American Gigolo is a film that purposefully captivates from the brilliance of its look – clothing, interior decor, Beverly Hills shops, Palm Springs modern architecture.  This is the beautiful atmosphere and its inhabitants – or the ones that serve them. We are mesmerized by the lifestyle. This was especially true for those who saw it in 1980 – when its style was trendsetting. Yet for all its gloss, it is ultimately a story of tragedy, love, and redemption. Like the paradox of the film itself – it was influenced by classic literature, and in turn influenced modern fashion and taste.

Paul Schrader directed and wrote the screenplay for American Gigolo. Richard Gere played the lead role as Julian, costarring Lauren Hutton as Michelle. Schrader was influenced by the French director Robert Bresson, and especially Bresson’s film Pickpocket (1959), in making American Gigolo. Bresson was also a big influence on the French New Wave. Jean-Luc Godard reportedly viewed Pickpocket ten times. Bresson was in turn influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky and his novel of crime and redemption Crime and Punishment in the making of Pickpocket. The story elements of the novel center on a young man who believes that he alone can judge that he is above the law, and that for some people even murder is permissible if it is done for a higher purpose, which he soon commits. Ultimately, he is doggedly pursued by a detective, and is sent to a Siberian prison, followed there by a former prostitute who he has helped, and who in turn helps him to recover. Dostoevsky’s theme was the power of love and redemption. Thus did this theme find its way in the final scene of Pickpocket, when the imprisoned robber for the first time tenderly kisses Jeanne, a young woman he had previously scorned, from behind bars and says, “…to come to you, what strange journey have I had to take.”

Paul Schrader took the existential starkness that was the backdrop of Pickpocket and turned it on its head, creating in American Gigolo, a ravishing and enticing look. He wanted a European aesthetic, and so the overall look of the film was done by art director Ferdinando Scarfiotti. He could not receive art director credit since he was not a member of that guild. Scarfiotti had previously worked with Luchino Visconti on A Death in Venice. Richard Gere’s wardrobe was designed by the young and then unknown Giorgio Armani. He subsequently became famous as the men’s clothier in Hollywood and the Westside. The music was composed by electronic dance music innovator Giorgio Maroder, with the opening song Call Me by Debbie Harry and Blondie subsequently becoming a mega hit.

 

 

The movie’s setting was Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Palm Springs – providing the rich background from  which the lead actor could ply his particular trade as a gigolo.  American Gigolo was very much ahead of its time, yet it was stereotypical in its depiction of gays, which the main character Julian calls “fags.” Julian glides with ease through the moneyed class and its social haunts in L.A.’s West Side. As the film title suggests, he is a high-class male prostitute. The film opens as he drives down PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) in his Mercedes-Benz 450SL to the sounds of Call Me, on his way to his tailors in Beverly Hills. He visits the woman who pimps him, haggling over her percentage of his $1000 fee. When he enters his stylish apartment and goes through his exercise routines while learning Swedish and gazing at himself in the mirror, we are meant to disdain his narcissism and shallowness. The interior of Julian’s apartment displays a spare but rich beauty. Its colors are muted: grays, taupes, rust, and browns, with occasional blues. These colors are also the tones of Julian’s wardrobe.

Julian gets a call to sub as a chauffeur for a rich middle-aged woman. He takes on the job and fulfills her every requirement. When he leaves her hotel room, he switches jackets at the coat check and goes to the bar to see what other business he can pick up. He sees a beautiful woman. She is played by model Lauren Hutten. She sits alone, speaking in French to the waiter. Julian introduces himself and asks her in French if he can sit at her table and have a drink. When she summons the waiter in English, they both laugh and begin talking in English, entering a conversation that leads to the discovery of his motive as a “guide” or “escort”, and possibly her motive as well. “How many languages do you speak?” she asks. “Five or six” he replies. “Plus the international one,” she smirks. “That’s right.” he says. Although she is  obviously interested in him, this awkward meeting degenerates further until he walks away.

The following day Julian continues his routines as escort and prostitute. His other pimp Leon sends him to Palm Springs to a beautifully decorated moderne-style house where Julian walks into an unsuspecting S&M assignment with a wife and her observing husband. Julian tries to put the woman at ease while her abusive husband gives orders.

Julian is always perfectly dressed for every occasion, whether in casual designer jeans and fitted shirt, or jackets, slacks, and ties. Armani designed Gere’s wardrobe, and it created a sensation in men’s clothing in the U.S. Armani used quality Italian wool for Gere’s slacks, with wool, wool and cashmere, or linen jackets. The famous scene of Richard Gere doing coke, singing along to Smokey Robinson’s “The Love I Saw in You Is Just a Mirage,” while laying out several matched wardrobe options on his bed is unparalleled in men’s fashion in film. With all of his wardrobe possibilities, he selects slacks, shirt, tie, and jacket combinations that are very muted in tone and with only slight color variations from each other. Finally, he dresses and its near midnight and he’s going out, but then he gets a ring that he has a visitor, “a friend.” It’s Michelle, who he met at the restaurant/bar. She is humble, asking, what does she have to do to have him? Why can’t she have what other women have, what other women pay for? She can pay also. He sees her yearning. She stays. They make love. Julian now enters into a different kind of relationship with a woman from high society.

The first crack in Julian’s carefully laid foundation appears with Detective Sunday, played by Hector Elizondo, the analog of Porfiry Petrovich in Crime and Punishment.  This dissonance is manifested by Sunday’s poor taste in clothes, an appearance which allows Julian to assume an air of superiority, while underestimating Sunday’s intelligence. Julian is suspected of murdering the wife of the Palm Springs couple. In another encounter with the detective, Julian states his point of view, “what is legal is not always right,” he says, “and some people are above the law.” Here we see the same philosophy as expressed by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, and by Michel in Pickpocket. And in each case, they are pursued by a detective that is not so much brilliant but is there to mirror their guilt and to doggedly pursue them until they succeed.

Meanwhile, Michelle still pursues Julian, and she reveals that she is the unhappy wife of Senator Stratton who is on the campaign trail. Julian has fallen from his pedestal, and he has now fallen for Michelle. When he goes to visit the senator to tell him that Michelle loves him, he no   longer wears earth tones, but a serious black suit. The senator offers him money to leave his wife alone. Julian tells him he can keep his money. The senator tells him nobody in society will have anything more to do with him.

Julian’s world crumbles. The police are looking to arrest him for murder. He’s been framed for a murder he didn’t commit. His apartment was first searched (further echoes of Crime and Punishment and         Pickpocket) and evidence was later planted in his car. He can no longer use either. Instead of the posh streets of Beverly Hills, he cruises the seedier parts of Hollywood in a cheap rented car. He tries to get an alibi from Leon but it’s Leon that admits that it was he who framed him. “Why Julian asks?” “Because you were frameable. Nobody cared about you,” Leon answers.  And then when Leon goes out on the terrace – Julian pushes him off in a rage over the railing – only to try unsuccessfully to save him before he plunges to his death.

One by one all his society ladies shun him, even the one that could provide the real alibi. There is only Michelle that stands by him, even as he is arrested and is prosecuted. From the heights of narcissism and self-confidence, Julian is now filled with self-loathing and despair, urging her to leave him alone.

Michelle keeps up her visits to Julian in prison. She is paying for his defense, and burning the bridges to her own connections with high society. She tells Julian that she explained to the prosecutor that he was with her on the night of the murder. “My God Michelle, ” Julian says, echoing the last line of the last scene in Pickpocket, “It’s taken me so long to come to you.”

 

 

A version of this post first appeared ten years ago this month in my now defunct blog Silver Screen Modiste. Since then, a sequel to American Gigolo was serialized on Showtime in 2022 starring Jon Bernthal, Gretchen Mol, and Rosie O’Donnell. Crime and Punishment was produced as a film starring Peter Lorre and directed by Josef von Sternberg in 1935, in what has to be Lorre’s only normal leading role. Other film adaptations of the book have appeared subsequently. American Gigolo (1980) is now playing regularly on cable station Showtime.

 

 

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Designing Hollywood: Studio Wardrobe in the Golden Age is my new book published by the University Press of Kentucky. It grew out of several of my blog posts over the last few years covering the Hollywood studio’s wardrobe departments, their costume designers, and the movie stars they dressed. Fellow CMBA blogger Patricia Schneider first gave me the idea to develop these blogs into a book. Now after three years – from post to press with lots of hurdles in between – this coming August the work will be released.

The subject of Hollywood costume design during the “Golden Age” is one part of a continuing spectrum. My book actually covers the period from the beginning of the Hollywood studios to the end of the studio system, or from about 1912 through 1970. Costume designing is still happening today with great results, only the work is not being done within the studios. The studios and their wardrobe departments are covered here in chronological order by their start, beginning with: Universal, Fox/20th Century-Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros.,  M-G-M, Columbia, and RKO.  Within each of their chapters is covered the studio’s history in brief, the costume designers that worked there and the stars they dressed – and in many cases created the images for, and the important films that were produced. The films within the chapters are described chronologically.

In the earliest days of the Hollywood studios – the decade of the 1910s – actors usually came to the set in their own clothes, unless the film had a period setting. In the latter case, the studios usually rented costumes from Hollywood’s venerable Western Costume Company.  But as actors became popular household names, they demanded a wardrobe commensurate with their status. And not long after that, the studios realized that the largely female audience was attracted to the fashions the stars wore on screen. Moreover, the costume designers themselves were becoming popular names, especially after studio publicity linked their names with the names of the stars they dressed, and the advice they gave to women on their own wardrobes.

Cecilia Evans appears above in Dressmaker from Paris, 1925. Paramount brought in Travis Banton from New York to design the costumes for this film and its fashion show.  He became head designer not long after and created the look of glamour for Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, and Carole Lombard.

M-G-M had lured the Russian-French designer Erté  to its studio in 1925 to design costumes, capitalizing on his celebrity status.  Erté did not last long at M-G-M.  Gilbert Adrian (Adrian) soon took over as head designer and created international fashion trends with his broad-shouldered look for Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and even the Wizard of Oz. Between Adrian and Travis Banton, they virtually created the look of modern glamour. Warner Bros. had George Orry-Kelly, an Australian who had been designing revue shows in New York and roomed with Cary Grant. He became Bette Davis’ regular costume designer. Walter Plunkett at RKO designed the early look for the dance gowns of Ginger Rogers. At 20^th Century-Fox, William Travilla designed Marilyn Monroe’s famous dresses. Elizabeth Taylor first became a teenage idol at M-G-M with Helen Rose designing her look, as Jean Louis did for Rita Hayworth as Gilda  at Columbia.

 

The above photo shows embroiderers working  on a costume for Romeo and Juliet (1936) in the M-G-M wardrobe department. Note the hand-embroidered sleeve of the lady on the right.

In addition to the famous designers of the Golden Age, the other designers that worked in the studios are covered as well. These range from very early costume designers such as George James Hopkins who designed Theda Bara’s costumes in films like Cleopatra (1917) at Fox,  or Vera West who designed the costumes for women in Dracula (1931), and for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) at Universal, going on to less monsterly movies with a killer dress for Ava Gardner in The Killers opposite Burt Lancaster (1946). Also at Universal was designer Yvonne Wood, shown below at left, with Ella Raines for the film The Web, (1947).

Some  less well-known costume designers are Renié (Conley) who started her career as a sketch artist at M-G-M in the late 1920s, designing her last movie Body Heat in 1982 and a TV mini-series in 1985 – a career almost as long as Edith Head’s. Or Edward Stevenson, who began as a sketch artist at M-G-M and later became the costume designer at First National Pictures, and Columbia’s first regular designer. He spent most of hist career at RKO where among many other films he designed costumes for Out of the Past, It’s a Wonderful Life,  Suspicion, and Citizen Kane. He went on to design for Lucille Ball in her TV series I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show.. Edward Stevenson had also worked at RKO with Bernard Newman, a favorite designer of Ginger Rogers.

Designing Hollywood: Studio Wardrobe in the Golden Age  also covers the workings of the artisans that fabricated all the costumes for the films, whether for the glamorous or for biblical epics, for Western films or for characters playing the poor.  Many of their methods are revealed. And the behind-the-scenes- stories that bring the era to life are peppered throughout the book.

 

Along with the dramatic black and white star studio photographs, the book is supplemented with color photos of original costume design drawings. Below is a costume design by Helen Rose for Elizabeth Taylor for The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954).

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Modern fashion shows often link to the glamour of old Hollywood movies. Important designers get movie stars to attend them. Fashion shows are produced with high entertainment and production values, and designers wage  campaigns to have stars wear their gowns at major Hollywood award shows. Once upon a time Hollywood put fashion shows right in their movies. The early studio moguls promoted both their films and their movie stars along with the costume designers that created their looks. It wasn’t long after the birth of the major studios that their newly created stars began influencing how young women wanted to look. The clothes that stars wore and how they wore them quickly became a hot topic by the mid-1920s. The hugely popular movie fan magazines became filled with reports on what fashions the stars wore in their latest movie, and the names of the costume designers that dressed them. While Parisian couture designers were well known to a select group of rich women, it was Hollywood that reached the masses – in America as well as abroad. If the modern woman of the 1920s was fascinated with movie fashion, why not give them a fashion show within the movies? And so, by 1925 film scripts were developed that involved characters working in the fashion or clothing business, or stars that were mannequins (as models were then called), or if they had really become successful in the plot, viewed fashion shows to select their own wardrobe. Thus was born the earliest film fashion shows, created by the studios’ own costume designers

Model Cecilia Evan wears a fringed dress in Dressmaker from Paris above designed by Travis Banton

One of the first fashion shows in film was Dressmaker from Paris, made at Paramount studio in 1925 and featuring the first movie costume designs by Travis Banton. Banton was lured from New York by film producer Walter Wanger. Banton had been working for the fashion house of Madame Frances. Paramount already had a great designer in Howard Greer, but Greer needed some help with the increasing number of films he had to design, and he was looking forward to starting his own fashion business. Banton made an immediate splash with his first movie, and from there his career took off. In 1925 the major studios suddenly became very competitive in luring new designers and thereby extracting maximum publicity. M-G-M itself grandly announced it was bringing Erté from France and putting him under contract.

Dorothy Seastrom plays one of the models, wearing a gown of satin with fur trim and capelet.

Dorothy Seastrom wears a Banton iridescent gown with the extra long string of pearls so in style in the 1920s.

Dressmaker from Paris was directed by Paul Bern and starred Leatrice Joy. It was surprisingly written by Howard Hawks, the director of later action films. Leatrice Joy played a fashion apprentice in Paris who returns to America as a modiste (a maker or shop owner of fashion garments) . Her old beau from Paris, a former American WW I aviator, is a part-owner of a clothing store. To promote the store and create some pizazz, he brings in a modiste from Chicago, who unbeknownst to him is Leatrice Joy his old flame, playing the role of Fifi. With a scenario firmly set in the fashion world, a fashion show was the next step. The film’s fashion show  involved fourteen beautiful Travis Banton designs on models. From then on, Parisian couturiers and their designs were no longer necessary to sell or influence American fashion. Paramount went so far as to state in its promotion for the film, “for the first time anywhere the 1926 Paris fashions.”

Gilbert Adrian was also lured from New York, where he had been designing for the Broadway revues. He was then hired to work  for Natasha Rambova and Rudolph Valentino, designing Valentino’s costumes for Paramount’s New York based films before moving with them to Hollywood. Adrian designed the costumes for Valentino’s last film, Son of the Sheik in 1926, after which Valentino suddenly died. It wasn’t long before several free-lance jobs were offered to Adrian, but he was hired by Cecil B. DeMille. Corinne Griffith had previously hired him to design her costumes and a fashion show scene for Mademoiselle Modiste released in 1926, a movie based on the Victor Herbert operetta. In this story Corinne Griffith, playing another Fifi, is sponsored by a wealthy man and opens a modiste’s shop. This serves as the prompt for many great costumes and a fashion show. Adrian used a theme of storms for the fashion show scene, with fashion creations based on storms, clouds, and lightening.

Corinne Griffith not only starred in Mademoiselle Modiste, she was also the movie’s producer, which was directed by Robert Z. Leonard.

Bernice Claire is hailed by French soldiers in Mlle. Modiste

Adrian also designed the costumes and a fashion show scene for Fig Leaves in 1926. This was based on another script by Howard Hawks, but was also directed by him. It is the earliest extent film directed by Hawks. And it’s a seeming contradiction to the manly type of film Hawks would be best remembered for

Olive Borden is shown above among the models in Fig Leaves

Fig Leaves starred Olive Borden and George O’Brien who played husband and wife. When Olive complains she has nothing to wear, her best friend suggests she get a job as a fashion model. This set up an eight-minute-long fashion show scene that was shot in two-strip Technicolor, a novelty in 1926. It was thus a precursor to Adrian’s The Women with its Technicolor fashion show in 1939. Adrian designed fifty costumes for Fig Leaves.

Olive Borden is shown above amidst the models and staff of the fashion store. The movie was made at the Fox studio. It was one of the early Hollywood movies to use Art Deco sets. The art directors for the film were the legendary William Cameron Menzies and the Hungarian William S. Darling. The striking Art Deco sets launched the trend for such sets as background for modern fashion shows on film.

 

In 1930 some of the biggest stars were still in their formative years, these included Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, Carole Lombard, Marion Davies, Jean Harlow, and others. Adrian was hired at M-G-M after C.B. DeMille had moved his production company there. Joan Crawford had already become a big star, and paired with Adrian, was starting fashion trends across the country. In Our Blushing Brides, released in 1930, the biggest fashion show yet seen on film was incorporated into the plot.

The gowns fashion show, with Joan Crawford at the center

The leisure wear show, designed by Adrian

Our Blushing Brides was made during the pre-Code years, when plot elements and wardrobe were more permissible. Joan Crawford, shown above, also modelled lingerie in the the fashion show.

Joan Crawford played one of three friends working in a department store, chasing or being chased by rich men. The two friends were played by Anita Page and Dorothy Sebastian. Joan also models in the store’s fashion shows – lavish theatrical numbers well beyond the production capabilities of even the biggest couturiers of the era. Ann Dvorak, then 18 years old, played one of the models.

Motion picture technology was not the only thing that had changed significantly between 1925 and 1930. The Great Depression had begun, and the need for escapism in film was dominant. Gone was the flapper look by 1929, and the high jinx of the jazz age. In fashion, short skirts and handkerchief hemlines had been replaced by long, sleek, and backless gowns in 1930.

Several other notable films from the 1920s had fashion shows. The 1926 Irene starred Colleen Moore, the flapper par excellence with the notable bobbed hair style. This First National film had Moore moving into New York and becoming a model, and it too featured a fashion shoe in two-strip technicolor. The costumes for Moore were designed by Broadway show designer Cora MacCreachy.

 

Colleen Moore is dressed in the above two photos  by “Madame Lucy,” the designer, played by George K. Arthur.

 

Three other films with fashion shows were Miss Brewster’s Millions,  from 1926, starring Bebe Daniels and Warner Baxter.  Monte Carlo which also came out in 1926, starring Gertrude Olmstead and directed by Christy Cabanne. And Three French Girls, with Fifi D’Orsay, Yola d’Avril, and Sandra Ravel, all dressed by René Hubert, M-G-M, 1930.

The Fox studio made another film in 1930 with the lead role being a modiste, in this case it was Irene Rich playing Julianne and her chic 5th Avenue clothes boutique in On Your Back. H.B. Warner stars in the film, along with Ilka Chase. The boutique has several attractive models that not only show the latest fashions but also lure men to the premises. While the film title shortens the expression, The Clothes On Your Back, its double entendre in this Pre-Code era conveys how the models really made money. The costumes were designed by Sophie Wachner

The field day that Hollywood was having with its attention-grabbing film fashions had a hiccup in 1929-1930. The Parisian couture house of Lucien Lelong came out with the long evening gown and instantly made shorter skirts passé. Since movies, even during the fast-paced 1930s studio system, took several months to make, from first fashion sketch to theatrical release, a new fashion trend could catch movies off-guard. This happened when the long gowns came out at the end of 1929. While film fashion shows and the influence of Hollywood fashion continued its onslaught, the movie moguls and costume designers decided to concentrate on a look of timeless fashion and not be caught with a fashion statement that would look dated by the time the movie came out. The result was the creation of the glamour gown, a look that is timeless and still intoxicating.

 

Fashions for Women was the first film totally directed by Dorothy Arzner, the pioneer woman director. It starred Esther Ralston and was released in 1927. It was made at Paramount Pictures.

 

Fashions for Women  featured the costume designing of the brilliant Travis Banton. The fashions in this movie are eye-popping examples of the 1920s look combined with the emergence of Hollywood glamour that Banton and Adrian were creating at the time. Above Banton dressed Ralston with strap shoes and lamé tunic top with its modernist floral design making a perfect 1920s outfit, complete with its simple loose pants and sash-tied waist

 

It is clear from the high quality of the costumes and the fabrics used for their fabrication that Adolph Zukor of Famous Players/Paramount style family was counting on the appeal of the fashions and the film’s fashion show to draw attention and get female viewers into the theaters. In those days, female viewers were credited with making most of the decision which film to go see. The fullness of the ostrich feather skirt and wrap is contrasted beautifully with the tightly-fitted diaphanous gown. The costume foreshadowed the Bernard Newman gown worn by Ginger Rogers in Top Hat.

In the photo above Ralston is shown wearing an extravagant gown with dolman sleeves and a tightly draped lamé fabric.

The basic story of Fashions for Women according to the American Film Institute’s catalog is about Céleste de Givray, whose social success is the result of the audacity of her press agent, Sam Dupont, is persuaded to retreat from public life and to have her face lifted. Lola Dauvry, a cigarette girl at the Café Pierre, who loves Raoul de Bercy, a former aviator, is hired by Sam to pose as the new Céleste in a fashion show while Raoul is hired as Céleste’s private aviator. While Raoul is waiting for Lola at Céleste’s apartment, the Duke of Arles, one of Céleste’s sweethearts, arrives; in despair, Lola begs Sam to inform Raoul of her identity, but he refuses. At the fashion show, Céleste appears and declares Lola an impostor, but the latter is declared “the best dressed woman” by the judges.  Raoul, realizing that Lola has been faithful, returns to her at the café and they are happily reunited.

Esther Ralston was a big star in the 1920s, she was often called the “American Venus” after a role she played in the movie of the same title. She was clearly a great beauty with an attractive figure that she showed off generously. She is shown above in an embroidered velvet gown with a see-through embroidered wrap trimmed in fur. It was Banton’s habit to state, “When in doubt, trim in fur.

Fashions for Women has an incredible wardrobe designed by Travis Banton. It raised the bar for future fashions shows on film. It also demonstrated that fashion helped sell movie tickets in the 1920s. It set the stage for more and more competition amongst the studios for top costume and fashion designers, and the publicity that resulted from film fashion. We will see in later blog posts how fashion shows further evolved in film.

 

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An American in Paris was made in 1951 at the very peak of the Hollywood studio system and the pinnacle of Gene Kelly’s artistic career. It was the perfect combination of art, dance, music and costumes in classic American movie-making.  M-G-M had among its employees all the veteran craftspeople and artists that could produce such a film. And as with many great movies, the back-story is as fascinating as the movie itself. In 1950 as the first plans were being made for the film, M-G-M, and indeed the entire Hollywood film industry was in transition. Television was siphoning off viewers and a court-imposed consent decree required studios to sell off their movie theaters. Cost-cutting was now the mantra, and M-G-M’s expensive musicals were not viewed favorably by its new production head Dore Schary, nor by the corporate offices at Loew’s in New York. The old lion Louis B. Mayer, still in charge of studio operations, supported musicals and the planned An American in Paris, but it took a lot of pleading and persuasive pitches to gain the approval of Schary. And even more for Loew’s corporate head Nick Schenck and his board. And there was still the threat of budget cuts to the entire production.

This blog post id part of the M-G-M Blogathon hosted by  the Metzinger Sisters ( Diana & Constance )  at the Silver Scenes Blog

Arthur Freed was the producer of An American in Paris, and he wanted Vincente Minnelli to direct and Gene Kelly to star and choreograph the film.  Minnelli and Kelly worked very well together and respected each other’s artistic talents. One of the big challenges for the film was the proposed 17 minute-long, wordless ballet and dance sequence (called the “ballet” in the film’s production). The ballet sequence was heavily influenced by The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s marvelous film with its own 15-minute-long ballet scene. And it was not just that The Red Shoes’ filmed ballet scenes had influenced the ballet sequence in An American in Paris, but also that both films’ ballet sequence had as themes the visual depiction of the principal dancer’s interior conflicts and subjective emotions. To his credit, Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris used this influence to produce a complex and deeply artistic film sequence of his own. And Gene Kelly brought to life the character that was an American in Paris – through his acting, choreography, and his unique dancing skills – the movie that became his favorite.

Other than Gene Kelly, the question of who should be cast for An American in Paris was not apparent. While M-G-M had several great female dancers, Kelly was convinced that a fresh faced and a native Frenchwoman should be cast as Lise Bouvier. And for that role he had seen a 19-year-old French ballerina named Leslie Caron that he wanted for the part. This too was a risky move – a major role for a young woman who had never acted.

In continuing with the relatively unknown cast members, Georges Guetary, a French Music Hall singer, was cast as Henri Baurel. For the fellow American expat and starving musician-neighbor, the inspired choice was the concert pianist and wit Oscar Levant, playing the role of Adam Cook.

The decision by Freed, Minnelli and Gene Kelly to include a 17-minute-long dance sequence was bold and risky. Regardless of the success of The Red Shoes, nothing of that scope had been done in an American film. Further, the ballet was to be a realization on film of the artistic works of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. This feature would not only guide the nature of the choreography, but would also be the theme of the set designs, cinematography, action sequences, and costumes. The ballet scene would be the heart and soul of the film. The music would be based on the haunting score of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris symphony, with the story for the film by Alan Jay Lerner. Minnelli convinced Broadway stage costume designer Irene Sharaff to come back from New York to design some 300 costumes for the ballet. She was able to envision a wider role of costume to the total look of the production and to have an additional role for costume as the transition from one scene to the next. While working on the costumes, Sharaff also started designing sketches for what the sets might look like for the various artist-inspired scenes. These sketches in fact were adapted by art director Preston Ames for the sets, which Ames, a former architecture student in Paris, could quickly envision. The sets would be based on the styles of Raoul Dufy; Henri Rousseau; Pierre Auguste Renoir; Maurice Utrillo; Vincent Van Gogh; and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Not a bad set of artists from which to draw inspiration. But how would the ballet transition from one artist-styled set to the next?

Those transitions indeed became a high-point in Hollywood film arts and crafts. Some 30 painters worked six weeks to paint the backgrounds and sets. Irene Sharaff also came up with the idea of using certain dancers, characters she called Furies (based on Greek mythology) for the women and Pompiers for the men. The Furies were dressed all in red ballet outfits and the Pompiers were dressed as traditional French firemen, with their brass helmets but also adorned in a military-inspired costume. Together they served as the “bridge” from one scene to the next, luring Kelly as Jerry Mulligan to pursue the ever-escaping Caron as Lise Bouvier. These transitions were also accomplished by using a “match-cutting” filming technique whereby the action of the dancer is exactly matched from the end of one scene to the beginning of the next. “There was an air of excitement and expectation among all of us working on the ballet which I have rarely felt in a production before or after,” Sharaff said about An American in Paris.

As the film opens, each character as played by Gene Kelly, Oscar Levant and Georges Guetary narrates that the happy characters depicted on screen, “are not me.” Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan is a struggling artist that stayed in Paris after WWII. He sells his paintings (sometimes) on a street in Montmartre, where a rich widow discovers him and decides to support him (with strings attached). Oscar Levant as Adam Cook is a struggling pianist, the “oldest former child prodigy.” In a very clever later scene Levant as Cook fantasizes about playing in a symphony, which he is also shown conducting while simultaneously playing several instruments. This take-off of the Buster Keaton film The Play House (1921) is still funny, especially since Levant being the only one that truly appreciates himself, also fills the audience with a hall full of himselves. Georges Guetary as Henri Baurel is the successful singer and entertainer, now worrying about getting older, but providing the yet unknown rival for the love of Lise. His singing performance of “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise”, in classic Hollywood show-girls-down-the-stairs style, is a highlight of the movie.

A later dual number of Kelly and Guetary in “S’Wonderful,” where they are still ignorant of their rivalry, is pure joy. Kelly as Jerry Mulligan is deeply in love with Caron as Lise Bouvier, made obvious in the “Our Love is Here to Stay” number, their song and dance on the banks of the Seine, here amazingly duplicated on a painted set built around one of those old M-G-M “cycloramas” is pure joy. Another scene provides laughs as the knowing Levant, sitting between Jerry and Henri while they each describe Lise and how much they love her, oblivious of each other’s common object of affection, nervously smokes two cigarettes at once and chugs several coffees and whiskies.

A later scene is the wild Beaux Arts “Black & White” Ball, here providing a stark contrast to the disintegrating relationships of the two couples: Jerry Mulligan with patroness Milo (Nina Foch), and Henri with Lise. Henri even overhears Jerry and Lise’s tender, heart-breaking exchanges.

Forlorn, Jerry realizes he is just a failed artist, a stranger in a strange land. The ballet scene begins with Jerry sketching the Cheveaux de Marly, the sculpted horses flanking the Champs Elysees. He enters that sketched scene which is his ballet dream, the love of Lise symbolized by a fallen red rose. The ballet sequence will put to music and art all his hopes and fears, as he continually pursues Lise through various sets.

 

The opening scene in the style of Raoul Dufy’s Place de la Concorde, becoming Jerry’s dream world.

The Furies, dressed in white and then red, beckon Jerry to pursue Lise. He is dressed simply in form-fitting clothes, the better to appreciate his dancing and his physique.

The white furies turn to more intense red furies.

The fountain at the Place de la Concorde serves as the dream dance floor to a united Jerry and Lise, dancing to George Gershwin’s exhilarating and romantic An American in Paris symphonic poem.

Jerry pursues Lise to the floral backdrop inspired by Pierre Auguste Renoir, and as they dance, they hold the red rose of love.

Alas, even in dreams our dreams escape us. Lise has been transformed into flowers, soon to fall from his grasp.

The background has now turned into the melancholy monochromatic artwork of Maurice Utrillo. Gershwin’s music is also changing to American jazz-inspired melodies.

Jerry becomes homesick, as had Gershwin in Paris, which inspired him to add the sounds of American blues and jazz into his musical composition.

Jerry’s homesickness is symbolized by his former side-kicks, the U.S. military men shown in the scene. They are not quite tangible, the artist’s paint still fresh on their uniforms.

The scene turns to the artwork of Henri Rousseau: primitive; wild; and exuberant. Jerry’s service-men are now dressed in cheerful suits, as is he, with the Pompiers now leading them forward in dance. And now Lise reappears.

Here we now enter the more turbulent world of Vincent Van Gogh, the skies of the backdrops painted in swirled colors. The Place de la Concorde again provides the setting for the romantic and sexy dance of Jerry and Lise. The dance transforms into the climax, one of the most beautiful scenes in movie history – a perfect blend of music, dance, romance and art.

But still the Furies beckon, transforming from red to many shades of yellow and orange.

The setting now changes to the nocturnal and hallucinatory world of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

And now Jerry himself is transformed into one of Lautrec’s painted portraits, a black stage dancer named Chocolat. (here seen with Lise below).

This final ballet scene is the most exuberant yet, and Gene Kelly provides one of his best dance numbers, a masterpiece of choreography, dance, and art. In this cheerful dance he is joined by his dream Lise, taking on the historical dance-hall character of Jane Avril, another Lautrec favorite.

Deep from his dream he begins to wake, only to realize that Lise is once again just a rose, and his colorful dream-setting turns black and white.

Only this dream turns into his real dream, and Lise returns, running up the stairs of the real (set) stairs of Montmartre. The final kiss says it all, our love is here to stay.

The film ends with a title card stating: Made in Hollywood, California. And so it was, where it also received 8 Academy Award nominations and won 6, though none for Minnelli. It won for Best Costume Design for Irene Sharaff, Orry-Kelly and Walter Plunkett. Yet Walter Plunkett, who designed the costumes for the Black & White Ball scene, must have found it ironic, he who had designed Gone With the Wind, the two Little Women (and the subsequent Singing in the Rain, Diane, Raintree County), among scores of others.  This would be his only Oscar, given for a relatively minor designing job.

Today it’s Singing in the Rain that is the crowd favorite and receives the “best musical ever made” accolades. No doubt that Singing in the Rain is the most cheerful and fun movie there is to watch, and the dancing is also outstanding. An American in Paris seems to be considered somehow less worthy because it strove to be art. But there is no more beautiful film ever made, and its integrated combination of music, dance, art, costume, and cinematography is the pinnacle of classic Hollywood film, and a proud achievement of the M-G-M Studio.

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The now classic Somewhere in Time was released in 1980 in the midst of a  Screen Actors Guild strike. Although the movie starred Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymore, they were barred from promoting the film due to the strike. Along with negative movie reviews at its opening, the film quickly sank in obscurity until its revival in later years on cable television.

This post is part of the Classic Movie Blog Association “Fun in the Sun” Blogathon, May 17-20, 2022. 

Somewhere in Time was directed for Universal Pictures by Jeannot Szwarc. It is based on Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return. The late Matheson was a well known writer of fantasy and science fiction books and stories such as I Am Legend and The Omega Man.  He also wrote the teleplays for many episodes of the Twilight Zone –  including classics such as Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, Death Ship, and Nick of Time (the diner with the fortune-telling machine). The romantic Bid Time Return’s idea came to him when he saw a striking photograph of the early 1900s actress Maude Adams. He then spent several weeks at the 1887-built Hotel del Coronado and developed the plot for the story of a modern man crossing an emotional path with history based on such a photograph.

But rather than being filmed at the Hotel del Coronado, an old hotel modernized to keep up with tourism and conventions, the  Grand Hotel on the lakefront of Michigan’s Mackinac Island was chosen. This remote site on Lake Huron  did not even allow cars. Permission had to be secured for specific filming times when cars needed to be in the story.

The costume designer chosen for the film was Jean-Pierre  Dorléac.  He was well known for his Battlestar Galactica series (where he had previously worked with Jane Seymour) and the later Quantum Leap series. In preparing for designing Somewhere in Time, he suggested to the  producer and director that the costumes for women would be less confining in the pre-World-War I period than in the original story’s 1896 period when Richard and Elise meet back in time.  Producer Stephen Deutsch and director Jeannot Szwarc liked the idea and moved that setting to 1912. Dorléac  designed the men’s costumes as well, with Reeve’s period costume being purposefully out of date since he purchased it at an Antique Store in his preparations to go back in time. Dorléac was also able to add a very special touch to Jane Seymore’s costume. Knowing that he was searching for a special piece of jewelry, his friend Edith Head gifted him one of her own vintage pieces — a cut-crystal necklace that had belonged the stage actress Ethel Jackson and worn when she played The Merry Widow in 1907. Each stone was faceted differently and glistened brightly. Now that he had this key piece in hand he scouted a vintage clothing bazaar to find the dealer who would supply him with over $5000 in vintage lace.

Christopher Plummer joined the cast as the manipulative manager of Elise/Jane Seymore. Susan French played the older Elise and Teresa Wright played her companion and aide.

The movie starts in contemporary time at a party where Reeve/Richard is celebrating the performance of his first play. In the crowd an elderly woman approaches him, hands him a pocket watch and whispers, “Come back to me.” She returns to her room at the Grand Hotel in Mackinac and listens to a record of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” while reclining on her rocking chair.  Years later in Chicago after Richard and his girlfriend break-up, he drives off aimlessly but decides to visit the Grand Hotel. There he decides to spend the night, and visits the hotel’s history room, where he becomes entranced by the vintage photograph of a beautiful young woman. The bellhop informs him that she was Elise McKenna, a famous stage actress who had once starred in a play at the hotel’s theater in 1912. Richard is so smitten that he researches her at the local library, and even finds a photo of Elise as an older woman – the same woman who gave him the pocket watch, with her resounding words, “come back to me.” This sets Richard off on a mystical journey through time, endurance, and the multi-dimensional power of love.

John Barry composed the music, and selected the film’s  haunting theme music, the eighteenth variation of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” This was not Barry’s typical film music, but both his father and mother had died within months of each other before he worked on Somewhere in Time, and this was an emotional time for him.

Somewhere in Time made the cover of the July 1980 edition of American Cinematographer, including an article.  The film’s cinematographer was Isidore Mankofsky. Film director Szwarc’s  concept of the film  was to have very different looks between the contemporary part of the film and the period era. Mankofsky stated that, “… in order to make the film work dramatically, we had to make sure that, in terms of visual presentation, these two periods would not look the same. The objective was to carry the audience back in time subtly, but with a definite difference in the ‘look’ from one era to the other.”  “We used Eastman color negative for the contemporary sequences, because it tends to be a little harder in the shadows and to have a crisper, more solid look to it. It seems to resolve better and to be sharper all the way through. Likewise, we decided to go with Fuji color negative for the period sequences because it seems to be a bit more pastel. It doesn’t appear to have quite the resolving power of the Kodak stock or the really black blacks.” Of course this was still in the days of using film rather than digital photography.

Szwarc and Mankofsky used Death in Venice as a guide, along with art books featuring paintings of Manet and Monet. Szwarc added, “For the sequences in the past we would use Fuji stock — which is a little bit softer and less contrasty — and go for wide-angle lenses and diopters and deep focus and a very pastel look. “We followed that concept through in everything — in set dressing, the colors of the walls of the sets, and also in wardrobe.”

SPOILER ALERT

In Richard Matheson’s story as in the movie, Richard Collier is given a condition for being able to go back in time to seek Elise. In the ancient tradition of mythology and the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice,  the good looks of Orpheus and his enchanting music allowed him to pass the monster Cerberus and got Hades to permit him to take back his dead love Eurydice from the underworld – on condition that he not look back at her until they exit. Fearing he is being tricked, Orpheus looks back to see if Eurydice is really behind him as they near near the exit, at which point she is trapped there forever — and the fate of Orpheus is to later die of sorrow wanting to join her in death.  With the handsome Richard, good with words, he is warned when he goes back in time that he must not bring anything with him from his modern life.  At the very moment when he believes that he and Elise have found true love and can have a life together – he finds a modern coin in his pocket, and is thrown back into modern times, never able to return to Elise.

Somewhere in Time was not well well reviewed. It was a science-fiction movie without any science – a “Time Machine” without the machine or any monsters. It was low budget without any special effects. Then and now some consider it too sappy.  Yet the movie has its own fan club, INSITE, active since 1990. As a love story with wonderful period detail, it is as great as any, and Jane Seymore and Christopher Reeve actually fell in love while filming it. Somewhere in Time, fun in the all too short sun of a few days in 1912.

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I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow–a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest– Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

Thus begins the second paragraph of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as it first appeared in The Young Folks Magazine as a serial, under the title “The Sea Cook,” in October, 1881. It would be published in book form as Treasure Island  by Cassel & Co., in London. So much for novels of the 1800s having lumbering starts. The story’s appeal to youths was recognized by the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons when it published the book in the U.S. in 1911, with dramatic illustrations by N.C. Wyeth.

It didn’t take long for the movie industry to recognize the cinematic appeal of Treasure Island, even if the only woman in the story was Jim Hawkins’ mother.  The Edison Company produced the first film version in 1912, with a Fox version produced in 1918 with a cast of children (now a lost film – see my post on films lost in fires here. A 1920 production of Treasure Island was made at Paramount, with Lon Chaney starring as Blind Pew and Charles Ogle playing Long John Silver.

M-G-M’s silver screen classic version from 1934 set the tone for Treasure Island from then on. It’s own visual style for pirates was heavily influenced by N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (1921). The film was directed by Victor Fleming and starred Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins, Lionel Barrymore as Billy Bones, Wallace Beery as Long John Silver, Lewis Stone as Capt. Smollett, Nigel Bruce as Squire Trelawney, and Otto Kruger as Dr. Livesay.  The film plot follows the novel fairly closely, whereby Billy Bones’ sea chest contains a treasure map, and Bones was right to be looking over his shoulder for Blind Pew, and then for Black Dog who comes to deliver the dreaded “black spot.” And then several men attack the Inn. But with a treasure map safely in their hands, Livesay, Trelawney, the young Hawkins, and Capt. Smollett  will use Smollett’s sloop to sail for Treasure Island in the Caribbean. They only need a crew, and harmless-looking, one-legged, sea-cook John Silver knows just the Bristol shipmates for the job.

Stevenson’s novel and the first 1934 classic had firmly established pirate looks, lore, and vocabulary in popular culture before Walt Disney. Stevenson himself acknowledged borrowing seafaring and lost treasure lore and iconography in his novel. Long John Silver’s parrot was borrowed from Robinson Crusoe, published by Daniel Defoe in 1719. This was written as a novel but the first edition stated it was written by Crusoe and most people thought it was an autobiography. The story was about the shipwrecked protagonist who spent 28 years on an island off the coast of Venezuela and Trinidad. One of the characters in Treasure Island is Captain Flint, although he is is already deceased in the story and it is his buried treasure everyone is after. Stevenson also borrowed the visual imagery of a pointing skeleton from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug.” But Stevenson borrowed most heavily from The General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724 and written by the unknown Captain Charles Robinson. The book contains the embellished biographies of legendary pirates including Anne Bonny, Blackbeard (Edward Teach), Calico Jack Rackham, Charles Vane, Mary Read and William Kidd.

The colorful language and accents of pirates has become well known and imitated for decades — largely originating from the  book, film and later screen versions of Treasure Island. Right off the page we have the drunken Billy Bones singing sea songs and telling tales to frightened Inn guests about men walking the plank. Common seafaring men, and the English-speaking pirates that had come from them, had spent so much of their lives on ships that they used the words for parts of ships or weather for their own anatomy or condition.  Belay there! meaning to stop came from the belaying pin used to hold fast a rope. Abaft meant rear or aft of the ship or backwards. Yardarm was the wood spar where the sails hung from. In the British Navy, it was used on ships indicating , “you could drink once the sun was above the yardarm.” The word buccaneer is used in Treasure Island. Buccaneer refers to pirates that operated in or out of the Caribbean during the 17th and 18th centuries. Although the word origin is attributed to the wood racks used to smoke wild game (boucans or buccans) on Tortuga Island, the French word for a male goat is bouc, and a boucan is to make a racket or hubbub — the latter a good description for buccaneering.

The great actor Lionel Barrymore played Billy Bones in the 1934 Treasure Island. Although Wallace Beery played a fine sweet and sour Long John Silver, I think Barrymore could have done much more with the role. And at least he would not have tried to steal scenes from Jackie Cooper like Beery did. But alas, Barrymore’s arthritic hands did not allow him to maneuver himself on a crutch. The cast of this version included many M-G-M contract players, and comprised mostly Americans.  With the Disney version produced in 1950, that all changed. American studios commonly had to spend part of their U.K exhibition profits making movies in England, and this was the case with the Walt Disney studio.  Walt Disney had wanted to make Treasure Island for fifteen years as an animated feature, and he finally got the film rights from M-G-M. But the “frozen” funds changed his mind into making it a live-action feature — Disney’s first full live-action movie.  It was produced and filmed in English locations including  Bristol, Falmouth and the coast of Cornwall, as well as London’s Denham Studios. Disney’s cast were all from the U.K except for Bobby Driscoll who played Jim Hawkins. English actor Robert Newton played Long John Silver in the Disney 1950 version of Treasure Island and its sequel Long John Silver (or Long John Silver’s Return to Treasure Island, 1954).  For the  July 1950  release of Treasure Island, the Disney Company did an extensive advertising campaign. A treasure hunt was launched involving treasure chests full of merchandise that could be opened by “keys” printed in some 350 local department stores and drug stores in 40 states.

Robert Newton’s use of a Cornish accent in these movies has come down as the standard pirate accent in subsequent pirate movies. As for Billy Bones’ old sea song that featured so prominently in the Stevenson text, this was now a Walt Disney movie, so new words were composed for the “Yo Ho” song, dropping “and a bottle of rum.” We wonder if this made an impression on Robert Newton, who died soon after making the Treasure Island sequel from alcoholism.

Orson Welles had been an admirer of Stevenson’s book since his youth. He had wanted to make a version of it in the 1960s, and a version of it with him cast as Long John Silver was made in 1972. It was such a low-budget production that it is not worth watching.

Even in the days of Robert Louis Stevenson, writers of stories knew about “in media res.” This is Latin for start your plot in the middle of things. With Treasure Island, several characters are already out to get Billy Bones at the beginning of the story, and one of the lead characters is already dead. Leaving so much untold, however, left plenty of story material for a prequel to Treasure Island in the long-form cable television show Black Sails. Here we see John Silver when he had two legs, and Captain Flint when he was  a British Naval Officer and turning into a pirate. And Nassau in the Bahamas as an important town before it becomes a pirate haven.

Black Sails (2014-2017) is one of the best and most unique television series I’ve ever seen. That this should be set within a “pirate” story is surprising, but then The Sopranos took place within a mafia family. As with any movie or show, the writing and acting set within solid production values and direction will achieve high quality. But with Black Sails, individual characters were plumbed to the depths as they sought their freedom, destinies, redemption, and in some cases, revenge. And more, the characters developed over the four seasons to become very different persons from who they were at the beginning – those that survived anyway.

The ensemble cast was superb. IMDB should be consulted for all the actors, but most were from England, Australia, Canada, and farther away in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Toby Stephens (son of Maggy Smith) played Capt. Flint, Luke Arnold played John Silver, Hannah New played Eleanor Guthrie, Toby Schmitz played “Calico Jack” Rackham, Tom Hopper played Billy Bones, Clara Paget played Anne Bonny, and Zach McGowan played Capt. Charles Vane among many more.

From the first episode the ways of the pirate life are made clear in dialogue and action: they are not paid wages and are bound to no one. If you join a crew you share in whatever spoils you take from Spanish or merchant ships. Capt. Flint has his own vision. Civilization is coming to the Caribbean, and to its rulers, people like them are monsters that should be eliminated. Only by uniting can they survive. John Silver is an opportunist just looking to stay alive. He just happened to find a page from a ship’s log book showing the route of the treasure ship the Urca de Lima, which Flint has been seeking for weeks. If only John Silver could read. After a dramatic battle to take over a merchant ship and a subsequent fight over who will be be the pirate captain,  part of the Flint crew land at Nassau where more pivotal characters are introduced.

The interaction of each character is fascinating to watch as each already has – or will develop – antagonisms. alliances, or even become mortal enemies. All of this set within the win or lose competition for treasure and power, and the coming attacks of Spanish or English armed forces – neither of which tolerated pirates. As in the case of the historic Brethren of the Coast, Captain Flint attempted to make a federation of pirates, inhabitants of Nassau, former slaves living in nearby islands, and whoever would join them in fighting British forces to keep Nassau a free pirate state. But in Black Sails, each strong-willed character is intent on fulfilling their own destiny.

While I can’t be sure what Paddy Nolan-Hall would have though of of all this, I’m sure she must have seen the M-G-M and Disney classic versions of Treasure Island.

This blog post is part of the Caftan Woman Blogathon honoring Patricia Nolan-Hall on May 6, 2020 by the Classic Movie Blog Association, The Lady’ Eve’s Reel Life and Another Old Movie Blog.

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Costume designer Anthea Sylbert always added life and character into her costume designs. She designed for many notable actors in her career, and the movies they starred in are classics of the late 1960s and 1970s.  This skill came  partially from studying art history at Barnard College, attending Parsons School of Design to  study fashion – before dropping out to  become a research assistant for a theater group in New York.  Her grandmother had already taught her to sew in her Greek heritage home.  She started designing ready-to-wear garments for boutiques as well as shoes and sports wear. But moving from costume design to becoming Vice President of Productions at Warner Bros. and later Executive Vice President at United Artist had all to do with her intelligence and problem solving abilities.

Anthea Giannakouros  married Paul Sylbert, a movie production designer, and she began socializing with a set of New York avant-garde theater and film actors including Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and directors Roman Polansky and Mike Nichols. That led to her designing the costumes for her first movie, the low-budget The Tiger Makes Out (1967), where her husband was also the production designer. Stars Elli Wallach and Anne Jackson were married, and this was Dustin Hoffman’s first movie. Anthea Sylbert’s second movie had more consequence –  Rosemary’s Baby  (1968). Roman Polansky directed, with Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, and Ruth Gordon starring. Sylbert’s costumes for Farrow made a splash, and were very influential.  The baby doll dresses in mostly floral patterns, pastel colors, or stripes, increasingly short as her situation grew perilous under the satanic forces of a coven, made for a bold contrast and sympathetic audience response.

 

Several movies followed but her next substantial movie was Carnal Knowledge (1971) directed by Mike Nichols starring Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Art Garfunkel, and Ann-Margret.  The sexual life and opinions of two friends through the decades  was the plot of the film, and the come-on for the 1971 audience. Since then the views of the protagonists has dated badly. But the costumes of the principal cast perfectly defined their character – who they are or want to be, from the well-dressed college days of the 1940s to the urban sophisticates of the late 1950s.

For something completely different, Sylbert designed the Western costumes for John Wayne in The Cowboys (1972). The movie costarred Bruce Dern, Colleen Dewhurst, and introduced Robert Considine. The Cowboys segued into designing Bad Company, Robert Benton’s directorial debut about a gang of young men and boys on the loose in the post-Civil War West. Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown star. The gang were  dressed by Sylbert in threadbare period costumes fabricated or provided by the Western Costume Co., which had done the same for The Cowboys.

Anthea Sylbert’s biggest hit came with Chinatown (1974), Roman Polansky’s film noir classic starring Faye Dunaway, Jack Nicholson., and John Huston. The movie about Los Angeles water rights, corruption, murder, and incest is ranked as one of the best movies of all-time. The screenplay by Robert Towne and Edward Taylor is used as a model in  script writing.  The new Paramount production head Robert Evans hired Roman Polansky to direct a Technicolor film noir with a European perspective with a very Los Angeles-based setting. And that 1930s setting was enhanced in every way with period details.

Anthea Sylbert  designed costumes for the principal cast that put them squarely in the sunny, drought affected Los Angeles of 1937.  Jack Nicholson played a detective much like Philip Marlowe, only more of a dandy. Faye Dunaway, like her earlier Bonnie and Clyde, made fashion news. W magazine devoted a multipage feature on her costumes from the movie in its December 28 ,1973 issue.  Dunaway plays Evelyn Mulwray, the rich wife of the Chief Engineer of  LA’s  Department of Water and Power. In a series of daytime scenes, she wears elegant tailored suits with stylish hats and gloves, the common well-dressed look of the day.  Polansky insisted she wear red lipstick and have high penciled eye-brows, which he remembered his mother wearing. This look was common for the 1930’s movie-star. Sylbert’s palette of light colors for Dunaway’s suits, blouses, and riding outfits, change to black after her husband dies, and continues through to the end of the movie. The movie itself turns to night scenes as  its plot turns increasingly dark.

 

Shampoo (1975)  was something completely different. Directed by Hal Ashby about the fast times of 1968 in the life of a Beverly Hills playboy  hairdresser. The movie starred the real playboy Warren Beatty, with  Julie Christie, his movie and then real girlfriend, and Goldie Hawn and Lee Grant, his other movie  girlfriends. A young Carrie Fisher also cameoed, with costars Jack Warden and Tony Bill. Warren Beatty plays the hairdresser that all his women clients fall for. Those with husbands suspect nothing as they assume he is gay, even when he visits them at home or takes them out.  The screen play by Beatty and Robert Towne is patterned after English Restoration comedy of manners, and takes aim at the hypocrisy of society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anthea Sylbert designed costumes for Beatty and the women that captured their sexiness and allure. Based on the times of 1968, the skirts were very short on Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie. Christie’s final all-white outfit of a belted short skirt, ribbed turtle neck sweater, and white go-go boots was a knock-out.  But her climax outfit worn at a restaurant dinner for the group, worn when she gives her unforgettable line, was a long black beaded gown covering up to her throat, but was completely backless. As Sylbert explained it, “I just thought it would be funny when we first saw her, if she looked so proper, like the queen mother, and then when she turned around, there she was, right down to the crack of her ass,” *

Lee Grant, as the somewhat older woman and rich wife of Jack Warden’s character, is  also a client and lover of Beatty’s character George. Her wardrobe is more situational, although Sylbert designed a wonderfully distinctive  sailor-suit dress of white satin with black piping.

Beatty as George was dressed in a combination of stylish but  masculine costumes.

Anthea Sylbert’s next two movies were not successes. The Fortune (1975) was a 1930’s screwball comedy take-off directed by Mike Nichols that did not work, even with co-stars Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. King Kong  (1976) was a remake of the 1933 RKO classic. Jeff Bridges starred, and it introduced a young and very sexy Jessica Lange, reprising the role made famous by Fay Wray. The movie has its pros and cons, but the costumes did their jobs, especially in making Lange the enticing object of Kong’s affections. Sylbert designed a stunning silver beaded, strapless and contoured gown with half-diamond patterning that was her costume for the final New York performance when Kong breaks all his chains after seeing her.

The Last Tycoon (1976) had a lot of promise, directed by Elia Kazan, Robert De Niro starring as the protagonist based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about M-G-M’s Irving Thalberg, with a cast including Jack Nicholson. Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, Dana Andrews, Jeanne Moreau, Ray Milland, and introduced Theresa Russell. Yet the screenplay by Harold Pinter and the not fully realized book led the plot nowhere. The art direction  was notable. Sylbert’s costume designs hinted at the 1930s but were still planted in the 1970s.

Sylbert’s next movie  Julia (1977) was nominated for several Academy Awards including Beat Costume Design and it won for Best Supporting Actors for Vanessa Redgrave and Jason Robards and for Best Adaptive Screenplay for Alvin Sargent. The story was based on the writing of Lillian Hellman and her childhood friend Julia. The movie was directed by the great Fred Zinnemann.

 

Anthea Sylbert’s final film as a costume designer was for F.I.S.T., which starred Sylvester Stallone as a union organizer among truckers. After Sylbert made suggestions to the movie’s director Norman Jewison about how Stallone was not wearing an article of clothing. She was told that he didn’t want a costume designer interfering with his actors. After that she quit.

But she landed on her feet. She was offered and accepted a job as Vice President of Productions at Warner Bros. Proving herself fully capable at WB, she then moved on to United Artists as Executive Vice President. She had forged a friendship with Goldie Hawn during the filming of Shampoo, and when Sylbert produced Private Benjamin (1980), they formed the Hawn/Sylbert Movie Productions Company. After Anthea Sylbert finally retired, she moved to Greece, where she now lives on the island of Skiathos.

 

 

 

 

Views: 2505

The Classic Movie Blog Association Hidden Classics Blogathon

One of the greatest love stories ever filmed is barely known. Its director Max Ophuls and co-producer John Houseman are masters. And its cast of Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan are an Oscar winner and an international star. The film story is based on a novella by Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular writers in the world in the 1920s-1930s,  and adapted by Howard Koch who was one of the scriptwriters of Casablanca and The Letter.

The story starts in Vienna circa 1900. It is night and men are discussing a duel in a carriage. Louis Jourdan as Stefan Brand exits the carriage and enters his house. He tells his mute valet that he will be packing and leaving soon, with no intentions of dueling.  His valet gives him a letter which Brand opens. “By the time you read this letter I may be dead, ” it said, the cursive hand written on St. Catherine’s Hospital Stationary. The letter is narrated in voiceover by Joan Fontaine. “I have so much to tell you.” The movie goes into flashback as we see a  teenage Fontaine as Lisa  Berndle, and a young friend in a courtyard. Lisa lives in an apartment there with her mother. Lisa becomes entranced by the  music coming from another room upstairs, played by the famous pianist Stefan Brand. Lisa is  enchanted by him and takes dance lessons and learns about music, all so she could someday impress Brand, with whom she has fallen in love. Helping his valet move rugs inside Brand’s house one day, she even sneaks into his study to  gaze lovingly at his piano and belongings, running out as John the valet sees her. But Lisa is panicked when her mother says she has accepted an offer of marriage, saying they must move to Linz. Lisa refuses, and then accepts, and then runs away at the train station. Loitering by Stefan’s house, she sees him arrive with a woman, shattering her illusions. She goes to Linz where she turns eighteen and is courted but refuses to marry.  The course of the flashback is broken as we see Brand reading the letter in astonishment as the night goes by and the woman’s life is explained.

Lisa returns to Vienna, where she finds a job as a model in a dressmaker’s shop. She models beautiful gowns for the upper class.  She still loves Stefan, and visits his apartment building, where one evening she listens to street musicians when he walks by.  He notices her direct stare, and he asks her out to dinner. At dinner she struck a chord with him when she said his music sounded like he was searching for something he hadn’t found yet. After dinner they spend the night at an amusement park, endlessly riding a make-believe train, then dance to a women’s band until the dance hall closed down. Afterwards they go to his house.

The next day he lovingly told her he needed to go to Milan with the orchestra and he would return. They went to the train station where she tearfully sees him off. She did not see him again for nine years — until they see each other at the Opera – he alone and Lisa with her husband. Some people talk about how Stefan’s promise as a musician had faded. Lisa could not bear to see him and got up to leave. Stefan from the seats below saw her leave and followed, wanting suddenly to take her away from her husband. At the exit he stops her to talk,  although he did not seem to recognize her. Will Lisa trust Stefan after what he has done before, leaving her alone  with a child? Even though he never knew about the boy? Could she possibly leave her settled and comfortable life in society?  The love of Lisa for Stefan is unfathomable, but in this remarkable film, it leads not to a Hollywood ending.

Joan Fontaine was a perfect choice for the lead, although she was older than Jourdan who played the older man. Her face can always portray the look of innocence and earnestness, so well acted in Rebecca, Suspicion, and Jane Eyre. Her lover was played by the  handsome French star Louis Jourdan in his second film in the U.S.  Fontaine’s then husband William Crozier was the executive producer.  Amazingly, the content of the letter and its ending, which was central to the plot, was objected to by the censor’s office, saying it, “… romanticized the characters’ illicit relationship.” And the censor’s office had their own language to substitute in the letter, which completely transformed its meaning. Crozier had to appeal this decision in order to keep the original language.

Hollywood’s Golden Age costume designer Travis Banton designed the costumes. His contract ended at Universal with this film, and he only designed  for a few more movies before retiring.  He had designed the glamorous gowns for Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, and the other stars of Paramount.

Letter from an Unknown Woman was selected in 1992 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”  The film has been restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding provided by The Film Foundation.

The following commentary contains spoilers. Letter from an Unknown Woman has been considered by many to be the most tragic love story ever filmed. It does not have the southing closing shot of Wuthering Heights, nor the peace-making consequences of Romeo and Juliet. Lisa has spent a lifetime fanning the embers of Stefan’s flaming and dying passion for her, hence, the letter from an unknown woman. Unknown because, when he came back into her life and she was ready to throw everything away for him (again), he didn’t even remember who she was.

Lisa remembered every detail of their time together, and even of all the time they were not together — staring at his rooms, listening to his music, or longing to be with him. The film makes clear that Stefan thinks often about his own enjoyment – living moment to moment. Dennis Grunes has written an excellent article on Letter From an Unknown Woman, about how its was not well received in 1948, and especially about the theme of memory that haunts the story’s original writer Stefan Zweig and the film’s director Max Ophuls. Both men were Jews from either Austria or Germany. The ruins of the pre-Nazi and pre-Holocaust world they came from forms the  foundation that the story, and Lisa’s memory, tries hopelessly to recreate. For Lisa, she was creating, recreating in the letter, a world of love she lived, a world Stefan could have shared with her and his son. But oblivious of this world, even of their brief loving affair, and of his second chance, Stefan reads the entire story when it is too late, written as Lisa died before she finished it — or signed it. Thus it was a letter from an unknown woman, concluding with these words:

“If only you could have recognized what was always yours. If only you could have found what was never lost, If only….”

The blog post is part off the CMBA HIDEN CLASSICS BLOGATHON   Please see the other excellent entries on Hidden Classics.

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