The Furniture: Saloon Kitsch in "How the West Was Won"

New Series. Daniel Walber talks production design in "The Furniture". Previously we looked at The Exorcist, Carol and Brooklyn and Batman. 

Gregory Peck, whose centennial we’ll all be celebrating tomorrow, was in a grand total of six films that were nominated for Best Production Design. Two of the best, To Kill a Mockingbird (the only winner) and Roman Holiday, will be featured in this week’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot. And so, in the interest of spreading the love, I’ll talk about a very different: 1962’s Cinerama epic, How the West Was Won.

The film, though it tells the story of a single American family, is broken up into five distinct sections. Peck is only in one of them, “The Plains.” This is actually good for our purposes, because it’s one of the three directed by Henry Hathaway. The John Ford and George Marshall chapters are much more about landscapes than sets, perhaps because they found the task of filling up the wide Cinerama frame with furniture to be too tedious.

Hathaway embraced the madness, however, and it makes all the difference. How the West Was Won is a cinematic victory lap for Manifest Destiny, an alternately uncomplicated and incoherent paean to the white conquest of the West. This can easily make it fall flat to 21st century eyes, particularly in its more earnest moments of breathtaking scenery and triumphalist narration (from Spencer Tracy).

But in Hathaway’s segments, with their exaggerated and falsified versions of Western style, suddenly it becomes kitsch...

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The Furniture: Batman's Nightmare at the Museum

New Series. Daniel Walber talks production design in "The Furniture". Previously we looked at The Exorcist, and Carol and Brooklyn. And now...

In the Oscar battle between Batman and Superman, there is no real contest. Superman’s three nominations, zero wins and one special achievement award have nothing on Batman’s fifteen nominations and three wins. And it doesn’t look as if we have to worry about the tally getting complicated by any nominations for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

However, the arrival of the newest Batman movie is an excellent excuse to discuss the oldest. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman remains the only superhero movie to ever win the Best Production Design Oscar, an honor it certainly deserves to keep...

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The Furniture: Brooklyn and Carol's Dramatically Different Department Stores

It's our new Production Design series, "The Furniture." Daniel Walber kicked things off last week with the bedroom in The Exorcist. Now a different era and public spaces - Editor

Thanks to Brooklyn and Carol, 2015 was a banner year for the 1950s department store. Both Eilis and Therese spend a fair amount of time as New York City shopgirls, selling to housewives and dealing with stern floor managers. Yet, despite the ostensibly common setting, Brooklyn's Bartocci's and Carol's Frankenberg's could not be more different.

The staff areas are a good place to start. Bartocci’s has a simple enough space for its employees, with open coat lockers to keep their belongings. It’s not beautiful, but the wood lends it a cozy quality. Production designer François Séguin (The Red Violin) and art directors Irene O’Brien (This Must Be the Place) and Robert Parle (Riddick) have a subtle, but assured touch. [More...]

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The Furniture: The Exorcist's Possessed Bedroom

Daniel Walber, new contributor, with the first episode of a weekly feature on production design. Every Monday morning we'll take a look at memorable sets and props, from classic Oscar nominees to the best new releases.

The Exorcist is a movie about a single room. Sure, it starts halfway across the world, on an archaeological dig in Northern Iraq. It’s true that Father Damien has a memorable, upsetting trip to a mental hospital in New York. And those iconic steps lurk just outside the house. Yet all of the violence, all of the vomit, all of Mercedes McCambridge’s legendary profanity issues forth from little Regan MacNeil’s tiny bedroom...

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Reader's Choice: a look back at Gattaca (1997)

Welcome to the new bi-weekly series "Reader's Choice." For the first episode I gave you a choice of several films currently streaming and you picked Gattaca (on Amazon Prime). I hope you enjoy and comment since we haven't talked about this movie ever, that I can recall. - Nathaniel

Memories of Gattaca are fuzzy at best. I saw it only once in theaters 19 years ago. I remember: Jude Law in a wheelchair; sterile, sleek, and awesome production design; Uma Thurman being an icy receptionist?; Ethan Hawke being less of a perfect specimen than Jude Law in the context of the movie (this remains true out of context); a hard to buy premise about violence being bred out of the human race?; something about brothers swimming? That's it. 

Join me in this revisit...

A fascinating juxtaposition: When the costume design credit arrives we're looking at a naked body

Gattaca begins with a beautiful blue credits sequence which becomes eerier as it goes along once you realize what its macro imagery is telling you. Ethan Hawke is ridding himself of all human detritus: dead flesh, body hair, cuticles, until he's smooth as a statue. He repeats this in several ways though sometimes (at work) the detritus isn't his. All the workers at his job get their fingers pricked upon entering like its a diabetic research center. There are even daily urine tests... which seems extreme for a world that's so into cleanliness. What if someone misses the specimen cup? 

At the pee test the doctor (Xander Berkeley) looks right at his penis and says the following. [more...]

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