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The Guardian (29/May/2006) - Obituary: Henry Bumstead

(c) The Guardian (29/May/2006)

Henry Bumstead

Hollywood art director for Hitchcock, Hill and Eastwood

Paramount was the Cartier of studios in the 1930s, its mountain logo signifying the upper crust. The supervising art director was Hans Dreier, whose set designs established the lustrous surface that dictated the feel of the films. Although Henry Bumstead, who has died aged 91, missed the studio's best period, he did benefit from working as set designer with Dreier on about 10 productions in the late 1940s and 1950s. He was then teamed with Hal Pereira, Dreier's successor at Paramount, on a further 20 features

Bumstead had been at the studio for six years, when Alfred Hitchcock, making his second Paramount movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much, asked Robert Burks, his cinematographer, to recommend the best designer around the lot. Burks named 40-year-old Bumstead, who was at the time busy on the cod-medieval sets of The Vagabond King.

It would be the first of four films Bumstead designed for Hitchcock, which included the master's best (Vertigo, 1958), his worst (Topaz, 1969) and his last (Family Plot, 1976). For The Man Who Knew Too Much remake, Bumstead improved on Alfred Junge's 1934 original with scenes such as the taxidermist shop lined with stuffed animal heads, which prefigures Norman Bates's room in Psycho (1960). There was also a sumptuously detailed Moroccan restaurant, and a bleak London church. The film boosted Bumstead's reputation.

Hitchcock told Bumstead that he conceived Vertigo as almost a motionless series of tableaux vivants, which needed particularly evocative set design. He suggested Bumstead try "to use a lot of mirrors", emphasising the dual role of Kim Novak and the moral ambivalence of James Stewart's character. In the end, both the interiors and exteriors - the empty picture gallery, the Spanish mission church tower - tend towards a Magrittesque surrealism. Vertigo gained Bumstead an Oscar nomination.

Bumstead was born in Ontario, California and took an arts degree at the University of Southern California. He remained at Paramount from 1948 to 1961, before moving to Universal, where one of his first assignments was on Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962). It won him his first Oscar (shared with Alexander Golitzen) for his recreation of small-town Alabama in the 1930s - the ramshackle architecture reflecting Gregory Peck's crumpled white suit.

For Franklin Schaffner's The War Lord (1965), an intimate epic set in 11th-century France, Bumstead created an atmospheric, superstitious world. At one stage, a knight riding through a forest festooned with druidic fertility symbols and charms, mutters: "This place has the dimensions of heresy," which could be taken as a tribute to Bumstead's artistry. The year 1972 was significant for Bumstead because he made his first films for George Roy Hill and Clint Eastwood, for both of whom he was to work happily and frequently. The long association with the former began with Slaughterhouse Five, in which Bumstead also played a role. The time-travel fantasy, based on Kurt Vonnegut's novel, was a real challenge for an art director as it has three concurrent narratives that take place in a bombed Dresden during the second world war, contemporary America and a futuristic "human zoo" on the planet Tralfamadore.

High Plains Drifter was Eastwood's first western as director, and Bumstead created a stylised, dusty and gritty west. This collaboration reached its apotheosis in Unforgiven (1992), whose evocation of the bleak architecture and harsh realities of frontier life gained Bumstead another Oscar nomination.

He had won his second Oscar for Hill's The Sting (1973), a superbly contrasting view of both seedy and sumptuous Chicago, ranging from flashy apartments to sordid backstreets which, despite the jokey tenor of the script, never leaves any doubt that this is the Depression.

Some of the better films he made for Hill were The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and The World According to Garp (1982), and for Eastwood, True Crime (1999) and Space Cowboys (2000). The set for the latter was a detailed re-creation of NASA's Mission Control in Houston. Also, in spite of a number of septuagenarians among the cast, Bumstead at 85 was far the oldest person on the film.

Among other honours, the tall, unpretentious Bumstead, affectionately known as "Bummie", received the lifetime achievement award from the Art Directors Guild in 1998.

He is survived by his wife of 23 years, a daughter, three sons and two stepdaughters.

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