Articles & Texticles

Continuing a series about Art Directors in the British film industry up to 1948, when the book containing these articles was published.

This chapter deals with Duncan Sutherland. (Born 1905 – )

Sutherland is another of those robust and jovial artists; like Vetchinsky, he bothers little about his drawings as such and depends for so much of his effect on the way he dresses his sets which, after all, is the only visible part of a character’s personality.

Production sketch from “Thunder Rock” Charter Films, 1942. Pencil & wash.
(Click these thumbnails to enlarge them please)

Production sketch from Bedelia John Corfield Productions, 1946. Pencil & wash.

DUNCAN MACDONALD SUTHERLAND was trained at the Glasgow School of Architecture and became assistant to G. P. K.Young, then President of the Scottish Institute of Architects.

Giving up architecture, he took to the stage and then to films as an actor.

Coming to London he worked for six years in the Art Department of the British International Pictures at Elstree, one of the first pictures he worked on being ‘Cape Forlorn’ under Alfred Junge.

Following this he did various films which he hopes ‘will always be shrouded in the mist of time’; all the same he established a reputation that brought him right to the forefront when he art directed Thorold Dickinson’s ‘Gaslight’ in 1940 and through his decor and set dressing built up an authentic Victorian atmosphere that could not have been bettered.

Then came ‘Pimpernel Smith’ and `Thunder Rock’, in which he built a lighthouse interior and a scene in one of the sheds in the Potteries during the industrial revolution that again came to life.

`San Demetrio London’ did not give him much scope, but on his new picture with Thorold Dickinson, ‘Then and Now’, it sounds as though he will again have an opportunity to make the past come to life.

Sutherland is another of those robust and jovial artists; like Vetchinsky, he bothers little about his drawings as such and depends for so much of his effect on the way he dresses his sets which, after all, is the only visible part of a character’s personality.

(Excerpted from: “Art & Design In The British Film” A Pictorial Directory of British Art Directors and their work. Compiled by Edward Carrick, 1947 )
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