Four Films at the Crane Estate
Ipswich is Moscow, Jack Nicholson is the devil, the flowers are in the attic.
Writing this at the library, in the corner where I can see out to the tennis courts. It’s pouring rain, and the sun has set, and two people have been playing tennis for at least twenty minutes out there, under the lights. It’s lovely to watch.
I didn’t leave the house until late afternoon today--the work from home curse--and finally got out to the library, in an effort to clear my head and finish the work day on a note of competence and clarity. Kind of an impossible task, given the week we’re in, but the obstacle is the path, as they say. I love watching tennis.
Speaking of tennis (kind of…), something that’s been a burgeoning fascination for me is the films shot at Castle Hill on the Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
I first went to the Crane Estate in 2015 after my first year in college, despite having lived in Massachusetts all my life. With two high school friends, we went to the beach, then a general store that I remember mostly for the self-serve glass jars of candy (there was a whole section just for different types of licorice), then we went to Castle Hill. The inside was beautiful, but I mostly remember the grounds. Walking up the hills, taking photos of and with friends. Pretending we were fancy, mostly, imagining what it would be like to have all this space just to yourself and your wife or whatever.
Since then, it’s always been a fun surprise to see Castle Hill pop up in movies--usually in a brief establishing shot, occasionally overused. The Great House on Castle Hill (stick with me) on Crane Estate has been known as the Lenox House (The Witches of Eastwick, 1987), Foxworth Hall (Flowers in the Attic, also 1987), and has been used to represent Moscow (The Equalizer, 2014, lol), and Paris (Little Women, 2019). Mostly, I think, it’s meant to be posh, Stuart-style and stuffy. Anyone who bought this house has got to be a little twisted, etc.
A lot of movies have used the Crane Estate as a location (and more have used Crane Beach--Thomas Crown of Affair fame, for example), but I’ll be focusing on the four that I’ve seen. Apologies to Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009).
Photo courtesy of the Salem News
Flowers in the Attic
I watched this on Sunday with the volume turned way down while contractors were fixing the tub in my apartment. VC Andrews is still something of a blind spot for me, despite Cornelia’s best efforts, so I was excited to venture into the twisted world of the Dollanganger family.
I like that it felt like a film while being shot almost like a serial. The amount of cuts to the house exterior were so numerous that it started to feel like a Good Neighbor bit. They’re in the house, then they’re up in the attic in the house, and then they get up onto the roof of the house! Extremely fun. Fred the mouse forever in our hearts! They don’t do incest plots like they used to, huh.
They shot almost all the interiors here, too, which I am intrigued by, since they really are mostly up in the attic. But what an attic!
Witches of Eastwick
Okay, finally circling back around to tennis! When googling around, I found an awesome article called “Five Seminal Tennis Moments in Cult Cinema.” Remember when you could write articles called “Five Seminal Tennis Moments in Cult Cinema”? The section on The Witches of Eastwick is almost entirely about the eponymous witches’ hair (an excerpt: “Susan Sarandon has back-combed AF ginger locks, which are legendary”) but I digress.
Jack Nicholson’s Daryl Van Horne (the devil, insane, etc) is sexually tormenting three witches who (One Direction voice) don’t know they’re magical, in part by playing twisted tennis on the ground of his big mansion. It’s awesome.
The Equalizer
I think it’s so funny that Antoine Fuqua uses the Crane Estate to double as the Moscow resident of a Russian bad guy named Pushkin. I love when movies are entirely shot in Massachusetts! Ipswich can be Moscow! Who cares!
Little Women
Another all-in-Massachusetts joint (perhaps one of the few common threads between the Equalizer and Little Women, though Jo March and Robert McCall both have a yen toward the written word). It’s so funny to think about Emma Watson being in Fruitlands and so nice to see the Arnold Arboretum as the backdrop for Aunt March carriage scenes (never forget).
So immersed was I in the world of WOMEN, however, that the Crane Estate was the only location that I recognized in my first viewing. It’s hard to miss! All brick and turret, I guess it could be Europe. It’s striking, and it certainly is fancy, which ultimately is the point.
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For fictional characters to actually LIVE in the Crane Estate, they’ve got to be true eccentrics, misanthropes or rich assholes with an edge. There’s a nostalgia to those earlier films, where Daryl Van Horne lolls around in pools overstuffed with pervy toys and Olivia Foxworth is always carrying a tureen of orange juice.
In more recent films, the characters who live in the Estate are hastily sketched, one-note if featured at all. Our heroes are just visiting, passing through (in Amy March’s case, getting engaged and then going back to Concord). Rich villains are no longer eccentric, keepers of mystery. They’re dumb, flat. They live in spare, sterile mansions and their desires are crude and pedestrian. I dunno! I miss the clutter and grime. If people are going to live in a mansion, they should at the very least be weird.