MODERN SCREEN
By Sandy McLendon

For most lovers of classic movies, old films offer a look at fabled stars in timeless stories and glorious costumes. For viewers interested in modernist design, what’s behind the actors is often much more interesting.

For nearly a century, movies have used modernism’s evolving styles to give stories extra glamour. Modernist elements could tell an audience that characters were wealthy or unbound by tradition. Pitched to a mass audience, movie modernism was often different from the real thing, but it helped establish the style in the popular consciousness.

At first, modernist design was used in film largely for technical and financial reasons. Clean lines and high visual contrast rendered better than complex period styles on the film stocks used before the 1930s. And with modernism, it was unnecessary to meticulously — and expensively — research an historical period, or to purchase antique furnishings and architectural elements for sets. Modernism could be anything a moviemaker wanted it to be: the style was so new that few viewers could tell if what they saw was good or bad, real or imagined.

In the early 1920s, France led the way; Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886–1945) did art direction and set decoration for motion pictures, notably for 1924’s L’Inhumaine, released in 1926. Mallet-Stevens’s Cubist approach did not go unnoticed in the United States. Cedric Gibbons (1893–1960), the newly appointed art director of the recently formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, began to borrow from Mallet-Stevens, as indeed he borrowed from nearly every modernist architect and designer.

Not nearly so well-trained as his publicity hinted, Gibbons nonetheless “got” designing for the screen like nobody else. His Art Deco settings (often used as background for the most glittering, best-designed Deco object of all, Joan Crawford) generally contrast curvilinear elements with the straight lines and zigzags of the style. Gibbons established two traditions that became standard practice in Hollywood.

First, he organized a design library for MGM’s art department, containing books and periodicals from all over the world. Gibbons had difficulty designing the Emerald City for The Wizard of Oz (1939) because he felt that it required something never seen before. He eventually found inspiration in an obscure, pre-World War I periodical from Germany that had been sitting in the library for years; it was a tiny sketch that looked like an assemblage of inverted test tubes.

M-G-M’s luxurious modernism changed over the years. For 1932’s Grand Hotel, Gibbons created a Bauhausian Berlin hotel, with an atrium presaging the designs of architect John Portman 35 years later. The Bauhaus also inspired the Riviera Hotel seen in 1931’s Private Lives. By the time of Oz, versions of the widely-published Moderne designs for the 1939 New York World’s Fair were showing up on film, and it was clear in the ‘40s that someone at M-G-M was keeping up with a new architect named Morris Lapidus; 1942’s Her Cardboard Lover gave Norma Shearer a Palm Beach apartment house that would have been entirely at home in the real Florida ten years later.

Other studios had very different takes on modernism. RKO, the lowest budget of the major studios, used modernist sets to compete with the period pictures of better-heeled companies. The studio’s chief art director, Van Nest Polglase (1898-1968), was responsible for the overall look of the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movies, though Carroll Clark (1894-1968) did much of the actual design for the early films. Clark’s major contribution was the invention of what became known at RKO as the “BWS,” an acronym that stood for Big White Set.

The beauty of a BWS was that it was mostly empty space; only a few strong Deco or Moderne elements, such as staircases and columns, were needed, giving RKO lots of glamour on the cheap. The early Rogers and Astaire pictures used a BWS for nearly every dance number; more realistic sets representing exteriors were used later, as the films generated more revenue. Clark also gave Rogers and Astaire light, elegant Moderne interiors to act in; his emphasis on Venetian blinds in The Gay Divorcee (1934) made them a must-have for 1930s homeowners. Clark later became a renowned period specialist, with 1941’s Citizen Kane one of his best-known efforts.

At Warner Bros., modernism wasn’t quite so prized as at other studios. The company’s thrifty approach to Depression-era film-making was to set its stories in the seedy furnished rooms, boarding houses and factories with which audiences were personally familiar. But in its Busby Berkeley-directed musicals, Warner excelled in much the same kind of futuristic fantasy as RKO. In Gold Diggers of 1933, Berkeley used simple modernist stairs, bridges and platforms filled with chorus girls holding neon-outlined violins. Berkeley’s