Osterley’s cinematic double life

The east front of Osterley Park House. The 1960 film 'The Grass Is Greener' shows the house with a drive going straight to the front steps, rather than the current curved one. ©NTPL/Andrew Butler

Prolific blogger Little Augury recently posted about the 1960 Stanley Donen film The Grass Is Greener, starring Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons. Osterley Park, on the western outskirts of London, was used for some of the exterior shots.

Some of the interiors at Osterley, designed by Robert Adam in the 1760s and 1770s, were also used as inspiration for the sets (as was, apparently, the Long Gallery at nearby Syon House, also by Adam).

The Entrance Hall at Osterley, copied in detail by Harbord in 'The Grass is Greener', although his blue is perhaps more 'Technicolor'. ©NTPL/Dennis Gilbert

The story revolves around the Earl and Countess of Rhyall (Grant and Kerr), who have been forced by straightened circumstances to open their stately home to the public. The Countess is flattered by the attentions of an American oil tycoon (Mitchum), and in revenge the Earl invites his former girlfriend, an American heiress (Simmons). Cue a romantic comedy that has over time become a minor classic.

The Great Stair, another model for Harbord, although in the film the walls were painted John Fowler-style pink. NTPL/Dennis Gilbert

The sets were designed by decorator Felix Harbord. As Little Augury’s post shows, they were sometimes amazingly accurate copies of the original spaces at Osterley, while on other occasions he clearly remoulded the rooms to suit the film.

The State Bedchamber. A very similar bedroom appears in the film, although there the bed is a Technicolor dark pink and the pleated wall hangings a ditto purple. ©NTPL/Bill Batten

Harbord must have had great fun adding characteristic country house touches, such as groups of miniatures hung next to the fireplace, the ‘correct’ picture hang with the smaller paintings hung below the larger ones, and a rush firewood basket of a type still (or again) fashionable today.

The cushions on the drawing room sofa seem very ‘c. 1960′ to me, but I wonder if, even in that era, the Victoria & Albert Museum (who ran Osterley then) had quite so many barrier-ropes about the place?

Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’ revisited

Detail of a pietra dura table-top including a leopard and a lion, at Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire. ©NTPL/Geoffrey Shakerley

Courtney Barnes and I have found ourselves chatting to journalist Steven Kurutz about the enduring influence of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film The Leopard. I told Steven that I was first introduced to the film at a suitably glamorous Manolo Blahnik exhibition at the Design Museum in London in 2003, where scenes from The Leopard played on a video loop (a trailer can be seen here, and Kurutz’s piece in the New York Times can be read here).

Detail of a pietra dura table-top at Charlecote Park, Warwickshire. ©NTPL/Derrick E. Witty

You can easily see why Blahnik would admire The Leopard: almost every scene contains a wealth of visual detail about aristocratic life in Sicily in the 1860s, including sumptuous costumes, lavish (and tellingly fading) interiors and dramatic landscapes.

Detail of a pietra dura casket at Charlecote Park, Warwickshire. ©NTPL/Derrick E. Witty

But with Visconti beauty is never an end in itself. The settings and furnishings speak eloquently about a certain way of life at a certain historical moment, and about how that way of life is changing. In one particularly poignant scene, for instance, Don Tancredi (played by Alain Delon) rushes through his uncle’s country house to say his goodbyes before going off to join Garibaldi’s revolution. The huge dog scampering alongside him, the billowing curtains and Tancredi’s own irresistable, dance-like progress all seem to suggest that the winds of change are blowing through this old, static society.

Detail of a pietra dura table-top at Charlecote Park, Warwickshire. ©NTPL/Derrick E. Witty

Even the stark Sicilian landscape, apparently so timeless, hints at the social and political changes that are taking place: traditionally these fields and hills had belonged to the Prince of Salina, the film’s protagonist (played by Burt Lancaster), but now they are changing hands as a politically astute nouveau riche class comes to the fore.

Detail of a pietra dura table-top at The Argory, Co. Armagh. ©NTPL/Derrick E. Witty

The Prince is history, both in the sense that he is yesterday’s man and in the sense that we see the changes happening through his eyes. Socially prominent and yet powerless, charismatically virile (he is ‘the leopard’ of the title) but also philosophically resigned, he is the pivot around which the whole epic spectacle turns.

Detail of a pietra dura casket at Charlecote Park, Warwickshire. ©NTPL/Derrick E. Witty

And yet the film never feels weighed down by its underlying ideas. Visconti’s love of visual richness and attention to detail ensure that the story is told directly through the senses and the emotions rather than through the mind.

Detail of a pietra dura table-top at Powis Castle, Powys. ©NTPL/John Hammond

In this way Visconti is a fantastic inspiration for anyone involved in the heritage business: if we can make the experience of visiting historic houses and gardens feel like watching The Leopard then our job is done. Which is rather a tall order, of course.

The fictional life of Lyme Park

View of the north front Lyme Park, c. 1700. Acquired with the help of the Art Fund in 1999. ©NTPL/John Hammond

This view of Lyme Park was purchased by the National Trust in 1999 with support from the Art Fund. It shows the north front of the house in about 1700.

These topographical paintings were usually at least partly fictional, an expression of the owners’ pride, their ideals and hopes.

©NTPL/Matthew Antrobus

This is the north front photographed fairly recently.

Although the image is obviously a truthful record of a moment in time, the photographer has also incorporated certain conventions from the tradition of landscape painting, such as the curve of the drive in the the foreground and the mass of the tree on the right. It is a composition just as artfully contrived as the earlier painting.

The south front of Lyme. ©NTPL/Arnhel de Serra

The other, grander front of the house will, for most of us, be associated with the 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. In that series Lyme stands in for Darcy’s country house, Pemberley.

It is below the south front of Lyme/Pemberley that Darcy, having just taken a dip in the lake after a strenuous journey on horseback, encounters the mortified Lizzie Bennet, and they have their famously stilted conversation. In this case the reality of Lyme is augmented by both literature and film.

Can we ever see a place without all these associations? Perhaps that is only possible when we are three or four years old.