Showing posts with label Yankee Doodle Dandy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yankee Doodle Dandy. Show all posts

Best Music, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

 The Academy had ironed out most of the wrinkles in its new category names, reassuring people that scores for comedies were as welcome to be nominated as those from dramas. There still remained some problems with allowing each studio or production company to submit a nominee. Universal nominated a song called "Pig Foot Pete," which it said was in Hellzapoppin', the film version of a Broadway revue that starred Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson, and Martha Raye. The trouble was, the song wasn't in the film. It had actually been sung by Raye in Universal's 1941 release Keep 'Em Flying, an Abbott and Costello movie, and hence was ineligible for the Oscar. The Academy admits that it has no idea how this mistake happened.

The nominees were ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 

(Song) 
... when they should have been ...  
(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) 
Max Steiner

Between his first Oscar, for The Informer, and this one, Steiner had also composed the score for Gone With the Wind. The next year he would write the music for GWTW's chief rival for the Great Hollywood Romantic Movie, Casablanca. Interestingly, he won the Oscar for neither of them. But the unstintingly romantic score for Now, Voyager is one of his best.   



(Scoring of a Musical Picture) 
Ray Heindorf, Heinz Roemheld, Yankee Doodle Dandy. 
Ray Heindorf
Heinz Roemheld
Heindorf was signed to a contract at Warner Bros. in 1932 and remained there for his entire career as a film composer, becoming head of the music department at the death of Leo Forbstein in 1948. This was the first of his three Oscars out of a total of eighteen nominations. This was Roemheld's second nomination and his only Oscar. A child prodigy on the piano, Roemheld was born in Wisconsin, but studied in Berlin. A prolific composer, his music has been used in more than 400 films.


(Song) 
"White Christmas," from Holiday Inn. Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.       
Irving Berlin
Virtually overnight, "White Christmas" became one of the most popular songs of all time. Berlin had written the song in the 1930s and set it aside, but it was a perfect fit for Holiday Inn, when Berlin himself came up with the idea for a musical set in a hotel that opens only on holidays. He was also nominated for original story for this idea. The instant popularity of the song owed much to the film's release during the first year of the United States's involvement in World War II, when it captured the mood of homesick soldiers and the families that missed them. This was Berlin's only Oscar, even though he composed dozens of great songs for the movies, notably for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals of the 1930s, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, and Carefree. A Berlin song, "Blue Skies," was one of the first ever sung on the screen, in 1927's The Jazz Singer. His last work for the movies came thirty years later, the title song for Sayonara, which had once been proposed as a Broadway musical for Berlin.     
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Best Sound, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 

And the Oscar went to ... 
Yankee Doodle Dandy, Warner Bros. Studio Sound Department, Nathan Levinson, Sound Director. 

Levinson, left, with the Oscar presented him by Y. Frank Freeman


This was the only competitive Oscar win for Levinson, who was a pioneer in the Warner Bros. efforts to bring sound to motion pictures. He was nominated seventeen times for sound and seven times for special effects. He also received an honorary award at the 1940 Oscar ceremony and two technical achievement awards, 
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Best Actor, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

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


George M. Cohan himself had proposed the idea of a film about his life, starting with his years performing with his family in vaudeville and following his rise to become a major songwriter, playwright, and performer. He took the idea to Sam Goldwyn, who talked to Fred Astaire about playing Cohan. Astaire, whose style as a performer was worlds away from Cohan's, quite sensibly turned it down, so Cohan went to Warner Bros., pitching it as a movie for Cagney.  Like most Hollywood biopics, Yankee Doodle Dandy sentimentalizes and sanitizes its subject, glossing over, for example, Cohan's acrimonious battle with Actors Equity, which as a rich and powerful producer he tried to block in its struggle to become a Broadway bargaining agent. But thanks to Cagney, who sings, dances, and acts superbly, it's one of the great Hollywood musicals, with marvelous re-creations of Cohan's routines. As a boy he had seen Cohan on stage, and he shared Cohan's Irish roots, modeling his own style as a dancer on Cohan's stiff-legged strut. Cagney called it his favorite film, as well he might, for he dominates it as few performers have ever dominated a movie. He's on screen virtually throughout, blazing with energy. 
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