A "Giant" Inspiration for the Mansion Exterior? And What About Phantom Manor?

I refer to the James Dean movie, Giant, which premiered in 1956. It was his third and final film, as he died in a car accident before the film was released. Also featuring Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, Giant was a giant critical and popular success.  88% fresh at Rotten T.

The reason it is of interest here is that Bell Cay, proprietor of The Original Haunted Mansion Fan Club (on FB), believes the house in Giant, also known as the Marfa-Ryan ranch house, served as the inspiration for the Mansion façade as proposed in early artwork by Ken Anderson, Sam McKim, and Marvin Davis. It's well-known and I've posted it more than once. The repetition doesn't bother me, since it's too gorgeous.

I'm pretty sure we have Sam McKim to thank for the sketch below.

The Marfa-Ryan house (which was only a movie façade, never a real building) is the central location in Giant, visually and psychologically. It could have been seen by Anderson in 1956, not long before he first sketched the above house design in 1957. Given the popularity of the movie, the prominence of the ranch house in it, and the time proximity, the possibility of influence cannot be denied, and at first glance, there does seem to be some resemblance.

Especially if you flip it:

Also, in the movie, the house is eerily isolated in a vast space, which gives it a kind of an Edward Hopper creepiness.

(Hold that thought, because Hopper makes another appearance below.)

The biggest problems for me are that (1) the more you look at the two buildings, the less similar they look. At least for me, the resemblance that strikes you at first glance tends to fade under closer examination. Also, (2) the architectural features in both buildings are so common that it isn't hard to scare up other artwork equally reminiscent of the Anderson house:

 

Alfred Heber Hutty, "In Old Charleston" (1928)

In contrast to Marfa-Ryan, the more you examine this Hutty sketch, the more it looks like the McKim sketch.

 

 

In the end, I'll concede that the Marfa-Ryan ranch house is a possible candidate, but the needle only gets to "maybe" on my dial.

The Phantom Inspiration for Phantom Manor

Thanks primarily to Jason Surrell's Haunted Mansion book (in all three editions), "everyone knows" that the Phantom Manor house was inspired by the historic Fourth Ward Schoolhouse in Virginia City, Nevada. And if you go by this concept art, it certainly appears that way.

But the resemblance owes as much to the coloration as it does to the actual design, and of course PM isn't white. In my opinion, searching for one particular "true inspiration" for the Phantom Manor house is searching for . . . well . . . a phantom manor. I'm convinced it owes its look to more than one source. You can't tell me, for example, that the artist who executed this PM sketch did not have Edward Hopper's "House by the Railroad" (1925) in mind.

What about the Psycho house? Nah, not even worth a side-by-side. The problem is that PM is a pretty generic example of Victorian architecture from the second half of the 19th century ("Second Empire" Victorian), and you can find plenty of real houses that can't help but remind you of PM. My favorite is the Joseph R. Bodwell house in Hollowell, Minnesota (1875), but if you scratch around enough you'll find other candidates.

Knock yourself out. That's a phantom I'm not particularly interested in chasing.

If you show this Bodwell house photo to your friends, they'll say, "Oh yeah, Phantom Manor." And then if you start comparing them more closely (the pictures, not your friends), the whole thing falls apart. Kind of an interesting phenomenon, really.

 

 

 

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