May 7, 14, 21, 28 | 24 Movies
You cannot spell artifice without art.
On Tuesday nights this month, TCM celebrates how production design, special effects and other feats of movie magic conjure up worlds that may be built on artifice but feel deeply real to us. We not only believe what we see, we feel it.
One of my favorite film classes from when I attended the University of Southern California back in noneofyourbusiness, was a film history course taught by Dr. Joseph "Drew" Casper. Dr. Casper wrote a book about director Vincente Minnelli, and he was particularly passionate about Minnelli’s impeccable art direction and set design.
He devoted one class to a screening and discussion of Gigi (1958). Ah, yes, I remember it well. After expounding on the character-defining furnishings of Madame Alvarez's apartment--the type of furniture on display, the placement of the furniture, the color of the fabrics, even the significance of a pet cat—a skeptical student (not me, I swear), challenged Dr. Casper that perhaps, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, a chair was just a chair, a cat was just a cat.
I cannot imagine anyone in the TCM-verse sharing that ill-fated student’s opinion, but if you do, the 24 films in this themed series will open your eyes.
The series begins on May 7 with North by Northwest (1959), an illustrative place to start, Robert Boyle served as a co-production designer, for which they received an Academy Award nomination. Boyle was inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame and in 2008, he received an honorary Academy Award. He was a co-Oscar nominee for his work on Gaily, Gaily (1969), Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and The Shootist (1976). His other illustrious credits include The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964) and Private Benjamin (1980)
North by Northwest, one of seven American films in the series inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry of “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” films, presented several challenges. For example, the climactic chase atop Mount Rushmore: it likely does not surprise you that, establishing shots aside, it was not filmed at the national landmark. The National Park Service reportedly rescinded permission for Hitchcock to film there after he gave an interview teasing a violent chase across the granite faces, according to Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan.
In the Oscar-nominated short, The Man on Lincoln’s Nose (2000), Robert Boyle said, “The main problem in the Mount Rushmore sequence was to make it believable that two people could climb down the face of Mount Rushmore — it couldn't be done, but we had to make it look believable. So, we went up to Mount Rushmore, climbed up the back and found that on the top of each one of the heads there was a huge iron ring, with a cable and bosun's chair. We then lowered down each face and photographed in every direction possible every 10 feet and those became the backgrounds.”
Also not filmed on location was the Mount Rushmore cafeteria where Eva Marie Saint “shoots” Cary Grant. This, too, was recreated on the MGM studio lot (by the way, keep your eyes on the kid extra who, um, jumps the gun by plugging his ears before Saint fires. From here on, he will be the only thing you watch in that scene).
On May 28, TCM will screen two milestone films that advanced the state of that art of stop-motion animation, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933) and Don Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
Stop-motion animation is a series of shots of a manipulated object that create the illusion of motion. The late comedian Gilbert Gottfried once observed that stop motion animation looks fake, but feels real, while CGI look real, but feels fake.
With King Kong, stop-motion master Willis H. O’Brien did for special effects what, say, Citizen Kane (1941) (airing as part of the series of May 7) did for the American film, which is to say it synthesized what had been learned to that point to create something artistically bolder. Rear projection, matte paintings and stop-motion animation brought the world of Kong, the eighth wonder of the world, to roaring, terrifying life. The image of Kong swatting away airplanes atop the Empire State Building is every bit an iconic cinema image as Harold Lloyd and the clock in Safety Last! (1923) or Charlie Chaplin as a cog in the machine in Modern Times (1936), which TCM will broadcast as part of this series on May 28.
Viewers of a certain age hold Jason and the Argonauts with a special reverence and affection.
Tom Hanks said it best in his role as Master of Ceremonies at the Motion Picture Academy’s 1992 Scientific and Technical Awards, where pioneer wizard Ray Harryhausen was presented with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for technological contributions that “have brought credit to the industry.” Proclaimed Hanks: “Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane. I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made.”
This is the film where Harryhausen really made his bones with the climactic battle against the skeleton army, one of the most memorable sequences in film history. As he described it in his book, “Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life”: “I had three men fighting seven skeletons, and each skeleton had five appendages to move in each separate frame of film. This meant at least thirty-five animation movements, each synchronized to the actor's movements. Some days I was producing just 13 or 14 frames a day, or to put it another way, less than one second of screen time per day, and in the end the whole sequence took a record four and a half months to capture on film.”
That skeleton army absolutely feels real, but sometimes filmmakers will use techniques such as obvious rear projection to give viewers a gentle meta nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Take William Asher’s Beach Party (1963). I interviewed Frankie Avalon several years ago (humblebrag) and he said it was one of the great jokes that the movies transformed a dark-haired Philadelphia boy into a California surf idol. Those hilarious close-ups of Frankie, Annette Funicello and company riding the wild rear-projected surf tell us, “Yeah, we know, totally fake.” But in a good way.
MGM, in its heyday, was known for its lavish and tony productions, especially Arthur Freed’s musical production unit. Minnelli’s Brigadoon (1954), based on the Broadway musical about the enchanted village that emerges from the mists once every 100 years, might have been filmed in Scotland, but somehow it just wouldn’t have felt as real as studio sets that brought the village to life.
The Dr. Seuss-verse has a fantastical look and distinctive feel that resists a literal live-action treatment. But Roy Rowland’s The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953) “was, and is,” wrote critic J. Hoberman in The New York Times, “one of a kind — and the only feature-length live-action movie to have been conceived, written and designed by the illustrator Theodor Geisel.”
Production designer Rudolph Sternad and art director Cary Odell create the surreal world of the Terwilliker Institute, where the dreaded piano teacher Dr. T. (Hans Conried in a career high note) has imprisoned 500 boys required to play the world’s largest piano. Do not miss this underseen gem when it airs on TCM on May 21.
Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), unlike the 1991 Disney animated musical, is not a children’s film, but a truly magical adaptation of the timeless French fairy tale “Before the days of computer effects and modern creature makeup,” praised Roger Ebert, “here is a fantasy alive with trick shots and astonishing effects, giving us a Beast who is lonely like a man and misunderstood like an animal.”
David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) is equally surreal but in a much bleaker way. The director describes it as “a dream of dark and troubling things.” The body horror story of factory worker Henry Spencer and his deformed baby plays out as an immersive nightmare viewers sink into like Henry and the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall in her quicksand-like bed. Filmed over the course of five years, the resourceful Lynch employed impractical effects, including, reportedly, an embalmed calf fetus to portray the deformed newborn.
From Lynch’s industrial hell to the magnificently affecting escalator that carries people from Earth to the afterlife in Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the two dozen films in this series are the very definition of movie magic and are testaments to the artists whose ingenuity and imagination continue to transport viewers and remind us that genius really is in the details.
