Biography
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