The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Designers

  • James Basevi

    The name of James Basevi (1890-1962) is probably less familiar today than that of Cedric Gibbons, but he was, like his erstwhile colleague, one of the most influential of all art directors during the classical Hollywood era. Basevi was to 20th Century-Fox, what Gibbons was to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

    James Badevi was British, but emigrated to Canada, then the USA, after serving in the First World War. He gave up his profession as an architect to design films, joining MGM at its formation in 1924. One of his earliest successes was The Big Parade (1925), where he designed battle sequences that drew on his own wartime experiences. 

    In the 1930s, he was put in charge of MGM’s special effects work, and in this capacity contributed to two musicals: Madam Satan and, most significantly, San Francisco, for which he designed “one of the truly great cinematic illusions”, the earthquake sequence.

    After moving to Fox, Basevi soon established one of the great partnerships between a designer and a director, when he worked with John Ford on The Hurricane (1937). He was the art director on a further seven Ford pictures, including some of his greatest westerns: My Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Wagon Master (1950) and (his final film) The Searchers (1956).

    Basevi also made remarkable contributions to two Alfred Hitchcock films of the 1940s, Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945).

  • Mitchell Leisen

    Fans of classical Hollywood films will know James Mitchell Leisen (1898-1972) as the director of Easy Living (1937), Midnight (1939), Hold Back the Dawn (1941) and Frenchman’s Creek (1944). Some may recall that he was the director who drove Billy Wilder to direct his own scripts, so that he did not have to watch Leisen doing it.

    What is less well remembered is Mitchell Leisen’s work as an art director. He worked in this capacity several times with Cecil B DeMille, including on Madam Satan, in collaboration with Cedric Gibbons. He also acted as an assistant director on that picture. 

  • Cedric Gibbons

    Austin Cedric Gibbons (1890-1960) has been called “the most powerful arbiter of style” at MGM after Mayer and Thalberg. He was head of the studio’s art department for more than 30 years, responsible for the look of all its pictures and was credited on most of them. 

    Clearly, Gibbons did not undertake the detailed design of over a thousand films, which has led some observers to treat him as merely a credit-hogging bureaucrat.  He was that, of course, which is why he has more onscreen credits than any other individual in cinema history. But this is no reason to overlook the contribution he made to the visual style of the studio that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s.

    Gibbons started out working for the Edison Studio in 1914  and then, after military service, for Samuel Goldwyn, and thereby to MGM in 1924. In 1925 he visited the Paris Exhibition, which consolidated the influence of contemporary art movements such as Futurism, Surrealism and Art Deco on his approach to design. 

    By 1931, Gibbons had 40 staff working under him, including six art directors. He was careful to recruit personnel whose style and influences were in line with his own. His role became supervisory, though in a genuine sense: Gibbons personally signed off on all designs and, frequently, constructed sets, until health issues curtailed this level of involvement in 1945.

    It is difficult to say which musicals Gibbons had a direct involvement in, but his influence certainly dictated both the look of 1930s’ black-and-white pictures, and the Technicolor extravaganzas launched by The Wizard of Oz. Two of his eleven Oscars were for musicals: the first version of The Merry Widow (undoubtedly deserved) and An American in Paris (almost certainly not).

  • Richard Day

    Canadian Richard Day (1896-1972) was one of the great Hollywood art directors, and one of the few to work steadily as a freelancer for much of his career. He won seven Oscars and was nominated a further thirteen times. Day worked with Erich Von Stroheim on a number of his best silent films, and developed a commitment to realism in design that set him apart from many of his peers.

    For a period after 1929 Day worked in partnership with Cedric Gibbons at Metro, including designing most of the settings for The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

    By the end of his career Day had worked on well over 300 films and with most of the leading directors, including Ford, Hawks, Vidor, Lang, Wellman and Preminger, and with Jean Renoir on Swamp Water (1941). 

  • Erté

    Romain de Tirtoff (1892-1990) was a Russian-born French exponent of Art Deco in many forms, including clothing, interior decoration and jewellery. He also worked in the theatre, designing costumes and sets for, for example, the Folies Bergère in Paris and George White’s Scandals on Broadway. 

    Erté first worked for MGM in 1924-25, designing gowns and costumes for The Mystic and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (both 1925). He continued in films, mostly in costume design, throughout the 1920s, culminating in costumes and sets for The Hollywood Revue of 1929. See, for example, the art deco arch in the opening number.

    Erté was still working at the age of 95, two years before his death. 

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