Grot!
What visions of splendour that name conjures up! These snaps are all from LITTLE CAESAR, but the production design/art direction of Anton Grot graced countless films of the ’30s (and ’20s, and ’40s). I think visually he may have had more to do with the look of some of these films than the credited director. Certainly Michael Curtiz would have had something to say about the look of DR X or CAPTAIN BLOOD, whether or not anybody understood him, but I could easily see someone like Mervyn LeRoy simply following a storyboard for these great establishing shots ~
Check those zig-zags!
I first read of Mr. Grot in Leon Barsacq’s nifty textbook Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, A History of Film Design, which my dad bought me when I was a kid. I think at the time I was kind of disappointed that the book wasn’t really about Caligari and horror films, or film directing per se, but about the speciality subject of film design. And yet, the images in the book stayed with me — I’ve been trying to recreate versions of the Caligari image on the left all through my “career” — there’s even a version of it scripted in one of the feature projects I’m working on right now. The malevolent cross-legged man in the middle of the room!
So thanks, Dad.
Barsacq himself was a distinguished designer, closely associated with Duvivier, Carné and Clair, and his book opened up whole worlds to me — images got embedded in my unconscious, and the tricks of the trade impressed my youthful mind: forced perspective, the Schufftan process, matte paintings and hanging miniatures — THIS was the way to make movies. I don’t recall Barsacq having any particular agenda against realism, but his taste was obviously more attuned to spectacular fantasy and blatant trompe-l’oeil effects. His sensibility crystallized my own.
