character. Its exteriors based on some of the Case Study Houses and its interiors on the work of interior designer Billy Haines, the beach house was crammed with modernist furnishings, including a pair of Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs, their cushions remade in white by the studio’s upholstery shop.
By the 1950s, modernism was so mainstream that studios used it less to denote otherworldly luxury and fantasy than to let audiences know that the characters in a film were “with it.” Even when the setting of a story was traditional, modernist elements were often appended to films to make them look up-to-date. United Artists’ The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) was given modernist titles and poster art by Saul Bass, completely concealing the downscale settings of the movie until ticketbuyers saw the film itself. Bass (1920–96), who was also an industrial designer, became one of the most sought-after title designers in Hollywood; Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho and Spartacus (both 1960), and West Side Story (1961) are just some of the films that received the Bass “touch.”
Paramount went Bass one better with the main titles for 1957’s Funny Face, a musical set against the world of the fashion industry. Richard Avedon (1923–2004) was commissioned to shoot Harper’s Bazaar-style photos as backgrounds; the graphic style of the titles was based on the look of the magazine as it appeared during the reign of editor Carmel Snow (1887–1961), and owed much to the pioneering graphic work of the Bauhaus’s Herbert Bayer (1900–85).
Onscreen modernism reached its zenith in the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film North by Northwest. In addition to the Bass titles (imposed on a background of New York’s 1952 Lever House, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill), the film included a sequence set in the United Nations Building (1950), based on a concept by Le Corbusier (1887–1965). The 20th Century Limited luxury train, designed in 1938 by Henry Dreyfuss (1904–72) is seen, although with later changes not by Dreyfuss. The Mount Rushmore climax of the movie shows both the park’s visitor’s center, designed by Harold Spitznagel & Associates in 1957, and a Frank Lloyd Wright-style eyrie atop the monument for villain Phillip Vandamm, played by James Mason. Designed by Hitchcock’s favored production designer, Robert Boyle, the Vandamm House is one of the better Wright copies on film; its massing and detail are believable. Only the steel beams supporting its cantilever give it away; Wright would have insisted upon a true cantilever, as he did at Fallingwater.
While modernism continues to appear in movies, today it generally evokes the midcentury era. Only yesterday’s films show modernism as it was intended to be: the perfect backdrop for lives well-lived, the best of the future today and the promise of a tomorrow with endless possibilities.
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