YESTERDAY WHAT A WIDOW! was identified as a first of 1930s’ movies with architecturally significant set design. Today in Part 2, Donald Albrecht’s book Designing Dream: Modern Architecture in the Movies continues to offer tidbits on this topic, focusing on flicks I’ve enjoyed on Turner Classic Movies.
Dinner at Eight. “For the decor of the movie bedroom,” Albrecht recounts, “the set designer was presented with a curious challenge. While the kitchen involved the active functions of cooking and cleaning, both of which were acceptable to censors, the sleeping and sexual functions of the bedroom were either static or taboo.”
Above, Greta Garbo in The Single Standard. Below, Jean Harlow with Wallace Beery in Dinner at Eight. Art Director in each: Cedric Gibbons. These and following images from Designing Dreams.
“Portraying the eroticism of the ‘new woman’ was less of a problem,” Albrecht describes. “A heroine’s sexual allure could be subtly suggested by placing her on a daybed—a popular item of decor of the period…. just lounging in elegant pajamas like the world-weary Garbo in The Single Standard, 1929; or Jean Harlow swathed in white, in George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight, 1933.”
Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler in Dinner at Eight.
Dinner at Eight contains one of my favorite movie lines: Over-the-hill stage actress Carlotta (portrayed by Marie Dressler) does a wonderful double-take when gold-digger Kitty (played by Jean Harlow) says she’s been reading a book. Carlotta “listens skeptically… that machinery will take the place of every profession,” looks Kitty up and down, and murmurs, “Oh my dear, that is something you never need worry about.”
Transatlantic Tunnel. Originally titled simply The Tunnel, this one got renamed for us Yanks. Albrecht recounts, “Ernö Metzner’s designs for The Tunnel, 1935, a pro-technology British science fiction film most noted for its streamlined New York-to-London tunnel, its trains, and its automobiles, include an airborne device that closely approximated Eugène Hénard’s formula for the type of airplane suited for urban travel: ‘a light aeroplane, equipped with horizontal helices in addition to a vertical propeller, and capable of remaining stationary in the air, hovering over a given point.’ ”
Aeroplane transportation in The Tunnel, 1935. Art Director: Ernö Metzner.
Broadway Melody of 1936. “Ironically,” Albrecht writes, “the ‘nightclub decade’ on the screen was only dawning as the deepening Depression forced more and more clubs to close, tempering the recklessness of the 1920s…. No aesthetic feature evoked the nightclub’s glamour as effectively as artificial illumination.”
Albrecht gives an example: “… the nightclub designed for MGM’s Broadway Melody of 1936 is a space conceived with light as its main component. Light emanates from iridescent globes, passes through curving walls of glass bricks, and is reflected off gleaming metallic furniture. Tall columns of backlit cloth pass through chrome rings from which cantilevered arms support billowing sails.”
Broadway Melody of 1936. Supervisory Art Director: Cedric Gibbons.
“These sails,” Albrecht says, “seem to draw the interior decor outward and toward the ubiquitous cinematic city of skyscrapers, where every illuminated window promises more revelers enjoying themselves far into the night.”
Albrecht Concludes: “The Versailles of the modern movement is the nightclub of the Hollywood musical; its Gothic cathedral is the skyscraper of the futurist epic…. Modern architecture itself might have left the public cold, but modern architecture in the movies caught its imagination by embodying in forms both tangible and beautiful their fears, hopes and aspirations.” ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024