Sam Leavitt

An apprentice and assistant cameraman in the silent days, Sam Leavitt became a camera operator in the 1930s. Among his credits were such splashy MGM Technicolor musicals as Bathing Beauty (1944) and Anchors Aweigh (1946). Leavitt found himself harking back to his silent-movie career for his first director of photography assignment: The Thief (1952), a dialogue-less experiment directed by Ray Milland. In films until retiring after 1975's The Man in a Glass Booth, Sam Leavitt won an Oscar for his black-and-white lensing of Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958), and was Oscar-nominated for his work on Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Exodus (1960).

~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide