Raymond Rennahan (1896-1980) was one of the most important cinematographers during Hollywood’s Golden Age, especially in relation to the development of Technicolor. In a career lasting fifty years, he shot around eighty feature films, many silent shorts and, in the final decade and a half, worked on dozens of television series photographing hundreds of episodes.
Rennahan began working as a camera operator in 1915, and was soon working for the recently-established Technicolor corporation. In 1921, he photographed the first two-strip Technicolor feature, Toll of the Sea, and fifteen years later was cinematographer on the first feature film shot in the three-strip format, Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp. He won two Academy Awards for Best Colour Cinematography, for Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blood and Sand (1942).
Pictures shot by Rennahan include Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Wings of the Morning (1937, the first three-strip Technicolor film shot in Europe), John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Down Argentine Way (1940), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Duel in the Sun (1947) and, his final feature film, the ‘B’ western classic Terror in a Texas Town (1958).
In 1933, Rennahan shot the Technicolor sequence for MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle.
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