AT last, we have it straight from the horse’s mouth. The chairman of the Arts Council, rector of the Royal College of Art and noted writer on film Professor Sir Christopher Frayling definitively confirms: “Yes, architect Erno Goldfinger was the man whose name was used for the James Bond novel and film.”
Sir Christopher is speaking about a weekend of films, entitled Home Movies, which he is set to open tomorrow (Friday) at the Everyman Cinema Club in Holly Bush Vale, Hampstead.
The short season will conclude on Saturday night with a champagne reception at 2 Willow Road, the modernist Hampstead home for 50 years of Erno Goldfinger, designed by the architect himself.
But the Bond movie Goldfinger will not be part of the programme. Instead, says Sir Christopher: “Home Movies is a fascinating spin-off from the research of the Royal College of Art’s celebrated Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, which explores the history and design of the home, in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum.”
Indeed, the centre’s work will culminate in 2006 with a major exhibition at the V&A.
But the Hampstead film season is the brainchild of Harriet McKay, curator (and resident) at 2 Willow Road, which is owned by the National Trust.
She says: “It’s the first initiative of its kind I know of, and the first time the National Trust, the Royal College of Art and the Everyman Cinema Club have worked in partnership together.”
She lighted on the idea “because this is a modernist house and film is the modern way of communicating.”
But before explaining further, she wants to dispose of the urban myth about Goldfinger, that James Bond author Ian Fleming made his fictional character a villain because he hated the Hungarian-born architect’s work.
Harriet insists: “It’s not true. Fleming was simply a golfing friend of a cousin of Goldfinger’s English wife Ursula, and he borrowed the name, as he did with another villain he named after an acquaintance, Blofeld.”
Back with Home Movies, Christopher Frayling explains: “The season covers a wide spectrum of themes associated with ‘the home’, as films are often centred on the home as a safe or unsafe place.”
The Friday night screenings, which he will introduce, focus on what he calls “the dark side of the home”, including a short 1929 surrealist film by Man Ray. It also has a showing of The Servant, directed by Joseph Losey in 1963, in which a menacing Dirk Bogarde, as the domestic of the title, turns the tables on his employer, played by James Fox, in a study of class relations within the home.
Other films in the season explore the home in other cultures, for example through Indian director Satyajit Ray’s 1984 movie The Home and The World. And Harriet McKay will lead screenings for children on Saturday morning showing how the idea of the home has been completely subverted on children’s TV in a single generation.
She says: “Hector’s House was on when I was a kid, but that was respectful. My seven-year-old son will probably wonder what planet it is from. Now the BBC has Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow, who regularly wreck the place with fights, mayhem and chaos, so that Tory MP Peter Luff asked last week if the programme is irresponsible.”
Harriet is a passionate advocate of opening up homes, and home as a topic, to the public, since she came to Willow Road in 1995 to prepare the house for the public.
She says: “It was a very daring move from the National Trust to acquire a modernist house, when the trust’s members, used to visiting its grand Palladian country houses, might have found it unfamiliar and foreboding.
“But we acquired the house in tact after Goldfinger died in 1987, with hot water bottles and toothpicks and soup cans in the cupboard. “They made it normal. It’s the juxtaposition of really good architecture and art (by Goldfinger’s friends, including Max Ernst, Bridget Riley and fellow Hampsteadite Henry Moore) with ordinary, familiar things which make this place unique.”
Sir Christopher Frayling confirms: “Willow Road is a great modernist house”. Harriet praises Goldfinger’s “very careful design”, with its flexible living space, which can be completely open or divided by partitions, and includes details such as the “immaculate, hospital skirting boards, which are curved to make them easier to clean”.
But back in the 1930s, when 2 Willow Road was built, Goldfinger’s plans sparked a furore initiated by Henry Brooke, secretary of the conservation group the Heath and Hampstead Society.
But, in the end, Goldfinger got his home and gave Hampstead one of its most notable buildings.
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