Hans Down

Art directors have long been hiding their lights, obscured by bushels but ever there were a key ingredient in the book of what is essential in filmmaking, it would be art directing. One such
German who began his screen sojourn in the year 1919, was Hans Dreier. Like many of his countrymen, he too made the voyage to America to embark on a career in production design. His resume was very much abundant, five hundred films to be precise and not to mention an astronomical twenty-three Oscar nods.

                An early example of Dreier's designs in a pre-code Cleopatra (1934)


Prior to his work in the film industry, Hans Dreier had a short lived career as a building designer in South Africa, and it would not be long until he would ascend to heights in the motion picture industry and become the official head honcho of Paramount Studios Art Department. Hans would be noted for his grandiose sets, they were stylized and constructed like no other art director in the business. He would not go unnoticed; and soon would summon the respect and attention of two most persnickety souls in King Vidor and Josef von Sternberg.

             That was the third maid that quit this week!


In his early days, designing proto-noirs and crime entries; particularly in 1937's The Dragnet, Dreier would present us with
a tamer version of what was to come, his set in The Dragnet would be relatively functional and of the norm, but a few years down the road in 1941, in The Glass Key, Dreier cultivated a hallmark style where design meets emotional trajectory. Perhaps the best example to underline his newfangled ways, was The Big Clock (1948), in which, the magazine headquarters, astutely adorned in Art Deco, would in their appeal, parallel the psychological jousting between the pained hero Ray Milland and contemptible magnate Charles Laughton. What we find in this illustrated scene is an optical correlative of the two men's state of mind. He would maneuver yet another legerdemain in the 1948 noir thriller Sorry Wrong Number, in which Barbara Stanwyck's unbelievably ungepatchka flat, conveys itself as something infinitely more precarious than the cozy lair, that Stanwyck's character erroneously believes it is.

         Try to get those curtains at Laura Ashley!

In 1950, Hans Dreier won the Academy Award for the best art direction (Black & White) for the flawless Sunset Boulevard - and here would be yet again, a premise where decor is used as a means to articulate an image of the cluttered mind of a central character. The washed out grandeur of the silent film star was inimitably matched by the Gothic amenity of her tony Beverly Hills estate. Dreier's main achievement was still the fact he was the head of Paramount art department, where he essentially had the level of creative control to their music department dynamo Alfred Newman did; to elucidate the point, Dreier had the power to benignly impose his own creative disposition onto  the many gifted creators that worked under him, without ever even slightly undermining their unique styles. And also as Newman, the humble Hans was lauded as a great teacher and those that would work under this master, were eternally grateful for the opportunity to do so. But it would be his own work (not to preclude  von Sternberg's potent Underworld, 1927) that was his truest legacy to cinema, and this legacy would be at last acknowledged in several gallery retrospects of his work.

                        A publicity still of Mr Dreier.

Hans Dreier passed away in 1966, he was eighty-one years old.