Five Movies That Memorably Feature Museums
The ‘Night at the Museum’ films aren’t the only films that take place largely in the confines of a museum
- By Joseph Caputo
- Smithsonian.com, May 04, 2009, Subscribe
High school senior Ferris Bueller skips class with his girlfriend and his best friend to take a life-affirming joy ride through Chicago. © Paramount / Courtesy Everett Collection
From art heists to fright flicks, here are five of our favorite movies that memorably feature museums. Have a favorite of your own? Share with us in the comments area below.
1) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
In this comedy classic from director John Hughes, high school senior Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) skips class with his girlfriend and best friend at his side to take a life-affirming joy ride through Chicago, which includes posing with paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. While only two-minutes long, the scene, set to The Dream Academy’s instrumental cover of the Smith’s tune “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,” finds Bueller and his friends reacting to works including Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884) by French pointillist Georges-Pierre Seurat.
2) The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
In this remake of the 1968 Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway classic, debonair billionaire Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan) is a playboy businessman, moonlighting as an art thief when he swipes Claude Monet’s “San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk” from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although exterior shots of the museum were permitted by the city, the Met declined to authorize filming inside its halls. Instead, crews shot several scenes, including the dazzling finale with a noteworthy homage to René Magritte’s “The Son of Man” (1964), in the New York Public Library.
3) Russian Ark (2002)
The fourth Winter Palace in St. Petersburg was home to the czars from 1732 until the Russian Revolution in 1917. Today it is the main building of the Russian State Hermitage Museum, founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great. The building took on another life when director Alexander Sokurov brought over 2,000 actors into the museum to depict 300 years of Russian history. The camera travels through 33 rooms of the Hermitage Museum in an uninterrupted 90-minute film shoot, the longest shot in movie history and the first feature-length film ever created in a single take.
4) The International (2009)
A gunfight between Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and assassins in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City is made even more thrilling by the art museum’s concentric architecture. In an interview with The New York Times, director Tom Twyker explains that he wanted the movie’s central scene (and most demanding sequence) to be in the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum, which he calls “the most iconic and interesting piece of architecture that the twentieth century has produced. After filming for three days in the actual Guggenheim, the actors went to a soundstage where the crew had spent 16 weeks building a replica of the museum to ensure that no artwork would be harmed in the making of the film.
5) Terror in the Wax Museum (1973)
You can’t tell the living from the dead in Dupree’s Wax Museum’s Chamber of Horrors. In this poorly received horror film, a random smattering of legendary criminals, ranging from Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden and Bluebeard the pirate, awake for a battle royal. The film is one in a long lineage of fright flicks that use wax museums to scare audiences, including 1933’s “The Mystery of the Wax Museum,” 1953’s Vincent Price classic “House of Wax” and its 2005 less than classic remake starring Paris Hilton.
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Comments (10)
how about National Lampoons European Vacation with the Griswalls.
Posted by victor on September 24,2011 | 09:27 AM
Question. Does anyone know if the banquet scene from Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps was actually filmed inside the Met of Art? Or was the scene a created set with external photos of the Met added? Thanks. Gary
Posted by Gary Bruschi on September 26,2010 | 12:42 PM
And don't forget that classic Sesame Street classic "Please Don't eat the Pictures"
Posted by Victor on February 4,2010 | 09:03 PM
How about the "National Treasure" movies and of course the mysterious Smithsonian catacombs at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
Posted by S Hood on June 20,2009 | 09:22 AM
How about The DaVinci Code?
Posted by Monica on June 3,2009 | 08:55 PM
How to Steal a Million with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole takes place almost exclusively in a museum.
Posted by Barbara on May 26,2009 | 01:03 PM
How can you forget "Bringing Up Baby" with Cary GRant and Katharine Hepburn
Posted by Katherine Keena on May 24,2009 | 06:19 PM
You left off "From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler", Starring Lauren Bacall and The MET C. 1995..among others. Wonder how many more your readers can come up with?
Posted by Nancy L. on May 19,2009 | 01:37 PM
Seurat's masterpiece, "La Grande Jatte" is my alltime favorite; I use it to spark stories in writing and speech classes. I saw it at MOMA in 1959, and have been a fan ever since. So of course I loved that moment in the movie. Also, "Nighthawks" and its variations - including the "Broken Dreams" version with Elvis, Bogey et al, and a Christmas card I sent out one year, with Santa a several reindeer on the stools. Thanks for t his delightful sidebar to the movie.
Posted by David Henshaw on May 8,2009 | 10:49 AM
First Hannibal Lector appearance, or "Lektor" in Red Dragon. was first adapted to film in 1986 as the Michael Mann film Manhunter. It was Lektor is first met in his prison lair, the High Museum in Atlanta, GA.
Posted by Dean on May 7,2009 | 05:57 PM