The Furniture: A Warm Welcome in Hunt for the Wilderpeople

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

Hunt for the Wilderpeople, the year’s most heart-warming comedy, may not seem like an obvious example of unique production design. It takes place entirely in the backwoods of New Zealand, much of it deep in the bush. It’s a showcase for the tremendous beauty of the land, not opulent sets.

Yet while the design team may not contribute to the film’s breathtaking vistas, their work is crucial to its narrative arc. Before young Ricky (Julian Dennison) and his ornery foster uncle Hec (Sam Neill) are forced by circumstance to run from the law, they don’t like each other very much. It’s Bella (Rima Te Wiata), Hec’s wife, who welcomes Ricky into their lives. Her love and her house serve as an emotional foundation, and her sudden death sparks the adventure to come.

Were it not for her memory, Ricky and Hec would run away, each to his own wilderness.

Their love for her keeps them together, or at least the guilt it inspires...

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The Furniture: Bored at the Border in "Hold Back the Dawn"

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

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the release of Hold Back the Dawn, the film for which Olivia de Havilland received her first Best Actress nomination. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t we have a whole month of de Havilland back in June, in the lead-up to her 100th birthday? Yes, we did. But I am here to inform you that celebrating this two-time Oscar-winner isn’t an occasional thing. It's an essential part of life.

Besides, the film is great. It’s a smart, cynical melodrama about a Romanian playboy named Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer), biding his time in a small Mexican town while he waits to be granted entry into the United States. It’ll be years, thanks to the National Origins Formula. Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder’s script was adapted from a story by Ketti Frings, but also took inspiration from Wilder’s own experiences as a refugee stranded by the quota system.

Fed up, Georges looks for other ways to get across. On the 4th of July he meets Emmy Brown (de Havilland), a thoroughly wholesome schoolteacher. She’s taken her students on a cross-border field trip... 

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The Furniture: The Malevolent Secret Code of The Conjuring 2

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

There are many ways to scare an audience. Music, special effects and editing are combined to surprise the audience with loud, unexpected images of malevolent demons or slashers or whatever. But what about production design? Can you be terrified by a stationary armchair?

The Conjuring 2 holds all the answers. James Wan is an excellent horror craftsman, a director who uses every trick in the book, including the sets and props. Production designer Julie Berghoff and art directors A. Todd Holland and Andrew Rothschild run amok, with the same ferocity as the film's music and editing.

Their first order of business is to exploit some of the genre’s stand-by images. There are a lot of crosses, in this case an entire roomful.

They stand at attention, ready to demonically invert themselves at a moment’s notice. There are smaller crucifixes sprinkled throughout the film, as well as the occasional window lit to resemble a cross... 

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The Furniture: Love & Friendship's Country Charm

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

Chirp.Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) finds the countryside boring. She’d much rather be in London, safe from her daughter and her other dull relations. Yet she’s broke and bound by obligation to spend time at a large country estate. This is the central problem of Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship, a delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan.

The estate in question is Churchill, the home of her brother-in-law Charles Vernon and his wife, Catherine Vernon (nee DeCourcy). Granted, as the amusingly dim-witted Sir James Martin points out, there appears to be neither church nor hill on the property. Instead there is only period-appropriate finery and some very subtle efforts to manipulate audience loyalty.

Production designer Anna Rackard and art directors Louise Mathews and Bryan Tormey go about this with great care. 

Lady Susan is a selfish, scheming character whose relatives almost certainly deserve more of our sympathy. Yet she’s the protagonist, and also quite funny. We can’t be allowed to tire of her too quickly. And so the production design team emphasizes a point on which many of us can agree with Lady Susan: The countryside is the worst...

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The Furniture: Comedy by Design in Come Blow Your Horn

1963 is our "Year of the Month" for September. So we'll be celebrating its films randomly throughout the month. Here's Daniel Walber...

Once upon a time, there were two production design categories at the Oscars. From 1945 through 1956, and again from 1959 through 1966, color films and black and white films competed separately. The Academy nominated ten films every year after 1950, creating a whole lot more room for variety.

This especially benefited comedy, a genre that has since fallen out of favor with Oscar. And while Come Blow Your Horn might not be the funniest of the 1960s, it is certainly one of the most deserving nominees of the era. Adapted by Norman Lear from a Neil Simon play, this Frank Sinatra vehicle stages most of its antics in one of cinema’s most luxurious apartments, the work of art directors Roland Anderson (Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and Hal Pereira (Vertigo) and set decorators Sam Comer (Rear Window) and James W. Payne (The Sting).

Sinatra plays Alan Baker, a salesman for his family’s plastic fruit business. His boss and father, Harry (Lee J. Cobb), is perpetually enraged by his son’s libertine Manhattan lifestyle. Harry and his wife Sophie, played by Yiddish theater legend Molly Picon, live a quiet life in Yonkers with their much younger son, Buddy (Tony Bill). But when Buddy runs away from home to live large with Alan, all hell breaks loose.

Alan's apartment in question is a spotless and opulent apotheosis of mid-century design. The open living room makes the place seem enormous...

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