Hitchcock aficionados are familiar with the trio of great collaborators who helped make some of Hitchcock's best films so memorable: Bernard Herrmann (composer), Robert Burks (cinemaphotographer) and George Tomasini (editor). Together, they brought a chillingly clean, professional touch to The Birds (1963), Vertigo (1958) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 version). Individually, they brought their talent to bear on Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964)—the bulk of Hitchcock's great, mature work.

What about Hitchcock's costume designers? Edith Head's a good guess—and a correct one, more often than not, for Hitchcock and almost everybody else working in Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1980s. (In all, she designed costumes for three hundred and fifty-four films.)

But what about Hitchcock's art directors and set designers?

Can you name one?

Don't worry: nobody else can either.

So ask yourself another question: can you name an object or a set that you remember readily from a Hitchcock film?

Ah, that's much easier, isn't it?

The shower scene and the creepy Bates mansion in Psycho, the sleeper train car and that wonderful lodge in North by Northwest, the fateful tower and the art gallery in Vertigo, the chest concealing the dead body in Rope (1948), the dark, wainscoted mansion of the three-and-a-half-fingered man in The 39 Steps (1935).

Or what about Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest? Hitchcock wasn't allowed to film on the real national monument, so he had a set designed to scale.

Actually, Hitchcock's films have wonderful sets—so why can't anybody name the people who helped design and build them?

A couple reasons come readily to mind. First, Hitchcock storyboarded his films copiously before ever talking to designers, and much of the credit for the visual strength behind his films should go to him. But possibly as importantly, Hitchcock's sets have a strangely generic quality that belies both their complexity and the sophisticated role they play in defining the films' characters.

Hitchcock is famous for his lack of interest in the nuances in character—he once said the best actor would be a tailor's dummy. And he was positively flummoxed when Paul Newman wanted to chat about the motivation behind his character in Torn Curtain (1966). So the subtle help Hitchcock gets from the sets is all the more important.

Take, for example, the slightly cloying, effeminate interior Robert Taylor's character finds himself trapped in with The Birds. While he spends weekdays in the city, on the weekends he travels to nearby Bodega Bay, where he stays with his mother and nearly-eleven-year-old sister. The mother (played by Jessica Tandy) smothers her son, chasing off potential mates like...well, like a bird chasing a cat from its young. The house interior is rather bland in its colors (grays predominate), with low-backed upholstered furniture that offers neither hints of a particular style nor much comfort, and the space gives off a tense, neurotic sense of unwanted closeness. So when Taylor boards up the house to protect his family (and potential mate) from the marauding birds, there's inevitably going to be a meltdown in the suddenly claustrophobic nest.

For another example, let's look at the elderly parents of Joan Fontaine's character in Suspicion (1941). They live in a striking British mansion, with tall, leaded-glass windows and heavily carved oak doors. Clearly, we're told, these are wealthy, stable people. They've been here for generations, and as long as their daughter knows her role in upper-class society, their genes will be staying here for years to come.

But look at the furniture in this opulent house: it's remarkably frumpy and boring. So ignore the house's wonderful bone structure and ask yourself: would you want to live with this couple, with this furniture? Yes, the place is worth a bundle, and a good decorator could bring it around, but what if you could leave it for, say, Cary Grant? Sure, he's got a bad reputation as a womanizer and a gambler among the locals, but just look at the guy! What woman would choose to take her mother's place in that musty old chair, spending her dwindling years with a needle in her hands, when she could be living it up with a dashing playboy?

All right, so he may be a murderer as well as a gambler and a womanizer. Isn't the fun worth the risk?

Actually, no. At least, not for Hitchcock's main characters. They tend to get punished rather severely when they go looking for adventure. As boring as that old couple in Suspicion may be, you're much safer with them than you are with Grant in that dashingly bright house and that winding staircase with its ominous shadows (anyone care for a glass of warm, glowing milk?).

But here's another question for you. Whatever made you think you could actually end up with Grant to begin with? The fact that so many of Hitchcock's characters are uncomplicated, even boring people (put into striking dilemmas, of course) may help us project ourselves into them—even though most of us don't look like Cary Grant or Grace Kelly. But it's not just their undistinguished lives that makes it so easy for us to slip into their characters. I think it's primarily the dowdy, boring furniture that helps us make the leap, frankly. Put Joan Fontaine in an exquisite palace and people may have trouble projecting themselves into her character.

Apparently, the average viewer is more than likely going to err on the flattering side when it comes to their body-image, but they're pretty damn accurate when it comes to sizing up their tastes in furniture.

But maybe the word 'generic' is too derogatory a word for Hitchcock's sets. Actually, the pieces are often quite nice—but they rarely leap at us the way, say, the Deco liquor cabinet does in Jake's office in Chinatown. This is a signal distinction, I think: Polanski is trying to evoke a past era explicitly by drawing our eye to stellar examples of period furniture. Hitchcock, on the other hand, primarily worked in the present. He had little need to telegraph 'Deco 1930s' to his audience, and he was thus under less pressure to make his sets do double—or triple—duty.

Instead, Hitchcock's after something a little simpler with his sets: the frumpy, boring couple gets frumpy, boring furniture because...well, because they're frumpy and boring.

It's a simple formula, really. When you don't want the actors chatting you up about motivation, you sometimes have to let the furniture do the talking.

So the individual pieces tell us a lot about the characters and help us make the precarious leap into thinking we're all Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.

But what about the sets as sets? Here, I think, we can see most clearly how involved Hitchcock was with the set design. Consider, for example, how often Hitchcock's love of difficult, even claustrophobic experiments hinged on brilliant set design. In Rope (1948), he used a set with walls built on wheels so that he could have the cameras move unimpeded around the film's group of three rooms. (Placed prominently at center-stage, of course, was that corpse-concealing chest.)

The shower stall in Psycho was built in sections, so it could be partly disassembled, thus allowing a variety of complicated camera angles. And in Rear Window, Hitchcock had an entire apartment building with a courtyard mocked up so that James Stewart could stare across the courtyard into his neighbors' windows—each window, of course, functioning like a miniature movie screen showing Stewart (our flattering mirror image) individual comedies, melodramas and (of course) murder mysteries staged on isolated sets.

But it's not just neat, complicated trickery that shows us how caught up Hitchcock was in the set design. It's often where the furniture was placed in those original storyboards that matters. Consider, for example, how brilliantly the husband's heavily formal and masculine desk works in Dial M for Murder. For much of the film, we are confined to the couple's apartment living room, and the desk sits with its back to the heavily draped windows, confronting, even controlling the room—just as Ray Milland's character tries to control his wife. (And what about those perennially closed drapes? Do they symbolically conceal the secrets behind Milland's seemingly respectable exterior?)

That Grace Kelly's struggle with her intended killer takes place on top of the desk itself (which holds the title's telephone, no less) only underlines what Hitchcock is trying to make the desk tell us about the couple.

But Hitchcock, smart as he is, didn't select each lamp and chair and sofa and put each one into place. So who are the designers behind the sets?

I'd like to report that there's a single, unsung hero behind it all. Unfortunately, there's not. Over the course of his career, Hitchcock drew on a variety of set designers and art directors, some undoubtedly provided contractually by the various studios (which functioned something like a present-day HMO with its list of participating physicians).

It is, in general, a good though not remarkable group of artists. Alfred Jung, Albert Juliann and Oscar Fredric Werndorff worked with him until 1938, when Hitchcock left British studios for Hollywood. Among this group, Jung probably did the most outstanding non-Hitchcock work, with Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Black Narcissus to his credit.

Through the forties, Hitchcock worked principally with Van Nest Polglase, Darrell Silvera, Russell A. Gausman, Emile Kuri and Thomas N. Morahan. Although Polglase worked on a few good non-Hitchcock projects (Citizen Kane being most prominent), the most significant designer to come from this period is Silvera, who worked on more than two hundred films, including everything from Val Lewton's Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man to Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World—with Citizen Kane thrown in for good measure. Kuri, on the other hand, went on to work on several live-action Disney movies like The Absent-Minded Professor and Blackbeard's Ghost. (Another name that pops up in the Forties with Hitchcock is Robert Boyle—he would later work as production designer on North by Northwest, The Birds and Marnie.)

Likewise, a variety of designers worked on the mature films of the Fifties and Sixties. Among them: Edward S. Haworth, George James Hopkins, Sam Comer, Hal Pereira and Henry Bumstead. Hopkins has the most distinguished (as well as the longest) resume, with the high points running from Casablanca to My Fair Lady and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Pereira and Comer, on the other end of the scale, did a lot of work together on Jerry Lewis comedies.)

So there are groups of designers who worked with Hitchcock for a period of time, but the overall vision and purpose behind the design—character development, audience projection, sophisticated layout, etc.—carry across the groups. Leading us to conclude, of course, that it was primarily Hitchcock's vision (probably in the earliest stages of storyboarding) that drove set design.

But that, I suppose, is hardly a surprise.