Film Noir Decor

In the opening scene of This Gun for Hire (1942), hitman Alan Ladd wakes up in a flophouse, ready to go to work. That magnificent old wrought-iron bed might have been headed for the junkyard if the seedy hotel hadn’t kept it in service. Today, such an antique could fetch around $2,000—and even more in comparable value during the antiques boom of the 1970s, when the battered furnishings seen in so many film noirs were being hauled out of America’s attics and basements, restored, and suddenly prized.

It is a rags-to-riches story. Notice the settings art directors tucked into the underside of the asphalt jungle—cheap rooming houses, run-down hotels, pool halls, and police stations. Here was the tired, “used” merchandise of the 1950s: Grandma’s furnishings, outdated and unwanted in the rush toward postwar modernism. A mere twenty-five years later, these woebegone pieces will sell for prices that would have astonished the folks back then.

The dresser and mirror in this dilapidated tenement in He Ran All the Way (1951) was destined to be stripped down to the original oak and given a hand-rubbed, soft-sheen “golden oak” finish, the beveled mirror re-silvered. At the height of the antiques revival, such a restored piece sold for the equivalent of $1500 today. Since then, however, demand for this “vintage” furniture has declined considerably.

In this shot from Mystery Street (1950) below, an outdated Victorian chandelier hangs in a shabby, low-rent boarding-house. Two decades later, the fixture might have been polished back to glittering brass, rewired, and sold with its original fluted glass shades adding to the value. Eager young collectors gladly paid stupid money for the grandparents’ furnishings they had laughed at as children.

The Great Antiques Revival was a heady time. Prospectors suddenly discovered that treasures could be pulled from the most mundane places—parlors, attics, basements, garages, even dumpsters. It became a national treasure hunt, rescuing countless discarded objects from landfills and oblivion. Enterprising dealers began prospecting old hotels and boarding houses for hopelessly out-of-date furniture—the very stuff that fills the back alleys of film noir’s hardscrabble world.

The set designers brought the same meticulous realism to the basement as they did to the penthouse. They left us with a remarkable visual catalogue of an America we thought nothing of throwing away.

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