Oscar Profile #413: Nicholas Musuraca

Born October 25, 1892 in Riace, Calabria, Italy, Nicola (later Nicholas) Musuraca emigrated to the U.S. with his father in 1907 when he was 14. They settled in Brooklyn where his father’s brother was already living.

Musuraca began his show business career as a chauffer for silent film director and producer J. Stuart Blackton. He became a projectionist, editor and assistant director with the Vitagraph Company of America in Brooklyn. He went to California with Blackton in the early 1920s and joined the Robertson-Cole Compnay at their studio in 1921. He stayed with the company when it evolved into Film Booking Offices of America in 1922 and RKO Pictures in 1928, becoming one its top cinematographers in the 1930s.

Musuraca’s first film as cinematographer was 1923’s The Virgin Queen, directed by Blackton, after which he made many other silent films. Among his 1930s films were Chance at Heaven, Murder on a Honeymoon and Saturday’s Heroes. Along with Gregg Tolans’s work on 1941’s Citizen Kane, Musuraca’s lighting of 1940’s Stranger on the Third Floor is credited with defining the visual conventions for film noir and codifying the RKO look for the 1940s. In 1941, he photographed the added scenes for The Magnificent Ambersons after Orson Welles and Stanley Cortez had left the project.

Musuraca worked with Val Lewton’s legendary horror unit at RKO where he photographed the groundbreaking Cat People as well as The Seventh Victim, The Ghost Ship, The Curse of the Cat People and Bedlam when he wasn’t working on such equally celebrated RKO films as The Fallen Sparrow, Bride by Mistake, Back to Bataan, The Spiral Staircase, The Locket, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, Out of the Past, I Remember Mama (for which he earned his only Oscar nomination), Blood on the Moon, Where Danger Lives, Born to Be Bad, Clash by Night, The Hitch-Hiker and Susan Slept Here.

When RKO folded, Musuraca worked briefly for Warner Bros. on such films as The Blue Gardenia, The Story of Mankind and Too Much Too Soon while continuing to work on the RKO lot from 1955 when it was bought out by Desilu Productions.

Among the TV shows Musuraca worked on were Maverick, December Bride, The Line-Up, The Lucy Show, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, The Jack Benny Program, McHale’s Navy and F Troop.

Nicholas Musuraca retired in 1966 and died in1975 at the age of 82.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

CAT PEOPLE (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur

Working in tandem with producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, Musuraca’s shadowy cinematography set the standard for psychological horror films, proving once and for all that what we don’t see is scarier than what we do see. This was the first of the nine horror films Lewton made at RKO between 1942 and 1946. Musuraca was director of photography on five of them including The Seventh Victim, The Ghost Ship, The Curse of the Cat People and the last one, Bedlam, all while making other films for RKO.

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1946), directed by Robert Siodmak

The claustrophobic feel of 1943’s The Fallen Sparrow, a lesser known film noir starring John Garfield and Maureen O’Hara set the stage for Musuraca’s work on Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase. Adapted from a novel by the original author of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, claustrophobia is all around the musty old house inhabited by Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, Ethel Barrymore, Rhonda Fleming, Gordon Oliver, Elsa Lanchester, Sara Allgood and Rhys Williams as a serial killer stalks mute McGuire as Barrymore’s paid companion.

OUT OF THE PAST (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur

Even in the bright sunlight of Jacques Tourneur’s California set Out of the Past, Musuraca managed to produce a host of memorable shadowy sequences. Featuring Robert Mitchum in one of his greatest performances as the retired private detective drawn back into the game in a complicated web of deceit, the film boasts memorable turns by Jane Greer as a femme fatale as well as Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Virginia Huston and former child actor Dickie Moore in his best grownup performance as the kid who helps Mitchum with his gas station and other things.

I REMEMBER MAMA (1948), directed by George Stevens

Infused with Musuraca’s trademark shadowy visuals, this beloved family drama was adapted from a stage play starring Mady Christians and was succeeded by the long-running pioneer TV series, Mama staring Peggy Wood. Liv Ullmann would later star in Richard Rodgers’ 1980 Broadway musical which ran for 100 performances. The version that everyone remembers best is, of course, this one starring Irene Dunne as the Norwegian mother, a role turned down by Greta Garbo who refused to come out of retirement to play a mother. It accounted for Musuraca’s only Oscar nomination.

THE STORY OF MANKIND (1957), directed by Irwin Allen

This notorious flop proved to be the final film of both top-billed stars, 66-year-old Ronald Colman as the Spirit of Man and 42-year-old Hedy Lamarr as 18-year-old Joan of Arc. Other players who have done better work include Vincent Price as The Devil, Groucho Marx as Peter Minuit, Harpo Marx as Isaac Newton, Virginia Mayo as Cleopatra, Helmut Dantine as Marc Antony, Agnes Moorehead as Elizabeth I, Peter Lorre as Nero, Marie Wilson as Marie Antoinette, Dennis Hopper as Napoleon and Marie Windsor as Josephine. Although Musuraca was the film’s only cinematographer, lots of stock footage was used in addition to his.