Author Archives: Jim Lane

Movie Playing Cards: 9 of Diamonds – Mary Miles Minter

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This one’s too dramatically juicy to ignore. Poor Mary Miles Minter — was there ever a Hollywood life more pathetic, or more completely ignored by posterity? She once seemed to be the heiress apparent to Mary Pickford, yet Pickford is still a household name nearly 80 years after her last movie, while Minter… I suppose it doesn’t help that only six of Minter’s 54 movies are said to survive. But Minter’s obscurity isn’t merely a function of poor film preservation. It was her off-screen life that doomed her to an addled oblivion and a lonely death at the age of 82 — and her off-screen life was something she never had a moment’s control over. Poor Mary Miles Minter. 
 
 As I said before, Minter is the only person to appear at the 9 of Diamonds in any extant version of the M.J. Moriarty deck of cards, so presumably the happily smiling lass we see on the card is Mary as she looked in 1916, when she was only 14 years old. She looks more mature in the undated photo at right, less inclined to adolescent baby fat, though surely no more than 18 or 19. More melancholy, too — or is it just historical hindsight that makes me want to see a sadder-but-wiser girl? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poses like that are easy to find of Minter — wide-eyed, pensive, gazing soulfully to one side or the other of the camera, as if listening intently for something. Or to someone. It was a popular attitude for virginal waifs in those days, but in Mary’s case it might have had another motive: to make her look older. People look younger when they smile. For an illustration by contrast, here’s a postcard of Mary (probably from late 1922 or early ’23, near the end of her career) in which her smile looks quite open and unforced. There’s a certain dressing-up-in-Mama’s-clothes quality about this picture, isn’t there?
 
That may not be too far from the truth. Minter’s mother was a real piece of work, a frustrated actress in the mold of stage mothers from time immemorial, who live out their own thwarted ambitions through their daughters — once they realize that that’s where the real talent in the family is.
 
Mary Miles Minter was born Juliet Reilly on April Fool’s Day 1902 in Shreveport, Louisiana, the younger of two daughters of J. Homer and Lily Pearl Miles Reilly. By 1907 Homer was out of the picture, sent packing by Lily Pearl, who went gallivanting off to New York to be an actress, adopting the name Charlotte Shelby. Nobody knows why she chose that name; Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, in his book A Cast of Killers (more about that later), relays the speculation that a politician named Shelby might have helped Lily Pearl get her first big break. For whatever reason.
 

Charlotte had left Juliet and her sister Margaret with their grandmother, but she soon sent for them to join her in New York, where little six-year-old Juliet caught the eye of Charles Frohman, producer of the play Charlotte was appearing in. Kirkpatrick says Frohman cast the tot in Cameo Kirby and A Fool There Was — but neither play was produced by Frohman, and Juliet Shelby doesn’t appear in either cast on the Internet Broadway Database. Well, whatever the exact names or titles involved, Charlotte realized in short order that little Juliet was the meal ticket.

Juliet Shelby made at least one picture under that name in 1912, for Universal in New York: The Nurse (now lost, of course). Not long after that she caught the baleful eye of the Gerry Society, watchdogs over the exploitation of child labor and the bane of any show business troupe with underage players. Charlotte handled the matter creatively; she rushed back to Louisiana and borrowed the birth certificate — and name — of her sister’s daughter, who had died in 1905 at the age of eight. And hey presto! — eleven-year-old Juliet Shelby became sixteen-year-old Mary Miles Minter, old enough to satisfy the Gerry Society but looking young enough (because she was) to play the sort of roles for which she was in demand. By the time she made a hit on Broadway in Edward Peple’s The Littlest Rebel, she was Mary for good.

This, in case you’re keeping track, makes the fourth name our girl had by the time she was eleven. Born Juliet Reilly, then Juliet Miles while she lived with her grandmother, then Juliet Shelby after joining her mother in New York, and finally Mary Miles Minter, a name and identity borrowed — stolen, really — from a dead cousin she never knew, yanking her once and for all out of any chance at a normal childhood. I leave the psychiatrists to speculate on what a history like that can do to a girl’s self-image.

By the time she returned to pictures in 1915, this time on the West Coast for a succession of studios, she was an established stage name (although in true Hollywood fashion, her biggest stage hit, The Littlest Rebel, was filmed with somebody else, one Mimi Yvonne). “Of Littlest Rebel fame” followed her everywhere she went. 

And so did Charlotte. Somebody made up a nursery rhyme: 
 
Mary was a little lamb.
Her heart was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
Her mother had to go.
 
Actress Florence Vidor, as quoted by Sidney Kirkpatrick, remembered: “She and her mother were at each other’s throats from the day I met them. They fought about everything. But her mother always won. Mary was like Charlotte’s cute little puppet. I don’t think she ever cared about acting too much, really, but Charlotte wanted her to be a star, so Mary did what she was told.” Journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns said that Charlotte’s only career was “managing” Mary’s — at a 30 percent commission. She hired lawyers to find loopholes in whatever contracts she signed for Mary so she could shop for better deals at other studios. 
 
And she kept Mary hopping: Six pictures at Metro in 1915 and ’16, then ten at Mutual in ’16 and ’17, one more at Metro, then back to Mutual for nine more through July 1918, when Mary was still only 16. Then to Pathe for seven pictures in one year, topped off by Charlotte’s coup de grace in 1919: a million-dollar-plus contract with Paramount just as America’s Sweetheart Pickford was bailing on her Paramount contract for a sweeter deal with First National and, later, her own United Artists.
 
Thirty-three pictures in 49 months; that’s a long resume for someone who “didn’t ever care about acting too much, really.” Maybe Mary’s heart wasn’t in the acting at that, but what else could she do? What else had she ever been allowed to do? She had to support the family in a style to which Charlotte was enjoying becoming accustomed. Charlotte and sister Margaret were actresses after a fashion, but the only parts they ever got were supporting roles in Mary’s pictures; talent was probably not a a major factor in their casting.
 
Besides, there’s evidence that the critics, at least, were beginning to view this Mary as something of a Pickford manque. Reviewing The Intrusion of Isabel in 1919, Variety said, “Miss Minter as the years advance still has much to learn now that she [is] becoming past the age of being a child wonder … She seems to be always bounding and jumping around, throwing her arms about someone.”  Later, on Anne of Green Gables, the paper said she “revealed nothing approaching the Pickford standard.”
 
 
 
 
 
Green Gables was nevertheless a success, and credit for it accrued to the director, William Desmond Taylor (left). In all, Taylor directed Minter in four pictures, and seems to have had a good effect on her acting; of their next one, Judy of Rogues’ Harbor, Variety said, “Miss Minter shows improvement with each new production, and her work in the present feature is by far the best she has done yet.”
 

What effect further work with Taylor might have had we’ll never know, for after the release of Jenny Be Good in April 1920 they never worked together again. But there’s reason to believe — at least judging from Variety’s reviews — that he had a pivotal influence on her acting in those four pictures, all made in the year between her seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays. 

 

 

 

 

 

He may have had other effects on her as well, and that possibility came to light only after the evening of Wednesday, February 1, 1922. On that night, sometime after 7:45 p.m., in the living room of this bungalow at 404-B Alvarado Street in Los Angeles, somebody stood behind William Desmond Taylor and shot him dead with a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

The murder came right smack in between Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s second and third trials, up in San Francisco, in the death of Virginia Rappe after a Labor Day party in Arbuckle’s suite at the St. Francis Hotel. And the press pounced on Taylor as they had on Arbuckle; here was more proof — as if any was needed — of the moral turpitude of Hollywood. Lurid stories circulated in the press as the investigation progressed. Most of them weren’t reflected in the official police files or those of a succession of Los Angeles district attorneys, but they were enough to ruin two careers.
 
Not all of those lurid stories were untrue. For one thing, it developed that William Desmond Taylor wasn’t his real name. He was born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner in 1872, not 1877 as was widely believed while he was alive. He had abandoned a wife and daughter in New York in 1908; his wife had divorced him in absentia, but she spotted him in one of his pictures as an actor, leading his daughter Daisy to seek to contact him. They had finally met in July 1921, and Tanner/Taylor promised to see her again; as things turned out, he never did. There was enough mystery in Taylor’s real life to feed plenty of rumors after his death.
 
The first career ruined by the Taylor scandal belonged to Mabel Normand. Already “tainted” in the public mind by her long on-screen association with Arbuckle, she had the incredibly bad luck to be the last person (besides the killer) to see Taylor alive. She had visited him that night, leaving a little after 7:30; Taylor walked her out to her car on Alvarado, then returned to his house for the last time. Rumors were repeated in the press: that she was a cocaine addict (true); that she was back at Taylor’s the morning his body was discovered, ransacking the place in search of compromising letters (false). She was closely questioned, investigated and exonerated. But it didn’t help; the rumors — and her drug problem — persisted, and fed each other in a spiraling decline. By the time she died in 1930, of tuberculosis no doubt aggravated by her addiction, she hadn’t worked in three years. She was only 37. As she lay dying, it’s said, she mused, “I wonder who killed poor Bill Taylor.”
 
The other ruined career, of course, was Mary Miles Minter’s, and looking at her face in this picture that she (or, more likely, Mama Charlotte) signed for the 1923 edition of Blue Book of the Screen, it’s impossible not to believe she knew the end was nigh. In the flurry of publicity after Taylor’s murder, all of her publicity was bad. Love letters surfaced, some in a kind of schoolgirl code, that she had written to Taylor — they look girlishly innocuous to modern eyes, but in 1922 they were scandalous, and not in keeping with the sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice image Charlotte and her studios had so carefully cultivated. Stories flew, and grew in the telling. In Taylor’s bedroom dresser, it was said, they found a pair of pink panties, embroidered with “MMM”; in a later iteration, the panties became a sheer nightgown. Whatever. The garment, the story went on, was passed around police headquarters for a while, for laughs, before vanishing altogether. (That is, if it ever existed at all. Minter herself denied it in a phone conversation with historian Kevin Brownlow in the 1970s. She believed the panties/nightgown story was invented by journalist Adela Rogers St. John.)
 
Were Minter and Taylor — 15 and 45, respectively, when they met in 1917 — lovers? Only two people ever knew the answer to that one, and they both died without saying. Florence Vidor, for one, didn’t believe Minter was sexually active with Taylor or anyone else. When would she have the chance, with Charlotte never letting her out of her sight? Some friends of Taylor’s believed Minter was infatuated with the director, badgering him with pleas for his affection when he regarded her as no more than a dear little child; other acquaintances believed that, ahem, Taylor had no interest in women of any age — if you know what I mean. 
 
Whatever the case, the damage was done. Even before the murder, the Hollywood establishment had begun to suspect that Mary Miles Minter’s time had all but passed; afterward, studios and the public at large regarded her almost as a has-been who wouldn’t go away. Reviews of her last picture, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (released on April 15, 1923) were downright cruel. The New York Times: “The chubby Mary Miles Minter, who apparently does not often take as much exercise as in this production…” Variety wasn’t as unchivalrous as all that, but reviewer “Fred” dismissed her as “colorless.” Ten days later, Paramount bought out her contract for $350,000 and released her. She had just turned 21. 
 
The murder of William Desmond Taylor was never officially solved, and it hung over Mary Miles Minter and her mother like a curse from beyond the grave. Eventually the two were driven to a public statement: the L.A. district attorney should put up or shut up; publish any evidence against them and charge them, or absolve them once and for all. The D.A.’s office replied that they had nothing, and absolved them. Over the years there’s been no shortage of theories. He was shot by a burglar. Or by Normand. Or one of her ex-lovers. Or a bootlegger to whom Taylor owed money. Or drug dealers, angered by his efforts to help Normand kick her habit and to have them driven out of town. Or a secretary who had disappeared after robbing Taylor and forging his signature to cash checks. Or, no kidding, the butler (one Henry Peavey) did it. 
 
In 1967, 73-year-old director King Vidor, who had been a contemporary and acquaintance of Taylor’s, launched a personal investigation for a screenplay he hoped to write and direct. Many Hollywood old-timers were still alive then, and nearly all of them had their own take on the mystery. His efforts took him far and wide, visiting friends and former colleagues — including Mary Miles Minter herself. She was now living quietly in Santa Monica and answering only to Mrs. Brandon O’Hildebrandt, the name of the man she married in 1957, after Charlotte Shelby finally died. Her husband had died in 1965, leaving little Juliet Reilly a final name to fold herself into.
 
Or perhaps there was one more. Vidor was appalled to find an obese, demented wreck of the beauty he had known, looking far older than her 65 years and clearly mentally unstable. She said she was writing a lot these days, poetry of her own. When Vidor glanced at the stack of poems she had, he noticed they were all signed “by Charlotte Shelby.” As they talked, Mary wafted her way through a disjointed, wandering monologue, often ignoring or only half-answering Vidor’s questions. At length, she mewled, “My mother killed everything I ever loved,” but the director couldn’t tell if she was being momentarily lucid or merely surrendering to the confusion of dim and distant imaginings.
 
Vidor never made that movie, or any other feature, though there was an unrelated documentary short in 1980. Solomon and Sheba in 1959 proved to be his final outing as a director. The fruits of his investigation were locked away in a strongbox in his garage, where they were discovered after Vidor’s death by his biographer Sidney D. Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick published the material in 1986, along with Vidor’s conclusions about the crime, as A Cast of Killers. Since then another book has examined the Taylor murder in depth; this was Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann. Mann and Kirkpatrick — or rather, Mann and Vidor — reached quite different conclusions as to who killed William Desmond Taylor, and why, and I won’t reveal either one. Both books are good reads, and I wouldn’t care to spoil them. Besides, any would-be solution to the crime at this distance has to be based on circumstantial evidence, and circumstances can always change.
 
Juliet Reilly/Miles/Shelby/Mary Miles Minter/Mrs. Brandon O’Hildebrandt outlived King Vidor by nearly two years. Mentally fragile as she may have been, she was reasonably well-fixed thanks to real estate investments during the glory days. But her Santa Monica neighborhood grew perilous, and she was robbed more than once. During one robbery in 1981 she was bound, gagged, beaten and left for dead; she survived, and an ex-servant was charged with the crime. She died on August 4, 1984, age 82; any thoughts she had after that 1967 visit from King Vidor she most likely took with her. Mary Miles Minter has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1724 Vine St., a little over five miles from the spot where William Desmond Taylor died. 
 
POSTSCRIPT: In preparing this post, I went looking for a copy of A Cast of Killers, my first one having slipped out of my hands some twenty years ago. I found a copy at a used-book store, and snapped it up. When I got it home, I learned to my surprise that I had bought an autographed copy. On the title page, above his signature, Sidney D. Kirkpatrick had cautioned a previous owner: “Don’t let this story haunt you. It’s only Hollywood.”
 
 

“MOVIE” Souvenir Playing Cards

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Try to imagine a time when a deck of cards with movie star pictures was a novelty. It’s not easy, is it? We can hardly even imagine a time when a movie star was such a novelty that the word “movie” itself was in quotes. But here it is, courtesy of one M.J. Moriarty and the Movie Souvenir Card Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio.

When I got this deck of cards as an opening-night gift from the director of a show I was in, about 50 years ago, I thought it was something really rare — all 54 cards (including the Joker and the descriptor card shown at right) complete and unblemished, with even the gilded edges of the cards reasonably intact after who knew how many years. Yes, a singular rarity, I thought. I know better now. These Moriarty movie cards are collectible, to be sure, but they don’t seem to be particularly rare. A deck cost fifty cents in 1916 — $13.59 in 2022 dollars. Collector-dealer Cliff Aliperti said in 2010 that one could sell for anywhere from $75 to $150, depending on condition; I don’t know what his estimate would be today, but as I write this in August 2022 there’s a deck for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $229.99. On the other hand, over the last twenty years or so, I’ve seen more than one in dealers’ rooms and memorabilia fairs going for $40 or less.
 

The relative commonness of these decks at collector shows suggests to me that they were probably treated as collectibles from day one; people bought them to keep and look at the pictures, not to face the wear and tear of their Tuesday night whist clubs. (When was the last time you saw a 100-year-old deck of cards in perfect condition?)

 

That may be about to change. It’s becoming common practice among dealers now to break up the decks and sell the cards one at a time. At this moment in 2022, there are 54 individual cards available on eBay at prices ranging from five to twelve dollars. At that rate, a deck that Cliff Aliperti once said was worth no more than $150 (and which I’ve seen much lower) can bring a dealer as much as $630 or more. (Some cards are worth more than others, like this Charlie Chaplin Joker; it brings a premium because it’s the one instance where the card and the personality are perfectly matched — and probably also because Chaplin is the one person in the deck whom pretty much everybody recognizes.) This deck-splitting makes good business sense, but it probably means that decks that survived the last hundred years in near-mint condition are going to have a tough time making it through the next ten.

These decks first appeared in 1916 — at least that’s the copyright date on the card backing. Stars came, went, and changed positions in the deck, and some people (here, for example, at Cliff Aliperti’s Immortal Ephemera) have made a study of comparing and contrasting the decks that can still be found. Certain evidence of the cards themselves suggests that that they stopped production in 1922 at the latest: Wallace Reid appears on the 4 of Spades, and Reid died in January 1923; that’s not conclusive, though, because two other actors (Nicholas Dunaew and Richard C. Travers) occupied that card at one time or another. More persuasive is the case of Mary Miles Minter, the only occupant (so far known) of the 9 of Diamonds. Minter’s career was wrecked in the backwash of the William Desmond Taylor murder in February 1922, when her indiscreet love letters to the late director (30 years her senior) shattered her virgin-pure screen image. But even if the cards were still in production in 1922 (probably unlikely), they stopped pretty early. Many of the stars most associated with the silent era — Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Colleen Moore, Harry Langdon, Ramon Novarro, Bebe Daniels, Bessie Love — hadn’t made their big splash yet and don’t appear in any version of the deck.

 

Others might be expected to show up but don’t. Conspicuous by their absence are the King and Queen of Hollywood (even before their marriage made it official), Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford — although their colleague in United Artists, Chaplin, is Clown Prince of the deck. Dorothy Gish (5 of Clubs) appears, but not her sister Lillian, much the bigger star. And we have Mabel Normand (10 of Clubs) but not her teammate Roscoe Arbuckle, with whom she made dozens of popular Sennett comedies between 1912 and ’16. When these cards hit the market, Arbuckle’s legal troubles were still five years in the future, but he appears in no extant version of the deck, although “Fatty and Mabel” were as much a team as Laurel and Hardy would later be. 

Now a word about the card backing — “the famous painting, ‘The Chariot Race'”, as the descriptor card says. The cards show only a detail; here’s a more complete look at the painting. It was indeed pretty famous during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and was the work of Alexander von Wagner (1838-1919), a sort of Hungarian Norman Rockwell of the era. Von Wagner painted at least three versions of the painting, the first one in 1873 for the Vienna Exposition. A second version went on display at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876, and another — or perhaps the same one — at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The painting sparked a national craze, with etchings and lithograph prints for sale everywhere. Contrary to what some have said, it does not reproduce a scene from Ben-Hur, which wasn’t published until 1880; indeed, the painting and its pop-culture clones may have inspired Gen. Lew Wallace to include such a scene in his novel. In point of fact, the full title of the work is “Chariot Race in the Circus Maximus, Rome, in the Presence of the Emperor Domitian”, which would have been several decades after Judah Ben-Hur and Messala had their fateful showdown in Antioch’s Circus Maximus. Only one of von Wagner’s versions of the painting is known to survive; it hangs today in the Manchester Art Gallery in England. 

But back to those 53 faces — “every one a favorite of yours”, according to the deck’s promo. So many of those favorites are forgotten today — victims of fickle audiences even in their own lifetimes, then victimized again by the passage of time and Hollywood’s too-little-much-too-late attitude toward film preservation. I thought it would be a fun project to take these cards one at a time and review what we can know now of the lives and careers behind those “beautiful halftone portraits.” Chaplin hardly needs it, of course, but what about House Peters, Mildred Harris, Wanda Hawley, George Larkin? I’ll be shuffling the deck from time to time, cutting the cards and seeing what comes up. Maybe we can uncover some sense of why these cards were bought, and enjoyed, and even cherished and preserved so carefully for a hundred years and more.

*                         *                         *

King of Hearts – H.B. Warner

 

 

Here’s an easy one for starters. Every true film buff knows Henry Byron Charles Stewart Warner-Lickford, although they might have to look twice to recognize the H.B. Warner they remember in this dapper, Arrow-collared, surprisingly youthful gent-about-town. This portrait may date from Warner’s entry into movies, when he was 38; that would have made the picture a couple of years old when the deck was published, but that sort of thing is not unheard of among actors’ head shots.

So film buffs know the name, even if the face comes as a bit of a surprise — but what about those less devout moviegoers, who don’t make a practice of memorizing the name of every Thurston Hall or J. Edward Bromberg who marches across the screen? Well, I’m going to go out on a limb here: I think it just may be that H.B. Warner’s work has been seen by more people alive today than anyone else in the M.J. Moriarty deck. Yes, maybe even more than Charlie Chaplin.

Note I said “seen by”, not “familiar to”. So take another look. Try to add, oh, maybe 30 years to that face. Look especially at the eyes. Ring any bells? Well…

 
 
How about this? That’s right, H.B. Warner was old Mr. Gower, the druggist who slaps young George Bailey around the back room of his store in It’s a Wonderful Life, and who, in the world where George was never born, is the “rummy” who “spent twenty years in prison for poisonin’ a kid.” I’ll just bet that anyone who ever saw Warner’s performance in It’s a Wonderful Life has never forgotten it, even if they never took the trouble to find out the actor’s name.
 
By 1946, the year of Wonderful Life, Warner had become a steady member of Frank Capra’s informal stock company. This was the fifth of his six pictures for Capra, and those six are a major reason why I suggest H.B. Warner’s work has been seen by so many. He played the judge hearing Gary Cooper’s case in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) — “Not only are you not insane — you’re the sanest man who ever walked into this courtroom!” It’s a hallelujah moment, provided by writer Robert Riskin and delivered by H.B. Warner.
 
 

In 1937, Capra gave Warner the opportunity to deliver probably his best screen performance. The picture was Lost Horizon, from James Hilton’s utopian romance about a group of refugees from war-torn “civilization” who find themselves in the remote Himalayan paradise of  Shangri-La. Warner (here with Isabel Jewell, Edward Everett Horton, Ronald Colman and Thomas Mitchell) played Chang, their mysterious escort from the snowbound wreck of their plane to the Edenic Valley of the Blue Moon, and their host after they arrive. Endlessly cordial, welcoming and polite, he nevertheless is inscrutably vague about when and how they will ever be able to return to their homes. Warner got an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor, but he didn’t win; he lost out to Joseph Schildkraut as Alfred Dreyfus in Warner Bros.’ The Life of Emile Zola. That’s a worthy performance, but I’m not at all sure the Academy made the right call. H.B. Warner’s other pictures for Capra were You Can’t Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  (1939, as the Senate majority leader) and Here Comes the Groom (1951).

But you don’t get your picture on a deck of cards for supporting and character roles in your twilight years, however memorable. What about his career earlier, when he appeared on the King of Hearts sometime between 1916 and 1920? Well, unfortunately, that’s something we’re going to bump up against over and over as we discuss this antique deck of cards — and for that matter, anything else about the silent era. The survival rate of movies made between 1890 and and 1920 is only a cut or two above snowball-in-hell level; for much of Warner’s career we have to piece together what information we can from secondary sources.

We know that he made his Broadway debut on November 24, 1902 at the age of 27 (billed as “Harry Warner”), in Audrey by Harriet Ford and E.F. Boddington. In 1910 he appeared in Alias Jimmy Valentine, one of the smash hits of the early 20th century stage, adapted from the O. Henry story “A Retrieved Reformation.” He must have made quite an impression in that, because in 1914, when he filmed another one of his stage successes, The Ghost Breaker, the laudatory review in Variety mentioned him as “he of ‘Jimmy Valentine’ fame.” The Ghost Breaker was his third picture in 1914, and was co-directed by Cecil B. DeMille. They would work together again, and would in fact make their last picture together — but more of that anon.

Warner was a veteran stage star by the time his movie career really got underway in the mid ‘teens, and he established himself (if we can believe his Variety reviews) as an appealing romantic lead in titles like The Raiders, Shell 43 and The Vagabond Prince (all 1916), Danger Trail (’17) and The Pagan God (’19). He continued to appear on Broadway until Silence in the winter of 1924-25 (which he also filmed in 1926); after that he was a Hollywood actor for good.

At least one of H.B. Warner’s silent movies has survived intact, and it’s a biggie: Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacularly reverent The King of Kings (1927), in which Warner played the title role. The movie was a triumph of prestige and box office for DeMille; in reviewing it, Variety’s legendary editor Sime Silverman was quite tongue-tied with awe; in 24 column inches, Silverman (normally so terse and pithy) fairly stumbles over himself groping for superlatives. The movie is a bit too earnestly pious for modern tastes, but its appeal for 1927 audiences is still understandable, and DeMille’s showmanship is at its smoothest. Most memorably, Warner’s performance, in an age when accusations of sacrilege were a very real concern, is excellent. Here’s a strikingly dramatic shot of him at the Crucifixion, seen from the viewpoint of Jesus’s mother Mary mourning at the foot of the Cross.

 

 

And here, just to give a flavor of the lavishness of DeMille’s picture, is a frame from one of King of Kings‘s two Technicolor sequences, showing the resurrrected Christ comforting Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) at the opening to the tomb on Easter morning. (On a curious side note: in King of Kings Judas Iscariot was played by none other than the self-same Joseph Schildkraut who ten years later would ace Warner out of that Oscar.)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
With the coming of sound, H.B. Warner was well into his fifties, so character parts became his lot as they do for nearly all actors as they age. And it proved to be a fertile field for him; after King of Kings there were well over a hundred film appearances in the 29 years that remained to him — Lost Horizon and It’s a Wonderful Life were only two of them. Here’s one that movie buffs particularly cherish: Warner playing himself in 1950’s Sunset Blvd. (though unidentified until the closing credits), as one of the has-been “waxworks” playing bridge with Gloria Swanson’s mad Norma Desmond. Staring him down is, of course, Buster Keaton. (And on a cautionary note, here’s an example of what a decade of sodden alcoholism can do to you: Warner and Keaton look about the same age; actually, Keaton was twenty years younger, almost to the day.)
 
 
 
 
H.B. Warner’s final screen appearance was a poignant one. He was approaching 80 and living at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills in 1955 when the call came from his old friend Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille was planning a massive spectacle expanding the Biblical section of his 1923 hit The Ten Commandments, and he had a part for H.B. if he felt up to it. The role was identified in the script as “Amminadab”, an aging Israelite setting out on the Exodus from Egypt, even though he knows he’ll never see the Promised Land — indeed, probably won’t live out the day. The actor carrying him in this shot, Donald Curtis, remembered that Warner weighed no more than a child, and carrying him wasn’t merely in the script, it was a necessity: “It was clear H.B. couldn’t walk — could barely breathe.” He had come to the set in an ambulance and lay on a stretcher, breathing through an oxygen mask, until the cameras were ready to roll. In the script, he had a rather complex speech adapted from Psalm 22, but he couldn’t manage it, so DeMille told him to say whatever he wanted, and Curtis and Nina Foch would work with it. H.B. Warner’s last words in his 137th movie, after 53 years as an actor, were: “I am poured out like water, my strength dried up into the dust of death.” 
 
Donald Curtis believed the old boy could only have weeks to live, but he was wrong. In fact, H.B. Warner lasted three more years; he died on December 21, 1958, 56 days after his 83rd birthday.
 

Items from the Scrapbook of Cosmo Brown

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(With Apologies to Betty Comden and Adolph Green)

I’m not at liberty to disclose how the following documents came into my possession. I think they pretty much speak for themselves.

Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1928

 

 
 

 
Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1928
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Rex the First

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Hollywood had two Rex Ingrams. Maybe someday I’ll write about the fine African American actor who played De Lawd in The Green Pastures, Lucifer Jr. in Cabin in the Sky and the Genie in 1940’s The Thief of Bagdad. But today I’m writing about the other Rex Ingram, who was born Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock in Dublin, Ireland on January 15, 1893.

I’ve been wrestling with this post much too long, trying to get some feeling for what this man was like beyond what we can see in his movies: an artist’s sense of composition, a tasteful eye for the telling detail, a delicate touch with actors, and a sure hand with both intimacy and epic sweep.

There’s only one biography of him, Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema by the late Liam O’Leary, and unfortunately it’s not much help. I know it sounds presumptuous for an armchair historian like me to pass judgment on a man like O’Leary — actor, director, archivist, official with both the Irish Film Society and London’s National Film Archive. But the fact is, his biography of Ingram is long on facts and short on insight, and it raises more questions than it answers.

Did Ingram ever graduate from Yale, where he studied sculpture? Michael Powell, whom Ingram inspired to become a movie director himself, says Ingram was a Yale grad, but O’Leary’s book isn’t clear. If Ingram didn’t graduate, did he drop out to work in pictures for the Edison Company, or did he flunk out and turn to pictures when he needed a job? He was obviously intelligent even in his youth, but he wouldn’t be the smartest student who ever grew bored and careless in his studies. Either way, O’Leary doesn’t say; one moment Ingram is at Yale, the next at Edison.

We know Ingram loathed Louis B. Mayer (he was neither the first nor the last to do that), and seethed when Mayer became his boss (Ingram had been Metro’s star director before the merger with Goldwyn and Mayer that formed MGM). But why? Given the effect on Ingram’s career, and possibly on Hollywood itself, it would be useful to have more of an inkling why Ingram couldn’t work with Mayer while directors like Clarence Brown and Sidney Franklin could.

Did Ingram ever convert to Islam, or didn’t he? It’s reported in Wikipedia that he did, along with a claim that he co-directed the silent Ben-Hur (which he didn’t). O’Leary cites the periodic allegations, and Ingram’s demurrals, then finally concludes “there may have been something to it.” A definite maybe.

Most frustrating of all, what exactly was Ingram’s relationship with June Mathis? This remarkable woman was one of the earliest power figures as Hollywood entered the 1920s. A writer with ambitions to produce, she went on to do just that (or “supervise,” as the jargon of the day had it) and might have risen even higher if she hadn’t died suddenly of a heart attack in 1927, age 40 (or 38, or 35, depending on whom you believe as to when she was born). There were rumors at the time that Mathis and Ingram were romantically involved, and that he threw her over when he eloped with Alice Terry during shooting of The Prisoner of Zenda in 1921. If true, that could explain the alienation between them that festered after The Conquering Power that same year, causing Ingram later to miss out on his dream project, Ben-Hur, when production supervisor Mathis pointedly gave the director’s megaphone to somebody else.

But there’s an alternate explanation, too: that the two clashed over Ingram’s direction of Mathis’s protege Rudolph Valentino in Conquering Power, the follow-up to The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the picture in which she and Ingram had launched Valentino to stardom. Mathis believed that Ingram was being high-handed with Valentino, while Ingram believed that he was directing the same way he always had, but that Valentino’s sudden fame had gone to his head and made him too big for his britches. Either story makes sense — the woman scorned or artistic differences — and it would be nice to know which is closer to the truth.

Ingram and Alice Terry at the time of their marriage in November 1921

Liam O’Leary became good friends with Alice Terry, Ingram’s widow, and she was still alive in 1980 when O’Leary’s biography of Ingram was published. I suppose it’s only natural that he might be too tactful to explore any rumors about Terry’s late husband and a woman dead more than fifty years, but you don’t dispel gossip by ignoring it. O’Leary does concede that Mathis may well have been in love with Ingram (as she clearly was with Valentino), but insists that Rex only had eyes for Alice; even Ingram’s first (apparently unhappy) marriage is dispensed with in two hasty paragraphs.

In any event, Mathis was there to give Ingram’s career a huge boost by choosing him to direct The Four Horsemen, her pet project at Metro, from the international bestseller by Vicente Blasco Ibañez. Ingram had been building a name for himself for some time, but that was the picture that catapulted him to Hollywood’s front rank.

Ingram began in movies in 1913 at the Edison Co. studio in the Bronx. He did a little bit of everything in those unregimented early days — advising on intertitles, set decoration, painting portraits of Edison’s prominent players, pitching in on scenario writing, and so forth. With his matinee-idol good looks (Erich von Stroheim said he looked like a Greek god), it was inevitable he’d end up on screen as well, but he was a self-conscious actor — and never much interested in that side of the camera anyway. After a few months at Edison he went to Vitagraph as an actor and writer for a year or so, then in June 1915 on to the Wm. Fox Film Corp. as a writer and assistant director. It was about this time that Rex Hitchcock dropped his last two names and became Rex Ingram for the rest of his life. After a year at Fox, he moved on to Carl Laemmle’s Universal, where he finally got his first opportunities to direct at the young age of 23 (like William Wyler nine years later). In 1917, When Uncle Carl moved his production operations to the new Universal City in Hollywood, Ingram went west as well.

 
 
In 1918, after America’s entry into World War I, Ingram enlisted in the Royal Canadian Flying Corps (he was still technically a British subject, his U.S. citizenship papers not having been finalized yet). But his service wasn’t long; he was honorably discharged after only ten weeks, possibly as a result of injuries incurred in a plane crash during training. In any case, in January 1919 he was back in Hollywood in very poor health, nearly broke, and out of a job. For months he was dependent on the kindness of friends; he was able to find some work as a set decorator at Lasky Studios, but it wasn’t easy to hold on even to that while he convalesced from whatever had washed him out of uniform.

 

It probably didn’t help his morale to return to Universal seeking his old job back, only to be told that the vacancy had been filled, and by the Vienna-born Erich von Stroheim — the “enemy” Ingram had gone off to fight. Stroheim went out of his way to be cordial when he found Ingram lurking around the set (“What’s that sonofabitch doing? He’s got my job!”); Stroheim brought out a bottle of scotch and after ten or twelve drinks “we were very palsy-walsy.” The friendship took hold and endured for the rest of Ingram’s life; Stroheim once called Ingram “the world’s greatest director.”

In short order Ingram’s health and his job prospects improved. He managed after all to pick up a couple of directing jobs for Universal (including helming a screen test for a hopeful newcomer named Rudolph Valentino, who impressed Ingram as having possibilities), then in late 1919 landed a directing berth at $600 a week with theater magnate Marcus Loew, who had just acquired the Metro Pictures Corporation to supply product for his chain of cinemas.

And this is where the Rex Ingram story really begins. His job at Metro brought him into contact with two people who had an incalculable impact on Ingram’s growing stature as an artist and as a maker of commercial hits. The first was John F. Seitz, the cameraman on Shore Acres, the first picture Ingram directed at Metro (though not the first released). Seitz was no inconsiderable artist himself; his career extended to 1960, and he just might be the greatest cinematographer of the sound era who never won an Academy Award (he was nominated seven times). He had begun his career as a lab assistant, so he knew how to manipulate not only lighting on the set, but the film itself in the developing process. Director Byron Haskin recalled, “Seitz was one of the true geniuses of filmmaking. Not just a photographer, he was tremendously imaginative, tremendously impressive to me as a young cameraman, and to most of the other boys in the business at the time.” Seitz and Ingram connected on a joined-at-the-hip level. They made a dozen pictures together in six years; Seitz understood Ingram’s pictorial sense because he shared it, and had the craftsmanship to interpret it in images that are subtly lit and strikingly textured even now, 75 and 80 years on.
 

The other person, of course, was June Mathis. She had been impressed with Ingram’s work on his first two films at Metro and asked for him to direct The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which she was shepherding to the screen after prodding Metro to acquire the rights. Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s novel had been a worldwide bestseller in 1918 and ’19, and rumor had it that Fox was willing to pay $75,000 for movie rights. Metro studio chief Richard Rowland, at Mathis’s urging, won the bid with a $20,000 advance against ten percent of the profits.

 
The Four Horsemen told the story of two branches of an Argentine family that diverge after the death of the patriarch around 1900. One daughter returns with her German husband to his fatherland, the other with her husband to his native France, and their sons end up on opposite sides in the Great War. Early scenes set in Argentina were filmed on the 250-acre Gilmore Ranch in what is now Los Angeles’s Fairfax District; elaborate action scenes set in a French village caught in the Battle of the Marne were shot in the hills behind Griffith Park, overlooking what are now Burbank, the Warner Bros. Studios and Forest Lawn. The visionary/symbolic scenes of the Four Horsemen themselves (Conquest, War, Pestilence and Death) were staged on Pico Boulevard, then little more than a country lane running from the seaside village of Santa Monica into downtown L.A. Shooting lasted from July to December 1920, at a cost of $1 million, 40 times the cost of the average Metro picture to date.
 
The result of Ingram, Mathis and Seitz’s efforts opened in New York on March 6, 1921, and was a sensation even greater than the novel that inspired it. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was the first box-office blockbuster to come from the Hollywood studio system. Marcus Loew made enough profit off this one picture to reimburse him for the entire cost of purchasing the studio. Richard Rowland bought out Blasco Ibáñez’s interest in the movie for $170,000 (thereby saving Metro $40,000). June Mathis became the most powerful woman in Hollywood. And Rex Ingram, just turned 28, was hailed as the peer of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.
 
The biggest sensation of The Four Horsemen, as all the world knows by now, was 25-year-old Rudolph Valentino as Julio Desnoyers, the idle playboy whose belated patriotism to his father’s France leads to his death in the trenches of the Western Front. Mathis favored him for the role over a number of better-known actors, and Ingram — no doubt recalling that screen test at Universal — readily agreed. Valentino justified their faith in him, but as I said before (and assuming there was nothing more personal between Mathis and Ingram than their professional work together), he may have caused the rift that erupted between them. The Conquering Power was Ingram’s last collaboration with Mathis. The script for his next picture, Turn to the Right was taken over from Mathis by Mary O’Hara (later a novelist and author of My Friend Flicka). We don’t know why; had Mathis and Ingram already washed their hands of each other?
 
The Four Horsemen was Ingram’s biggest artistic and commercial success, but it wasn’t his only one. The Conquering Power could hardly miss, with Valentino starring. Turn to the Right was indifferently received (and led to rumors that Mathis had been the real genius behind Valentino), but The Prisoner of Zenda (1922) and Scaramouche (’23) — both with Ramon Novarro, a Latin Lover rising on Valentino’s coattails — cemented Ingram’s prestige. (Another picture, 1922’s Trifling Women, is now apparently lost.)
 
For his next picture, Ingram persuaded Metro to let him shoot on location: Tunisia for exteriors and a Paris studio for interiors. The Arab was intended to do for Novarro what The Sheik had done for Valentino (which, to a lesser extent, it did). Although Ingram did not stay away from Hollywood for good (he died there in 1950), he never worked there again. He moved his operations to the Victorine Studios in Nice, on the French Riviera, and his remaining five pictures were all made there. 
 
This is where we enter the realm of speculation, wondering why Rex Ingram, sitting on top of the world, preferred to work 6,000 miles away from his studio’s base of operations. “As we have seen,” Liam O’Leary writes, “Ingram had longed for the day he could get away from Hollywood, its coteries, gossip, and inevitable scramble for power, increasing bureaucracy and production controls.” With all due respect, by that point in O’Leary’s biography, we’ve seen nothing of the kind. So what did prompt Ingram to this quixotic drive to create a New Hollywood in the south of France? I think the straw that broke this Irish-American camel’s back was Ben-Hur. 
 
Lew Wallace’s book had been the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and a lavish stage production in 1900 had toured the U.S. for twenty years. It was only a matter of time before a movie would be made. In fact, strictly speaking, one already had been: a cheap and short quickie in 1907, produced by the Kalem Company without bothering to consult either the Wallace estate or Klaw and Erlanger, the stage producers. That sneaky piece of work had resulted in a landmark copyright lawsuit, and the rights were jealously guarded thereafter. Still, this was a plum property, and sooner or later someone was going to pick it. Ingram yearned to direct Ben-Hur, and had it written into his contract that if Metro finally landed the rights, he would get the job; if another studio did, he would be loaned out to do it. In the end, the Goldwyn Company got the rights, with June Mathis in charge of production and writing the script. After The Four Horsemen, Zenda and Scaramouche, Ingram was the obvious front-runner, but Mathis froze him out; she gave the assignment to Charles Brabin. 
 
By all accounts, Ingram went into a serious depression at missing out on what at the time promised to be one of the biggest pictures of all time; even casual acquaintances noticed a distinct change in his character. It was about that time that he went to North Africa to shoot The Arab, and while he was there another blow fell. His home studio Metro merged with the Goldwyn Company, and Louis B. Mayer came aboard to be head of production at the new conglomerate. 
 

We may not know exactly why Ingram despised L.B. Mayer — their paths don’t seem to have crossed in Hollywood — but we know he did. Ingram had left for Tunisia an employee of the Metro Pictures Corporation; now suddenly he was working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had a new clause inserted into his contract: he would answer to Marcus Loew and Nicholas Schenck, not Mayer; his pictures would have the billing, “Metro-Goldwyn presents a Rex Ingram production.” He literally did not want Mayer’s name mentioned in the same breath with his own.

With the MGM merger, Loew’s Inc. had inherited Ben-Hur, shooting in Mussolini’s Italy at the same time Ingram was in Tunisia with The Arab. By mid-1924 the Ben-Hur production had degenerated into a shambling fiasco (for the juicy, fascinating details, see Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By). Mayer and Irving Thalberg assessed the situation, and were appalled. June Mathis, Charles Brabin and leading man George Walsh were all summarily fired. And at this point, evidently, Rex Ingram missed out on directing his dream picture once again. O’Leary reports that Mayer invited Ingram to take over the production, “but Ingram made so many conditions that Mayer refused to consider them.” What conditions? For that matter, if Ingram was so depressed when he lost out the first time, why were there any conditions? I suspect one condition might have been that “Metro-Goldwyn” business; Ingram wanted Ben-Hur, but not if it was to be a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture. Also, Ingram may have wanted to shoot at Victorine, while Mayer may already have decided to bring this runaway disaster home to Hollywood where he could keep an eye on it; besides, an epic like this could never be done at Ingram’s quaint little boutique studio on the Mediterranean coast.

This double miss is one of the great what-ifs of Hollywood. As good as the 1925 Ben-Hur is — and it’s very good indeed, far superior to its more famous remake — it surely would have been even better in Ingram’s hands, even if he’d had to make it without his alter ego John Seitz.

For a few years in the 1920s Ingram operated in a manner Stanley Kubrick would later duplicate (albeit for a much longer time), staying within his own workspace far from studio higher-ups, keeping his own counsel and pursuing his own course, telling the home office when he had a movie ready for them. After The Arab he made three more pictures for MGM — or rather, Metro-Goldwyn — Mare Nostrum (1926), from another Blasco Ibañez novel set during the Great War; The Magician (also ’26), from a bizarre story by Somerset Maugham, with stylistic elements that clearly influenced James Whale’s later Frankenstein pictures at Universal; and The Garden of Allah in 1927. This last picture completed his contract with Metro, and when Ingram refused to return to Hollywood to work, MGM declined to renew.

Meanwhile, Ingram had somehow managed to lose control of his Nice studios. He sued his French lawyer, claiming that the attorney had fraudulently maneuvered ownership of the studio away from him (and alleging that the studio manager had swiped documents from Ingram’s office that would prove his charge). The case dragged on until 1936, and Ingram lost every step of the way. His opponent was a powerful and influential man in French law and politics; Ingram may have come to reflect that he hadn’t left chicanery and the “inevitable scramble for power” behind in California after all.

After that there were only two more pictures, The Three Passions (’29) and Baroud (’32). His only talkie, Baroud was planned in English, French, Spanish and Arabic versions, but only the English and French were ever shot. Released in America as Love in Morocco, it was curtly dismissed by Variety as “A dull story, badly handled and acted.”

That has a certain how-the-mighty-have-fallen ring, doesn’t it? Ingram didn’t see it that way at the time, he simply moved on from what he’d been doing. He welcomed talkies (“Silent pictures are finished and a good thing too”), but visual artist that he was, was never entirely comfortable with them — understandably, being an American working in France with polyglot actors and crews. He basked a while on the beaches of Nice, sojourned in North Africa, where his affinity for Arab culture gave rise to those rumors that he had embraced Islam. While in Egypt, O’Leary reports, he contracted an unnamed illness that left him with high blood pressure for the rest of his life (which no doubt brought on his early death at 57 of a cerebral hemorrhage).

In 1936 Ingram and Alice Terry settled again in Hollywood, where he lived in modest comfort, writing two novels and several short stories, sculpting, painting, traveling occasionally (Hawaii, Mexico, London, Egypt), and perusing a succession of scripts forwarded to him by his old pal Eddie Mannix at MGM, just in case there was that one he simply had to direct. (In 1942, when he heard Paramount was planning to make For Whom the Bell Tolls, he was interested, but nothing ever came of it; another what-if.) And so it was on July 21, 1950, that the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse came for Rex Ingram himself.

Rex Ingram’s output was impressive while it lasted — 27 pictures in just under 16 years. Unfortunately, few of his pictures are readily available to help us appraise his full career. Many (if not all) of his pre-1920 pictures are lost forever, and others are preserved only in archives and seldom shown. Fortunately — and it is good fortune indeed — the handful to be found on home video are among his best, and preserve the record of a great director at the pinnacle of his career.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, make no mistake, is every bit the masterpiece it was in 1921, and can be shown today to anyone without explanation or apology — anyone, that is, who doesn’t blindly and rigidly refuse to abide silent movies. There’s a reason this one made a star of Valentino (it’s probably still his best performance), but he’s far from the only reason to see it, and not even the best reason at that. Alice Terry (not yet Ingram’s wife) is radiant as Valentino’s married lover, and veteran Joseph Swickard as Valentino’s father gives one of the great performances of the silent era; it is in fact Swickard who carries more of the film than any single player. And over it all is Ingram’s amazing command of pacing, epic sweep, and depth of emotion, while underpinning it is June Mathis’s literate distillation of Blasco Ibañez’s sprawling novel.

Scaramouche (available here in a gorgeous transfer from the Warner Archive) has nearly the epic sweep of Four Horsemen, and John Seitz’s camerawork is little short of astonishing. Rafael Sabatini’s novel is faithfully and intelligently followed (unlike the 1952 remake, which made major changes), and the settings, costumes and faces of the characters have the realism of a trip in a time machine to Revolutionary France.

The Prisoner of Zenda, at least in the version I’ve been able to track down, does murky damage to Seitz’s photography, but Ingram’s subtlety, eye for detail and sense of pace survive, as does Lewis Stone’s performance in the lead (Ronald Colman obviously emulated him in the 1937 remake) and Ramon Novarro’s delightful turn as the likeable villain Rupert of Hentzau.

In the final analysis — and I admit, this is the rankest barstool psychology — I think Rex Ingram was an artist who fought against the constraints of the nascent studio system without realizing how much its support and resources helped him achieve what he was after. He worked best at the controls of a well-oiled machine with a complement of crack mechanics who understood how the machine worked and where Ingram wanted it to go. At its best, that machine and that crew gave shape to what Michael Powell called “Rex’s extravagant dreams”; when the crew started to fall away and Ingram tried to do more of the work alone or with substitutes, then came what Powell in the same sentence called his “thundering mistakes”.

Ingram had Irish charm, but arrogance as well, and he made enemies as easily as friends (though not as often). When he fell out with June Mathis, I’m sure it never occurred to him that it might backfire later on. And when she was mulling who would direct Ben-Hur, I suspect he thought something like, I’m the best choice for this job and she knows it. When Mathis chose Charles Brabin, he probably thought Mathis was being petty and vindictive and — maybe even — just like a woman. This created such a disgust in him — that she would wound him and the picture, simply out of spite — that it drove him out of Hollywood altogether, as far as he could go and still breathe the air.

In Nice he found a studio where, he thought, he needn’t wrangle with or truckle to anyone, smaller and more manageable than the factories that were coalescing in Hollywood, more like the heady, footloose atmosphere at Edison and Vitagraph where he started, but better equipped and up to date. But there was still wrangling to be done, and what he thought of as truckling we might now call networking. Off there in the Mediterranean, to the moguls back in Hollywood he was out of sight, out of mind. MGM indulged him because his movies were good, even excellent. And while there were no more blockbusters like Four Horsemen, there were no calamities either; his pictures made money, and even the least successful (The Magician) broke even. But when his time-out was up and Ingram still wouldn’t come home and play well with others, Metro-Goldwyn and Mayer sighed and cut him loose. Ingram, for his part, shrugged and got on with his life.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Finally, two quotes. First, Grant Whytock, editor on eleven of Ingram’s best pictures: “Rex worked harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. He used to run to the set.”

And one more from Byron Haskin: “Ingram’s work forecast the coming of finesse in movies. I would rank Ingram as number one director, number one in the business. He had traces of sophistication that were not seen in films, that’s all there was to it. Films were just a child-like, fairy-tale quality about most of them; they were made to entertain, and that’s that. But Ingram got into nuances and values of the story, of the characters that — I don’t really know any other director who reached that deeply.”

 

And here’s a parting look at the Victorine Studios as Ingram knew them in 1928. They still stand, though much changed, having weathered bankruptcies, fires, and World War II. Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief was shot there, and Truffaut’s Day for Night, and even Mr. Bean’s Holiday. They are now run by Euro Media Television, the name changed to Studios Riviera. Ownership of the property will revert to the City of Nice in 2018, at which time the property may be cleared, subdivided and redeveloped. Some people say the ghost of Rex Ingram still walks there. They say he doesn’t want the place to close.

The Bard of Burbank, Part 2

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“Was Warner Bros.’ film the glorious climax of Shakespearean art,” asks Scott MacQueen in his commentary on the DVD of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “or just another sign that the Day of the Locust was at hand?” It’s a good question, and I’ll address it in due course.

First, though, let’s take a look at the opening title that appears on the Midsummer screen. I wonder: Is this the only time the word “Brothers” was ever spelled out in a Warner Bros. picture? (They didn’t do it for Anthony Adverse, the studio’s big prestige spectacular of the following year.) Somehow it seems to lend an intimate touch, as if the title card were speaking for Harry, Albert and Jack Warner personally, not merely the corporate entity whose official name was “Warner Bros. Pictures.” At the same time, there’s an almost endearing air of self-conscious dignity about it. Deference too — notice that Max Reinhardt gets bigger billing than the brothers themselves.

Notice something else, the background. It’s an image that appears again early in the movie, as the scene shifts from Athens to the forest fairyland. There’s the moon exactly as it’s described by Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, “like to a silver bow/New-bent in heaven.” It’s the kind of touch that ruffled the feathers of some of the movie’s snootier critics (especially in Great Britain), a sign that (in their eyes) Shakespeare’s sublime poetry had been sullied by the over-literal hands of these impertinent, vulgar Yanks. A more charitable eye might have perceived that the artists and craftsmen behind the screen understood and honored that poetry, and were doing their best to render it faithfully in the visual medium that was their own area of expertise.

For the Hollywood Bowl production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that so captivated Hal Wallis and thousands of other Angelenos, Reinhardt had moved away from the minimalist staging that he had been trending toward in Shakespeare’s forest revel (and which has more or less been followed ever since). In such a setting, a bare stage and simple green curtains would hardly do, so Reinhardt had transformed the play into a spectacular, awe-inspiring pageant. Or rather, transformed it back, for that was what the 19th century had seen in the play at least ever since 1843, when a German production in Potsdam first incorporated Felix Mendelssohn’s grandly romantic incidental music.

Scott MacQueen’s commentary on the DVD goes far to address the need for a full account of the making of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (though I still say it rates a book), but he offers only scattered details of the Bowl production which begot it. To my knowledge, no pictures from that staging are readily available, so I can’t address how the movie might have emulated or departed from it. There is, however, a certain semi-Wagnerian, almost Teutonic grandeur to the movie that is in keeping with what we know of Reinhardt’s style, and reviewers who saw his stage productions in L.A., New York and London recognized his touch on the screen. Whether direct credit for the final look of the movie goes to Prof. Reinhardt or to a combination of art director Anton Grot, set designer Harper Goff, costumer Max Ree, cinematographer Hal Mohr and editor Ralph Dawson (who won the movie’s other Oscar), it’s clear that the headline “A Max Reinhardt Production” was no empty boast.

The Hollywood Bowl had freed Reinhardt from the limitations of the ordinary proscenium stage. The movie screen freed him from the limitations of even that vast basin in the Hollywood Hills. As it happened, the camera ventured outside the sound stages only for this brief scene, where you can see the familiar hills of the Cahuenga Pass behind the studio’s backlot. But other freedoms came with the camera, and Reinhardt and co-director William Dieterle drew on the talents of Mohr and special effects team Byron Haskin, Fred Jackman and Hans Koenekamp to do things impossible on any stage.
 

Like this, for instance. Here the followers of fairy queen Titania gather for their nightly revels, prancing, dancing, swirling and flying to the sprightly strains of Mendelssohn’s Scherzo as scored by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. (Korngold was imported by Reinhardt from their native Austria to arrange Midsummer‘s music; he would stay in Burbank to do other work for Warner Bros. Then, on the heels of Hitler’s annexation of Austria, Korngold would settle in Hollywood permanently, composing some of the greatest film scores of all time.) In the droll words of The New Yorker’s John Mosher, “The Reinhardt fairies flit over the treetops on escalators of moonshine, mists rise from the meadows and take the shapes of weird creatures of the night…” Shakespeare himself (as we can infer from the text of his plays) had a keen appreciation for the power of theatrical effects; would he not have reveled in these scenes as much as Titania’s fairies do? I believe he would have, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a snob beyond redemption.  

This first confrontation between the fairy king and queen — “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania” — sets up the royal couple in terms of darkness and light. Victor Jory’s Oberon, in voice and appearance, is literally “king of shadows,” Anita Louise’s trilling Titania the physical embodiment of “moonlight revels” — indeed, she first materializes on screen as a moonbeam taking human shape. The two become a kind of supernatural yin and yang, and the visual juxtaposition of quarreling darkness and light emphasizes what Titania (in lines cut from the movie) calls “this…progeny of evils [that] comes/From our debate, from our dissension.” Was this what Shakespeare had in mind? I don’t know. But does it aptly express the spirit of the “debate and dissension” between the fairy monarchs that disrupts the life of the forest and spills over into the lives of the young lovers and Nick Bottom’s troupe of amateur players? It certainly does, and from Reinhardt and Dieterle down through the hierarchy of Warners’ designers and technicians, it bespeaks an acute understanding of Shakespeare’s play and an instinctive confidence in bringing it to life. 
 
Other facets of Reinhardt’s production drew fire, particularly the casting — some said miscasting — of some of the roles. In truth, it’s dizzying to consider some of the choices Reinhardt, fresh off the boat in New York, telegraphed to his son Gottfried, urging him to secure the following talents for stage productions in Hollywood, San Francisco and Berkeley: Oberon – John Barrymore; Titania – Greta Garbo; Puck – Fred Astaire; Hermia – Joan Crawford; Lysander – Gary Cooper; Helena – Myrna Loy; Demetrius – Clark Gable; Bottom/Pyramus – Charlie Chaplin; Flute/Thisbe – W.C. Fields; Theseus – Walter Huston.
 
Whew! Some of those choices are intriguing; most make us wonder what the maestro was thinking. But nearly all of them were obviously out of the question on sheer logistical grounds. That Reinhardt even contemplated such a stew was an early sign that his understanding of movieland reality was severely limited and would need careful guidance from old hands like Hal Wallis, Henry Blanke and (most particularly) William Dieterle.
 
In any event, when it came time to make the movie, most of the principal cast came from the deep bench of Warner Bros.’ contract players. Most widely reviled of these was Dick Powell as Lysander, both then and now — even Wikipedia makes a point of saying he was “horribly miscast.” But that’s unjust, really — if not to Powell, then certainly to whoever assigned him the role. In fact, he was ideally cast; there’s not that great a gulf between Lysander and Billy Lawlor in 42nd Street or Brad in Gold Diggers of 1933.
 
The problem wasn’t Powell’s casting, it was his performance; he’s terrible. 

 
 
 
 
He preens…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

…minces…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…simpers…
 
 
 
 
 

…and pouts, in easily the worst performance of his career, and arguably one of the worst in Hollywood history. Powell was already chafing at his boy-tenor roles, sensing that the clock was ticking — on stage a male ingenue might keep it going until his grandkids were out of knee pants and pinafores, but in the movies it would never work, and at 30 Powell’s juvenile days were clearly numbered. Well then, playing Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a heaven-sent opportunity for Powell to segue nimbly from squiring Ruby Keeler and Wini Shaw around Buzz Berkeley’s dance floors into the kind of roles where he could age with grace. But did he see it that way? He did not. Insisting he wasn’t “a Shakespearean actor,” he tried to dodge the role (some say “to his credit,” but I’d say it does him none; never mind “Shakespearean,” whatever that means; do you want to act or don’t you?). When the studio wouldn’t let him take a pass, he seems to have gone out of his way to prove how wrong they were. Obviously he didn’t think that one through; when the projector beam finally hit the screen in October 1935, it wasn’t Jack Warner or Hal Wallis up there with egg on his face. When Powell finally managed to carve out a new screen persona for himself in 1944’s Murder, My Sweet, I wonder: did he ever look back on the chance he had blown nine years earlier?

We can contrast Powell’s tantrum of a performance with another Midsummer actor who was miscast yet still managed to make it work: James Cagney. He’s the last actor you’d expect to play the lumpen dullard Nick Bottom, and he was apparently one of the last considered. Dieterle’s early notes mention Wallace Beery and W.C. Fields. Beery was a logical choice, if he could keep from dawdling through his lines and overdoing the neck-scratching mannerism he liked to use instead of acting — and if anyone on the set could have stood working with him (it certainly would have strained Anita Louise’s talent to the limit). Fields might have been fun, but the idea was a nonstarter — he was shooting David Copperfield over at MGM. Memos from Hal Wallis say what a “far-fetched” choice Cagney would be, and as late as the day before rehearsals started, contract player Guy Kibbee was slated for the role. But Reinhardt made an executive decision and Kibbee was out, Cagney in.

Fifty-two-year old Guy Kibbee would have been a comfortable choice for Bottom — a little old, maybe, but the right physical and character type — and he probably would have passed muster with the critics (except those in England who sniffed that there were just too damn many American accents in the cast). But Reinhardt was impressed with Cagney’s dynamism and the studio was comfortable with his box office clout (he did get top billing), so that was that. Cagney’s approach was straightforward — “The keynote,” he recalled decades later, “was the sonofabitch was a ham…he wanted to play all the parts…” He played Bottom as cocky and obnoxious rather than sluggish and obstinate; he made the character work for him, and made his performance work for Reinhardt and the movie. It’s not exactly the Bottom of Shakespeare, and in the movie it’s not entirely incongruous for Titania to fall for him, even crowned with a donkey’s head. But faced with the fait accompli of his casting, Cagney rolled up his sleeves and got to work. It was an attitude Dick Powell could have learned from, if he’d pulled in his lower lip long enough to take notice.

 

 

One facet of the movie that I’ve seen no comment on, but that keeps it living and breathing today, is its undercurrent of discreet eroticism. Nothing to put the bluenoses of the Hays Office out of joint, to be sure, but it’s there all the same. Here, for example, is the on-screen equivalent of that posed publicity shot of Titania and Bottom that I showed in Part 1. Not only is the pose more explicitly sexual, but so is the expression on Titania’s face. In the publicity still she stares blankly past Bottom’s snout, while here — in action, as it were — she gazes at him with a postcoital afterglow worthy of Scarlett O’Hara.

And here we are again with Hermia, as she contemplates eloping to beyond the forest with her true love Lysander. In 18-year-old Olivia de Havilland’s first screen performance, Hermia is proper and maidenly, but we see moments like this, flashes of the wanton under her decorous exterior. It makes the transition ring true later, as Puck’s mischievous love potion takes effect on Lysander, when Hermia becomes a snarling spitfire, seething with all the fury and sexual frustration of a woman scorned.

Notwithstanding the Neo-Victorian pageantry of the movie, there’s one way in which Reinhardt and Dieterle look not back to the past, but forward to later directors’ approach to A Midsummer Night’s Dream: they treat the quartet of young lovers not as the lyrical ideals they had become in the 19th century, but as foolish figures of fun, and the squabbling and bickering of this romantic quadrangle are some of the funniest scenes in the movie. Love’s unpredictable magic has turned them all into asses — a neat counterpoint to the story of Nick Bottom, where being changed into an ass unexpectedly turns him into a lover. Again, is that counterpoint explicitly to be found in Shakespeare? Perhaps not. But is it an astute comment on the intertwined stories of the Dream? Definitely. And it shows (again) an acute understanding of the material running all through the Warner lot in Burbank, not (as some critics then and now would have it) a blundering blindness to the beauty of what they were manhandling in their clumsy paws.

So returning to Scott MacQueen’s question — no, this was not the flowering of Shakespeare’s art, although it came closer to it than anyone could have expected. But “a sign that the Day of the Locust was at hand”? Hardly. For that, we need look no further than the 1930 Moby Dick, when Warner Bros. thoughtfully corrected the oversights of Herman Melville by providing Captain Ahab with a last name, a sweetheart, and a happy ending.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream may well be the most miraculous of those “miracle pictures” I wrote about before. Warner Bros. and Max Reinhardt undertook one of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays — not to “improve” or “correct” it, as Warners had tried with Moby Dick, but to fulfill it. Hal Wallis saw something at that amphitheater on Highland Avenue that struck him as worth putting on film, and whatever changes were wrought between the Bowl and Burbank, Wallis and his colleagues did their best to get it right. Let the salesmen worry about getting audiences into the theaters.

 

I conclude this tribute with a salute to three of the players from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the three members of the Hollywood Bowl cast who Max Reinhardt absolutely insisted must be included in the movie. By a happy coincidence, they are also the last three survivors of the principal players. Top to bottom: Mickey Rooney as Puck, Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, and Nini Theilade as chief fairy-in-waiting to Queen Titania.

 

 

Rooney and de Havilland hardly need any introduction. De Havilland, not only for her double-Oscar career but for her landmark lawsuit that eventually broke the studios’ iron slaveholder’s grip on their performing artists, may have proven to be Max Reinhardt’s most momentous contribution to movie history.

 

Nini Theilade, however, is a less familiar name. Born in Indonesia to Danish parents, she was 19 when she danced for Reinhardt at the Bowl, and for Dieterle and choreographer Bronislava Nijinska on the Warner Bros. sound stages. When Midsummer went from its road show to general release, 16 minutes were trimmed; since her performance was almost entirely danced, she was left with only a brief moment of dialogue with Rooney’s Puck. It took the restoration of the complete movie in 1994 to let us again see Mlle. Theilade’s full work, and appreciate her ethereal beauty and exquisite grace. She turned 95 on June 15, while de Havilland was 94 on July 1 and Rooney will turn 90 September 23. Continued long life to them all, and thanks.

 

UPDATE 9/5/16: Mickey Rooney passed away April 6, 2014, age 93. But I’m pleased to report that as of this date Ms. de Havilland and Mlle. Theilade are still with us, having turned (respectively) 100 on July 1 and 101 on June 15 of this year.

UPDATE 4/15/18: Mlle. Nini Theilade left us on February 13, 2018, just past the halfway mark to her 103rd birthday. Olivia de Havilland, 101, is now the last survivor of Warner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream — and, in all likelihood, of the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

UPDATE 8/11/20: And now, Olivia de Havilland is gone too, having passed away July 26, 2020, twenty-five days after her 104th birthday. May she, and the rest of the Midsummer cast, rest in peace, with the thanks of us all.

The Bard of Burbank, Part 1

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One night years ago I was showing a friend some scenes from the 1935 Warner Bros. movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — the gathering of the fairies, the magic woodland dances, things like that. “This movie,” I told her, “won an Academy Award for its cinematography. There are two amazing facts connected with that. One is that it’s the only Oscar ever awarded on a write-in vote.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You mean it wasn’t nominated?“

“That’s the other amazing fact.”

It is amazing. No disrespect to the three actual nominees that year (Barbary Coast, Les Miserables and The Crusades), but why wasn’t it? Hal Mohr’s cinematography was the one thing about Midsummer on which all commenters on the movie agreed at the time, and they still do now: this is one of the most beautiful black-and-white movies ever shot. Kevin Jack Hagopian of Penn State says Mohr sided with management in a union dispute and the cinematographers’ branch of the Academy refused to nominate him out of pure spite; that makes sense to me. Whatever the cause, a write-in campaign was organized; the Academy allowed write-ins for only two years (1934-35), and this is the only one that ever went the distance.

Mohr had replaced Ernest Haller on the picture when producer Henry Blanke and production chief Hal Wallis found Haller’s footage too murky and dark. Mohr decided it was a case of literally not seeing the forest for the trees, so he ripped out some of the trees designer Anton Grot had erected on the sound stage, had the remaining ones painted and aluminized to be more reflective, and made room for more lighting instruments.

One of Mohr’s instruments is just visible in the corner of this picture; for some reason it wasn’t cropped or retouched out of sight in this version of what became one of the movie’s signature images: fairy queen Titania (Anita Louise) doting on the donkey-headed ass Nick Bottom (James Cagney). This picture was, in fact, my introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in any form, when I came across it at the age of eight or nine, thumbing through a copy of Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer’s 1956 coffee-table tome The Movies. This picture took up most of page 330; I remember it stopped me cold, and I stared at it a long time. What in the world, I thought, could possibly be the story behind a picture like this?

In time I became more familiar with A Midsummer Night’s Dream; I even directed a production of it during my college years, the only occasion on which I was able, without really trying, to commit an entire Shakespeare play to memory (and no, I can’t still remember it all). So now I know the story of how the glittering, tinselly queen of fairies and the blowhard weaver from working-class Athens come to be tenderly embracing under that tree — she madly in love, he crowned with an ass’s head, each in the grip of a different magic spell.

But my childhood question still stands: What is the story behind that picture — not Bottom and Titania, but A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself? What prompted Warner Bros., home studio of gangsters, fast-talking newsmen and working class stiffs, to take a chance on a highbrow director and a highbrow property, even one in the public domain? Prof. Hagopian says it was Jack Warner’s drive to crash high society, to prove to the upper crust that this son of Russian immigrants had kult-chah. Hmmm. Maybe, but I still wonder, was any amount of boulevard cred worth $1.5 million to this notorious penny-pincher?

Actually, according to historian Scott MacQueen in his commentary to the Midsummer DVD, it was Hal Wallis who prompted Warner to approach Max Reinhardt about committing A Midsummer Night’s Dream to film, and thereby must surely hang a tale. No doubt we could find it in the Warner Bros. archives, with that studio’s penchant for memos and paper trails (“Verbal communication leads to misunderstanding and mistakes. Put your ideas in writing.”), but nobody’s ever bothered to, evidently. There’s no section on Midsummer in Rudy Behlmer’s Inside Warner Bros., barely a sentence in Ted Sennett’s Warner Bros. Presents or in Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story by Cass Warner Sperling, Cork Millner and Jack Warner Jr. It’s been decades since I read Jack Warner’s My First Hundred Years in Hollywood, and if he said anything about it, the recollection of it is long gone by now.

Some recounting of this undertaking is overdue, for A Midsummer Night’s Dream is another one of those “miracle pictures” I talked about in my post on Peter Ibbetson. (UPDATE 6/23/20: Since I wrote this in 2010, I’ve learned that my wish had already been granted, by the aforesaid Scott MacQueen, in a long making-of article for the Fall 2009 issue of The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. It’s an excellent, eye-opening read, if you can find a copy of it. Try the Project Muse Web site.) Certainly it would have taken nothing less than a miracle for Warners to recoup their massive investment in it. Not that the studio’s publicity department didn’t give it the old college try. Here they’ve leased the whole side of a building in some blighted New York City neighborhood (Probably Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx; certainly not Manhattan) to proclaim the picture to anyone happening by the rubbish-strewn empty lot next door. There’s something wistfully gallant about the effort. Likewise the string of special announcement trailers to be found as supplements on the DVD, in which various cast members — Ian Hunter, Olivia de Havilland, Anita Louise, Dick Powell, etc. — step from behind a curtain to avow their pride in being part of Midsummer, all but pleading with the audience to turn out and prove their efforts from December 1934 to the following March had not been in vain. 

Unfortunately, they were, as far as Warners’ bottom line for 1935 and ’36 was concerned. Midsummer did okay in the cities and not too bad overseas, but in the small towns it died a thousand deaths. Or three thousand; a record 2,971 theaters exercised their option to cancel their bookings. Jack Warner must have thanked his lucky stars (and the newest and luckiest of all, Errol Flynn) for the unexpected bonanza of Captain Blood. 

Max Reinhardt was already an old hand at Shakespeare’s enchanted comedy by the time he strode onto the Warner Bros. lot. It was his favorite play, maybe because it was a 1905 production in Berlin that first made his name and set him on a course to virtually creating the theater-director-as-superstar, as we know the position today. According to his biographer J.L. Styan, Reinhardt had restaged the play over twenty-five times since then, including heralded productions in Oxford, New York and Berkeley.

It was his colossal production in the Hollywood Bowl that piqued Hal Wallis’s interest. For that, Reinhardt removed the famous band shell (what most people think of as the “bowl”; actually, the term refers to the topography of the site) and replaced it with a 25,000-square-foot stage; he had tons of soil trucked in to construct an artificial forest on the hillside behind, including a pond and suspension bridge, to be lined with torch-bearers for the big wedding procession between Acts IV and V.

Oddly enough, for years Reinhardt had been moving in a more minimalist direction for Midsummer; by 1925 he was staging it on a virtually bare stage with only green curtains to suggest the woods outside Athens. But for the Hollywood Bowl, and later for Warner Bros., he returned to the elaborate pageantry that had characterized the play through much of the 19th century.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Laurence Olivier would revolutionize the practice of filming Shakespeare, setting the bar for all who followed. But in 1935 the only bar was imported from the stage. There had been a film inspired by Midsummer in 1909, but that could be no use to anyone now. Reinhardt himself had directed movies in the silent era, but his metier was the stage, and it might have been the undoing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had his direction carried the day. James Cagney and other members of the cast later recounted how he stalked up and down giving his own rendition of their characters, gesticulating and declaiming wildly (in German) as if he imagined they were still on that huge stage at the Hollywood Bowl projecting to an audience of 15,000 sitting hundreds of yards away. “Somebody ought to tell him,” they whispered.

Not to worry. Reinhardt’s grip of English was shaky, and consequently so was his control of the actors, which fell to William (ne Wilhelm) Dieterle. Dieterle had been a protege of Reinhardt’s in Berlin before becoming a movie director and actor and, in 1931, going over to work in Hollywood, where he flourished. Under contract to Warners in 1934, he was assigned to Midsummer ostensibly as co-director, but actually as a sort of majordomo; he and producer Blanke served as the maestro’s interpreters, and actors and technicians alike remembered the three of them barging into the soundstages where the sets were under construction, growling and barking among themselves in German.
 

As things turned out, Dieterle was more the director than Reinhardt once the cameras began rolling; Mickey Rooney, who played Puck, said Dieterle was the only director he ever worked with on the movie (he had also worked for Reinhardt in the Hollywood Bowl). Dieterle bristled at having to play second fiddle to Reinhardt in studio publicity, and he said so to Jack Warner. Warner understood, but explained that — to put it more bluntly than he did — Reinhardt had a name and Dieterle didn’t; the studio’s huge investment had to be protected, and the only way to do it, he figured, was to play up “A Max Reinhardt Production” to the max (pun intended).

In the final analysis, the dual director credit was probably just; let’s give Reinhardt credit for conception and Dieterle for execution, each taking the lead where the other was less at home. In Part 2, I’ll talk a little more about both facets — conception and execution — of the final product.

To be concluded…

 

Wyler’s Legacy

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When I mentioned to a friend that I was planning a
post on William Wyler (which has now turned into
several), he said, “Good. I’ll be interested to see
what you consider his…” — he searched for the
right word — “…apotheosis.”

To tell the truth, at that point I hadn’t given much
thought to apotheosizing the man, though I guess
that’s what I’ve done. The dictionary gives two
definitions of apotheosis: (1) the elevation of
someone to the status of a god; and (2) the epitome
or quintessence. So since my friend brought it up,
what is, or was, the apotheosis of William Wyler?
Now that I’ve elevated him to somewhere in the
vicinity of godhood, what should we consider the
epitome and quintessence of his work?

To answer that, we might as well start by taking a look at Wyler’s three Oscar-winning best pictures. Ben-Hur is the easiest to dismiss; in fact, it’s the hardest one not to. Check out this poster from 1959: The Entertainment Experience of a Lifetime. At the time, despite the exclamation point, that seemed a simple statement of fact, and it’s hard at this remove to explain the impact of Ben-Hur to anyone who wasn’t there. Star Wars wasn’t a patch on it, though the mystique has outlasted Ben-Hur‘s. Star Wars was the movie of the year in 1977, the way Titanic was in 1997. But in 1959 and ’60, Ben-Hur was a movie for all time; the few dissenting voices were swamped in the ballyhoo.

Check out Wyler’s billing on the poster, too — bigger than anything but the title. Certainly bigger than author Lew Wallace way up there in the fine print, but bigger too than even the stars or producer Sam Zimbalist (whom the stress of the project sent to an early grave). There’s an apotheosis for you.

By the time the Oscars rolled around Ben-Hur was a juggernaut that would not be denied. It seemed a waste of time even to bother finding four other nominees; the thankless mantle of designated also-ran was eventually conferred on Anatomy of a Murder, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun’s Story and Room at the Top. Nobody would have blamed those hapless producers if they had just stayed home on award night, so foregone was the conclusion. But what a change a half-century makes; all four of the sacrificial nominees have aged more gracefully than the winner. For that matter, the silent 1925 Ben-Hur holds up better, especially now on video, with its proper running speed and Technicolor sequences restored and spruced up with a stirring Carl Davis score; only the 1959 chariot race surpasses the original (even that, not by much), and Wyler had to leave the race to second-unit men Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt.

Mrs. Miniver was also a juggernaut in 1942, but that time the momentum was fueled by patriotism instead of studio hype. In this poster the exclamation point is appended to the claim “Voted the Greatest Movie Ever Made.” Whose votes were counted is left obscure, but there’s no denying that Miniver was beloved in its day, and its Oscar was similarly assured.

The picture began as unabashed pro-British propaganda in their war against Germany; it changed to pro-Allied propaganda when Pearl Harbor was attacked midway through production. Its morale value was a real boon to the war effort, and it deserves points for fervent sincerity, but alas, it’s a museum piece today, with the same Hollywooden imitation-Englishness that besets MGM’s 1938 A Christmas Carol. (In Miniver‘s case, British audiences seemed not to mind, no doubt taking the intention for the deed.) Among its fellow best picture nominees, even the rampant flag-waving of Wake Island, The Pied Piper and Yankee Doodle Dandy wears better today. Add in The Invaders, Kings Row, The Pride of the Yankees, The Talk of the Town  and The Magnificent Ambersons — and the case for Mrs. Miniver grows weaker with each title. Potent blow for righteousness that it was in its day, Miniver no longer has the ring of truth it had in 1942.

I use that phrase deliberately, because it brings to mind the first time I saw The Best Years of Our Lives, in the early ’70s when Sam Goldwyn had finally released at least some of his films to television. I watched Best Years one night with a friend, a conscientious objector then in the midst of the Vietnam War. As we watched the movie unfold, Wyler’s (and writers MacKinlay Kantor and Robert Sherwood’s, and producer Sam Goldwyn’s) story of three World War II vets struggling to readjust to civilian life, my pacifist-conscientious-objector-draft-dodger pal turned to me and said, “This still has the ring of truth, doesn’t it?”

It was true when he said it at the height of Vietnam, and it would still be true if he said it again today. Of Wyler’s three best pictures, The Best Years of Our Lives is the one that holds up with the fewest allowances made. True, it’s overshadowed today by another 1946 picture, one it beat in nearly every Oscar category: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Well, I suppose that’s natural; Christmas comes back again every year and World War II only ended once. If the voting for best picture of ’46 got a do-over, Wonderful Life might well take the prize (I’d probably vote for it myself). Olivier’s Henry V would certainly be a strong candidate. Even The Razor’s Edge and The Yearling  might have their cheering sections.

Still, none of this negates the award having gone to Best Years. Wyler’s movie is one of those rare ones that tackled a current issue foremost in the minds of nearly everyone who saw it, dealt with the issue head-on and unflinching, and had (yes) the ring of truth to the very audience least likely to tolerate any Hollywood phoniness about it. Not only in America, and not only among the Allies. The movie was a smash hit from Stockholm to Sydney, winning best picture awards (Jan Herman tells us) “from Tokyo to Paris.” When we look at the Oscars for 1946, we don’t have to scratch our heads and wonder what people were thinking back then; The Best Years of Our Lives tells us.

So much for those three. But it’s a truism that people seldom win Oscars for their best work, and nobody illustrates the point better than William Wyler. To find his best work — his (ahem) apotheosis — I do think you have to look further than even the best of those.

High on my short list — and right at the top, probably — would be the two pictures Wyler made on loan to Warner Bros. with Bette Davis. I’ve told the story of Jezebel and the 48 takes with the riding crop. Later on that same picture, when executive producer Hal Wallis made noises about firing Wyler for (what else?) wasting film and ordering too many takes, Davis went to bat for her director and saved his job, offering to work overtime if it would help (and only if they’d keep Wyler on).

True, she was having an affair with Wyler at the time, but she was a hard-nosed career woman who (if you’ll pardon the expression) never let the little head do the thinking for the big head. Whatever was going on during off-hours, she knew he was getting the performance of her life (so far) out of her, and was doing almost as much for others in the cast — George Brent and (of all people) Richard Cromwell were seldom as good, and never better.

He did almost as much on The Letter in 1940, two years later, and with a much better script (from the story by W. Somerset Maugham). Davis didn’t get the Oscar for this one, but she’s nearly as good as she was in Jezebel, showing the feral fang-and-claw passions roiling under a studied veneer of respectability. (The Wyler-Davis magic failed only on their third and final movie together, 1941’s The Little Foxes, and then only because the headstrong Davis wouldn’t listen to him. He wanted a more textured performance, but she insisted on going deep into Wicked Witch territory. Her two-dimensional approach wasn’t enough to sink the movie — Davis was always worth watching, no matter what — but it did allow the all-but-unthinkable:  not one but two other performers, Charles Dingle and Patricia Collinge, stole the picture from her.)

Other pictures should make the list. Wuthering Heights, no doubt, and These Three and Dodsworth. Hell’s Heroes, despite its early-sound primitivism — or maybe because of it — was a real eye-opener for me, showing a grittier, closer-to-the-bone Wyler than I’d ever seen. And Roman Holiday is a delight from beginning to end; all those heavy-prestige years with Sam Goldwyn, followed by weighty dramas like The Heiress and Detective Story, hadn’t sapped Wyler’s sense of fun, nor his ability to whip up a scrumptious feather-light souffle even in the broiling heat of an Italian summer. The famous Mouth of Truth scene, improvised by Wyler and Gregory Peck on the spot and sprung on an unsuspecting Audrey Hepburn, is a little gem of wicked fun, one of the great moments in Wyler’s career — and Peck’s, for that matter, and Hepburn’s. For that and other reasons, Roman Holiday makes my short list too.

Maybe not on the short list but deserving to be remembered (at least more than it seems to have been since it was the hot one to see back in 1965) is The Collector, essentially a two-characters-on-one-set drama of a timid kidnapper and his beautiful captive in which Wyler got brilliant performances from Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. Coming after the turgid Ben-Hur and the miscarried The Children’s Hour, here was reason to believe Wyler hadn’t lost it, and it gained him his final Oscar nomination. But maybe “it,” whatever it was, was slipping through his fingers at that; Wyler’s hearing and his lungs were deteriorating, and some of the excitement had surely gone out of the game. His next picture, Funny Girl, was a hit, but it strikes me as basically Ben-Hur with songs, and Barbra Streisand instead of a chariot race to provide excitement (and Wyler’s final acting Oscar). His next and last, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, was a physical ordeal, and critically savaged, barely released, hardly seen. He was proud of the picture, but he knew the grind would kill him if he tried to keep it up, so he got out, having nothing more to prove.

I guess my friend’s curiosity will have to remain unsatisfied, at least by me. I can’t name a single “apotheosis,” and even now I’ve probably left somebody’s favorite out. There’s no single “elevation” for me; there are just too many peaks, like the Himalayas with a dozen Everests.

Wyler and “Goldwynitis”

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Joel McCrea’s little ploy turned out to be a pretty momentous backfire. In 1935 he was under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, the irascible producer who had gone independent, largely because no other mogul in the picture business could stand to work with him.

McCrea knew that the boss was looking for an actress to add to his small stable of stars — a Bette Davis, a Katharine Hepburn, somebody with “that little something extra” — and McCrea thought he had just the woman for him: his wife, Frances Dee. She had already appeard in over thirty pictures, including RKO’s Little Women (playing Meg) and Of Human Bondage, and McCrea had been pitching her to Goldwyn for months without success. Now he took the bull by the horns: he showed up at the studio with a print of Dee’s latest picture for Fox, a Cinderella story called The Gay Deception, and screened it for Goldwyn.

Goldwyn loved the picture, but for the wrong reason as far as McCrea was concerned; when the lights came up, he was no more interested in Frances Dee than he had been the day before. Instead, he turned to McCrea. “Who directed this?”

“A funny little guy named Wyler.”

What was it about The Gay Deception — a frothy comedy about a small-town secretary who uses a $5,000 sweepstakes prize to pose as an heiress at the Waldorf, where she meets a prince incognito as a bellboy — that convinced Goldwyn he’d found the director he was looking for? Jan Herman doesn’t say in A Talent for Trouble, nor does A. Scott Berg in his magisterial Goldwyn — and Berg had unrestricted access to Goldwyn’s archives, so maybe Goldwyn never said either. That kind of question is just what makes Sam Goldwyn such an enigma. How do we figure this guy out?

If Goldwyn was nothing more than a crass and ill-tempered parvenu who threw money around in an effort to buy a reputation as a class act, all the time raging and bullying and mangling the English language, how do we explain this mind-boggling flash of insight that changed his life, and Wyler’s — and left no small ripple in Hollywood history? For whatever reason, he decided the director of this lighthearted romantic comedy was just the man he wanted to direct a searing drama about two schoolteachers accused of lesbianism.

When the two men met later that summer of 1935, Wyler said Goldwyn “couldn’t have been more charming, but I thought he’d lost his mind. He wanted to film The Children’s Hour.” Lillian Hellman’s play was a scandalous success on Broadway, and the Hays Office had tried to warn Goldwyn off bringing it to the screen. But Hellman maintained that the play was about the power of a lie, not lesbianism; Goldwyn was going to give her the chance to prove it by hiring her to write the screenplay, and he wanted Wyler at the helm.

The result was These Three; the Hays Office allowed Goldwyn to proceed only if he removed any suggestion of “sex perversion” and didn’t make any reference to Hellman’s original title on screen or in any of the picture’s publicity. Hellman proved her point by changing the schoolgirl’s lie to a more conventional accusation of illicit heterosexuality. And Wyler proved it again 26 years later, by default: he remade the movie under its original title and — the Production Code having loosened up in the meantime — with its original lesbian theme intact. That time, Hellman wasn’t available to do the script, and she hated the final film. Wyler himself wished he had never made The Children’s Hour.

Not so These Three, which even in 1962 outshone its remake, and in 1936 was exactly the succes d’estime Goldwyn was looking for, and a box-office hit to boot. Their next picture together, Dodsworth, from Sinclair Lewis’s novel and Sidney Howard’s play, brought Goldwyn within striking distance of his Holy Grail: the Academy Award for best picture. It was nominated for that and six others (including Wyler for best director), although only Richard Day’s art direction won. But Goldwyn had found the director who could give him the prestige pictures he wanted sent out under his name. Wyler, for his part, found a producer entirely unlike Junior Laemmle back at Universal, one willing to spend the money to support the style that in time would dub him “90-Take Wyler.”

It was a professional marriage made in heaven — with plenty of hell along the way. There was a reason Goldwyn was called Hollywood’s lone wolf: he fought with everybody — with Edgar Selwyn, his first partner in movies; with United Artists, the distributor of his pictures; with A.H. Giannini, UA’s banker; with his stars, directors, lawyers. Everybody.

He fought with Wyler, too. By the time of their last picture together, The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, he spoke of having “occasional attacks of ‘Goldwynitis.'” After one run-in with Goldwyn he came late to the set, fuming: “This goddamned picture! Goldwyn wants it Produced by Sam Goldwyn. Directed by Sam Goldwyn. Acted by Sam Goldwyn. Written by Sam Goldwyn. Seen by Sam Goldwyn.”

For his part, Goldwyn complained that Wyler shot as if he owned stock in a film company. Part of the reason for all this is the fact that they were so much alike. They were both inarticulate, though each handled it in different ways. Goldwyn blustered and railed, shaking his fist at the top of his voice. Wyler didn’t; he just quietly ordered another take, saying little. Neither man could tell people exactly what he wanted, but each knew it when he finally saw it. In Goldwyn A. Scott Berg quotes Ben Hecht on the producer:

Ben Hecht wrote that Goldwyn as a collaborator was inarticulate but stimulating, that he “filled the room with wonderful panic and beat at your mind like a man in front of a slot machine, shaking it for a jackpot.”

 

“Inarticulate but stimulating” describes Wyler as well as it does Goldwyn. If Goldwyn filled a room with wonderful panic, Wyler filled it with equally wonderful desperation. Staying with Hecht’s metaphor, if Goldwyn shook that slot machine for a jackpot, Wyler stood there dropping coin after coin into it, figuring that sooner or later the lemons and cherries and bananas would line up the way he liked them. And during the years from 1936 to 1946, when Wyler made the pictures that would secure his reputation as a man who couldn’t make a flop, most of the coins he used belonged to Sam Goldwyn.

One of Wyler’s jackpots, and Goldwyn’s, was also Hecht’s — his and Charles MacArthur’s. The two had written an adaption of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights while on vacation in 1936, just on spec. They sold it to Walter Wanger for Wanger’s star Sylvia Sidney. But those two got into a screaming match over another picture, and when Wanger grumbled that the script needed “laughs,” the writers asked Goldwyn to buy the property from him.

Goldwyn wasn’t interested; the atmosphere was too grim and the flashback structure confused him. But when Wyler — stretching the truth a bit — told him Jack Warner was considering buying Wuthering Heights for Bette Davis, Goldwyn couldn’t resist the idea of stealing it out from under him. By the time the picture premiered in April 1939, the movie Goldwyn hadn’t been all that interested in making had been transformed in his mind into the one he thought he’d be remembered for (although he never did get the title right; he always called it “Withering Heights”). He’d been practically conned into making the picture, but whenever anyone mentioned “William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights,” he’d correct them: “I made Withering Heights. Wyler only directed it.”

“Only.” That’s how petty Goldwyn could be; he was willing to pay to get the best, but he never shrank from grabbing credit for how things turned out. But as Wyler rhetorically asked an interviewer in 1980: “Tell me, which pictures have ‘the Goldwyn touch’ that I didn’t direct?”

 

Well, there was The Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood did that one), and Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks), and The Hurricane (John Ford). But Wyler’s point is well-taken. No other director worked as many times for Goldwyn — seven — and of the seven times Goldwyn was in the running for a best picture Oscar, only two were directed by anyone else (Yankees and The Bishop’s Wife). Without movies like These Three, Dodsworth, Wuthering Heights, Dead End and The Little Foxes, the vaunted “Goldwyn touch” could well boil down to those Eddie Cantor musicals, Danny Kaye’s 1940s comedies, and Guys and Dolls.

 

Take this picture, for example. If there’s one movie besides Wuthering Heights for which Goldwyn is remembered now, it’s The Best Years of Our Lives. It’s the movie that finally got Goldwyn into the winner’s circle on Oscar night, and it was Wyler’s picture one hundred percent.

Goldwyn tried to talk him out of making it. Goldwyn had commissioned the story from writer MacKinlay Kantor as World War II was finally inching to its end; he said he wanted something about returning soldiers, and he gave Kantor carte blanche as to the story; but when Kantor came out with Glory for Me, a 288-page novel in blank verse, Goldwyn lost interest and wrote the investment off as money down the hole.

In October 1945 William Wyler was himself a veteran back from the war, and he connected with Glory for Me as Goldwyn never could. He still owed Goldwyn one more picture under the contract that had been in abeyance for the duration, and this was the one he wanted to make. Goldwyn demurred. Wyler insisted. He got his way, and he and Goldwyn (among others) got their Oscars.

But service in World War II taught William Wyler one lesson that didn’t make its way into The Best Years of Our Lives: he learned that life is too short to deal with people like Samuel Goldwyn. When Goldwyn denied him the “A William Wyler Production” credit he’d promised, snubbed him at the after-Oscar party, then turned out to have cooked the books to shortchange him on his profit participation, Wyler washed his hands.

Wyler could have said, “I made The Best Years of Our Lives. Sam Goldwyn only produced it.” But he never did, because William Wyler was a gentleman. With all he and Goldwyn had in common, and after all they had helped each other to accomplish, that was the one big difference between them.
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“The Best of Us,” Part 2

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Thalberg called him “Worthless Willy.” This surely makes William Wyler the only recipient of the Academy’s Irving G. Thalberg Award to have been publicly disparaged by the man the award was named for.

 
 

Thalberg did have his reasons. Only three years older than Wyler, he was far beyond him in stature at Universal when Wyler started there as an errand boy in 1921. According to Wyler’s biographer Jan Herman, the only time Universal’s youthful production chief deigned to notice the 19-year-old Wyler, it didn’t go well for the future director. “You read German, don’t you?” Wyler, fairly fresh from Europe and still honing the command of English he’d begun developing there, said he did. Thalberg handed him a German novel, a property the studio was considering buying for director Erich von Stroheim. “Bring me a synopsis in English on Monday.”

This was on Friday, and Wyler didn’t make the deadline; he didn’t even finish the book. Monday came, then Tuesday and Wednesday before he could even tell Thalberg what the book was about; he appears never to have done a written synopsis. It also appears that Thalberg was administering a test — and Wyler flunked. In any case, Wyler — young and unfocused — never got another personal assignment, however trivial, from Thalberg. The “Worthless” moniker came along later, when Thalberg got wind of the teenager’s arrests for reckless driving; Thalberg must have decided the kid would never amount to much.

If so, then Thalberg, who died at 37, lived just long enough to get an inkling of how wrong he was. Even by the time Thalberg left Universal in 1924 for the new-minted super-studio MGM, Worthless Willy had already amounted to an assistant director — of sorts. On The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Thalberg’s pet project at Universal, Wyler was still just an errand boy, but now he was running errands for assistant directors Jack Sullivan and Jimmy Dugan, wrangling the picture’s thousands of extras and getting his first chance to wield the coveted megaphone.

The anecdote of the German novel is a telling one. He may have been a slow starter at Universal, and may have struck higher-ups — and in those days nearly everybody at Universal was higher up than he was — as a bad bet, but he was already showing a trait that would follow him all through his career: Willy Wyler didn’t like to be hurried. In time, the “Worthless Willy” nickname would give way to another: “90-Take Wyler.”

Bette Davis told a story about working with Wyler on Jezebel in the fall of 1937. Her first scene called for her to stride into her plantation home after dismounting from her horse and saucily slinging the long train of her riding outfit over her shoulder on her riding crop. At Wyler’s request, Davis had practiced long with the crop and felt ready to nail the scene in one take. In fact, she thought she did, but Wyler disagreed. He ordered another take, and another, and another. After a dozen takes, Davis, who had rarely required more than two takes in her entire career so far, was exasperated. “What do you want me to do differently?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

Whatever it was, Wyler saw it on the forty-eighth take. “Okay, that’s fine.” And he called a wrap for the day.

Davis was furious, and demanded to see the rushes of the day’s work. Wyler obliged. Davis no doubt was primed to fly into a self-righteous tirade: “What was wrong with that take…or that one…or that one?” But she never did. She walked into the screening room believing that she’d done the action exactly the same every single time, but now she saw that she hadn’t. Each take was different, and the forty-eighth was the best.

That’s how 90-Take Wyler operated, and in a way it wasn’t all that different from Worthless Willy. He knew what he wanted, but he wasn’t one of those directors — not always, anyway — who could get it from an actor with a few well-placed words. There’s a famous story about how Wyler’s friend John Huston, directing The African Queen, saved Katharine Hepburn from playing her character as a sour, prissy old-maid missionary (and probably saved the whole picture) by a simple, seemingly offhand remark comparing the character to Eleanor Roosevelt. Wyler didn’t work that way. There are countless stories of Wyler ordering another take, saying things like “It stinks.” “Do it again. Better.”

Charlton Heston on Ben-Hur, for example. One night, he said, Wyler came to him in his dressing room. “Chuck, you gotta be better in this picture.”

Nonplussed, Heston said, “Okay. What can I do?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. If I knew, I’d tell you, and you’d do it, and that would be fine. But I don’t know.”

“That was very tough,” Heston recalled. “I spent a long time with a glass of scotch in my hand after that.”

Wyler, it seems, didn’t always issue instructions like a recipe to his actors. But he knew what he wanted. And he knew that “I’ll know it when I see it.”

These anecdotes conjure an image of a director passively waiting for lightning to strike, and willing to spend any amount of time and his producer’s money while he waited. What they don’t suggest is the process his refusal to accept the merely adequate sparked in his actors and writers. On their first picture together, The Big Country, Heston took exception to some minor piece of Wyler’s direction and wanted to discuss it. He didn’t have his script handy, so he asked to borrow Wyler’s.

Wyler always carried his script in a leather binder, with the titles of his movies engraved in gold inside the front cover; when he finished a picture, he’d take the script out, engrave that one’s title on the cover and move on to the next. As Heston took Wyler’s script, it flipped open to the inside cover and he saw the titles engraved there: Dodsworth, Dead End, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights, The Letter, The Westerner, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Heiress, Detective Story, Roman Holiday…

As Heston stared, Wyler grew impatient. “What is it, Chuck? What’s on your mind?”

Heston closed the script and handed it back. “Never mind, Willy. It’s not important.”

Wyler began directing on two- and five-reel westerns at Universal, where they didn’t want it good, they wanted it Thursday afternoon. The formulas were simple and unsubtle, and the movies had to move. Wyler showed, in now-forgotten titles like Ridin’ for Love, Gun Justice and Straight Shootin’, that he could turn it in Thursday afternoon and good. As the importance of his assignments increased, he drew on his bosses’ memory of how right he had gotten things before — under the gun, with the front office relentlessly beancounting — to take more time and money to get it exactly right this time. And as his reputation grew (and stayed with him nearly to the end) as a man who couldn’t make a flop, the people who worked with him tended more and more to take his word, like Heston on The Big Country and Ben-Hur. If Willy thinks I can do better, he must be right, and it’s up to me to figure out how.

When a director insists on take after take, saying nothing but “again” and “it stinks,” an actor’s response is usually to think (or say), “This guy’s giving me nothing, and he’s a tyrant to boot.” And some did. Jean Simmons worked for Wyler on The Big Country (1958), and even thirty years later she declined to discuss the experience with Jan Herman. Not so Sylvia Sidney, who dripped venom talking about doing Dead End fifty years after the fact. Ruth Chatterton didn’t wait that long; she was every inch the affronted diva on Dodsworth even as Wyler and producer Sam Goldwyn were trying to jumpstart her fading career (“Would you like me to leave the studio, Miss Chatterton?” “I would indeed, but unfortunately I’m afraid it can’t be arranged.”).

Whatever the truth of these situations, the point is what conspicuous exceptions Simmons, Sidney and Chatterton are among the legions of actors who worked with Wyler. The tales of his calling take after take are recounted with affection, not exasperation — not only by the Oscar winners, and not only years after wounded feelings have healed (Bette Davis got over her snit instantly). Wyler apparently never uttered the words “I know what I’m doing; trust me,” but that seems to be the effect he had on people. Combined with a powerful personal charm, he exuded an atmosphere of serene confidence on the set that made people want to please him, even as they struggled through twenty, thirty takes or more trying to figure out what the hell he wanted them to do. Wyler’s attitude was that they could do better; their response was to work all the harder to prove him right.

This is the intangible ingredient in Wyler’s pictures, along with the ones we can identify and point to: the bravura or simply spot-on-genuine performances, the incisive writing, the striking cinematography (Wyler worked seven times with the great Gregg Toland, and they brought out the best in each other), the handsome production designs. If you want to find the “personal element” in Wyler’s pictures, there it is: He had the confidence to take his time. In remarkably short order, thanks to luck as well as talent, he established a track record that allowed him to insist on it.

Gregory Peck nailed it exactly: “He was not one to talk a thing to death…What worked worked, and he knew how to recognize it…[N]ot all directors know how to do that. They pick the wrong take, or they’re not open to what can happen on the spur of the moment. Willy had a special sensitivity to that. He sensed the interplay between actors…This was ‘the Wyler touch.’ It’s why so many actors won Oscars with Willy, because he recognized the moments that brought them alive on the screen.”

I haven’t even gotten around to talking about Sam Goldwyn, have I? Next time, then; that testy, fruitful relationship deserves a post all to itself.

“The Best of Us,” Part 1

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When William Wyler died in 1981, writer-director Philip Dunne delivered a euolgy at a memorial service in a packed auditorium at the Directors Guild of America. “Talent,” he said, “doesn’t care whom it happens to. Sometimes it happens to rather dreadful people. In Willy’s case, it happened to the best of us.”

Everybody called him Willy. Naturally enough — it was his name. He was born Willi Wyler, actually, in Alsace on July 1, 1902. When he began directing two-reel westerns for Universal in 1925, they Anglicized — and, to their minds, dignified — his given name to William, and he went along, but he never changed it legally, and to his friends and family he was Willy to the end.

He looks more like a Willy here, on the left holding the megaphone, playing a Hitchcockian cameo as the assisstant director of the film-within-the-film in Daze of the West, his last two-reeler for Universal; he had already begun directing five-reel westerns and would soon graduate to more prestigious (for Universal, anyhow) features. He’s 25 in this picture and has already been directing for two years, the youngest on the Universal lot and probably the youngest in Hollywood. (A few years later, he took mild umbrage at seeing Mervyn LeRoy over at Warners touted as Hollywood’s youngest — “He had press agents and I didn’t.” — even though LeRoy was two years older and began directing two years later. Much later on, coincidentally, both would work for producer Sam Zimbalist on the two huge Roman epics that bookended the 1950s at MGM: LeRoy on Quo Vadis and Wyler on Ben-Hur.)

In between the one-week shoot on Daze of the West and the eight months on Ben-Hur, Wyler had one helluva run. In the end it may have been Ben-Hur that proved the undoing of his reputation, at least among “serious” film students. Wyler certainly thought so: “Cahiers du Cinema never forgave me for the picture. I was completely written off as a serious director by the avant-garde, which had considered me a favorite for years. I had prostituted myself.”

Well, it certainly didn’t seem that way at the time. At least among the hoi polloi and mainstream movie reviewers, Ben-Hur looked like Wyler’s masterpiece; his Oscar for directing it was only one of the eleven it won, a record that stood for 37 years. In 1959 and ’60, Ben-Hur wasn’t simply a great movie, it was a touchstone in the march of human culture. It was everywhere; you couldn’t catch a cold without blowing your nose on Ben-Hur kleenex, and everybody who even wanted to be anybody simply had to see it.

In time cooler heads prevailed, and it became clear that as great movies and cultural touchstones go, Ben-Hur was neither. But by then the damage was done; the avant-garde (whoever they are) had abandoned Wyler for — oh, pick a name: Howard Hawks? Vincente Minnelli? John Cassavetes, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller? Andrew Sarris’s American Cinema relegated Wyler to four tiers below the Pantheon, in a section headed “Less Than Meets the Eye.” David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film dismissed him as “Hollywood’s idea of an outstanding director.”

True, it’s hard to believe that the director of the bloated, lumbering Ben-Hur is the same man, 20-plus years on, who turned out the spare, gritty Hell’s Heroes or the trifling, light-hearted confection The Good Fairy with Margaret Sullavan (who became, for a scant sixteen months, his first wife), never mind anything in between. Wyler’s career doesn’t have to stand on Ben-Hur, nor does it deserve to fall on it. 

I have an idea for a book, and I may yet do it: The Movie Directors’ Hall of Fame. The idea is this: create a scoring system for directors, compiling statistics the way they do for professional athletes. Award so many points for winning an Oscar, so many for directing an Oscar-winning best picture, for directing an Oscar-winning or nominated performance, for directing one of the top box-office movies of the year, for winning the DGA or other directing awards, and so on. Total up the points and see how things shake out.

Now clearly, a scoring system where, for example, Kevin Costner beats out Orson Welles isn’t going to be definitive. But let’s take it as a premise, just for the sake of argument — something at least a bit more objective than asking an assortment of critics and “film industry professionals” what they think are the greatest movies of all time. The stats pretty much speak for themselves: William Wyler is the Babe Ruth, the Wilt Chamberlain, the Muhammad Ali of movie directors. There isn’t even a close second.

Wyler won three Academy Awards for best director. Only one director (Frank Capra) has won as many, and only one other (John Ford) has won more. Perhaps more important, all three of Wyler’s movies also won best picture; one of Capra’s didn’t, and only one of Ford’s did.

Wyler was nominated for best director a total of twelve times; his nearest competitor is Billy Wilder, with eight. Wilder’s nominations spanned 17 years, from 1944 to 1960, which could indicate a hot streak, while Wyler’s ran 30 years, ’36 to ’65, which you could read as a sustained career. Fred Zinnemann has seven nominations, several have six, and quite a few have five. But a full dozen? Only Wyler, and it’s all but inconceivable that any director will ever top his total (or Wilder’s, for that matter).

But where Wyler’s directorial touch really shows is in the number of actors and actresses who won or were nominated for his films: 14 wins (or 131/2, if you insist; one, Walter Brennan’s supporting win for Come and Get It, was for a film where Wyler shared director credit, taking over after producer Sam Goldwyn fired Howard Hawks) and 36 nominations. His closest runner-up here is Elia Kazan, with nine wins and 24 nominations. It’s particularly telling to note the unusual number of times that two performers won for the same Wyler picture: Jezebel, Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, Ben-Hur. Multiple nominations, too: two for Dodsworth, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights, The Letter and others; three for The Little Foxes, and five for Mrs. Miniver.

Surely this record will stand for as long as Oscars continue to be handed out. Today the only director working with anything like the prolificacy of Golden Age Hollywood is Woody Allen — 41 features in as many years — and he’s only racked up six wins and 16 nominations (including his own). How long would it take Steven Spielberg or James Cameron — or even Martin Scorsese (five wins, 20 nominations) — to equal Wyler’s tally? In a Hollywood where directors devote two, three, four years to one picture, it can’t be done.

In Part 2, I’ll look a little closer at some of these pictures, at Wyler’s productive partnership with Samuel Goldwyn, and the working style with which Wyler often drove his actors nuts, even as he shepherded so many of them to the podium on Oscar night.

To be continued…