Stanley Cortez

Born Stanislaus Krantz in New York City, Stanley Cortez was the younger brother of the silent-film star Ricardo Cortez, and he came to cinematography by way of portrait studios, where he absorbed a painter's feel for tonal gradation. He worked his way up through the camera departments of Hollywood in the 1930s, a slow, deliberate craftsman in a business that prized speed, and his perfectionism sometimes put him at odds with impatient producers.

His reputation rests on a handful of extraordinary films rather than a mountain of them. For Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons," he photographed a vanishing Gilded Age world in long, gliding takes and deep, melancholy shadow, giving the doomed family's great house an almost living gloom. The result earned him lasting acclaim among those who care how films are lit, even as the picture itself was famously recut behind Welles's back.

More than a decade later he collaborated with the actor Charles Laughton, directing his only film, on "The Night of the Hunter." Together they created one of the most visually unforgettable pictures in American cinema: a menacing preacher's silhouette against the sky, children drifting downriver under an enormous, storybook moon, expressionist nightmare fused with rural folk tale. Cortez considered it the summit of his art, and generations of filmmakers have echoed its images.

He brought the same lush, sometimes flamboyant sensibility to melodramas like "Since You Went Away" and to a long string of lesser projects, including science fiction and horror films where his lighting frequently outclassed the material. Cortez was an eloquent, almost mystical talker about his craft, describing light in musical and emotional terms, and he became a beloved elder statesman among cinematographers. He kept working into the 1970s and lived until 1997, revered less for the quantity of his output than for how completely he could transform a frame into something haunted and beautiful.