William Cameron Menzies

William Cameron Menzies (born July 29, 1896, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.—died March 5, 1957, Beverly Hills, California) was an American set designer, one of the most influential in filmmaking, whose work on The Dove (1927) and The Tempest (1928) won the first Academy Award for art direction. His visual style was also evident in the 15 films he directed, Invaders from Mars (1953) being the best-known.

The silent era

Menzies studied at Yale University and New York City’s Art Students League. After military service in World War I, he began his Hollywood career as a production designer on The Naulahka in 1918. The following year he served (uncredited) as the art director on The Witness for the Defense and soon became sought-after. Menzies’s reputation derives from the opulent fairy-tale settings of such films as The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and The Beloved Rogue (1927). He often used forced perspective, making actual depths appear much greater than they were. Another of his techniques was to use broken diagonal barriers—fences, walls, or railings—to emphasize tension, grief, or separation.

After winning an Oscar in 1929 for The Dove and The Tempest, Menzies received an unofficial nomination for his art direction on The Awakening (1928) and Alibi (1929). He later earned a nod for Bulldog Drummond (1929). Menzies’s other notable silent films include such classics as Rosita (1923), Cobra (1925), and Sadie Thompson (1928).

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Films of the 1930s and ’40s

In 1931 Menzies made his directorial debut with Always Goodbye and The Spider, both of which were codirected with Kenneth MacKenna. The following year he codirected (with Marcel Varnel) the low-budget action adventure Chandu the Magician, featuring Bela Lugosi. Menzies’s first solo directing credit was on the British production of Things to Come (1936), which was inspired by the novel The Shape of Things to Come by H.G. Wells, who wrote the script. The science-fiction epic starred Raymond Massey in a dual role as the visionary Cabal, who survives the fall of one futuristic society and whose grandson (also Massey) helps to rebuild the next. Seeming talky and somewhat stilted to contemporary viewers, the film nonetheless possesses a singular visual beauty quite unlike any other film of its time, thanks to both Menzies and Vincent Korda, who served as the settings designer and was a leading art director.

After directing one more picture in England, Menzies returned to the United States to work on Gone with the Wind (1939). Although he held the title of production designer, he actually directed several key scenes, including the famed crane shot depicting hundreds of wounded soldiers during the siege of Atlanta. He won a special Oscar for his work on the film, cited for “outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood in the production of Gone with the Wind.” Menzies followed that success by working as the production designer on Our Town (1940), The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). On Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), he handled special production effects.

Later films

In 1944 Menzies returned to directing with the cautionary political fable Address Unknown. He then shot a few scenes of producer David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun (1946) after King Vidor left the production. Menzies did some television work before helming a pair of B-films in 1951: Drums in the Deep South, a potboiler set during the Civil War, and The Whip Hand, a thriller about a communist plot to conquer the United States by unleashing germ warfare.

Invaders from Mars (1953) is probably Menzies’s best-known work. Made during the height of the sci-fi craze, it is a nightmarish, at times surrealistic, tale told from the perspective of a little boy who sees a Martian saucer descend in a field but finds no adults willing to believe him until most of the townspeople, including his parents, have been turned into slaves. Menzies’s production design for Invaders from Mars is still a model of low-budget resourcefulness. He then directed his last film, The Maze (1953), a horror yarn that was less memorable, although Menzies bolstered the weak plot with his usual stylish design.

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