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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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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