Happy Birthday, William Cameron Menzies! Born today in 1896, this American film production designer (a job title he invented), and art director as well as a film producer and director had a career spanning five decades.
Over time, he had earned acclaim for his work in silent film, and later pioneered the use of color in film for dramatic effect.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut to Scottish immigrant parents, originally from Scotland. Menzies, years later, studied at Yale and the University of Edinburgh.
Post-graduation and later serving in the United States Army during World War I, he attended the Art Students League of New York.
Menzies then joined Famous Players-Lasky (later to evolve into Paramount Pictures) working in special effects and design. He quickly established himself in Hollywood with his elaborate settings.
In 1923, he went independent to work with prominent directors of the period.
These included pioneering Canadian-born American motion picture director, producer, and screenwriter Allan Dwan ('Silver Lode'), American director and actor Raoul Walsh ('The Thief of Bagdad', 'High Sierra', 'White Heat') and American pioneer film actor, director and producer Fred Niblo.
Of these director's features, Menzies' most notable was working on Walsh's 1924 American silent black and white swashbuckler fantasy/adventure film 'The Thief of Bagdad'.
Menzies soon made a name for himself as one of the most individual and gifted of cinematic designers. His status was confirmed at the first-ever Academy Awards ceremony in mid-March 1929.
This was when he won Best Art Direction Oscar for the 1927 American silent black and white romantic drama film 'The Dove' and the 1928 American silent black and white romance drama film 'Tempest'.
In 1931, Menzies took up direction, and made half-a-dozen pictures - but always as co-director.
The American motion picture art director Lyle R. Wheeler, who worked with him later at 20th Century Fox, felt that Menzies was "no damn good as a director... He wanted to photograph ceilings and didn't give a damn what the actors were saying."
Menzies' first solo directing commission came in 1935, when Hungarian-born British film producer and director and screenwriter Alexander Korda invited him to Denham, Buckinghamshire, England. This was to direct a massively ambitious science fiction project.
This was the film of which Menzies is best known for directing, being the 1936 British black and white science fiction film 'Things to Come'.
It was also known in promotional material as 'H. G. Wells' Things to Come'. Korda, it seemed, hoped that Menzies would make up for Wells' lack of visual imagination.
Set in Christmas 1940, Everytown resident John Cabal (Raymond Massey) fears that war is imminent. When it breaks out, the war lasts for thirty years, destroying the city and ushering in a new dark age of plagues and petty despots.
However, there is hope in the form of Wings Over the World, a group of pacifist scientists and thinkers lead by Cabal.
Their dream is to build a utopian society on the ruins of the old. But first they'll have to unseat the latest ruling tyrant The Boss (Ralph Richardson).
The dialogue and plot were devised by English writer H. G. Wells as "a new story" meant to display the "social and political forces and possibilities".
He had outlined this from his 1933 science fiction novel The Shape of Things to Come, a work he considered less a novel than a "discussion" in fictional form that presented itself as the notes of a 22nd-century diplomat.
The film was also influenced by previous works, including his 1897 science fiction novella A Story of the Days to Come and his 1931 non-fiction novel The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, a work on society and economics.
In the event the easy-going Menzies found himself hamstrung and out of his depth. Wells took against him, describing him as "an incompetent director... a sort of Cecil B. de Mille without his imagination; his mind ran on loud machinery and crowd effects and he had no grasp of my ideas."
Nonetheless, 'Things to Come' was a science fiction film like no other, a prescient political work that predicts a century of turmoil and progress.
Skipping through time, the film bears witness to world war, disease, dictatorship, and, finally, utopia.
This megabudget production, the most ambitious ever from Korda’s London Films, is a triumph of imagination and technical audacity.
Back in America, Menzies wield much more influence as a “production designer” (a title American screenwriter and film studio executive producer David O. Selznick created for him).
This culminated in Menzies' monumental design of 'Gone with the Wind'. He was also the director of the burning of Atlanta sequence.
The following year, Menzies won an Academy Honor Award "for outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood" in the production of 'Gone with the Wind'. This occurred at the 12th Academy Awards in late February 1940.
In the 1940s, Menzies worked with directors like Alfred Hitchcock, American film director and stage actor Anthony Mann, and Sam Wood ('A Night at the Opera'), helping them to puzzle out complex compositional problems.
For Hitchcock, this was for the windmill interiors in his 1940 American black and white spy thriller/war film 'Foreign Correspondent'.
Menzies achieved his greatest results with Wood, effectively co-directing behind the camera while Wood dealt with the actors.
This was for his 1942 American black and white sports film 'The Pride of the Yankees', with Wood's opening credit card being shared with Menzies).
In the mid-1940s, Menzies also re-shot the Salvador Dali dream sequence of Hitchcock's 1945 American black and white psychological mystery thriller noir film 'Spellbound'.
In his 2015 biographical film criticism book William Cameron Menzies: The Shape of Films to Come, American biographer James Curtis examines Menzies’ work in depth, revealing him as a key figure in revolutionizing the look and technique of American motion picture production.
Martin Scorsese once said of him: “Menzies, the man who more or less invented the idea of production design in movies, [was] a genius, pure and simple, and his influence was incalculable.”
British educationalist and writer Christopher Frayling had called 'Things to Come' "a landmark in cinematic design".
Shortly after completing his work as an associate producer on the epic 1956 American Technicolor adventure comedy film 'Around the World in 80 Days', Menzies passed from cancer in Los Angeles, California on March 5, 1957. Menzies was 60.
Menzies set the Hollywood standard for designing sumptuous movie panoramas. In epics and fantasies, studios relied on his visual wizardry, whose prestige derived from his uncanny eye for film visuals.
As a director of his own films, Menzies' choices of subjects (espionage stories, science fiction, and horror stories) were frequently as idiosyncratic as his style, which often lent a dream-like--or nightmarish --unreality to his pictures.
Menzies had been active from 1924–1956.
#borntodirect
@Criterion
@tcm
@BFI
@SmithsonianAssociates
@filmforumnyc
@yourdictionary
@encyclopediacom
@Britannica
@Amazon
@tubi
No comments:
Post a Comment