase "Big White Set" became applied to the many sound-stage extravaganzas, featuring masses of dancers on fanciful sets, characteristic of 1930s musicals, particularly the ones starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at RKO. Polglase was the head of RKO's design department, and his name went on all of the studio's productions, even though he didn't do the actual design work. That was typically left to the person whose name came second in the credits, in this case Clark. It was Clark who gave us fantastic boudoirs like the one from Top Hat shown below, with its round bed in a curtained alcove. And the stylized Venice beneath it. And the places where Fred and Ginger went to dance cheek to cheek. He was nominated for seven Oscars and never won, though he shared in a 1943 scientific and engineering award from the academy for "the design and construction of a moving cloud and horizon machine." But he also never lost his touch for the fanciful: His last nomination was for the stylized London seen in Mary Poppins.
Carroll Clark



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