William Cameron Menzies: One Forceful, Impressive

Idea

David Bordwell
March 2010

Film Art:
An Introduction
Planet Hong
Kong, second
edition
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The Way
Hollywood
Tells It
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Poetics of
Cinema
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Figures Traced
In Light

Ozu and the

Poetics of
Cinema
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Exporting
Entertainment :
America in the
World Film
Market 1907–
1934 pdf online

Mad Detective:
Doubling Down
new
The Classical
Hollywood
Cinema
Twenty-Five
Years Along
Nordisk and the
Tableau
Aesthetic
William
Cameron
Menzies: One
Forceful,
Impressive Idea
Another Shaw
William Cameron Menzies (photo by Karl Strauss)
Production:
Anamorphic
Adventures in William Cameron Menzies was a wunderkind. He started working on films in 1919 when he was twenty-
Hong Kong three; ten years later he won an Academy Award. By the time he died in 1956, he had participated in over
Paolo Gioli’s
seventy films. Why has nobody written a book about him?
Vertical Cinema
Don’t look at me. After several years sporadically tracking his career, I’m aware that this is a mammoth
(Re)Discovering task. Here I want just to float some ideas about a filmmaker as distinctive, and sometimes as delirious, as
Charles
Dekeukeleire Busby Berkeley. Like Berkeley, Menzies shows that a strong imagination can yank the screen away from
weak directors. Like Berkeley, he shows that the studio system gave considerable leeway to flamboyant,
Doing Film
History even peculiar imagery, as long as it could be somehow motivated by story and genre. Just as important, he
shows how exceeding the limits of that sort of motivation can seem daring, or maybe just cockeyed.
The Hook:
Scene Pictorial beauty and early talkies
Transitions in
Classical Menzies is today remembered chiefly as Gone with the Wind’s production designer, a term and role that
Cinema originated on that production. He had already earned acclaim as art director for Fairbanks’ Thief of
Bagdad (1924, below), Barrymore’s Beloved Rogue (1927), and The Dove (1927) and The Tempest (1928),
Anatomy of the
Action Picture which jointly won him his first Oscar. His prestigious projects included Rosita (1923), Foreign
Correspondent (1940), Korda’s Thief of Bagdad (1940), Meet John Doe (1941), For Whom the Bell Tolls
Hearing Voices (1943), Spellbound (1945), and Arch of Triumph (1948). He took up directing as well, signing Things to
Preface, Come (1936), the more cult-friendly Invaders from Mars (1953), several shorts and B-pictures, and
Croatian edition, portions of films signed by others, notably Gone with the Wind. At the start Menzies made his name with
On the History
of Film Style monumental sets, often stylized in what he called “romantic” fashion. These sets were well-suited to
Slavoj !i"ek: costume pictures and period fantasies. 1
Say Anything
Film and the
Historical Return
Studying
Cinema

After these triumphs, he felt confident enough to declare that the art director was not merely the person
who designed the sets. A stage designer could concentrate on setting and leave the moment-by-moment
unfolding of the action to the director. But cinema was a pictorial art, built out of motion within the frame
and a rapid succession of shots. So composition took on a special importance. Each shot had to have “one
forceful, impressive idea.” 2 The art director should sketch the phases of the action, and indicate the
camera’s viewpoint, the lens used, and any trick effects. Once the set was built, the final filming “reproduces
the composition line for line.” 3

Sound movies had lost the pictorial splendor of the great silent era, but Menzies thought that could be
recovered if someone coordinated the overall look of the film, including lighting (traditionally the province
of the cinematographer) and figure movement (a task for the director). In 1929–1930, Menzies began to
campaign for this new production role by giving lectures, signing articles, and publishing his drawings of
film shots. Unlike most set designs, which show empty settings or people in undramatic poses, Menzies’
drawings look more like what we now call storyboards.

Magazines were happy to publish these dynamic images, and sympathetic journalists took up Menzies’cause.
A New York Times article from 1930 notes that he makes sketches that follow the script “as closely as
possible. These drawings not only will show the backgrounds for the action but also suggest the action
itself, so that the eye for composition that an artist has will not be wasted on mere back-drops.” 4 Two
visitors to Hollywood praised his dynamic images and spared a sneer for those who didn’t understand them.

We must regret that often in the production of the films with which he has been associated the
supposed needs of the story have prevented him from exercising his full artistic powers in the
direction of more vivid picture-making. The number of directors who know the value of true
pictorial art in the movies is yet limited. 5

Menzies’ work convinced these writers that the set designer could become the master planner, “the
illustrator of the film.” 6 Significantly, Menzies began his working life as an illustrator of children’s
books.

To show the power of his new conception of pictorial design, Menzies gravitated toward certain types of
imagery. Neither his writings nor his drawings addressed the demands of dialogue scenes, which in early
talkies were necessarily blandly, even awkwardly composed. Filmmakers relied on shooting with multiple
cameras, a tactic that worked against that single bold design that Menzies thought every shot ought to
have. Instead, his imagination sparked to atmospheric shots and action scenes.
In The Bat (1926) he had already experimented with frames slashed by diagonals and wrapped in shadows.

In this frame, it’s not the prowling Bat but his shadow that opens the door.

We shouldn’t be surprised that such images recall German Expressionism. Menzies acknowledged his
admiration for Caligari and The Golem, and he claimed to have held Murnau in special regard. He was also
probably influenced by his mentor Anton Grot, a set designer who specialized in chiaroscuro and laid out
sets by calculating what lens would be used. 7

Anton Grot sketch for A Ship Comes In (1928).

By 1929, Menzies had decided that the cinematic illustrator could show his stuff in passages of violence and
“melodramatic action.” Such scenes achieved greater emotional vibrancy with bold lines, stark tonal
contrasts, silhouettes, extremely high or low camera positions, and—a Menzies favorite—forced perspective.
(From his first film with Grot, The Naulakha, 1918, he learned that drastic foreshortening could make sets
seem bigger.) He also advocated using wide-angle lenses and building ceilings on sets to permit low angles.
8

To exploit such heightened visual expression, Menzies turned to the crime film. Three films from early
sound years show this side of his talent. The least distinctive is Raffles (1930), an amiable crook
melodrama. The bulk of it doesn’t live up to its flashy opening, in which the gentleman thief breaks into a
jewelry store safe.
Alibi (1929), directed by Roland West, has some passages of inert dialogue, but it is pretty adroit visually,
with police-investigation transitions that look forward to M and some surprisingly flexible editing for an
early talkie. There’s an occasional proto-depth shot.

Menzies’ love of monumental central perspectives is announced in the opening sequences of convicts in
prison and of Bachmann’s night club.
Menzies claimed much later that Bulldog Drummond (1929) was the first film in which he prepared “a
complete layout of every camera setup.” 9 The dream of total preparation on paper was to become a
leitmotif across his career, but even at this point it fell far short of achievement. Bulldog Drummond has
many bland multicamera stretches, and nearly all its striking continuity sketches are not fulfilled in the final
product. Still, many images in these films have a graphic vividness rare in early talkies. The asylum in
Bulldog Drummond is more or less out of Expressionism, and claw-handed silhouettes evoke Nosferatu.
Again we find grandiose central perspectives, off-kilter angles, and objects, particularly lamps and lanterns,
dominating the foreground.

Menzies’ love of the vertical dimension of the shot leads him to split the frame into halves, the top
dominated by empty space, the bottom harboring an abnormally low point of interest.

Such shots subordinate the characters to the overall play of masses and edges, fulfilling Menzies’ idea that
the art director can “create his design with a broad arrangement of lines and values, and then apply to these
lines and values the realism of architecture, figures, and properties.” 10 It’s a brutally Modernist
approach: Chisel out the composition as a pure play of graphic energies, and then fit your setting, props,
and players into it. Even in action scenes, the human figures are dominated by the larger design. They move
through vast spaces, often overwhelmed by stabbing verticals and plunging perspectives. One shot in Alibi
turns a cityscape into nightmarish outcroppings, and there is a chilling moment when a fleeing crook leaps
across rooftops and then falls backward into an apparently bottomless canyon between buildings.

Drummond peers into the laboratory of the asylum, and we get a shot with an outsize hanging lamp in the
foreground; when he fires his pistol and extinguishes the light, his silhouette in the background pops into
view.
Eyes of an astigmatic worm
The 1929–1930 crook movies look as if Menzies had struck a bargain with his directors: You handle the
dialogue scenes and give me the atmospheric establishing shots, the connective tissue, and the chases. The
ultimate example of the one-off effect is probably The Green Cockatoo, filmed in Britain in 1937 but not
released until 1940. Menzies was brought on to direct it, but it was taken from his hands and redone by
William K. Howard and Thornton Freeland, both uncredited. Only one sequence, a noirish cat-and-mouse
game on a staircase, has visual flair, but it doesn’t go beyond what we sometimes find in American crime
films of the era.

More thoroughgoing was Menzies’ contribution to two fantasies. For Alice in Wonderland (1933) he
collaborated on the script and concentrated on creating ingenious special effects, none of which display the
compositional dynamism of the 1929–1930 films. Things to Come (1936) was something else again.
Menzies was given the post of director, but he worked under two powerful overseers, producer Zoltan
Korda and writer H. G. Wells, who had negotiated a degree of control over the project unprecedented for an
author. The film has become a classic for its vision of a world ravaged by war and healed by science and
rational planning. Along with the set designer Vincent Korda, Menzies gave the city of the future an even
more towering vertical thrust than we find in Metropolis.

The fantastic premise of Things to Come gave Menzies freedom to indulge his love of unusual angles. Art
director Lyle Wheeler told him he was “no damn good” as a director because all he cared about were steep
compositions. “He wanted to photograph ceilings and didn’t give a damn what the actors were saying.” 11

Menzies liked low angles because they made for cleaner design. Straight-on angles swathed the players in
distracting décor, but a face seen against sky or ceiling stood out vividly. In interiors, ceiling corners and the
edges of walls contributed V-shaped vectors. High angles could yield sharp diagonals just as easily.
The important thing was to avoid the neutral presentation, to charge every moment with the sort of visual
energy seen in Art Nouveau or Art Deco or the Modern Style. With the aim of dynamizing every image,
Things to Come imbues static dialogue scenes with a mild version of the interplay between figures and
setting that we find Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. An underground cell is dominated
by a huge pipe that pokes into every shot. Another interior displays vectors on rooftop and floor.

The motif is sustained later when Oswald Cabal comes forward and his head remains pinched within the
wedge formed at the back of the set. Menzies was starting to conceive the scene as not simply a string of
striking images but as a decorative accompaniment to the dramatic development.
These efforts seem a bit forced, I think, because Menzies simply lacks Eisenstein’s resourcefulness in finding
graphic motifs to fill his frames. Things to Come’s strongest effects, it seems to me, appear in the
frightening opening that juxtaposes announcements of impending war with imagery of Christmas shopping.
The anxiously pitched shots, accompanied by harsh musical cuts in Arthur Bliss’s score, evoke a society
dancing toward catastrophe.

It’s fitting that when the bombardment starts, the first building blown to bits is the gargantuan Modern
Style cinema.

The sequences that Menzies is said to have directed of Gone with the Wind betray his signature techniques:
silhouettes, diagonal masses, low-slung camera positions, central perspectives alternating with skewed
ones, and brooding Gothic effects.

His fondness for a very low horizon line, perhaps inspired by Soviet filmmakers, can be seen in the “burning
of Atlanta” sequence, yielding probably the most astonishing shot in the film.

It seems to rework a more stylized image scheme we find in a montage sequence in Things to Come.
Once you’re exposed to the Menzies Touch, it’s hard not to see even an apparently simple shot, like that of
Rhett Butler at the foot of the stairs, as a geometrical display. Squint, and it’s easy to see the curving
banister culminating in his torso while the flooring and shadows behind him mark out his head.

Beyond those sequences he actually directed, Menzies designed the overall look of Gone with the Wind,
including its changing color palette. 12 But did he dictate the film’s breakdown into shots as well? Selznick
famously advocated “pre-cutting” as a time- and money-saver, claiming in a 1937 memo, “I hope to have
Gone with the Wind prepared almost down to the last camera angle before we start shooting.” 13

This would seem to be the ideal test of Menzies’ conception of the “film illustrator.” Yet by January of 1939,
once shooting had started, Selznick had to admit that “A picture of this size in importance cannot be
created to the last inflection in advance of production; there must be a certain leeway in production as we go
along.” 14 That leeway was necessary partly because Selznick was constantly rewriting scenes, sometimes
the day before shooting. By May, to hurry the schedule along, he was urging staff to “substitute simple
angles that do not take time” for “elaborate angles”—of course, a Menzies speciality. 15 Alan David
Vertrees’ painstaking study of the scripts and the surviving continuity sketches and storyboards confirms
that the film often diverges from the “pre-cut” designs. 16

Vertrees argues persuasively that Menzies’ role was not only to secure a unifying look for the film but to
serve as the producer’s representative in discussions with the director, the cinematographer, and
Technicolor consultants. Menzies became in effect the hand and eye of Selznick’s conception of the movie.
He was, according to Selznick in another memo, “the final word on these matters…responsible for the
physical aspects of the production and for the color values of the production and any difference [of opinion
among the creative staff] should be settled by him.” 17

On the whole, Gone with the Wind displays a much more subdued (some would say subtle) approach to
design and framing than we find in Menzies’ 1929–1930 crime films and in Things to Come. The other films
on which he collaborated at the time display his typical bargain: a few bursts of visual panache sandwiched
within more orthodox shooting and cutting. Mr. Lucky (1943), directed by H. C. Potter, is a brisk and
orthodox RKO item that occasionally spares a moment for a flashy transition or a flamboyantly centralized
composition, as when the gambler Joe learns to knit. Most striking is a very early pair of shots in which
Joe, the owner of a gambling cruiser, strides down a row of slot machines and finds one paying out. The
reverse shot shows a maintenance man.
The shockingly low horizon lines and the perspective that seems to go on forever return us to Menzies’ love
of the monumental image created by forced perspective. Chopping off the human figure and planting it at
the very bottom edge of the frame is somewhat better motivated in this exchange from Korda’s Thief of
Bagdad (1940), when the negative space at the top of the shot does duty for the looming djinni.
Menzies’ influence is more pervasive in John Cromwell’s So Ends Our Night (1941). Centering on refugees
from Nazi-occupied countries, it took a political stand that was quite brave for early 1941. Yet for Menzies
this was a film of “melodramatic escape” and so justified “violation of perspective.” In one daffy passage he
explains:

If it heightened the drama to shoot a tree from the viewpoint of an astigmatic worm sitting on
a leaf of that tree, or even from that of the tree looking at itself [!], we did in so far as the new
28mm lens and our imagination would permit. 18

The result is another film that anticipates Kane through cramped compositions, lowered ceilings, wide-
angle lenses, and skewed vanishing points.
In the climax, a man’s leap from a building is shown as a faint shadow flitting down windows from landing
to landing.

The film’s tight facial close-ups pay off in a graceful tracking shot in which a wife under surveillance by the
authorities is followed, nearly cheek to cheek, by her husband urging her to divorce him. 19

Did Menzies somehow abduct these films from their named directors? Surely his stature in the industry by
1940 gave him considerable clout. By now he was frankly claiming control over a film’s look. The
production designer, he told the New York Times, has the task of “coordinating every phase of the
production not covered by dialogue and action of the players.” 20 With breathtaking casualness, he
declared that the director’s job is to work with actors while the production designer supervised the
cinematographer, set designer, costume designer, and other artisans. How much pressure he was able to
exert on each of these productions, I can’t say, but clearly he had even more control over his work with Sam
Wood.

Where to put the camera

Sam Wood was older than Menzies by several years, but he started directing at about the same time as the
young set designer began his career. From A City Sparrow (1920) on, Wood became known as a reliable
journeyman at Famous Players-Lasky before shifting to MGM in the late 1920s. There he turned out
comedies and sports movies before taking charge of the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera (1935) and A
Day at the Races (1937). After directing Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) in England, Wood left MGM in 1939 to
go independent. He made Raffles (1939) for Sidney Howard’s independent company and Kitty Foyle (1940)
for RKO.

Wood had seen Menzies’ prowess at full stretch on Gone with the Wind, for which Wood shot several
sequences. After Sol Lesser acquired Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-Prize winning play Our Town, William
Wyler was slated to direct but had to drop out. Lesser turned to Wood, and the production design went to
Menzies. This began a three-year collaboration on five films that are among the most visually striking, not
to say narratively peculiar, in Hollywood cinema.

In Our Town (1940), The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), Kings Row (1942), The Pride of the Yankees
(1942/1943), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) Menzies’ pictorial imagination reigned. We have
testimony on one project from James Wong Howe:

Kings Row I loved doing. William Cameron Menzies designed the sets and did the sketches
for the shots; he’d tell you how high the camera should be. He’d even specify the kind of lens
he wanted for a particular shot; the set was designed for one specific shot only, and if you
varied your angle by an inch you’d shoot over the top. . . . Menzies created the whole look of
the film; I simply followed his orders. Sam Wood just directed the actors; he knew nothing
about visuals. 21

Menzies, according to a contemporary, put it more abruptly: “Sam Wood never knew where to put the
camera, so I told him.” 22

But what did Menzies tell him, through his drawings? As we’d expect, silhouettes, big settings, and bold
perspectives—some maniacally centered and others skewed, but all driving the eye toward a visual node.

But now Menzies seems to be playing with solutions to a lingering problem: How to give dialogue sequences
the visual punch that he applied to transitions and scenes of physical action? How to give conversations
pictorial beauty? “He could take the most ordinary thing in a picture,” noted art director Ted Haworth,
“and make it so cinematically fascinating.” 23

One sign of this impulse is Menzies’ effort to rethink the close-up. In the Wood collaborations of 1940–
1943, the camera is set rather close to the players. (This may have been one of Woods’ contributions to the
pair’s style.) Formerly a director of big sets and hollow spaces, Menzies now builds vigorous compositions
around the human face.
The films Menzies directed gave such shots a special thrust by cutting abruptly from a long shot to a rather
big close-up without the way station of a midsize shot. A cameraman once said to him: “Let’s pull back to a
long shot now and show the chin and hair.” 24 Sometimes the faces are vastly enlarged. Haworth again:
“Bill Menzies’ philosophy was that if you were going to show a close-up, make it closer than any close-up
has ever been.” 25

Even when the faces are not preternaturally large, to a greater degree than in Things to Come or Gone with
the Wind they are caught within the same V’s of setting and lighting that were formerly reserved for long
shots. Most conservatively, that means letting corners or radiating shadows in the background give
prominence to a player.

But sometimes that means having diagonals slash not across a landscape but across a face.

Instead of canting the camera, Menzies lets lighting and wall edges create quasi-abstract diagonals.

Another way to dynamize dialogue is through depth. That can be accomplished through the sort of big
foreground and distant background that Welles and Toland made famous.
More often, Menzies prefers to use the wide-angle lens to jam several faces in the frame rather close to one
another.

Aggressive depth would of course become a common compositional strategy for other directors in the
1940s, but Menzies was playing with unusual forms of it fairly early. The Wood collaborations recast
shot/reverse shot in somewhat eccentric ways.
Perhaps most startling is his habit of pushing faces to the very bottom of the shots, in the way he would
handle bodies in long shots in the crime films.

Perhaps one shot in Our Town sums up the emerging Wood-Menzies look. A pattern of light and
architecture creates a wedge in which a face and a shadow stand out starkly, while the low angle and the
calculatedly unbalanced framing let the traditional center of interest—Emily, who may be dying—at the very
bottom edge.

In all these tactics, the frame edges play unusually strong roles, cropping visual elements and chopping up
the scene’s space. Menzies had little use for camera movement, so his shots, the result of his hundreds of
sketches in the script margins, come to resemble panels in comic strips.

Our Town takes a drama usually performed on a bare set and steeps it in Gothic chiaroscuro. It’s a useful
reminder that this play, so often taken as a hallmark of middlebrow affirmation, is actually shot through
with foreboding; early on, the stage manager tells us that a character we’ve just met will die some years
later. If Copland’s score brings out the poignancy and yearning in the story, the imagery is far grimmer.
Perhaps Menzies and Wood decided that if the movie version of the play had to have props and settings,
those should be stylized somehow. So everything looms.

A pump broods over a kitchen counter, and chickens look monstrous when seen from below. The
monumental fantasy sets of Menzies’ youth have become a gigantism of the homespun.

The dominant strategy for the dialogue scenes is tightly framed depth, with faces pressed close to one
another.
Call this “compressed deep space”: The frame is packed with elements arrayed in marked depth, but the
distances between planes are not great.

Broader shots exhibit the same jamming of the frame. The two primary households in the town are
cramped, and the crosscutting between them not only sets up narrative parallels but invites us to see them
as extensions of the same low-lying architecture. In these interiors the figures scarcely have room to move;
even Emily as a ghost has to slip in between her mother and her earlier self.

True “deep-focus” imagery is reserved for the graveyard hallucination, with mother and dead daughter in
the same frame. Anticipating the special effects in Citizen Kane, this shot was accomplished with a split
screen.

In plot, Kings Row is the anti-Our Town. “A good clean town,” says the sign under the credits, but you
wouldn’t know it from the contagion of madness that sweeps through the movie. “A good place to raise your
children”? The respectable fathers of Kings Row lock up their wives and daughters and amputate the legs of
the lads who dare to come courting. Class warfare is rampant, old women weep powerlessly, and the girl
loved by the timid young physician behaves like one demented. She will be poisoned by her father.

This inspires the young doctor Parris to head to Vienna to study psychiatry. Returning to Kings Row, he will
find plenty of business, and his reward will be a new version of his beloved. The childhood scenes are shot
straightforwardly, but as adulthood pulls the characters into a spiral of hysteria, the film introduces hard-
edged shadows, thunderstorms, canted angles, oppressive ceilings, oversize lamps, big close-ups, and a
flagrant deep-focus technique. When Parris calls on his ailing grandmother, we get an image more
complicated than the celebrated shot of Susan’s suicide in Kane.

The carafe is a decoy, taking up a huge chunk of the frame but inconsequential compared to the syringe.
That grows in importance as Parris lunges forward to discover it.
He realizes that the old woman’s care has passed to the palliative phase, but the framing hides his face. At
this point the nurse Anna enters the background.

As she comes forward to explain that the disease is cancer, the camera tilts up and her head fits perfectly
into the vectors formed by the ceiling corners.

They close the door as Anna tells Parris that his grandmother will die in a few days.
Anna moves offscreen to cry as Parris returns to the bedroom to stare down at his grandmother.

A less flamboyant but equally moving scene takes place around another bedside, when after recoiling from
the woman who has nursed him, the anguished amputee Drake clutches the bedstead and then
acknowledges his need for her by stretching one arm into the distance. The wide-angle lens exaggerates the
burst of his arms to the foreground and then accelerates the thrust of his right hand back toward Randy.
Shot in the summer of 1941, after the spring release of Citizen Kane, Kings Row looks as if Welles’ film had
given Menzies permission to push further in the expressive and Expressionistic direction taken in Our Town.
Yet the extremes are motivated to a considerable degree by the melodramatic fluctuations of the action. As
the plot moves toward resolution, the florid style abates and we’re back to the more orthodox technique of
the childhood scenes.

Between Our Town and Kings Row, Wood and Menzies made a comedy, and its visual style is even more
offbeat than what we see in its mates. The Devil and Miss Jones centers on workers’ agitation at a
department store. The owner, the pompous and life-denying mogul John P. Merrick, goes undercover
disguised as a new salesman. Soon he comes face to face with his store’s petty bosses, obtuse policies, and
quarrelsome customers. He admires Mary Jones and her coworker Elizabeth, whom he will later start to
romance. The ebullience and self-sacrifice of Miss Jones and her agitator boyfriend Joe lead Merrick to
embrace their cause. At one point he ends up picketing himself.

The film continues the compressed deep-space look of Our Town, with several faces packed alongside one
another, but what is most striking is a tactic of unbalanced and decentered framing of those faces.

Menzies is one of the few filmmakers (apart from Ozu and Mizoguchi) to give the bottom third of the frame
its due. We saw one example in the Mr. Lucky slot-machine battalions above, but there it was a one-off
flourish. The Devil and Miss Jones, made two years earlier, supplies so many instances that you start to see
this compositional oddity as normal.
At one point the key event, Mary peering under Merrick’s elbow, lies almost flat along the bottom frameline.

It’s hard to provide a robust functional explanation for these shenanigans. I’m inclined to take them as pure
experiments, since they create a sort of visual rigidity that is hard to integrate with comedy. (The relevant
comparison here might be the way that Gregg Toland’s deep-focus schemas somewhat freeze up the players
in Hawks’ Ball of Fire.)

The decentering strategy is perhaps better motivated in the film that followed Kings Row, Pride of the
Yankees. This story of Lou Gehrig follows one conventional biopic arc: Origins—Striving—Success—Personal
Happiness—Tragedy of a Career Cut Short. (Another example is The Glenn Miller Story, 1954). But there’s
nothing ordinary about the film’s visual design. We get the Menzies bottom-heavy look from almost the
start, with the second scene shoving the boy Lou’s face down against the frame edge.
Shot/reverse shot is even more off-balance than in Miss Jones.
And where another film would play out the pathos of Sam’s response to Lou’s final address in a close-up,
Wood-Menzies tucks it into the lower left corner, highlighted by architectural diagonals and the other
sportswriters’ stares.

Again, this pictorial strategy is hard to square with traditional genre motivation. It seems to be an effort to
create a deliberately offbeat style that not only binds the film together but serves as an authorial signature.
(If you think the handwriting might have been Wood’s, consider that his other baseball yarn of the period,
The Stratton Story of 1949, bears no trace of these techniques.)

For Whom the Bell Tolls changes the game somewhat. A large amount of it was filmed in exteriors (the
Sierra mountains doing duty for Spain), and in Technicolor. In some respects, it is Menzies’ most
flamboyant achievement of the era, a feast of pictorial design laid over a somewhat static plot.

Given three days to prepare to blow up a strategic bridge, Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the
Republican cause, must join a band of guerrillas. Among them is Maria, a refugee who was raped by the
Nationalists when they took over her town. The nominal leader of the guerrillas is the shifty Pablo, but the
driving force is his wife Pilar, who can mobilize the men vigorously. Robert and Maria fall in love quickly;
the drama is provided by the band’s efforts to plan the demolition and Pablo’s wavering support of the
mission.

From the very first shot after the opening title, we are in Menzies territory. Characteristic jet-black
silhouettes, tightly packed into the frame, are even more striking in color.
The huddled gatherings of the band are remarkable for sustaining depth of field with the slow Technicolor
process, and action scenes are propelled by stark vectors provided by rock formations or logs.

Menzies’ eye for expressive color remains remarkable; when Robert crouches over the dead Anselmo, smoke
curls into the frame like a shroud.
Most of the scenes between Robert and Maria are shot straightforwardly, as if setting off their relationship
from the war maneuvers filmed in low angles and steep perspectives.
But the decentered framing, which can look so arbitrary and showoffish, becomes a motif associated with
the couple and reaches a kind of climax in the film’s final stages. We get the decentering when they
reconnoiter, and much later when they’re reunited after the firefight.

At the end, when the wounded Robert urges Maria to go, she is turned and pulled away by Pilar, and the two
women sink below the frameline.
This sort of downward departure has been a signal of closure in earlier Wood-Menzies efforts. Lou Gehrig
steps down into a block of shade as he retires from baseball, and the Stage Manager of Our Town leaves by
literally dropping out of sight.
Going solo
Each of the Wood-Menzies films of 1940–1943 deserves more detailed analysis than I can supply here.
There’s also the matter of their last collaboration on Ivy (1947), a more pictorially restrained enterprise.
26 But I’ll conclude by considering the films of the 1940s and 1950s that Menzies directed.

Two of these, Drums in the Deep South (1951) and the 3-D effort The Maze (1953), are of striking banality
(except for the occasional decentered head). By contrast, Invaders from Mars (1953) indulges in Menzies’
eccentricities of set design and composition pretty freely. Admirers of the film point to the Caligaresque
forest and the forced perspective of the jail cell.
There are as well his customary bare walls and strenuous viewpoints.

Once seen, Invaders from Mars isn’t forgotten, but the stylistic signatures don’t seem to me to compensate
for arid and schematic designs, lugubrious pacing, and special effects of a pretty jejeune nature. The
fantastic plot offers no ballast for Menzies’ urge to float into abstraction. I’d argue that two other films
that he signed benefited from realistic constraints on his pictorial imagination.

In The Whip Hand (1951) a journalist on a fishing trip to a Minnesota town discovers a nest of Soviet
scientists bent on poisoning Chicago’s water supply. The mystery is reasonably well-sustained, despite an
over-explicit opening scene showing Russian officers pinpointing the town on a US map. The film employs
solid character players, particularly Raymond Burr as a hotelkeeper exuding false bonhomie. Menzies’
predilictions are somewhat toned down now because his more moderate solution to the problem of
enlivening dialogue had become standard practice. Thanks to Kane and perhaps the Menzies/Wood films,
the tight, deep-space imagery of the conversations were stock in trade of American cinema of the period.

What looked striking in 1940 had become commonplace ten years later. But Menzies was still able to invoke
bursts of graphic tension, as when the innkeeper and a lab technician are caught in a hail of bullets and a
pattern of striped shadows.
Menzies’ most worthwhile solo feature, I believe, is Address Unknown (1944). Like So Ends Our Night, it’s a
wartime drama with a strong political message. Two fathers, Martin Schulz and Max Eisenstein, are
partners in an art gallery. Max’s daughter Griselle accompanies Martin’s family to Germany, while her
fiancé, Martin’s son Heinrich, stays in San Francisco with Max to run the gallery. Once in Germany and
exposed to Hitler’s rise, Martin chooses to conform and even asks Max, who is Jewish, to stop writing to
him. At the same time, Griselle is launched on a stage career but courageously challenges the censor. Out of
cowardice Martin lets her be caught and killed. Thereafter he starts to receive messages, apparently from
Max, that the Nazis intercept and take to be in code. Gradually Martin finds himself alone to face the wrath
of the authorities. It’s revealed that Heinrich has sent the letters in revenge for the loss of Griselle. He has
deliberately sent his father to his death.

Unusually for a Hollywood movie, the film doesn’t build its plot around a sympathetic protagonist. Martin
nervously slips into pleasing his Nazi masters, and Griselle becomes a figure of our allegiance only briefly. It
would be too much to call this a Brechtian exercise, but the refusal to tell the story through the normal arc
of the Griselle-Heinrich romance and the concentration on the mechanics of correspondence give the film a
drier, more detached air than we find in most wartime propaganda. The usual iconography of swastikas,
flags, and armbands was deliberately omitted, so that the drama is really that of two elders, an exchange of
offspring, and the contrast between a weak father and a courageous daughter in a moment of political
crisis.

Visually Address Unknown is quite satisfying. No longer are Menzies’ stock images sprinkled over the
screenplay; now they become part of a consistent, albeit unusual style. Menzies’ vast corridors and offices
find a natural justification in the government bureaucracy that Martin joins and the official style of
National Socialism.

Menzies’ beloved decenterings now serve dramatic purposes, most memorably during Griselle’s scandalous
stage performance. At one point the director lurks backstage in a composition recalling Ivan the Terrible.

Likewise, treating Max’s art gallery in train-tunnel fashion risks looking ponderous until we realize that the
axis running from the office to the front door of the showroom gets developed across the film. First it is a
space for welcoming a customer.
But when Max learns of Griselle’s death, the looming ceilings are replaced by a floor as lonely as a plain.

Martin’s decline is played out through a cluster of motifs of setting and lighting. He and his wife move into
their German estate, and patterns of circles in the windows are laid over them.

Later, as Martin starts to fear every mail delivery, Menzies uses the circular shapes to enclose the butler
striding to the postal box.
As the nets close in, Martin peers through the window pane.

At the climax, however, he is caught in a new patterns of light: a strip across the eyes, a network across his
body.
He watches his executioners arrive through a squarish grillwork.

This modulation in imagery is recapitulated when the epilogue reveals Heinrich as the author of the
damning letters. First, he stands in the office looking down the gallery at Max, and a reverse angle presents
him in a grid.
Our final shot of him offers a stripe of light comparable to that crossing his father’s face.

The motifs link the son to the father whom he has condemned to death. The pattern is simple, but it shows
that Menzies had the capacity to go beyond one-off effects and build an associative chain that accompanies
the drama as a sort of pictorial score. The “film illustrator” has gone beyond illustration to subtly shape
the movie’s visual texture.

Legacy of an idea
You can make the case that Menzies is an overblown, repetitive illustrator. He recycles images over and
over. The beakers bulging on lab tables are there early on.
The Beloved Rogue (1926)

Bulldog Drummond (1929)

Invaders from Mars (1953)

One schema, that of the plunging view through a high window, reappears in movies twenty years apart.
The Bat (1926)

A drawing for Bulldog Drummond

Bulldog Drummond (1929)

Whip Hand (1951)

As early as 1930, Harry Alan Potamkin was deploring Menzies’ “arty” impulses, “which depend for their
appeal on the public’s general ignorance of the antiquity and derivation of the devices employed,
expressionistic light-designs and Méliès virtuosity.” 27 And undeniably arty he was. Although he paid lip
service to the Hollywood idea that visual style should be “motivated” and that “every shot must contribute in
some manner to the story,” he makes movies of flagrant artificiality. 28 In the article celebrating
shooting from the viewpoint of an astigmatic worm, he also says, “My work is the less noticeable the better
it is.” 29 Like so many Hollywood practitioners, he was caught between a desire to try something wild
and the need to justify it, at least in public, as fulfilling traditional purposes.

Apart from his own films, his example evidently spurred several new creative practices in studio cinema. If
he did not invent the storyboard, he surely popularized it, and along with it the new role of production
designer. As early as 1941, Harry Horner, production designer on The Little Foxes, was declaring that the
task of the art director was that of “designing a visual score to the film manuscript. Each camera set-up
should be considered according to its dramatic value, and also according to its visual artistic composition.”
30

Menzies’ manner of dynamizing dialogue scenes through vivid compositions was taken up by his successors.
More broadly, the general 1940s trend toward locked, centrifugal images may owe something to Menzies as
well as to Welles and Wyler. As Boris Kaufman put it: “The space within the frame should be entirely used
up in composition.” 31 Menzies’ love of the vertical axis, the corners of the image, and the vital frame
edges fulfill that purpose, and he may have inspired others as well. Perhaps Welles learned something from
him; Anthony Mann certainly did. 32 More recently, those who admire the absurdly inflated portrayal of
corporate life seen in The Hudsucker Proxy ought to thank Menzies for leading the way. The Coen brothers’
distended wide-angle mode, using both deep central perspective and skewed angles for 1930s-ish montage
sequences, is a contemporary equivalent of his forceful images.

During the 1930s a depth aesthetic was emerging as one creative option, but while Wyler pursued its more
stable possibilities, Menzies pushed it to an unusually frantic pitch. Then, as the deep image was becoming
normalized in the early 1940s, he was eager to take it in unexpected directions. His oddities, pursued with
zeal and a considerable degree of commercial success, don’t fit into any tradition neatly. That may be
enough to guarantee his continuing value.

[For some personal reflections on my interest in Menzies, see this blog entry.]

1 : For background on Menzies’ silent cinema work, see Beverly Heisner, Hollywood Art: Art Direction
in the Days of the Great Studios (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 1990), 41–49.

2 : Menzies, “Cinema Design,” Theatre Arts Monthly 13 (September 1929), 681.

3 : Menzies, “Pictorial Beauty in the Photoplay,” Cinematographic Annual vol. 1 (Hollywood CA: ASC,
1930), 177. See also “The Layout for Bulldog Drummond,” Creative Art 5 (October 1929), 729–734.

4 : Anonymous, “As a Director Views the Art of Settings,” New York Times (12 January 1930), 113.

5 : Jan and Cora Gordon, Star-Dust in Hollywood (London: Harrap, 1930), 181.

6 : Gordons, 179.

7 : Fred J. Balshofer and Arthur C. Miller, One Reel a Week (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967), 130.

8 : Menzies, “Pictorial Beauty,” 176.

9 : Ezra Goodman, “Production Designing,” American Cinematographer 26, 3 (March 1945), 82.

10 : Menzies, “Cinema Design,” 682.

11 : Lyle Wheeler, quoted in Mary Corliss and Carlos Clarens, “Designed for Film,” Film Comment 14,
 3 (May–June 1978), 57.

12 : On Gone with the Wind’s color design, see Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow:
Color Design in the 1930s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), Chapter 7. A very thorough
account of the making of the film, with superb color illustrations, can be found in Ronald Haver’s David
O. Selznick’s Hollywood (New York: Knopf, 1980), 236–311. Haver’s book includes other information
on the collaboration of Selznick and Menzies.

13 : Memo from David O. Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (New York: Viking, 1972), 151.

14 : Memo from David O Selznick, 189.

15 : Memo from David O. Selznick, 206.

16 : Alan David Vertrees, Selznick’s Vision: Gone with the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1997), Chapters 3 and 4.

17 : Memo from David O. Selznick, 190.

18 : William Cameron Menzies, “Production Designed By—Mr. Menzies, Specialist in Illusion, Reveals a
Couple of His Fancy Tricks,” New York Times (1 December 1940), X5.

19 : Kent Jones provides an eloquent appreciation of this shot and the film as a whole in “State of
Desire,” Film Comment 43, 3 (May/ June 2007), 22.

20 : William Cameron Menzies, “Production Designed By,” X5.

21 : Quoted in Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of Light (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1970), 88.

22 : Richard Sylbert quoted in Vincent Lo Brutto, By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 52.

23 : Quoted in Lo Brutto, By Design, 21.

24 : Quoted in Ezra Goodman, “Production Designing,” 83.

25 : Quoted in Lo Brutto, By Design, 21.

26 : David Cairns offers a discerning, more affirmative account of Ivy here.

27 : Harry Alan Potamkin, “Reelife,” Close Up 7 (December 1930), 391.

28 : Quoted in Scot Holton and Robert Skotack, “William Cameron Menzies: A Career Profile,”
Fantascene no. 4 (1978), 6.

29 : Menzies, “Production Designed By—,” X5.

30 : Harry Horner, “Designing Films,” Theatre Arts 25, 11 (November 1941), 794.

31 : Quoted in Edward L. de Laurot and Jonas Mekas, “An Interview With Boris Kaufman,” Film Culture
1, no. 4 (Summer 1955): 5.

32 : See John Hambly and Patrick Downing, The Art of Hollywood: Fifty Years of Art Direction
(London: Thames Television, 1979), 4, 90–97.

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