Hal Pereira

After graduating from the University of Illinois, Hal Pereira served his apprenticeship as a theatrical designer in his home town Chicago, between 1933 and 1940. In 1942, he moved to Hollywood and signed with Paramount as a unit art director under the tutelage of department head Hans Dreier. He took over Dreier's job of supervising art director upon the latter's retirement in 1950. Pereira had an innate sense of naturalism and knew how to best suit and enrich the emotive or thematic needs of a subject. He was particularly adept at designing realistic urban landscapes, often using understated sets, and employing props and lighting devices which conveyed moral or economic values. His best early work was on Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), for which he provided a sombre and claustrophobic atmosphere, alternating his use of light and shadow, both for dramatic effect, and as juxtaposition between good and evil. He used similarly confining interiors, both for the dust bowl of the anguished mining community of Ace in the Hole (1951), and for Alfred Hitchcock's set-bound thriller Rear Window (1954). Pereira was immensely versatile, tackling films of every conceivable genre, from The War of the Worlds (1953), with it's death-ray dispensing alien flying machines, to creating the expansive outdoor feeling of Shane (1953); from the seedy, random disorder of the police station in Detective Story (1951) , to the rich, glowing sunbaked locations of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), and the happy-go-lucky Bohemian interiors of The Odd Couple (1968). In 1959, Pereira worked in tandem with A. Earl Hedrick as art director on Bonanza (1959). Nominated for 23 Academy Awards, he only won one, for The Rose Tattoo (1955). He retired in 1968, to work as a design consultant in the architectural firm of his famous brother, William L. Pereira.