Certainly not outrage or indignation: this Ottawa-set debut by director Patrick White barely qualifies as a feature apart from its runtime, and lacks even the maddening cognitive dissonance that “objectively” worse films would no doubt inspire. In one defining scene, as the countess visits the diabolic St Germain, a dizzying high-angle shot builds terror and manipulates scale in a way that confidently handles the supernatural dimensions of the film, using light to take us by the hand and through Messel’s sets into a physical and spiritual darkness.The hare-brained Queen of Spades rides a wave of stale familiarity to miserable results.įor viewers whose formative years have nourished the clickbait addiction of YouTube horror, neither the lackadaisical Queen of Spades nor the lore behind it should elicit more than a nonchalant shrug. Mirrors recur not only as a classic gothic metaphor for revealing more than face value, but also as a spatial device leading and deceiving the eye. Point of view shots to imply space where there was none wide-angle lenses to enlarge the little space there was (see the ballroom, in particular, for this trickery). But Messel’s sets and Otto Heller’s camerawork came together in a beautiful partnership. As Keith Lodwick has illuminated elsewhere, the designer understood the power of the cinematographer to overcome the limitations of the studio floor. There was simply not enough room or budget to create a full-scale vision of St Petersburg. A strong red somewhere gets into all the other colours …” John Barber, ‘Oliver Messel – a Genius’, Leader Magazine, ĭespite this attention to detail, Messel’s designs were challenging once realised. ‘The white isn’t white and every print is different. Here he explores new possibilities with transparent and diaphanous materials. Messel is a pioneer of new materials: he was the first to use cellophane on the stage. Hours are spent fiddling with new materials until helmets appear fashioned from pipe cleaners, satin robes from rubber sheeting, silver and gold from painted leather, Queen Mab’s chariot itself from mousseline and plastered string. The paint brush rattles against a tumbler, a design is help up to the mirror, and soon every level surface is covered with paintings laid out to dry. Someone comes in with a coffee, but nothing is said. John Barber gives a sense of the studio from which such items emerged: Within these white walls up in the roof, Messel frequently works all night. And, provided one’s palate is inclined to the romantic, one can lean back and enjoy it all unrestrainedly.” John Barber, ‘Oliver Messel – a Genius’, Leader Magazine, It is all done with a grace as natural as a flower unfolding. Choosing as models the most elegant and artificial masters – Inigo Jones, Fragonard, Boucher, Carpaccio, Botticelli – he executes original arabesques, as it were, in their memory. All his work is an escape into the fairy-lands of fancy. He will not discuss modern clothes, and would refuse to dress a present-day film or play. ‘I am the enemy,’ he says, ‘of everything utilitarian’. As a 1948 article on The Queen of Spades put it: Messel is anti-naturalistic, anti-austerity. He was a star designer, sitting alongside leading actors Anton Walbrook and Edith Evans. Having Messel attached to a production was capable of garnering more than a few headlines. By the time that he worked on The Queen of Spades, Messel had five major film productions under his belt including The Private Life of Don Juan (1934), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Romeo and Juliet (1936), The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Caesar and Cleopatra (1945).
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