American Cinematographer - November 1998 - 74

Great

Relationships
Walker collaboration,
time-worn

Lady For a Day
focused on the
face of May Robson,

whose fine

performance

(1933), the

camera

Annie" earned her

"Apple
Academy

as

an

Award nomination.
The

surprise hit of 1934 was It
Happened One Night, a romantic
comedy starring Clark Gable and
Claudette

Colbert.

Little

was

expected of the picture, much of

action in

a

a

with

room

Claude Rains and Edward Arnold).

loan-out
latter

magic touches supplied by Capra
and Walker turned it into
influence

a

classic. Its

future movies

on

can

hardly be overstated. Broadway Bill
(1934), with Warner Baxter and

Arthur and
bank

a

runners

Gary Cooper, Jean
bigger mob than the

of American Madness.

This sequence was a test for Walker,
who carried it off with seeming ease.
An

even

bigger challenge

was next:

Lost Horizon

(1937), a great audience
favorite in which utopian fantasy and

spectacle were added to all the other
elements
of
the
"Capracorn"
melange. An uprising in China, an
airplane crash in the Himalayas, and
a stay in the lost paradise of ShangriLa, where life expectancy is more
than doubled, gave patrons a memo¬
rable vacation from the Depression.
A

fine

headed

by Ronald
Colman, performing in magnificent
settings (built at the Columbia
Ranch in Burbank) photographed
with just the right combination of
the fantastic and reality, made it all
convincing.
A frantic yarn pitting a screw¬
ball household against industrial
giants put Jean Arthur, James Stew¬
art,

cast

Lionel Barrymore and Edward

Arnold into the
corn

You

epitome of Capra¬

idealism, You Cant Take It With
(1938). It was, Walker said, "a

nightmare to photograph," with four

"The Master of

as

after

helming

tension-filled melodramas
Man Who Knew Too

to

other studios. One of the

for the short-lived

Liberty
independent production
company set up at RKO Radio by
Capra, William Wyler, George
Stevens and Sam Briskin. The picture
was It's a Wonderful Life (1946),
produced and directed by Capra. In
this holiday tale, an angel saves James
was

Films,

an

Stewart from suicide and lets him

relive his life

that he has a lot
to be thankful for. Combining the
supernatural with small-town family
drama and a great deal of film noir
style, the picture was regarded as a
However, it

emerged as a
legendary film that is still a favorite
Christmas booking on TV.
success.

It

was

also the last of the 20

pictures Capra and Walker made
together.
- G. T.

Steps and The Secret Agent. With

brought Hitchcock to the U.S., where
his first American film, Rebecca, won
the Academy Award as Best Picture

ing

be associated with Hitchcock for

national Pictures when Hitchcock
arrived

title artist, art director and
director

became

in

Britain, he

director, gaining wide¬
spread recognition in 1926 with his
fifth film, The Lodger, a Tale of the
a

there

in

1927.

Cox

photographed Hitchcock's last five
silent films, ending with Blackmail in
1929. (This was followed by a
synchronized version of Blackmail,
which is regarded as England's first
sound-on-film talkie). A dozen addi¬
tional Hitchcock/Cox collaborations
followed. In

England, Hitchcock also

worked with such

cameramen

as

Baron

Vintigmilia, Curt Courant,
Bernard Knowles, Harry Stradling,
ASC and Glen MacWilliams, ASC.

Hitchcock's
in America

cinematographers

all from the top
rank, beginning with George Barnes,
ASC, who shot Rebecca (1940) and
were

Spellbound (1945). Harry Stradling
(Sr.), ASC, Joseph Valentine, ASC,
Glen

MacWilliams, ASC, Lee
Garmes, ASC and Ted Tetzlaff, ASC
each worked with the master director
than

once. After
returning to
England for two pictures respctively
shot by BSC fellows Jack Cardiff and
Wilkie Cooper, Hitchcock returned
more

on a

as a

a

long period of time was Jack Cox,
who was employed by British Inter¬

to

assistant

the

-

Robert Burks, ASC
Director Alfred Hitchcock was

over

made in America.
He wanted
and got - the finest
cinematographers available.
The first cinematographer to

and Alfred Hitchcock
born in London in 1899. After work¬

The

much fanfare, David O. Selznick

to prove

curio which had little chance of

such
as

Much, The 39

of 1939. Most of his movies

1936 in Mr. Deeds Comes to Town,

bus, but the

Suspense,"

next 36 years were

which featured

a

By the mid- 1930s he was

the establishment for the

Myrna Loy, a racetrack yarn, was also
popular and widely imitated.
Capra's special blend of social
satire and humanist philosophy,
which he called "Capracorn," jelled in

on

London Fog.

world-famous

Mr. Common Man

again defeated
good of the
U.S.A. The long sequence in which
Stewart stages a 'round-the-clock fili¬
buster to stall passage of a crooked
bill is photographed so imaginatively
by eight cameras that it manages to
make
legislative tactics seem
anything but dull.
Capra soon left Columbia, but
Walker stayed on until 1952, making
33 more pictures there plus five on

which occurred

72 November 1998

lot of frantic
only one
removable wall. This highly regarded
picture was followed by the even
more popular - and difficult - Mr
Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
which pitted Stewart and Arthur
against a pack of powerful political
nabobs (including portrayals by
covering

cameras

the U.S. in 1950

Train,

flesh yarn,
met

a

to

make

Strangers

black-and-white goose-

for Warner Bros. He soon
photography

the director of

assigned to the picture: Robert
Burks, ASC.
Burks
40 years

was a

youthful-looking

old, and had been a cine¬
matographer in Warners' special
American Cinematographer - November 1998

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