Showing posts with label Wiard Ihnen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wiard Ihnen. Show all posts

Best Art Direction, 1945

Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ... 
(Black-and-White)
(Color) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Black-and-White) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
Blood on the Sun. Art Direction: Wiard Ihnen; Interior Decoration: A. Roland Fields. 

James Cagney plays a newspaper editor and Sylvia Sidney a Eurasian counterintelligence agent in pre-World War II Japan. Thick with propaganda, the movie still manages to be fairly entertaining today. Ihnen picked up his second Oscar in a row for the film, which was produced by Cagney and his brother William for their independent production company. This was the only Oscar win for Fields, who was nominated for his work on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and should have won for both. 

(Color) 
Frenchman's Creek. Art Direction: Hans Dreier, Ernst Fegte; Interior Decoration: Sam Comer. 

Beautiful but empty-headed Restoration bodice-ripper in which Joan Fontaine enters into a loveless marriage to Ralph Forbes to escape the designs of his rakish friend Basil Rathbone. She escapes to her family home in Cornwall, where she meets handsome pirate Arturo de Cordova. This was the first Oscar win for Dreier, the head of the Paramount art department. He had been nominated eighteen times previously, and would be nominated three more times and win twice. This was the only win out of four nominations for Fegte. This was the first of four wins for Comer, Paramount's head set decorator. He was nominated twenty-six times. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
The Lost Weekend. Art Direction: Hans Dreier, Earl Hedrick; Interior Decoration: Bertram Granger. 

Hans Dreier
Dreier got his Oscar this year for an opulent romantic drama, but he should have got it for leading his team of designers and decorators in creating one of the starkest and grittiest of Oscar-winning films. Among other things, the designers rebuilt the interior of the New York bar P.J. Clarke's on a soundstage, and the tale is often told that Robert Benchley, homesick for New York, would stop in on the set every afternoon at five, when actor Howard Da Silva, playing the bartender, would pour Benchley a shot. Neither Hedrick nor Granger ever won an Oscar, but this would have been an excellent opportunity for a win, if the Academy had seen fit to nominate them.

Howard Da Silva and Ray Milland in the soundstage P.J. Clarke's
Da Silva behind the bar
Location filming in New York still necessitated set dressing
Milland's Don Birnam has trashed his apartment in search of a bottle he has hidden away
One of Birnam's secret bottles
(Color) 
Leave Her to Heaven. Art Direction: Lyle Wheeler, Maurice Ransford; Interior Decoration: Thomas Little.

In commenting on the art direction of Leave Her to Heaven, I have only to refer to my comments on Leon Shamroy's Oscar for the film: This is a stunning and essential example of what can happen when cinematographers and designers work together. Any objection that the movie would have been better in black-and-white vanishes when you look closely at the work Wheeler, Ransford, and Little put into achieving a cohesive palette, rich yet muted, relying on purples and grays. Having seen what an intelligent use of color can do in Leave Her to Heaven makes me amazed that the Academy should have preferred the candy-box colors of  Frenchman's Creek. Wheeler and Little, as heads of their departments, raked in Oscars and nominations; Ransford was nominated three times but never won. 

Gene Tierney dozes, the redness of her lipstick providing the only jolt of primary color 
The white gown is ironic, the chess game prophetic
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Tierney and Cornel Wilde encounter in a luxurious train car
Predator and prey? Note the Production Code-mandated twin beds. 
Wilde on studio rocks before a painted drop. Noticeable in a still, less so in a theater.
Early American decor, maybe a bit too Laura Ashley, but the quilted dressing gown with its military frogs is a nice touch.
Vincent Price questions Wilde on the witness stand. Note the simplicity of the courtroom, with the circular window suggesting either a halo or the eye of God. 
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Best Art Direction, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
(Black-and-White) 
(Color) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Color) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Black-and-White) 
Gaslight. Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, William Ferrari; Interior Decoration: Edwin B. Willis, Paul Huldschinsky. 

Ingrid Bergman, being gaslighted in Gaslight
A suave psychopath (Charles Boyer) tries to persuade his young wife (Ingrid Bergman) that she's going mad in this remake of a superior British film, released in 1940, which MGM tried to suppress when it released this version. The gloomy Victorian sets add much to the atmosphere of menace. Gibbons and Willis, as heads  of their respective departments, were routinely and frequently nominated, and much of the credit for the look of the film probably belongs to Ferrari and Huldschinsky. This was the sole Oscar for Ferrari, who would later be nominated for How the West Was Won. It was also the only Oscar for Huldschinsky, whose career at MGM was brief -- he died in 1947. It's interesting to compare his work on Gaslight to his work on Meet Me in St. Louis, released the same year. Both have Victorian/Edwardian settings, but where the ones in Gaslight are sinister and creepy, the ones in Meet Me in St. Louis radiate coziness and warmth.  

(Color)
Wilson. Art Direction: Wiard Ihnen; Interior Decoration: Thomas Little. 

This was the first of two consecutive Oscars for Ihnen, who had begun his career as an art director in 1919 at Famous Players-Lasky, the forerunner of Paramount. He was married to costume designer Edith Head. It was the fifth Oscar win for Little, who had won in four consecutive years. He would skip a year, and then win one more time. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Color) 

The art direction Oscar was still very much under the control of the studios for the 1944 awards, which meant that each studio could and did supply the nominees. Sometimes this got a bit absurd: Universal's nomination for color art direction was The Climax, which was not only something of a rip-off of the story line of The Phantom of the Opera -- a madman has a young soprano (played in both films by Susanna Foster) under his spell -- but also used the same sets that were used for that film, and which had won the 1943 art direction Oscar. But how to explain MGM's choice of nominee: Kismet, a kitschy treatment of an old warhorse of a play that seems more suitable for Universal's Jon Hall-Maria Montez series than for a glossy MGM treatment with Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich? The answer may be that the Kismet sets look an awful lot like a previous art direction winner, The Thief of Bagdad. But were they really better than the sumptuous sets for the Smith family home in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis? No. It may also be that MGM (meaning art department head Cedric Gibbons) thought that nominating one movie with Victorian sets, Gaslight, was enough. As far as set decorator Paul Huldschinsky was concerned, it was: He won an Oscar -- his only one, and his only nomination -- for Gaslight. This was one of the first films on which designer Jack Martin Smith worked at MGM. He would go on to design sets for other musicals produced by the Freed unit, and would win three Oscars. 

The Smith home, winter
The Smith home, summer. The "St. Louis" house stood on the MGM lot until the late 1960s, when the studio's property, sets, costumes, everything, was sold. 
Above, Minnelli shows Judy Garland how to snuff the gaslight chandelier. Below, Tom Drake does the task in the film.

Mary Astor and Margaret O'Brien in Tootie's bedroom
Garland descends the stairs

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