Sol Polito

Sol Polito, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer who helped create the distinct visual character of Warner Bros. films in the 1930s and 1940s, was born Salvador Polito on November 12, 1892, in Palermo, Sicily. While still young he emigrated to the US with his family, which settled in New York City, where he attended public school. He started out as a still photographer, then became a laboratory assistant before becoming an assistant to a movie camera crew.

Polito received his formal training in the craft of cinematography during a three-year apprenticeship on a camera crew before graduating to head cameraman, shooting Rip Van Winkle (1914) in 1914. He worked for a variety of movie companies through the early silent era, including Metro, Triangle, Universal and World.

Polito thrived in the studio system that emerged with the vertical integration of the studios in the 1920s. He established himself as a first-rate craftsman who strove to create the finest images by following industry guidelines even as he perfected their application. Warner Bros. , under studio boss Jack L. Warner, demanded efficiency from its technicians and would not allow extra shooting to achieve an effect unless the additional expense could be justified by its propensity to make the finished film a success at the box office. Polito became co-chief cinematographer, along with fellow Italian immigrant Tony Gaudio, at Warners. He worked in a wide variety of genres, and he and Gaudio created what became known as "the Warners look"--a hard, unglamorous image, unsoftened by flattering lighting effects. Influenced by German Expressionism, the Warners "look" crafted by Polito and Gaudio was rooted in chiaroscuro contrasts between light and darkness that also were a metaphor for the world the characters lived in.

By the time he shot 13 program Westerns starring Harry Carey from 1925 to 1928, he already showed his mastery of black and white, creating crisp images.

Polito joined First National Studios in 1927, which was merged with Warner Bros. the following year.

When Warners moved to a lusher aesthetic in the 1930s, Polito readily adapted. As one of the studio's chief cinematographers, he often shot Warners' most important pictures. He frequently worked with director Michael Curtiz on the A-list pictures starring Errol Flynn, working in both black-and-white and the difficult Technicolor three-strip dye transfer process.

Polito's cinematography for Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is extremely expressive and adds to the somber tone created by the director.

His color cinematography on the blockbuster The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is still hailed as one of the greatest examples of Technicolor shooting. For the studio's #1 star, Bette Davis, he created a more glamorous look.

The Warners look in cinematography anticipated the "film noir" style that emerged in the late 1940s, when filmmakers and audiences, in response to the documentaries of World War II and Italian neo-realist cinema, sought to inject realism into American cinema (Polito was not really involved in postwar film noir, though he shot Anatole Litvak's classic noir Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), giving it a hazy look with an undefined framing that serves as a metaphor for the moral ambivalence and sense of anomie that is at the heart of the film).

Eschewing the hard contrast between white and black that was part of Warners' famous "look", he created classic romantic fantasies, such as Now, Voyager (1942), which featured soft focus close-ups of Davis. As a cinematographer he was flexible and willing to modify his effects to fit the exigencies of the movie's theme. For his work at Warners, he was nominated three times for the Academy Award, twice for best color cinematography.

After shooting the Errol Flynn vehicle Escape Me Never (1947) and The Voice of the Turtle (1947) , Polito moved on to Paramount to shoot "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948) for former Warner Bros. producer Hal B. Wallis.

He shot only one more film before he retired: Anna Lucasta (1949) at Columbia Pictures.