M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang) (via)

L to R: Tod Browning, Carroll Borland, and Bela Lugosi on the set of Mark of the Vampire (1935, dir. Tod Browning) (via)

Jean Harlow on the set of Red Dust (1932, dir. Victor Fleming) (via)

Marlene Dietrich on the set of Angel (1937, dir Ernst Lubitsch) (via)

Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers in Top Hat (1935, dir. Mark Sandrich) (via)

Colin Clive & Boris Karloff on the set of Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale) (via)

The Blue Angel (1930, dir. Josef Von Sternberg) (via)

Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord in the theater program for the Broadway production of The Philadelphia Story (1939)

Harold Lloyd in Feet First (1930, dir. Clyde Bruckman) (via)

1930s imagining of 1980s New York in the sci-fi musical Just Imagine (1930, dir. David Butler) (via)

Designed by art director Stephen Goosson, the city set was an elaborate miniature model that covered a ground area of 75 x 225 feet and whose tallest tower measured 40 feet.

Just Imagine’s New York was primarily inspired by architect Harvey Corbett’s prediction that 1970’s New York would resemble a “very modernized Venice” and by the futuristic urban designs presented in Hugh Ferriss’s 1929 book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow.

Ferriss’s drawings of the ”business center of the future” (pictures #3-5) provided the most direct inspiration for Goosson’s sets. Broad superhighways establish a geometric ground plan that extends upward through overlapping levels of bridges, streets, and terraced walkways. The grid of streets and bridges is pierced by huge freestanding skyscrapers surrounded by lower setback buildings, a design Ferriss created as an analogy to the natural world of “towering mountain peaks… surrounded by foothills”

The opening scenes of the (otherwise mediocre) film, which feature this cityscape, can be seen here. 

More on the building of the Just Imagine set. Collection of Hugh Ferriss’s futuristic city sketches here.

Poster art: Swedish edition (click on individual posters for artist/film info) (via)

Vivien Leigh & Olivia de Havilland in Gone With the Wind (1939, dir. Victor Fleming) (via)

Sylvia Sidney on the set of The Miracle Man (1932, dir. Norman Z. McLeod) (via)