The Furniture: Accuracy and Allegory in "The Poseidon Adventure"

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design offers a digestif for our Shelley Winters festival. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Does it matter to you if a disaster movie is realistic? This is an honest question. How solid is your suspension of disbelief when it comes to airplane explosions and burning buildings, tsunamis and earthquakes? Do you sit on the couch fact-checking on your laptop while expensive catastrophes unfold on your TV?

I ask this because I was surprised to learn how much the team behind The Poseidon Adventure cared about accuracy. Paul Gallico, who wrote the original novel, was inspired by an actual trip on the Queen Mary he took in 1937, during which the ship turned on its side. And he did plenty of research to make sure it was possible for an ocean liner to be flipped entirely upside down by a rogue wave. 

Director Ronald Neame and production designer William Creber were equally concerned. By the time The Poseidon Adventure went into production, the Queen Mary had begun a long retirement docked in Los Angeles. Much of the film was shot on the real ship, including this pleasant glimpse at the deck...

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The Furniture: Visual Rhyming in Babyteeth

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

This week we’re keeping it brief. Is it because I’m tired? Is it because this year isn’t the best so far in terms of production design? Is it because Hurricane Isaias is really dampening the mood? Who can say?

It’s also because Babyteeth is a movie with admirable graphic simplicity. Director Shannon Murphy and her design team (Sherree Philips, Bil Goodes, Ishtar Cavagnino and costume designer Amelia Gebler) use a limited color palette to express their themes, a concise visual language built upon the clashing personalities of their characters. It speaks for itself.

The frequent textual incursions, for example, might become grating in another film. Here, they fit in among the other accents. This one rhymes with Anna’s (Essie Davis) dress, which then underlines the fact that she sticks out like a sore thumb against Henry’s (Ben Mendelsohn) dull office - and his dull clothes.

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The Furniture: Olivia de Havilland Embroiders Her Fate

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Olivia de Havilland was in nine films that were nominated for the Oscar for Best Production Design. It’s not the record, but it’s quite something. I’ve covered three of them: Hold Back the Dawn, My Cousin Rachel and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. But none of those actually won the award, so I still have some work to do. I haven’t got time for Gone with the Wind, and The Adventures of Robin Hood can wait a few weeks until our 1938 celebration, so I dove into The Heiress.

I hope you’re ready to think deeply about embroidery.

Granted, I’m not entirely sure director William Wyler was thinking deeply about his protagonist’s favorite pastime. The emphasis on Catherine Sloper’s (de Havilland) stitching can feel like little more than shorthand for “spinster” status. And the mid-19th century was a high point for this association, as embroidery was a standard part of the girls’ school curriculum.

Dr. Austin Sloper (Ralph Richardson) sent Catherine to the finest boarding schools, where she would have learned the art of the sampler from an unmarried teacher. The end of the film bluntly zooms in on one of these stitched alphabets, which in this context might as well read “OLD MAID”...

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The Furniture: Barton Fink and the Common Man's Wallpaper

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

What is the wallpaper of the Common Man? It’s a strange question, but Barton Fink is a strange movie. The titular writer (John Turturro) is a man consumed by passion for the clichéd unsung hero, though he would never go so far as to actually ask a Common Man what he thinks. His obsession is really with the idea of the Common Man, abstract and waiting to be tossed onstage or slapped onto the blank canvas of a movie screen.

In his defense, the Common Man was not yet a cliche when Fink arrived in Hollywood, sometime in 1941. Henry Wallace’s famous “Century of the Common Man” speech wouldn’t be delivered until May of 1942, inspiring Aaron Copland to write his “Fanfare for the Common Man” soon after. Maybe someday the Coen Brothers will make a sequel, and Barton will take the opportunity to claim credit for both of those cultural landmarks.

But back to wallpaper. Barton Fink opens with a close-up of it, a pleasant sort of floral-Deco pattern in mild colors...

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The Furniture: First Cow and the Architecture of Settlement

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

First Cow is a mossy and melancholy tragedy. Kelly Reichardt makes the failure of her protagonists clear from the start, showing us their skeletons before introducing them in the flesh. There’s a morbid air to everything that follows, though it’s softened by an atmosphere of tremendous beauty. It’s the best ASMR video of the year.

Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee) clearly think that they are in a land of endless possibility: Oregon Country in the 1820s. Decades before a settled border, the USA and the British Empire “jointly occupied” the Pacific Northwest, in accord with an 1818 treaty agreement that did not even acknowledge the presence of indigenous people.

This is the context for King-Lu’s utterly false observation:

This is still new - more nameless things around here than you could shake an eel at… History isn’t here yet.”

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