The Furniture: The Cruel, Curtained Childhood of a Leader

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

We love to collectively pore over the biographies of history’s most monstrous figures, usually in search of both meaning and sensationalism. Our fantasies are full of vindictive parenting, traumatic events and uncanny brilliance. It’s as if we want to reverse Freud, using psychoanalysis as a tool to craft new mythology. And they certainly are myths: Fascism can’t be blamed on paternal cruelty alone.

But what if the protagonist weren’t real? With The Childhood of a Leader, Brady Corbet has contributed a fictional allegory to this evergreen genre. Loosely based on a short story by Jean-Paul Sartre and a novel by John Fowles, the film chronicles a short period in the life of Prescott (Tom Sweet), a very moody child. The year is 1919, in the midst of the post-Armistice treaty negotiations. The boy’s father (Liam Cunningham) is an American diplomat, his mother (Bérénice Bejo) a “citizen of the world.” They’re both miserable...

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The Furniture: Design Inspires Van Gogh in Lust for Life

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Kirk Douglas nearly drove himself over the edge while filming Lust for Life, inhabiting the character of Vincent van Gogh with a tenacity akin to the Method. The result was an Oscar nomination, likely the closest he ever came to a win. His emotionally volatile performance lends real weight to the oft-sensationalized biography of history’s most famously mad artist.

But the success of Lust for Life isn’t owed entirely to Douglas. Director Vincente Minnelli was a perfect match for the material, which necessitates a balance between the beauty that Van Gogh saw in the world and the feverish passion that drove him away from it. The Oscar-nominated production design team, led by frequent Minnelli collaborator Cedric Gibbons, offer a rich vision of the French countryside that serves as an essential counterpoint to Douglas’s madness.

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The Furniture: Porches and Nostalgia in Hell or High Water

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

The Old West has been dead since well before the dawn of cinema, and so the best Westerns are parables of a way of life in decline. Yet despite the history, there are plenty for whom the mythology of the cowboy and the outlaw isn’t extinct. That’s why the Western has lived on, well after the death of even the oldest Americans who could remember those days. It’s also what drives films like Hell or High Water, which use symbols to chronicle the last days of the Old West’s cultural descendants.

It takes place in a nearly empty West Texas, now being picked over by banks. Taylor Sheridan’s script is insistent in its reminders of this context. “No wonder my kids won’t do this shit for a living,” says an anonymous cattle rancher fleeing an encroaching fire. “The days of robbing banks and trying to live to spend the money - long gone,” says an anonymous old man in a burger joint.

This is why the surface tension between the criminal brothers (Ben Foster and Chris Pine) and the aging Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) is a red herring...

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The Furniture: Wednesday Addams Sets Thanksgiving on Fire

"The Furniture" our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber

Happy Thanksgiving! In three days, Americans will gather together to cook, feast and argue. The acrimonious presidential election has launched a multitude of think pieces on the subject. How do you talk to your relatives who voted differently than you? The classic stereotype of the young, liberal, usually-white urbanite going back to conservative “middle america” for turkey is certainly more fraught this year than it’s ever been. Does that scenario now come with the moral obligation to speak up?

This may seem like a weird way to begin a column about Addams Family Values, a comedy sequel without an overt political message. But there's some Thanksgiving advice to be found in the Oscar-nominated design of legendary production designer Ken Adam (The Spy Who Loved Me) and set decorator Marvin March (Annie). Beyond the social satire of the early 1990s ("But Debbie...pastels?"), a blunt clash of historical narratives is built into the sets for Camp Chippewa...

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The Furniture: How Subtly Is Paris Burning? (Not Very)

"The Furniture" our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber

This week marks 50 years since the release of Is Paris Burning? (not to be confused with documentary classic Paris is Burning) an epic that hasn’t quite stood the test of time. In the tradition of The Longest Day, it harnesses a cast of thousands to tell the story of a single, crucial moment of World War Two: The liberation of Paris. French stars like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon take roles in the Resistance, while the likes of Kirk Douglas and Glenn Ford play American generals. There are cameos from Simone Signoret, George Chakiris and Anthony Perkins, to name only a few.

Directed by René Clément with a script by Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola, you’d think it would be more popular. Still, it’s worth revisiting, and not only for its two Oscar nominations (art direction and cinematography).The film’s visual ambition is often astonishing. Its commitment to accuracy caused at least one unlucky Parisian passerby that the Wehrmacht had actually returned. Everything is bold, nothing subtle.

Production designer Willy Holt, an American who mostly worked in France, later worked on Julia and Au revoir les enfants. Art director Marc Frederix designed for films as disparate as Moonraker and Love and Death, while his colleague Pierre Gufroy won an Oscar for Roman Polanski’s Tess. Clearly, the talented group was more than up to the task of winding back the clock 20 years on one of the world’s most recognizable cities.

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