James Basevi

James Basevi saw military service with the 2nd Canadian Division during the First World War and fought at the Battle of Amiens as a machine gunner. He attained the rank of major and was decorated and mentioned in dispatches . After being demobilized, he first returned to Canada, then settled in the United States. In 1924, he joined the fledgling MGM company, first to design sets, then as a special effects director, often in collaboration with Cedric Gibbons and A. Arnold Gillespie. Basevi was under contract at MGM from 1925 to 1929 and, again, in the mid-30's, his earthquake scenes from San Francisco (1936) earning him a well-deserved reputation as one of the top craftsmen in the field. He was at United Artists from 1936 to 1940, doing more sterling special effects work (with Alexander Golitzen and Richard Day) on the storm sequences of The Hurricane (1937). For this, he built a 600-foot set of a tropical island to be drowned by thousands of carefully manipulated gallons of water. Reviewer Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times was so impressed that he referred to it as the 'Basevi Hurricane' blasting an audience "from the orchestra pit to the first mezzanine"(November 10,1937). Basevi received his first full credit as art director for Raffles (1939). In 1941, he moved to 20th Century Fox, first as supervising art director, becoming head of the art department by 1945. His crowning achievement was winning the Academy Award for art direction for The Song of Bernadette (1943) (sharing the honours with William S. Darling. On loan to David O. Selznick, he also famously worked with Salvador Dalí on Hitchcock's thriller Spellbound (1945), transferring Dali's paintings for the dream sequence onto film and creating an 'artistically compelling' atmosphere. He also excelled at conveying strikingly convincing images of the Old West, as in My Darling Clementine (1946) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). After departing Fox in 1947, Basevi did freelance work, in addition to brief spells with RKO (1948-50) and Warner Brothers (1953-54).