Remember the opening of The Sound of Music? That idyllic Austrian meadow, Alps in the background, in which Julie Andrews twirls? “The hills are alive,” she sings. Actually, they weren’t. As with so many of the striking locations in Hollywood movies, from Singin’ in the Rain to Cleopatra, a flat canvas held those hills. For the first museum show dedicated to Hollywood’s backdrops, the Boca Raton Museum of Art has rounded up canvases made between 1938 and 1968—22 in all. They mostly come from movies by MGM, titles such as Marie Antoinette (1938), An American in Paris (1951), and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). The exhibition also features “the grandaddy, the Babe Ruth of all Hollywood backdrops,” as Karen Maness, one of the show’s curators, describes it: Mount Rushmore, where Alfred Hitchcock, in his 1959 thriller, North by Northwest, staged his precarious penultimate scene.
The film stars Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive who’s been mistaken for a spy and must outwit the thugs who are trying to kill him. To clear his name, Thornhill chases down the actual target, a hunt that takes him from New York City to South Dakota. Which leads to Mount Rushmore, where the beautiful blonde he’s picked up on his way west ends up dangling under Thomas Jefferson’s chin.
