Oscars 1940: Black and White and Color

The newspapers weren’t happy about the latest development at the Oscar ceremony—the sealed envelope. It meant, of course, no advance word on who the winners were, resulting in missed deadlines for the dailies and more hours of competition-free reporting for radio. It was also the first year that the category of Interior Decoration was split in two, one set of nominees for black-and-white films and another for movies shot in color. Cedric Gibbons and Paul Groesse took the black-and-white prize for Pride and Prejudice; Vincent Korda won the statuette for his work on Alexander Korda’s vibrant The Thief of Bagdad. “The particular glory of this film is its truly magnificent color,” wrote New York Times critic Bosley Crowther about the British fantasy adventure. “No motion picture to date has been so richly and eloquently hued, nor has any picture yet been so perfectly suited to it.”

BEST PICTURE
Rebecca

BEST DIRECTOR
John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath

BEST ACTOR
James Stewart, The Philadelphia Story

BEST ACTRESS
Ginger Rogers, Kitty Foyle

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Walter Brennan, The Westerner

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jane Darwell, The Grapes of Wrath

Oscars 1938: One Performance, Three Oscars

Spencer Tracy’s performance as Father Flanagan—the priest who founded a home for orphaned boys in Nebraska—became, through a series of errors, a windfall where Oscar statuettes were concerned. In the day or two following the ceremony, an Oscar arrived at the Tracy home with the name “Dick Tracy” inscribed on it. Sent back for the proper inscription, the award was then, without Tracy’s knowledge, promised by an MGM publicist to be dedicated to Father Flanagan and donated to Boys Town. Tracy agreed only if the Academy would give him a duplicate to keep. The Academy acquiesced and everybody won.

BEST PICTURE
You Can’t Take It with You

BEST DIRECTOR
Frank Capra, You Can’t Take It with You

BEST ACTOR
Spencer Tracy, Boys Town

BEST ACTRESS
Bette Davis, Jezebel

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Walter Brennan, Kentucky

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Fay Bainter, Jezebel

Oscars 1936: Acting Firsts

Oscars for supporting performances were a new thing at the eighth annual Academy Awards ceremony—an attempt by Academy President Frank Capra to appease actors in general and the Screen Actors Guild in particular. The first Best Supporting Actress Oscar went to Gale Sondergaard for Anthony Adverse, her screen debut. The inaugural Best Supporting Actor trophy went to character actor Walter Brennan who, over the course of the next four years, made collecting Oscars a habit—after Come and Get It, he won again for Kentucky (1938) and The Westerner (1940).

BEST PICTURE
The Great Ziegfeld

BEST DIRECTOR
Frank Capra, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

BEST ACTOR
Paul Muni, The Story of Louis Pasteur

BEST ACTRESS
Luise Rainer, The Great Ziegfeld

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Walter Brennan, Come and Get It

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Gale Sondergaard, Anthony Adverse

Howard Hawks on Red River (1948)

In Red River, I wanted [John] Wayne to get his finger caught between the rope and the saddle horn and come in with it all mangled. Then Walter Brennan would look at it and say, “That finger isn’t going to be much good to you.” Wayne says, “No, it isn’t.” Brennan would say, “Get a jug and build the fire up good and get me a chopping block.” They’d start feeding him some liquor, and Brennan would say, “I guess he’s ready,” and he puts Wayne’s finger on the block and Brennan sharpens up the knife and cuts it off. Wayne wasn’t even supposed to know that it was cut off. But then his line was, “Where’s my finger? A man ought to be buried whole.” The scene ended with a bunch of fellows looking through the ashes for the finger. Wayne said to me, “You think that’s funny?” “Yeah,” I said, “but we don’t have to do it.” He said, “I don’t think it’s funny.” I said, “Okay, I’ll do it with some actor who’s better than you are.” And I did it with Kirk Douglas in The Big Sky, who isn’t nearly as good as Wayne. I think it’s the only time they laughed at Douglas. Wayne saw it and came around and said, “Well, I was wrong again. If you tell me a funeral is funny, I’ll do it.

When I hired [Montgomery] Clift he’d never made a picture before, and we took a look at him and Wayne said, “”Couldn’t you have gotten somebody who could stand up to me a little bit?” I said, “I think he can stand up to you pretty well.” We made the very first scene and he came over to me and said, “That kid is going to be good.” He said, “He looks like he’s just figuring that he can take me apart at any time and isn’t worried about it. One thing though—we can’t have a fight. It would be silly.” “Well,” I said, “you’re a lot bigger and it would be silly, but it wouldn’t be silly if you tripped and he kicked you in the face first.” “Okay, let him kick me in the face.” And we did it that way and it made a perfectly good fight. We had an awful time because Monty Clift couldn’t throw a punch. It took us three days.

[Clift] had something you rarely see today—he really wanted to work. He went out for two weeks with a box lunch and a cowboy and they didn’t come back all day. At the end of those two weeks he could ride a horse, he could handle a gun and he could even make a special little mount to get into the saddle. He worked like the devil.

September 21

Walter Brennan dies of emphasyma in Oxnard, California, 1974. The character actor was Academy Award-nominated four times for Best Supporting Actor. He won three times, all within a five-year span: for Come and Get It (1936), Kentucky (1938) and The Westerner (1940). Though Jason Robards and Shelley Winters came close, no other actor has won as many supporting performance Oscars.