#TOTAL SPACES ALFRED MOVIE#

The flat exterior façades and polished interior materials recall the streamlined work of designer Raymond Loewy or the futuristic visions of Norman Bel Geddes (the father of Vertigo star Barbara Bel Geddes). For the character of Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), Hall created a sleek modernist house with glass-block walls, neon-tube accents, and bent-steel chairs, a marked departure from earlier Universal films in the horror genre. The Black Cat stands out not only for this genius co-billing, but also as one of the first films to feature modernism as the home of the villain, a devious and deadly architect.

#TOTAL SPACES ALFRED MOVIE#

The VANDAMM HOUSE, now a movie star itself, makes its first appearance almost two hours into NORTH BY NORTHWEST and is onscreen a mere 14 MINUTES. Hall, a mastermind of monster homes, also worked as art director on The Black Cat, notable for the inaugural screen pairing of horror stars Lugosi and Karloff.

Hall, created “an endless variety of cobwebbed halls, frightening stairs, and creepy cemeteries” for The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Invisible Man. Universal’s resident art director, Charles D. Universal Pictures pioneered the horror genre and cemented this connection in the public eye with more than a dozen movies released in the 1920s and 1930s, many featuring iconic film villains Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. This convention for architectural metaphor perfectly fit the visual nature of film narratives, creating an intellectual shortcut within the mind of the viewer: Bad things happen in scary places. In early productions a dysfunctional mastermind inhabited a ruined home on the moors or an agent of the undead hunkered down in his stone-walled fortress on the hill. Other creators designed fantastical modernist hideaways that existed only on film and in matte paintings.įor decades, filmmakers followed literary and stage traditions in which the architectural environment matched the disposition of the character. In the years afterward, production designers, screenwriters, and directors recruited actual houses to play the part of the villain’s lair, drawing from a proliferation of modern designs in Southern California created by architects such as John Lautner, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright. This cinematic-architectural marriage of patron and design was so successful that it has been fully typecast as a storytelling device.

In North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s team revealed these two new archetypes fully fledged for contemporary moviegoers, pairing a modern villain with a mid-20th-century modern building. Drawing from early films such as Metropolis, Hitchcock also reconstructed the essential character of the screen villain, abandoning the crazed henchmen of the 1920s and instead casting dashing, charismatic people who wielded wit and charm as their weapons. Order The Architecture of Suspense from Amazon or Bookshop.Īlfred Hitchcock was one of the first major directors to leverage this architectural zeitgeist, co-opting the essential features of modernist design and turning those characteristics into totems representing the calculated fervor of a malevolent genius.

Total spaces alfred