The Furniture: "Mank", Crusader Against Tackiness

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on images for magnified detail)

Opulence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes things that are expensive are worse. This is the message of Mank.

Or, rather, a message. But much of the film’s impact does spring from an acknowledgement that it would be cost-prohibitive to replicate the colossal excesses of the real Hearst Castle. Production designer Donald Graham Burt is pretty clear about that in this short video feature about his work. So, rather than trying and failing, they did something different...

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The Furniture: A Centennial Tribute to Ken Adam and The Ipcress File

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on images for magnified detail)

Ken Adam in 1976. Photo © Deutchse Kinemathek

Today marks the centennial of legendary production designer Ken Adam, the artist responsible for some of the biggest film sets of the 20th century. The first that comes to mind for me is the supertanker in The Spy Who Loved Me, built on the world’s largest sound stage. Adam designed dozens of secret military facilities and hidden lairs for the seven James Bond films he worked on. But his most famous is probably the “War Room” from Dr. Strangelove, another vast interior  - and the reason he had to turn down From Russia with Love.

Adam’s legacy is intimately connected to these atomic fantasies, which continue to influence our collective memory of the Cold War...

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The Furniture: Promising Young Woman and Set Decoration as Weapon

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

The best part of Promising Young Woman, aside from Carey Mulligan’s performance, is the look. It’s refreshing to see a comedy with so striking a visual sensibility, a neon nihilism that leaps off the screen. It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever seen coffee shop decor that I could describe as “snide.”

The work put in by production designer Michael Perry, art director Liz Kloczkowski and set decorator Rae Deslich is remarkable. Promising Young Woman has such a heightened visual sensibility, occasionally its own plot seems surprisingly tame in comparison...

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The Furniture: The Elephant Man and an Interior City

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

There’s an image from The Elephant Man I can’t get out of my head. 

Well, there are a few. David Lynch and Freddie Francis didn’t exactly slouch here. But there’s one moment, quite early on, that struck me with its oddness. Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins) has snuck into the legally-tenuous circus of Mr. Bytes (Freddie Jones), just as the police are about to shut him down. The deeper one ventures, the strange the surroundings look. Here we see a cop navigating this temporary labyrinth of light and shadow...

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The Furniture: Death by Taste in The Talented Mr. Ripley

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

As we gear up for a Patricia Highsmith centennial, here’s a not-exactly-fun fact. Only one adaptation of her work has been nominated for Best Production Design at the Oscars: The Talented Mr. Ripley. (An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Carol had also been nominated for this award, as the author had unconsciously, but happily, written The Danish Girl out of his memory. Carol was nominated for costume design, not production design.)

Production design is central to Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of the first Ripley novel, given that so much of the plot hinges upon taste. The young Tom (Matt Damon) ingratiates himself to Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) with his self-trained taste in jazz. Freddie Miles’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) knowledge of his friend Dickie’s taste in furniture is what gets him killed. Ripley’s games of subterfuge and impersonation depend upon his understanding of style and class - and his own fluctuating taste in other people will lead him to the film’s violent end.

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