'Hail, Caesar!': Hollywood's Golden Age Inspirations for Coen Brothers' New Caper

Hail, Caesar! is Joel and Ethan Coen’s unabashed love letter to the Golden Age of cinema — that period between 1930 and 1960 when the studio system was at its peak, and when the escapades behind the scenes were as riveting as the films unspooling in theaters. The brothers and their creative team, including production designer Jess Gonchor, painstakingly recreated the vibe of old-time Hollywood for the movies within the movie. “It was so much fun to go through all those archives and retrace the steps that the production designers of the era took to achieve the look of their movies,” says Gonchor. Here, in GIF form, we’ve assembled a handful of classic films that directly inspired Hail, Caesar!