The Furniture: Yul Brynner Blows Up a Bridge

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

Yul Brynner, who were celebrating this week for his centennial, was in a lot of very expensive movies. His biggest year was 1956, with The King & I, Anastasia and The Ten Commandments - a combined budget of over $20 million. But there were plenty to follow. Studios saw Brynner as a generic racial and ethnic “other,” which got him cast in all sorts of bloated historical, international, orientalist pictures. Which also means, of course, that many of his movies are entirely worthy of consignment to the dustbin of Hollywood history.

Intriguingly, though, he did occasionally work beyond Hollywood. In the late 1960s he joined Orson Welles, Sergei Bondarchuk, Franco Nero and Curd Jürgens in Yugoslavia for The Battle of Neretva. A World War Two Partisan film directed by Veljko Bulajić, a Partisan veteran himself, it ranks as the most expensive production in the history of Yugoslavia - and potentially in Brynner’s career, as some estimates push it into Ten Commandments territory...

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The Furniture: Funny Face, France, Fashion and Failure

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design by Daniel Walber. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Funny Face (1957) is not really a complicated movie, visually or otherwise. Its production design doesn’t express inner turmoil or repressive social structures, nor does it take the characters on any sort of elaborate journey. And in some scenes it’s downright boring, director Stanley Donen essentially stepping back to allow Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn room to dance.

But production design doesn’t have to be profound to be good, or even Oscar-worthy. And while I wouldn’t have voted for Funny Face for the Academy Awards, I do think it’s worth a look. Besides, its design does sort of have a message: that the opposite of fashion is books, and that any attempt to combine the two will lead to utter chaos. Is it serious? No, of course not, but it manages to be fun and chic at the same time.

It all starts with a gorgeous opening sequence designed by legendary photographer Richard Avedon, who also served as “Special Visual Consultant”...

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The Furniture: Social Distancing with Safe

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design by Daniel Walber. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Safe turns 25 years old this week. I’d say it’s “more relevant than ever,” but just typing those words felt ridiculous. Todd Haynes made Safe about the way America responded to AIDS, and that’s still relevant because America has not changed. And so here we are, in another crisis of public health, watching the same phenomena play out in similar ways.

Let's talk about two of them. First, the way that AIDS was ignored by those who saw themselves as unaffected, even immune. Reagan could choose to do nothing because, to so many Americans, it happened to “other people.” Second, the way that its victims were blamed for their own sickness. Contracting HIV was seen as the result of a moral failure - something we’ve seen time and again, from cholera and tuberculosis to SARS and COVID-19.

25 years later, another Republican president is playing the same game. The response has been a torrent of virulent racism and an utter denial of medical reality. And once again, there is a prevailing attitude that contracting the virus is one’s own fault.

Did rewatching Safe make me feel better about any of this? Absolutely not. But it did cause me to think about a new relevance...

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The Furniture: Architecture of Anxiety in The Golem

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

 by Daniel Walber

The story goes that Paul Wegener first heard of the Golem while shooting The Student of Prague (1913). Though he was clearly caught by the story, Wegener may also have been entranced by a glimpse of the old Josefov, Prague’s Jewish ghetto. Dating back to the Middle Ages, the neighborhood was almost entirely demolished between 1893 and 1913 to make room for Paris-style boulevards. Inspired, Wegener made two (now-lost) Golem movies during World War One - though not in Prague.

By the time he started on The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), the world had changed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was gone. Prague was the capital of brand-new Czechoslovakia, a Czechoslovak-speaking nation - which would be complicated for its mostly German-speaking Jews. Frankly, Wegener could have set his Golem movie in 1920 if he wanted...

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The Furniture: Shirley and the Haunting of Her Own Grim House

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

by Daniel Walber

“A clean house is evidence of mental inferiority,” snaps Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) from her bed, annoyed by her husband for so many reasons. One of them is Rose (Odessa Young), the young bride that has just arrived to keep an eye on both the housekeeping and Shirley.  And with both husbands at campus most of the day, the two women will be spending a lot of time together in this beigely bewildering, story-haunted house.

After all, any house can be a haunted house. And while director Josephine Decker doesn’t send in any actual ghosts, Shirley is as spooky as much of Jackson’s own fiction...

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