THE SHAPE OF FILMS TO COME.

It’s not encouraging that it’s taken nearly a hundred years for someone to go into print with an ambitious study of William Cameron Menzies. He did after all create the function of movie Production Designer, popularise the Story Board and format Batman. David O. Selznick thought Menzies’ input into Gone with the Wind ranked with his own. Menzies’ contribution to “The Golden Years of Hollywood” was important as any director, writer or producer. 

Now we have James Curtis’ “The Shape of Films to Come.” (416 p. Pantheon 2015) which tries to correct the omission. Curtis has put a lot of effort into the project, working with the surviving members of the Cameron Menzies family and delving into the print record. He even excerpted the fifty year old interview Chris Wicking and I did with Anthony Mann on Menzies’ work on 1949’s Reign of Terror/ The Black Book. 

It would have been nice if he’d asked permission and spelled my name right - but I digress.

This lands Curtis’ book with the familiar problem of secondary sources. He quotes the designer speaking about his 1931 The Spider where Edmund Lowe plays a stage illusionist. Menzies explained that he’d done the severed head effect without edits. Watching the film however you can see our man’s memory playing him false. There’s a jump cut with Lowe obscuring the substitution of a dummy for actress Manya Roberti. It’s the preceding levitation routine which strikingly appears to be one run of  the camera.

We don’t get the impression that Curtis has seen and absorbed Menzies’ films.  We need to read more about concepts that the designer developed, as he suggests with  the air crash in Lottery Bride as a first sketch for later films like Foreign Correspondent. How about his stacking the dancers vertically against the backcloth in Sidney Frankin’s 1925 Her Sister from Paris anticipating his way of showing the Communards in Reign of Terror? Half the fascination of studying Menzies’ career is in this. 

The Black Book's communards - spectacle on a budget. Note the tall windows and painter's circle of interest.

 

 

With his art and illustration training, Menzies saw the screen as a canvas. He would even change the shape of the image, putting a dark tree trunk down the side in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) or a sofa back across the bottom in Gone With the Wind (1938) and in Our Town (1940) he gives up all pretense of reality and just blacks out half the picture, as the drunken choir master goes through the streets at night. In the fifties, even in treadmill TV production, a Halls of Ivy episode he directed has the butler stand back to the camera, obscuring the right of the frame. Turning the camera on it’s side and filming actors lying on the papier maché rock covered floor in his 1951 Drums in the Deep South anticipates the wall climbing shots for TV Bat Man closing a circle begun when Bob Kane saw Menzies' work on Roland West's The Bat.

 

Not just staging screen action East-West, Menzies added North-South bringing characters in from the top of the frame - Tamiroff in his cave mouth introduction in Sam Wood’s For Whon the Bell Tolls or Robert Cummings on Wood’s Kings Row stile. The ship’s mast is lifted into frame from below in the storm in Wesley Ruggles’ 1929 Condemned. Menzies filmed stair cases square on, in the way that the books on movie design say should never be done - removing their dimensionality, so that characters on them appear to rise and fall in the image.

Making visual disorder reflect disorder in the characters is one of Menzies’ best numbers. In Lewis Milestone’s 1943 North Star the regular, parallel telegraph wires are turned into a confused tangle by Nazi bombs. There’s a brilliant piece of design in King’s Row with  lightning illuminating the brick pavement where tree roots have distorted the regular pattern. We see this only momentarily in the flashes, as Robert Cummings scurries along the street on his way to a liaison with a disturbed Betty Field, but it registers more vividly than many complete films.

Cummings & Nancy Coleman - Kings Row.

Curtis comes into his own on Kings Row detailing Menzies' extraordinary staging as a means of avoiding censorship hassles - the syringe or the smashed coffee pot.

It would have been interesting to have him discuss the influences that Menzies absorbed - Aubrey Beardsley, Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia in For Whom The Bell Tolls, the German “Expressionist” cinema with it’s shadows and silhouettes, which arrives via working at Fox in it’s post Murnau period.

The book follows the record of  its subject’s training with Anton Grot, later head of Warners’ art department, his association with Rudolph Valentino, the Talmadge Sisters and Ronald Colman or Douglas Fairbanks, peaking with The Thief of Bagdad, and with producers Joseph Schenck, Alexander Korda and Selznick and particularly with producer-director Wood (“a stand up fellow”) who is probably better documented here than any place else. The picture that emerges of the pair’s eight film collaboration is conflicted, with Menzies sometimes depicted as uneasy with the associate who was giving his talent it’s fullest expression.

Fairbanks - Raoul Walsh's Thief of Bagdad

We are now hearing the qualities of  Wood’s best films attributed to Menzies. David Kehr also asserted that recently - and Menzies did provide many of them. However no one points out that films that Wood made on his own (include Goodbye Mr. Chips and Kitty Foyle) are  far superior to the ones that Menzies made without Wood, like Wharf Angel or The Maze. Even Menzies’ celebrated Things To Come has self conscious players and bad eye lines.  It was Wood who understood film form, pacing, emphasis and performance to which he was able to add Menzies’ imagery to such effect.

Curtis misses out the aborted Victor Fleming - Spencer Tracy version of  The Yearling, which Menzies was in the process of designing, but he does lay out the extent of  Menzies’ undocumented associations with De Mille, Capra and with Hitchcock, going beyond the credited designing of the wind mill sequence in Foreign Correspondent. Menzies came up with the film’s umbrella assassination (the book has sketches) as well as him handling the burning of Manderlay in Rebeca and the Dali material in Spellbound

What does disappoint is the author’s unwillingness or inability to differentiate among Cameron Menzies uneven output. He speaks glowingly of  his slap dash 1953 Invaders From Mars, where one scene is included twice with the characters in different clothes, to get the piece up to length. (artist Jeffrey Smart liked that one too, seeing it by accident and being gobsmacked told it was the work of the maker of the Korda Things To Come)  The superiority of the Menzies’ 1949 Terribly Strange Bed (mute images timed out to Richard Greene’s reading of the Wilkie Collins story) to his other short films goes unnoticed.

All this belated interest has not exhausted the topic. Questions that Curtis might have cleared up are missing - the lack of any visible Menzies input into his director credited Howard Hughes B movie The Whip Hand? There’s no reference to the resentment among Hollywood colleagues to Menzies’ nailed down control - the ridiculed “arm pit shot” - which is actually a composition through William Holden’s elbow, in Our Town.  

Curtis is reluctant to comment on Menzies as the clown who wanted to play Hamlet. The greatest screen designer of his day and possibly all time, wanted to produce and direct, at which he was less than brilliant. Menzies had no real interest in what the actors were doing in his marvelous images. He traded working on some more of the most imposing films ever - for control of pot boiler B movies.

DVD of Menzies early sound shorts - note Joseph Swickard, co-director of Hell's Hinges in The Wizard's Apprentice (small left) and Paul Fix in Hungarian Rhapsody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know that I wanted to hear that the artist who showed the most masterful control of imagery in the cinema’s history had a drinking problem, was pottty mouthed and constantly menaced with unemployment and unwelcome projects. We can however be grateful to James Curtis for his book and his film seasons in Pordenone and New York, directing more attention to William Cameron Menzies than at any time since the designer’s death and probably during his life time.

     Charlotte Henry, the Duchess mask and Alison Skipworth in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland.

 

 

 

 

 

William Cameron Menzies filming The Shape of Things to Come