"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail. Here's Daniel Walber...
My Gal Sal is a pack of lies. The 1942 musical, ostensibly a biopic of songwriter Paul Dresser, is almost entirely fabricated. Of course, that hardly matters. Accuracy is no prerequisite for the Best Production Design Oscar, which Richard Day, Joseph C. Wright and Thomas Little won for the picture. No one will be mad if some details are fudged in musical numbers like “Me and My Fella and a Big Umbrella.”
That said, My Gal Sal is interesting because it’s all nonsense. It’s a window into the way Hollywood projects itself onto the past, a compendium of historical kitsch.
Dresser (Victor Mature) begins the film in a strict, Indiana home. His minister father objects to his music, so he runs away and gets a job with a medicine show.
Eventually he meets Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth), an established Broadway star. They don’t hit it off right away, but he meets her again in New York City. Their on-again-off-again romance, troubled by his sudden success, drives the rest of the plot...
But the real Sal of the title song wasn’t Sally Elliott, who never existed. She was Sally Walker, the proprietor of Evansville, Indiana’s most prominent brothel. She and Dresser were involved for the better part of a decade. They fell out in 1889, well before he got famous.
This narrative fix isn’t just a simple act of censorship. It’s central to the image that the film projects of the “Gay Nineties,” an insistent nostalgia that governs everything from the script to the sets.
It’s obvious from the very beginning, a brief introduction to Dresser’s music that arrives even before the opening credits. Soldiers cheerfully belt out “Mr. Volunteer,” their twilight song blessed by an enormous floating decal that reads “Remember the Maine.”
But the Gay Nineties mean more than the Spanish-American War, which didn’t even break out until 1898. They were also a time of tremendous opulence. This Gilded Age is most evident in My Gal Sal’s version of Broadway, where sets mimic the ballrooms of 5th Avenue mansions.
The final number is deconstructed but over-the-top, its tremendous arches hovering above a palatial veranda.
This is still how we often remember the 1890s, with its opulent Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. But the decade was not really a time of widespread prosperity, particularly after the Panic of 1893. For most Americans, life did not look like this at all. But My Gal Sal sticks resolutely to the glitz and glamour, conjuring up a series of increasingly overwhelming cakes.
The stage also gives My Gal Sal’s designers the opportunity to project an image of the era’s popular culture as well. The aforementioned umbrella number includes a backdrop painting of San Francisco’s Sutro Beach, a public saltwater swimming pool that opened in 1896. Thomas Edison even shot a film there. It burnt down in 1966, but would have certainly been known by audiences in 1942.
Dresser’s biggest hit was “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” an ode to his childhood home. It has been the official state song of Indiana since 1913. Sally’s first performance of it is a real showstopper, somehow the most nostalgic number in the film.
She enters from the garlanded doorway of an idyllic white house, flanked by a white picket fence and some flat orange trees.
As the camera pans, we discover that this Indiana version of Sally lives right next to a church. Of course she does. This is 1940s Hollywood’s version of 1890s Broadway’s version of Indiana, which is to say that it’s pure kitsch. It’s like something out of an Our Town musical, or a television remake of Meet Me in St. Louis.
The thing is, the culture of the Gay Nineties wasn’t quite this bland. It was the decade of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, Dracula and Spring Awakening. My Gal Sal accounts for none of that. Instead, by filtering everything through a reimagined Broadway stage, the designers are able to repackage an entire decade of nostalgia. In the case of the Wabash, its looming woodlands and its newmoan hay fit perfectly into a charming picture frame.
