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The Economist (19/Aug/2010) - Obituary: Robert Boyle

(c) The Economist (19/Aug/2010)

Robert Boyle

Robert Francis Boyle, art director for Alfred Hitchcock, died on August 1st, aged 100

IN THE 1930s many, if not most, of the graduates from the Southern California School of Architecture ended up wandering the backlots of Hollywood studios. Robert Boyle was one of them. He had dreamed of building apartment complexes, corporate headquarters, modernist town halls. The Depression wiped out the need for any of those.

Instead he found himself supervising the construction of a full-scale model of the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty for “Saboteur” (1942), on which Robert Cummings and Norman Lloyd could confront each other with deathly smiles while the East river crept below; the whole range of presidential heads from Mount Rushmore, big enough for Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint to clamber across the brows of, for “North by Northwest” (1959); a lush bordello and a chunk of the Loop for “Chicago, Chicago” (1969); and a quaint shtetl of leaning wooden shacks, hencoops and carts for “Fiddler on the Roof” (1971). The closest he came to the architecture of his college days was the book-lined cantilevered house, allegedly by Frank Lloyd Wright, which was inhabited by silky-smooth James Mason in “North by Northwest”. Wright fans were disappointed to be told it did not exist.

The job of art director was then new in cinema. Before the 1930s movies needed little more than a theatre prop-and-set man, but now they were acquiring a “reality” of their own that called for a look and a mood. Mr Boyle's job, in his words, was to control the space in which the film was set. He had to infuse the emotional and psychological requirements of the screenplay into buildings, landscapes, rooms. Ruts in a road, clutter in a house, the paint on a wall, would evoke layers of living and feeling over the years. He had to present all this as real and then, by subtle placing of objects and use of light, draw viewers to see the scene as the director wished them to.

Most directors gave him merely a script and an outline. He worked for many over the years, on films ranging from “Cape Fear” to “Abbott and Costello go to Mars”, but it was Hitchcock, he said, who taught him what he knew. At their first meeting in 1941 he found him at his desk making drawings on a little scroll of paper, and was invited, awestruck as he was, to sit down opposite and do the same. It seemed to be a sort of test. Hitchcock, who already held every shot in his head, drew stick men, all to proper image size, and Mr Boyle understood that his job was to give the story an atmosphere that would seem to wrap the figures round, be part of them, and contain their histories, as a small child could make a stick man represent all he felt and knew about mother, brother or friend.

Later, to show what this had led to in “North by Northwest”, he would draw two lines meeting at a point with a stick figure standing midway on either side. Nothing else. Thus was born the scene of Roger Thornhill and the Stranger on a road in northern Indiana, actually California, in a landscape almost as blank and psychologically disturbing as white paper, remarking to each other how odd it was that a plane should be crop-dusting, when there were no crops.

Controlling the dawn

Location shooting became the norm over the seven decades Mr Boyle spent in the trade. He had trouble with it, because no place could ever be exactly right for him. He toured Europe before lighting on Croatia as the setting for Norman Jewison's “Fiddler on the Roof”, and even then the silhouetted buildings in the opening sequence, as dawn broke over bare “Ukrainian” fields, had been designed and built by Mr Boyle from his own charcoal sketches, in the style of van Gogh and Chagall. Reality, in cinema, was not truthful unless it was entirely controlled by him.

His fishing-town of Bodega Bay in Hitchcock's “The Birds” (1963) could also never be found in one place. It had to be put together from half a dozen towns, a church from here, a school from there, supplemented with mock-ups, masking mattes, blue- and yellow-screen and back-projection. Many of the most terrifying shots in “The Birds” were achieved by filming seagulls from high cliffs and hand-painting each frame on to mattes. Computers, he admitted, might have helped; but he preferred building and layering. The fire in Bodega Bay was a montage of mattes of houses, smoke and birds, with only the fire, in the backlot at Universal, really burning. All through Mr Boyle kept in mind the image of Edvard Munch's “The Scream”.

He lectured on his craft at the American Film Institute almost to the end of his life, often in humble, rambling talks with old friends, and was revered for creating some of the most powerful images in cinema. Belatedly he was rewarded (having been pipped for four Oscars) with an honorary Academy Award in 2008.

He might have gone several different ways in his life. Painting attracted him: in the late 1930s, in Mexico, he had spent his Sunday afternoons with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. In the war he was a combat cameraman, in France and ruined Berlin, for the Army Signal Corps. And then there was architecture, his first love. But after only a little time in Hollywood he had fallen for a different kind of constructive art, the building of “truth” with “magic”, and never looked back.

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