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Wyler and “Goldwynitis” (reprinted)

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July 1 will mark the 110th anniversary of the birth of William Wyler (1902-81), peerless movie director par excellence. The occasion is being observed by a blogathon hosted by The Movie Projector June 24 – 29, in which many of my fellow members in the Classic Movie Blog Association (CMBA) will be holding forth on their favorite Wyler pictures. Go here for a list of blogathon participants and links to their individual posts as they go up.
 
For my part, in conjunction with The Movie Projector’s blogathon, I’m republishing a series of five posts I did on Wyler in 2010, one a day for five of the six days of the blogathon. Happy Birthday, Willy, and thanks for the memories!
 
 
 
 

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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, Wyler would speak 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.
 

To be concluded…

 

“The Best of Us”, Part 2

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July 1 will mark the 110th anniversary of the birth of William Wyler (1902-81), peerless movie director par excellence. The occasion is being observed by a blogathon hosted by The Movie Projector June 24 – 29, in which many of my fellow members in the Classic Movie Blog Association (CMBA) will be holding forth on their favorite Wyler pictures. Go here for a list of blogathon participants and links to their individual posts as they go up.

For my part, in conjunction with The Movie Projector’s blogathon, I’m republishing a series of five posts I did on Wyler in 2010, one a day for five of the six days of the blogathon. Happy Birthday, Willy, and thanks for the memories!
 
 
 
 

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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?” Thalberg asked. 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. Wyler 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.
 

To be continued…

“The Best of Us”, Part 1

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July 1 will mark the 110th anniversary of the birth of William Wyler (1902-81), peerless movie director par excellence. The occasion is being observed by a blogathon hosted by The Movie Projector June 24 – 29, in which many of my fellow members in the Classic Movie Blog Association (CMBA) will be holding forth on their favorite Wyler pictures. Go here for a list of blogathon participants and links to their individual posts as they go up.
 
For my part, in conjunction with The Movie Projector’s blogathon, I’m republishing a series of five posts I did on Wyler in 2010, one a day for five of the six days of the blogathon. Happy Birthday, Willy, and thanks for the memories!
 
 
 

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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 movie-within-the-movie 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 13½, if you insist; one of them, 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 a whopping 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 43 years — and he’s only racked up six acting 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…

 

Wyler Catches Fire: Hell’s Heroes

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July 1 will mark the 110th anniversary of the birth of William Wyler (1902-81), peerless movie director par excellence. The occasion is being observed by a blogathon hosted by The Movie Projector over the next six days, in which many of my fellow members in the Classic Movie Blog Association (CMBA) will be holding forth on their favorite Wyler pictures. Go here for a list of blogathon participants and links to their individual posts as they go up.

For my part, in conjunction with The Movie Projector’s blogathon, I’m republishing a series of five posts I did on Wyler in 2010, one a day for five of the six days of the blogathon. Happy Birthday, Willy, and thanks for the memories!

 

 

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In his biography of William Wyler, A Talent for Trouble, author Jan Herman makes the kind of statement movie buffs love to see become obsolete: “There are no extant prints of the sound version of Hell’s Heroes.” Herman then goes on to discuss Wyler’s first talkie in terms of its silent version (like many early sound pictures, Hell’s Heroes was released silent as well, for theaters that had not yet been wired for sound).

A Talent for Trouble was published seventeen years ago, and I’m sure Herman himself is pleased to know that his pronouncement is no longer operative. Fortunately for us, Hell’s Heroes was remade by MGM in 1936 under author Peter B. Kyne’s original title Three Godfathers (and again in 1948 as 3 Godfathers, that time directed by John Ford and starring Duke Wayne), so ownership of this Universal picture devolved upon Metro.

In those days, when Metro remade a movie, it was studio practice to buy up and suppress (some say destroy) any earlier versions. If those originals were in fact earmarked for the incinerator, we probably have a fumbling studio bureaucracy to thank for the fact that we can still see Paramount’s 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Universal’s 1936 Show Boat, the British Gaslight of 1940, even MGM’s own silent Ben-Hur, and other movies that the suits at the Tiffany Studio took it into their heads to remount over the years.

We can certainly thank MGM’s acquisitiveness for the fact that these titles from other studios ended up in the MGM library and are now owned by Warner Home Video. The Warner Archive offers a double-feature package of Hell’s Heroes with MGM’s 1936 remake, and it affords us an opportunity to appreciate this landmark in William Wyler’s career that wasn’t available to Jan Herman in 1995.

Peter B. Kyne’s short novel The Three Godfathers was published in 1913 in The Saturday Evening Post, and was his first great success in a writing career that would carry him through 1940 as a popular and well-read author. The story has a mythic resonance: three outlaws on the run from their latest crime come across a dying woman in childbirth in the desert. Before the doomed mother dies she extracts a promise from the three desperadoes to take her baby to safety, and the helpless child awakens the latent humanity of the three unregenerate bad men.
 
By the time Carl Laemmle Jr. decided to make The Three Godfathers the basis of Universal’s first outdoor all-talkie, the studio had already gotten more than its money’s worth out of it. There was a screen version in 1916 starring Harry Carey, and another in 1919 titled Marked Men, again with Carey and this time directed by John Ford. Both pictures had been good moneymakers for Universal. (There was another Ford western in 1921, Action, which the IMDb claims was based on Kyne’s story, while Clive Hirschhorn’s The Universal Story gives an entirely different and unrelated plot. Alas, this is one of Ford’s many westerns presumed lost, so we may never resolve the discrepancy.)
 

To direct the new version of the story, Laemmle chose 27-year-old William Wyler. Wyler had begun work on the Universal City lot as an errand boy, and after a rocky start — at one point studio chief Irving Thalberg dubbed him “Worthless Willy” — Wyler had risen to where he was considered an asset to the studio. Hell’s Heroes was to be his first talkie, but he was no stranger to westerns, having cut his directorial teeth on them from 1925 on — first a series of nearly two dozen two-reel horse operas for Universal’s so-called “Mustang” unit, then five-reel features in the “Blue Streak” series.

Wyler began shooting in California’s Mojave Desert and Panamint Valley, just south of Death Valley, on August 9, 1929. Jan Herman tells us that the temperature on location rose as high as 110 degrees Fahrenheit, but those of us who know the California desert in August suspect that’s probably a conservative figure — 115 to 125 sounds more like it. In any case, one can only shudder at what the poor cameraman in his booth — like a meat locker, but without refrigeration — must have gone through. He must have needed five gallons of water a day just to ward off dehydration.
 
In the movie, the three outlaws — Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton and Fred Kohler — are on the run after robbing the Bank of New Jerusalem on the edge of the desert (and killing the cashier, who we later learn was the father of the baby they rescue — a nice detail not in Kyne’s story, supplied by scenarist Tom Reed). For Wyler’s company, New Jerusalem was Bodie, Calif., an erstwhile Gold Rush boomtown near the California-Nevada border.
 

Bodie was near the tail-end of its boom-and-bust history in the late summer of 1929. Originally founded on a nearby gold strike in 1859, it had grown by 1880 to a reported population of 10,000, home to 65 saloons and other establishments of ill repute. By 1929 the population hovered around 100. Three years after the Hell’s Heroes crew left town, so the story goes, a young boy at a church social threw a tantrum when he was given Jell-O instead of ice cream. Sent home as a punishment, he set fire to his bed and burned down over 90 percent of the town. The final blow came in 1942, when War Production Board Order L-208 closed down all nonessential gold mines in the country, including Bodie’s; even the U.S. Post Office closed. Today, what’s left of Bodie is a California State Park and a National Historic Landmark.

 

 

Notwithstanding the efforts of that youthful Depression-Era pyromaniac, traces of Bodie as it appears in Hell’s Heroes survive to the present day. Here’s Bodie’s Methodist Church, which figures prominently in the movie’s opening and closing scenes, as it appears today.

 

And here it is again, on the left edge of the frame, at the top of Bodie’s — er, that is, New Jerusalem’s — dusty main street.

 

Here’s a glimpse of town and the hills beyond in the closing moments of the movie …

 

 

… and a similar view taken more recently, showing what’s left of the same street.

Hell’s Heroes was a success for Universal and for Wyler personally. He’d become an asset to Universal for his westerns, but outside the studio Universal’s westerns — cranked out in days for small-time houses in neighborhoods and farm towns — hardly deserved notice. Now people were noticing. Over at Warner Bros., Darryl F. Zanuck ordered all his producers to see “this picture by this new director.”

What specifically excited Zanuck was a tracking shot that Wyler inserted as a way to sidestep a conflict with his leading man, Charles Bickford (on the right in this picture; the others are Raymond Hatton, left, and Fred Kohler). Bickford was a recent import from Broadway — Heroes was his third picture, made and released hot on the heels of the other two — and he evidently didn’t cotton much to being directed by some Hollywood rube who didn’t know anything about real acting. Herman tells us he even went out of his way to undermine Wyler with his fellow actors, an unconscionable breach of protocol then, and an actionable offense under union rules now.

Their particular conflict came over a scene late in the movie as Bickford, the last survivor of the three bandits, trudges through the desert with the baby in his arms. Wyler wanted Bickford, carrying a rifle as well as the child, to first drop the butt-end of the rifle in the dust and drag it for a distance before dropping it altogether. Bickford refused. He insisted on stopping in his tracks, looking at the rifle, then hurling it away from him into the dirt.

I almost wish this shot survived in the Universal vaults; I’d love to see it, because it sounds perfectly ridiculous — just the kind of grandiloquent gesture you’d expect from a stage-trained ham with a lot to learn about movie acting. A man dying of thirst won’t be able to summon the strength to throw a heavy rifle at all — and besides, shooting the scene in a real desert, he’d have to throw it about a hundred yards before it looked as impressive to the camera as the actor doing it thought it did.

Wyler’s solution was ingeniously simple. He filmed the scene the way Bickford wanted to play it. Then, one day when Bickford wasn’t on call, he dressed a prop man in Bickford’s boots, had him make tracks in the desert sand, and photographed them with a moving camera.

 

 

First we see just the bandit’s footprints, occasionally staggering and shuffling…

 

 

 

 

 

…then the tracks and the divot dug by the rifle butt…

 
   …then the discarded rifle itself…
 …and so on through other items discarded by the bandit under the grueling desert sun. When we next see Bickford’s character, he’s stumbling along clutching the child, discarding the last of his burden — the gold from his bank robbery. 
 
Bickford’s reaction to this end run is not recorded. He no doubt didn’t see it until the picture was finished. Did he recognize the tracking shot as a directorial tour de force and an improvement on his own idea? Maybe not; Bickford was always headstrong and cantankerous, and I suspect the whole thing rankled: when he next worked with Wyler — 28 years later, on The Big Country — they took up squabbling again as if they had never left off.
 
But it’s not as if Wyler ruined Bickford’s budding career. In fact, Hell’s Heroes is probably where he first gave evidence of the actor he’d become, and it’s still one of his best performances. Along with the four other movies he appeared in during 1930, this one marked him as a strong and distinctive actor who bore watching. 
 
It marked Wyler as someone worth watching, too. Variety‘s review called it “gripping and real. Unusually well cast and directed.” True, the movie’s director was misidentified as “Wilbur Wylans” — but it was the last time anybody would make that mistake.
 
One who didn’t like Hell’s Heroes, it must be said, was Peter B. Kyne. Asked to provide a complimentary letter for studio publicity, he indignantly refused. “Frankly,” he wrote to Tom Reed, “I think your Mr. Wyler murdered our beautiful story … I don’t care how much money the picture makes, my conscience will not let me cheer for the atrocious murder of one of the few works of art I have ever turned out … I will not write any letter to Mr. Wyler. The young gentleman must fight his weary way through life without a helping hand from me.”
 
My, aren’t we cranky! Maybe Kyne was miffed that the movie altered the character dynamics, embellished the plot and changed the ending of his story. Whatever got him all riled up, there’s no getting around the fact — the man had rocks in his head. Hell’s Heroes is a terrific picture, and in 1930 everybody but him knew it. Of the three versions of the story I’ve seen, it is easily my favorite, and certainly the simplest and least sentimental.
 
The acting is straightforward and unpretentious, and at a swift, lean 68 minutes the movie spends no time wallowing. The presentation is hard-eyed and terse, which makes the three desperados’ conversion to decency and self-sacrifice all the more persuasive and moving. As the first of the bandits to die, Raymond Hatton has a line that’s straight out of Kyne’s story: “Don’t let my godson die between two thieves.” Hatton’s reading of the line, and the staging of his suicide as the other outlaws plod doggedly away, are presented with a simplicity that — in hands other than Hatton’s and Wyler’s — could easily have become lachrymose and bathetic. 
 
There is a creative use of sound, too, that Jan Herman could not have appreciated in 1995, not having an extant print to review. Notice especially the last scene, as Bickford’s character staggers into that church, the in-and-out subjective sound, so eloquently showing us the man’s delirious condition. 
 
Seen today, too, the movie’s age works for it. The primitive technology of early sound, the rugged conditions on location, the stark frontier setting and the primal power of the story all work together to make Hell’s Heroes feel not like a movie but a relic, in the best sense of the word — something rare and precious brought back by a time traveler just returned from 1880 or 1900. 
 
As things turned out, young Mr. Wyler fought his weary way through life rather well, with or without Peter Kyne’s help, and Kyne himself lived long enough to see it. By the time Kyne died in 1957, he had seen — or could have, if he cared to notice — Wyler direct two of his three best picture Oscar winners, win two of his three Oscars for direction, and receive ten of his twelve Oscar nominations. 
 
I’ll have more to say about Wyler later. This is just a respectful — I might even say, given the subject matter, reverent — look back at the movie that really put him on the map. If it really was lost, as Jan Herman said, in 1995, it’s not anymore. Hallelujah.
 
 

 

 

Andrew Sarris, 1928-2012

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I was saddened to learn of the death of movie critic Andrew Sarris, who passed away Wednesday at the age of 83. I didn’t always concur with his judgments, but that sort of thing is overrated. What makes a critic valuable isn’t how often you agree with him (or her), but how clearly his passion for the art and craft of movies comes through in his writing, and whether he enriches your understanding with his own perceptions and observations. On that score, Sarris was one of the best.

Sarris’s great adversary Pauline Kael, in her 1963 essay “Circles and Squares”, which inaugurated her and Sarris’s longstanding feud, wrote: “The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in it that shouldn’t be, what is not in it that could be. He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work than they could see for themselves; he is a great critic, if by his understanding and feeling for the work, by his passion, he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there, waiting to be seized. He is not necessarily a bad critic if he makes errors in judgment. (Infallible taste is inconceivable; what could it be measured against?) He is a bad critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, enlarge the interests and understanding of his audience. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others.” By this measure, both Kael and Sarris, whatever their differences, were great critics. (About their feud, Sarris once graciously said, “We made each other. We established a dialectic.” I seem to recall that Kael once expressed similar sentiments about him, but I’ve been unable to confirm this.) (UPDATE: Oh wait, I can too: Kael biographer Brian Kellow tells us that she was “often quick to point out that she thought Sarris had a lively intelligence”.)

Kael and Sarris had another thing in common: They both came of age and found their voices at a time when movies were an explosively vibrant art. I’ve been reviewing movies off and on since 1967, and steadily since 1989. When people ask me what is the greatest change I’ve seen in that time, I tell them: It’s harder now. In the 1960s and ’70s, even the bad movies were worth writing about; nowadays, even the good movies, there’s just not all that much to say about them. Andrew Sarris, like Kael, was one of a dwindling corps who wrote often and well at a time when there was one helluva lot to be said.

Pauline Kael died in 2001. By that time, we’d already lost Otis Ferguson, Graham Greene, James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, Penelope Gilliatt, Vincent Canby — the list goes on. Sarris’s death deprives us of yet another critical voice that arose amid the ferment of those heady days, and one that uniquely championed the vigor and vitality of American movies against the “higher” forms of Cinemah coming from other countries.

Requiescat in pace.

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Please Stay Tuned

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Deepest apologies to my patient readers for making them wait so long between posts. To tell the truth, my six-part series on The Magnificent Ambersons turned out to be a more exhausting effort than I thought it would be when I embarked on it, and my batteries have been slower to recharge than I expected. I do have some things in the hopper, though, to go up once they’ve ripened, so if you’ll kindly bear with me, I’ll try to make them worth the wait.

In the meantime, something else has cropped up that may delay me a little longer: Warner Home Video has finally delivered the long-promised Maverick: The Complete First Season, and I’m afraid just about everything must go on a back burner while I reacquaint myself with one of the Best. TV Series. Ever. Certainly the best western series — pace Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel etc. Not to mention the show that made James Garner an overnight sensation. It’s available here from Amazon, and I think everybody in America should buy it — if only to make sure that Warner stays with it and brings out subsequent seasons for me to add to my collection.

If plugging Maverick seems like an almighty stretch for a blog supposedly dedicated to classic Hollywood — it’s not. Maverick hails from a time (the mid-to-late 1950s) when Warner Bros. all but dominated prime-time television, even as it breathed the last gasps of the dying studio system. Here — as in Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Jim Bowie, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Surfside 6 and others — was the last flowering of the legendary Warner Bros. stock company, with Garner and co-star Jack Kelly (as Bret Maverick’s brother Bart) supported by a wonderful mix of seasoned veterans (Edmund Lowe, John Litel, Jane Darwell, Esther Dale, Stanley Andrews, Buddy Ebsen, Patric Knowles, Morris Ankrum) and rising young comers (Mike Connors, Clint Eastwood, Troy Donahue, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Roger Moore). The well-written stories were often recycled from Warners’ B-westerns of the ’30s and ’40s (average running time 65 minutes, easy to trim down for an hour time slot minus commercials), and production values were enhanced by frequent trips to the Warner Bros. library of stock footage (that spectacular saloon brawl from 1939’s Dodge City crops up time and time again).

Think of these episodes as B-westerns in the best sense — economical, densely plotted, crisply directed, well-cast and -acted — only delivered to your TV instead of to your neighborhood theater. Which, come to think of it, is where most of Golden Age Hollywood is playing these days anyway. Remember the name: Maverick. A legend of the West.
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Wings, Again

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As a postscript to my last entry here at Cinedrome, I’ve just learned that Cinemark Holdings, Inc. is presenting one-night- only screenings of Wings this month as part of their Reel Classics series. There were two of them scheduled, but the first one (on May 2) was over before I knew about it. That leaves one more, on Wednesday, May 16. Go here on the Cinemark Web site and click on the Wings/Reel Classics box at the bottom of the page to see if there’s a participating Cinemark theater near you. If there is, you’ll find it well worth your while.

Based in Plano, TX, Cinemark has theaters all over the country, though not all of them are participating in this Reel Classics series (upcoming titles include Citizen Kane, The Searchers, North by Northwest and Cabaret); other chains under the Cinemark umbrella include Century, CineArts and Tinseltown theaters.

The screenings, of course, will be the brilliant Paramount restoration I wrote about last time; kudos to Paramount for doing it right and standing behind their product to the extent of furnishing these big-screen showings. If all extant silent pictures got the same loving care, we’d have an embarrassment of riches on our hands.

I plan to catch the screening here — if only to see how many people show up (the attendance at Casablanca in March was quite impressive — but of course, that was Casablanca). I may be there all by myself, for all I know — but if I’m not, those other folks can hardly imagine the treat they have in store.

Silent Weekends

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I recently spent two consecutive Saturdays in a sort of time machine, living the silent movie experience of 1927 — what seemed back then to be its culmination, but was in fact a final blaze of glory before the whole structure collapsed under the onslaught of talking pictures. The first Saturday (on March 31) was a once-in-a-lifetime experience I never expect to repeat, but the second (on April 7) was one I can recreate for myself any time I want — and so can you.

First, on March 31, there was this:

 

Seeing Abel Gance’s Napoleon as it was meant to be seen — with a live symphonic accompaniment and its climactic three-panel “Polyvision” sequence, including this Tricolor triptych — truly is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I’ve been lucky; I’ve seen it three times. The first time was Bastille Day (July 14) 1981, when just about everybody who was anybody in Hollywood — plus a hefty contingent of nobodies like me — crammed the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles to see Gance’s masterpiece and to hear Francis Ford Coppola’s father Carmine conduct his own score. That engagement was such a thundering triumph that Napoleon and Coppola père returned to the Shrine for nine days in December and January ’82, and I saw it again.
 
But this third time topped them both, and it came my way courtesy of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF). The movie I saw at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre was an hour and 45 minutes longer than the one I saw at the Shrine in 1981 and ’82. Some of the extra time was additional footage, some the result of a proper running speed of 20 frames per second (the Shrine speed had been 24 fps).
 
The great Kevin Brownlow — on top of everything else he’s done — has made the restoration of Gance’s picture a lifelong project, ever since he first bought two 9.5mm reels as a teenager in the 1950s. His efforts have been tireless and positively superhuman. In his 1983 book on the subject he lists no fewer than 19 different versions of Napoleon, beginning with its April 1927 premiere at the Paris Opera (4 hours 5 minutes) and Gance’s so-called “definitive version” (9 hours 20 minutes) shown only twice the following month — through various re-edits and reissues, right down to Brownlow’s own 1983 reconstruction for the Cinematheque Francaise (5 hours 13 minutes). But Brownlow didn’t stop there; additional footage has continued to surface from time to time in the nearly 30 years since his book. The version screened in Oakland was assembled by Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury in 2000 for the British Film Institute and has never been shown outside Europe; these four screenings were the first in the U.S., and no others are contemplated. With the expense and time involved in hiring and rehearsing a live orchestra (to say nothing of, in the SFSFF’s case, bringing composer Carl Davis over to conduct the score in person), plus the technical demands of three synchronized projectors, Napoleon is insanely expensive to present. The San Francisco Festival’s efforts in this regard were heroic to the point of foolhardiness: it cost more than their entire budget for a normal year, and even if they sold every one of the Paramount’s 3,100 seats (at $40-150 a pop), they would only break even. (They sold out, sure enough, at the screening I saw; I can’t speak for the other three. I stuffed some extra cash in the Festival’s donation jar in the lobby, saying, “It’s a noble thing you people are doing, and I know you’re taking a bath on it.” The attendant smiled and shrugged: “It’s the mission of the festival.”)

Well, God bless ’em for it.  

Gance regarded Napoleon as a tragic hero, and he planned a biography in six installments that would take his protagonist from his early revolutionary fervor and triumph through growing tyranny and megalomania to final downfall. But the best-laid plans, you know: Gance blew his budget for all six pictures on the first one, and the rest were never made. Probably just as well in the long run; it makes it possible for the one he did make to end on an exultant note, with the conquest — oops! “revolutionary liberation” — of Italy. But it matters little whether or not you accept Gance’s historical analysis (personally, I don’t; I think Bonaparte was pretty much a Megalomaniac in Waiting from the word go, biding his time while the thugs and jackals of the Reign of Terror lopped each other’s heads off); Napoleon is still a sensual and emotional feast that makes the word “movie” sound too puny to contain it. Seeing it the way we saw it in Oakland was a rare privilege, and I’m telling you right now: If you ever hear of this picture coming to anyplace within a thousand miles of you, do not let this golden opportunity slip by, and do not imagine that it will ever come again. Hop a plane, book a hotel, rent a car, do whatever it takes.

UPDATE 11/16/2022: When I published this post in 2012, I closed this half of the post with an embedded YouTube clip of the Napoleon trailer prepared for the SFSFF. For reasons that have never been clearly explained to me, I’m no longer able to embed YouTube videos, and the link I had has gone dead — even though that trailer is still here on YouTube. For good measure, there’s also this trailer advertising Napoleon‘s release on DVD and Blu-ray (alas, only in Europe Region 2, incompatible with North American players). I direct your attention to those trailers. Whichever one you watch, be sure to take it full-screen; it’ll give you (just barely) an inkling.

 

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Moving from the sublime to the merely first-rate, I come to my second time-machine excursion to 1927, on April 7:

 

My sister-in-law mentioned a while back that she was embarking on a project to see all the Oscar-winners for best picture that she hadn’t managed to catch up with over the years. First on her list, naturally enough, was Wings — the first (and until this year the only) silent movie to win the Oscar for best picture.

(Strictly speaking, that’s not exactly true. There was no actual “best picture” category that first year; what Wings won was “best production”. There was also “artistic quality of production”, which went to F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise. So in a sense you could say that that year — for the only time — there were really two best pictures. Frankly, I think this production/artistic-quality-of-production dichotomy might be worth bringing back.)

Anyhow, back to my sister-in-law’s see-all-the-best-pictures project. It so happened that I had just gotten the new Blu-ray restoration of Wings and had been looking for an excuse to host a screening of it. I urged her not to settle for Wings from Netflix. I learned last year at the Kansas Silent Film Festival that to see Wings on home video is one thing, but to see it projected on a large screen is to understand at last why it won the Oscar (something it has in common with both Lawrence of Arabia and Oliver!). I suggested she wait until I could screen it for her and my brother, she agreed, and the date we settled on was April 7.

I would venture to guess that in the transfer to home video, no silent picture — perhaps no picture, period — has ever been as lovingly and carefully treated as Wings; Paramount Home Video can be as proud of the transfer as they are of the picture itself, for both are justified.
 

Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide gives Wings two-and-a-half stars, saying: “One of the most famous silent films is, alas, not one of the best, despite rose-colored memories.” I say it’s Leonard who needs a memory check; Wings is a whopping piece of entertainment, and it set the template for Oscar-winning best pictures, with only rare (and usually regrettable) exceptions, from that day to this: well-crafted crowd-pleasers rather than groundbreaking works of art.

While it’s no work of art, Wings is certainly a crowd-pleaser, and extraordinarily well-crafted. The craftsmanship is evident even in straight black-and-white silent prints like the one I saw in Topeka last year, but on Paramount’s Blu-ray it shines like a beacon. The source material was a dupe negative in the Paramount vault that had nevertheless suffered significant deterioration in 85 years and required a frame-by-frame digital repair. The result is…well, in the supplement documentary, Tom Burton of Technicolor Corp. says, “It’ll never be like Day One in 1927 seeing this release, but it cleaned up a great deal.” Indeed it did; Wings looks like it was shot last week, an impression enhanced by the surprisingly frequent use of telephoto and even zoom lenses.
 
Almost as important as that dupe negative, Paramount also had the original documentation for how the picture was to be tinted — both stock-tinting (amber, violet, sepia etc.) and the Handschiegel process (shown here), which added color to highlight flames, machine-gunfire and explosions; the documents specified exactly the shades to be used and the frames where every tint was to begin and end.
 
Paramount also had access to a single copy in the Library of Congress (perhaps the only copy in existence) of J.S. Zamecnik’s original score (well, substantially original — it incorporates numerous popular tunes of the World War I era, and the music for the flying scenes was cribbed from Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Zamecnik was a usually anonymous studio musician who did yeoman work assembling Wings‘s music, particularly his main theme, which serves as a wistful love theme, a stirring march, or a soaring anthem, according to the needs of individual scenes.
 
Oscar-winner Ben Burtt recreated Wings‘s sound effects. No, that’s not a misprint, and on the Blu-ray the sound effects aren’t an anachronism. Wings was state-of-the-art in 1927 (although the art was changing faster than anybody realized at the time), and it originally played with a soundtrack for sound effects — explosions, machine guns, auto and airplane engines, things like that (music was nonstop and performed live, and of course there was no spoken dialogue). The original track still existed as a guide to when there should be sound and what would remain silent, and Burtt and his associate Dustin Cawood worked with the earliest sound libraries from the 1930s to keep the sounds as authentic as possible. (Even so, the Blu-ray’s 7.1 surround audio allowed Burtt to indulge in effects the sound technicians of 1927 could only dream of — planes roar up behind you and pass overhead before swooping into view on the screen.)

Wings is famous, even among people who’ve never seen it, for its scenes of aerial combat, and rightly so — they’re still breathtaking after 85 years and countless fighter-pilot movies, from Hell’s Angels to Top Gun. Wings invented the genre, only 24 years after Kitty Hawk, using aircraft that were little more than motorized kites. No process photography, certainly no CGI in those days; there was nothing for it but to strap the camera to a plane and get up there and fly around. (And remember, of all the people who saw Wings on its first run, probably not one in a thousand had ever been up in a plane; if these scenes are amazing now, how must they have looked in 1927?)
 
But even on the ground, Wings has some of the most spectacular battle scenes ever filmed, climaxing in director William Wellman’s recreation of the battle of St. Mihiel, the first major American offensive of the war (and one in which the U.S. Army Air Service played a significant role). With 19 cameras posted in trenches, in shell holes, and on towers all over the five-acre location, it’s a sight to see — in fact, I’ve seen some of this footage (uncredited) in a number of documentaries about World War I, and you probably have too. 
 
Last but absolutely not least, Wings has this young lady. Let me say this as plainly as I can: There was never a more charming and delightful movie star than Clara Bow. Plenty who were as delightful, certainly, but none more so. Ever. (If you don’t know Clara’s work, Mantrap [1926] and It [’27] are good places to start. For that matter, so is Wings.) She was the hottest star in Hollywood in 1927 (in every sense of the word), so naturally she’s top-billed in Wings, but it’s really a supporting role, almost a cameo; she plays the adoring, neglected girl next door who follows Buddy Rogers to France as a member of the Women’s Motor Corps. When Buddy’s leave in Paris is cancelled but he’s too drunk to respond, Clara goes to fetch him, only to find he’s too drunk even to recognize her, and she must dress as the flapper her fans have come to expect, all to lure him away from a French demimondaine with designs on him. (This scene also has Wellman’s most amazing non-combat shot, as the camera glides across table after table at the Folies Bergere, each with its own little drama going on: an angry woman tossing her drink in her lover’s face, a matron slipping cash to her gigolo, an adulterous couple nervously looking over their shoulders, even a pair of love-struck lesbians!)
 
In Silent Stars Jeanine Basinger describes Wings as “an epic war movie enclosing a small Clara Bow movie”, and that sums it up neatly. The structure of the story is Hollywood showmanship at its best; without interrupting the war story or making Bow look like a cornball play for the box-office, Paramount created a picture that absolutely everyone who went to movies would want to see.
 
They still would, and Leonard Maltin really needs to take another look. The review in his book dates back at least as far as the 1980 edition; I’ll bet it was based on watching a VHS tape on a 19-inch TV (Leonard himself may not even have written it). As Ben Burtt says, “I can’t imagine that audiences today would not get excited by seeing Wings.” But as I told my sister-in-law, you have to see it as large as possible; the screen in my home theater is 70 inches wide, and that’s really the bare minimum you need to appreciate it fully.  
 
My screening that night certainly made my point. As the music swelled to its crescendo, the final end title faded out, and I brought up the lights, I said: “And that’s why it won the Oscar for best picture.” “No kidding!” somebody said.
 
For my brother, whose only experience of a silent movie had been an 8mm Blackhawk print of Laurel and Hardy’s Two Tars 46 years ago, Wings was a revelation. He told me, “You know, Jim, I thought this was just going to be a sort of archaeology lesson. I didn’t expect it to be…you know…a really good movie.” And the next day at an Easter backyard barbecue, I heard my sister-in-law telling her adult children about it. She too had half-expected to be impatient and a little bored with a silent movie, but she had an interesting take on it now: “After the first few minutes,” she said, “it simply never occurs to you that they’re not speaking.”
 
 

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I have no doubt that I’ve seen Abel Gance’s Napoleon for the last time, and I’m completely fine with that; as I said, I’m lucky to have seen it as many times as I have. But Wings, thanks to Paramount Home Video, a 70-inch screen and an Epson Powerlite 6100 projector, is at my beck and call anytime, almost exactly as the audience saw it at New York’s Criterion Theatre on August 12, 1927.*
 
And as the saying goes, that ain’t chopped liver.
 
____________________
*Almost: The battle scenes were originally shown in widescreen “Magnascope” — a surprising link with Napoleon — but none of that footage has survived.
 

Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 6

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I worked with Robert Wise once. In 1986 I played a small role in Wisdom, on which he served as executive producer and all-round good shepherd for first-time writer-director Emilio Estevez. My scene was a small one, only about 45 seconds on screen, but it meant two twelve-hour days on the set. As I reported for work on my first day, Wise came up to me and introduced himself (as if it were necessary!). There was something I had thought and said about  him more than once in the past, but now, to my amazement, I actually had the chance to say it to him in person: “I have to tell you, Mr. Wise, I think you’re the greatest film editor who ever picked up a pair of scissors.”
 
He looked pleased and surprised in equal measure. “What makes you say that, in particular?” 
 
“In particular,” I said, “The Magnificent Ambersons. You might have ruined that movie, but instead you saved it.”
 
I said this to Robert Wise before I had ever seen Robert L. Carringer’s reconstruction, or even read Booth Tarkington’s novel. Now that I’ve done both, I haven’t changed my mind. But it must be said, mine is not the generally held view on the matter (that’s where the “Minority Opinion” title to these posts comes in). To most critics and historians, Robert Wise is the chief culprit in the mutilation of The Magnificent Ambersons — a judgment planted, watered and grudge-nursed for over 40 years by Orson Welles himself. Because make no mistake, whenever Welles said “they” destroyed the picture, he was talking about one single individual.
 
“They destroyed Ambersons,” Welles said late in life, “and the picture itself destroyed me; I didn’t get a job as a director for years afterwards.” That’s dramatic, but probably not true. Regardless of what Charles Koerner and his minions at RKO might have thought of Ambersons, or of the prospect of ever hiring Welles again, nobody could deny that with Ambersons, there was a picture there. If anything destroyed Orson Welles in Hollywood, it was It’s All True. With that one, he came back from spending six months and half a million dollars in South America with almost nothing to show for it — miles and miles of footage, but no picture.
 
Nowadays, in hindsight, with World War II safely won and South America no longer leaning toward the U.S.’s Axis foes (beyond playing host to the occasional Nazi fugitive), we can see that flying down to Rio to make It’s All True was probably the biggest mistake Orson Welles ever made; it cut short (like a brick wall) the momentum of his rocketing career, and he never really got it rolling again. Welles no doubt came to see it that way himself, judging from the way he distanced himself from the decision. “I was sent to South America by Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney,” he said. “I was told that it was my patriotic duty to go and spend a million dollars shooting the Carnival in Rio.” Sounds almost as if he was drafted, doesn’t it? Uncle Sam walked up out of the blue, poked a finger in his chest and growled “I want you!” Actually, when Whitney and Rockefeller made their proposal, Welles took little persuading; he deliberated barely 24 hours before agreeing to go.
 
And nobody ever had to tell Orson Welles to spend a million dollars — he could do that all on his own. In fact, the Office of Inter-American Affairs only underwrote It’s All True to a total of $300,000; RKO was on the hook for anything over that. (Welles made it clear that this was to be an RKO production with assistance from the U.S. government, not vice versa.) It was when the studio’s budget projections forecast an eventual cost over $1 million that Charles Koerner finally pulled the plug on It’s All True.
 
Welles’s mistake wasn’t in letting Whitney and Rockefeller talk him into something against his better judgment — in his best judgment, and everybody else’s, it seemed like a great idea at the time. His mistake was in thinking he could do anything: He could make an ambitious documentary about South America even though neither he nor anyone on his crew had ever made one before (he didn’t even take any newsreel cameramen along); he could leave The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear behind while still controlling what became of them — when Ambersons had yet to take final shape, and Journey hadn’t even finished shooting. (In fairness, Welles couldn’t have foreseen that Wise wouldn’t be allowed to join him in Rio — but that one glitch was all it took to undo his whole plan. Besides, whether it would have made any difference to have Wise in Rio rather than Hollywood is another question; it might have made things worse.) The bitter lesson in store for Welles was this: It was one thing to dash around Manhattan from stage rehearsals to various radio gigs a mile or so apart, or to shuttle from one set to another at RKO. But to edit a troubled picture from 6,000 miles away with makeshift equipment and only a telephone, telegraph and shortwave radio to help — that was something entirely else.
 
Orson Welles was, let’s admit it, a man of prodigious, even titanic gifts — the kind of artist who comes along not once in a lifetime, or once in a century, but once in history. Three major media of the first half of the 20th century — radio, the stage and motion pictures — had never seen anything like him. He was a unique phenomenon, like Joan of Arc (meaning no other comparisons, of course). But he wasn’t omniscient, omnipotent or infallible. If I seem to be hard on him in these posts, it’s because I think he blundered badly on both It’s All True and The Magnificent Ambersons, and because I think that in his public remarks about Robert Wise he was often shabby and small; Wise — at least in his conversations with me — showed far more sympathy for Welles’s situation than Welles ever showed for his. (Welles, for his part, called Wise an idiot.) The fact is, Welles walked into his situation with his eyes wide open; Wise’s situation was thrust upon him willy-nilly by Orson Welles.
 

In 1984, complaining to Barbara Leaming about Joseph Cotten’s “Judas” letter, Welles said Cotten had become “an active collaborator with Wise, and the janitor of RKO, and whoever else was busy screwing it up.” This is frankly disgraceful. For the record, the men who were wrestling with The Magnificent Ambersons — while Welles was in Rio lecturing cultural groups, hatching grandiose plans for It’s All True, tossing furniture out his apartment window, and screwing chorus girls — wrestling with Ambersons were Robert Wise, whose authority was not to be questioned (until Welles chose to question it); Jack Moss, who had Welles’s full confidence (until he didn’t); and Joseph Cotten, who was probably Welles’s best friend (until, in Welles’s eyes, he wasn’t). 

In This Is Orson Welles Peter Bogdanovich expands on that “janitor at RKO” crack. He asserts that RKO “approached several directors — among them William Wyler” — to recut Ambersons, but all refused out of respect for Welles. (Prof. Carringer’s history of the editing makes no mention of this.) Bogdanovich also says that producer Bryan Foy of Warner Bros.’ B-picture unit was called in. Foy’s verdict: “Too fuckin’ long. Ya gotta take out forty minutes.” Asked what to cut, he said to “just throw all the footage up in the air and grab everything but forty minutes — it don’t matter what the fuck you cut. Just lose forty minutes.” Bogdanovich cites Jack Moss as the source of this story, but I’ve been unable to find it corroborated anywhere else. I tend to suspect that the real source was Welles himself, as in “Jack Moss told me…” (If I’m mistaken about this, I’ll be happy to post an update when I know better.)

Easier to corroborate is David O. Selznick’s reaction to the editing of Ambersons. Selznick biographer David Thomson says Selznick, an admirer of Welles who had loaned the services of Stanley Cortez to photograph the picture, tried to have “the original version” deposited at the Museum of Modern Art. A worthy suggestion, Mr. Selznick, but just what is the original version? The 132-minute answer print that Wise prepared after Miami and shipped to Welles in Rio? The 110-minute version prepared at Welles’s instruction and previewed in Pomona? It couldn’t be the 148-minute version Welles mentioned to Bogdanovich because Ambersons never existed at that length. 

This brings us to the central fallacy in the Magnificent Ambersons legend: the idea that Welles created a masterpiece that was slashed and mangled afterwards to what we have now. In fact, there really was no “original version” of Ambersons because Welles never finished the picture. He left for Brazil while Ambersons was in its final stages — before music and visual effects had been added, transitions (fades, dissolves, etc.) put in place, even before the order of scenes had been settled. Then, from Rio, before even seeing the 132-minute version, Welles ordered extensive changes: making the “big cut” (everything from Eugene’s letter to Isabel’s death) and removing the “Indian legend” scene and George’s auto accident; this trimmed a total of 22 minutes. If anything, that should be considered Welles’s “original version”, even though he never actually saw it, since it was ordered by him before the first preview (and before any studio panic had set in). When Orson Welles went to Rio, The Magnificent Ambersons was an unfinished work. Welles’s partisans cry that Ambersons was taken out of his hands, and they’re right. What they will never say is that he abandoned it — but in effect (if not in intention) that’s exactly what happened.

In “Oedipus in Indianapolis” Robert L. Carringer theorizes that leaving for Rio with Ambersons incomplete was Welles’s way of distancing himself from it, a process that began with his choosing not to play George Minafer himself. This distancing, Prof. Carringer thinks, rose out of Welles’s unresolved feelings about his parents — his imperious mother and feckless father — and his discomfort with the Oedipal subtext in Tarkington’s novel. Prof. Carringer’s theory is forcefully argued, but I don’t find it entirely persuasive; if that’s how Welles felt about it, why would he have filmed Ambersons at all, or done it on the radio (when he did play George) in the first place? 

I think it may have been something simpler: that Orson Welles, for all his mastery of moviemaking so manifest in Citizen Kane, didn’t fully grasp the nuances of the editing process — not as early as 1942, anyhow. Certainly his first edits from Rio must have looked capricious and arbitrary, so much so that Wise and Moss immediately reversed them after they played so badly in Pomona. Then when Welles doubled down on the “big cut”, wanted to eliminate the end of the Amberson ball and the iris-out in the snow scene, and capped it all with a bizarre idea for a cheery curtain call “to leave audience happy”, how could it not look as if Welles had lost his train of thought on Ambersons, or simply didn’t understand how these changes would play?
 

Simon Callow is firmly in the mutilation-and-destruction camp regarding The Magnificent Ambersons (he calls Wise, Moss and George Schaefer “partners in crime”), but even he admits that there was never a time when anyone connected with it could honestly say, “It’s perfect; don’t change a thing.” Welles’s new contract entitled him to edit the picture through its first preview, which had been a disaster. After that came the changes — and like it or not, the farther Wise and Moss took the picture from Welles’s last edit, the better the previews were received. Callow relates an unconfirmed anecdote about pages and pages of Welles’s telegrams going straight into the wastebasket, the phone from Brazil ringing on and on with no one bothering to answer. Enough has survived in RKO archives to suggest that sort of thing wasn’t common, but it does seem that Welles’s demands were looking more irrelevant and less helpful to those back home. Moss later said, “If only Orson could communicate his genius by telephone”; Robert Wise expressed similar sentiments to me. He and Moss and Mark Robson wanted to follow Welles’s wishes, but the bottom line was Orson wasn’t there — in Pomona or in Hollywood.

Robert Wise was under a threefold mandate: (1) from himself, preserve the spirit (and as much of the letter as possible) of Welles’s (and Tarkington’s) Ambersons; (2) from George Schaefer, get the picture into releasable form; and (3) from Charles Koerner, keep it to no more than 90 minutes. In the end, Wise had to do more than simply assemble the picture. He had to edit it — in the literary, Maxwell-Perkins-to-Thomas-Wolfe sense of the word. In later years, as the auteur theory took hold, this would be considered the crowning effrontery.

And yet. A comparison of Prof. Carringer’s reconstruction with the release version gives the lie to the notion so snidely implied in Peter Bogdanovich’s Bryan Foy anecdote — the idea that 40 minutes were cut thoughtlessly, at random. The cutting may seem drastic in places — especially to Welles, seeing the hard-won ball sequence, which he (mis)remembered as “one reel without a single cut”, shortened from 12 minutes 25 seconds to 6 minutes 56 seconds — but it’s not random. Wise followed the compromise plan worked out in late March with Jack Moss and Joseph Cotten, with a few differences. He kept in the kitchen scene but ended it before George (and Tim Holt) began raving in the rain about the new construction; and he retained the bathroom scene between George and Jack but trimmed George’s melodramatic overreaction (“unspeakable”, “monstrous”, “horrible”). Both of these moves, if they didn’t exactly create sympathy for George, at least helped keep Tim Holt’s performance from going over the top.

And Wise replaced the boarding house scene with the new one between Eugene and Fanny in the hospital corridor. Admittedly, this scene is hard to defend. It’s frankly so awkward — with its shallow-focus photography, Joseph Cotten’s line readings a little too chipper, Agnes Moorehead’s expression a little too blissful — that I tend to believe it was directed by Jack Moss. Wise and Freddie Fleck did better with the added scenes they directed. But at least the new scene was more faithful to Tarkington, albeit an over-compensation for Welles’s somber, downbeat ending.

To be sure, there are lines, passages and scenes whose loss is regrettable; Robert Wise admitted that the 132-min. cut was superior to what was finally released. But running much over 90 minutes simply was not an option. In 1984, Welles complained to Barbara Leaming: “The plot of course was really what they took out. Using the argument of not central to the plot, what they took out was the plot…” Excuse me, but that is rich coming from the man who wanted to take out the end of the Amberson ball, the “big cut”, the Indian legend, and George’s auto accident, all to protect his long ballroom sequence and boarding house scene. If anyone tried to cut “plot” out of The Magnificent Ambersons, it was Orson Welles (Robert Wise is roundly denounced for what he cut, but never gets any credit for what Welles wanted to cut that he left in). In fact, with two exceptions, nothing essential in Booth Tarkington’s novel is left out of the picture as it was finally released.

The first exception is the ruinous investment in the headlight company by Major Amberson, Uncle Jack and Fanny. In the release version there are only two rather cryptic references to it, with no explanation. But the only other mention in the cutting continuity is in the second porch scene, which not even Welles ever wanted to keep (possibly because of Richard Bennett’s struggle with the lines), so that would surely have been a problem no matter how long the release version ran. (Welles wanted to add some voice-over references in the closeup of the dying Major Amberson, but this was deemed too much information for that short, simple scene.)

The second exception is the portrayal of George’s “comeuppance”. In the finished film, Welles reads Tarkington’s narration in voice-over (“George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance…three times filled and running over…but the people who had so long for it were not there to see it…Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.”) But the scene is Isabel’s bedroom in the abandoned Amberson mansion, with George praying, “Mother, forgive me! God, forgive me!” In Tarkington’s novel, the comeuppance comes later, in his and Fanny’s new boarding house, when George consults the book of the city’s 500 most important families and finds nothing between “Allen” and “Ambrose”. That is Prince George’s comeuppance: the sudden knowledge that he and his whole family are, in the great scheme of things, not worth mentioning. It would have been a simple matter to include it, but Welles never shot it, never even wrote it into his screenplay.

An instructive (and nearly simultaneous) comparison is to look at what happened over at Paramount to the picture Preston Sturges wrote and shot with the title Triumph over Pain, but which finally went out as The Great Moment. (I wrote about that one in detail here.) To be sure, The Great Moment was never going to be as good as The Magnificent Ambersons, but it was going to be a lot better than it turned out, and contrasting it with Sturges’s published script shows clearly that the men who took it away and cut it didn’t know what they were doing — and didn’t care. The same comparison with Ambersons shows that Robert Wise et al. did care, and did know what they were doing.

Anyone willing to shell out 60 bucks for Prof. Carringer’s reconstruction can see that there’s really no “aha!” moment in the reconstructed version, no scene that clearly says “This absolutely should have been left in.” But the fact that the reconstruction is “a print-on-demand volume” testifies that there’s no great demand for it. Most people instead fall in with Orson Welles’s 43-year tantrum over being ignored, and they call Wise’s editing of Ambersons a mutilation instead of what I think it truly is: one of the most heroic feats of film editing — against unique, almost overwhelming odds — in the history of Hollywood. The picture’s high esteem to this day (though often qualified with “even in its present form…”) testifies to how well Wise preserved the picture Orson Welles left in his hands on February 6, 1942.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: Robert Wise — besides being an Oscar-winning producer and director, National Medal of Arts and AFI Life Achievement Award recipient, and past president of the Academy and the Directors Guild — was the greatest film editor who ever picked up a pair of scissors. 

*               *               *

There’s a persistent question that won’t die: What happened to the answer print that Wise sent to Welles in Rio? When Welles returned to the U.S., he left the print behind with Adhemar Gonzaga, head of Brazil’s Cinedia Studios. Gonzaga wired RKO for guidance, they told him to destroy it, and he told them he did. But Gonzaga was a film collector when film collecting wasn’t cool, and…well, would you have destroyed it? Someone claimed in 1995 to have seen the print in the 1960s, but it’s never turned up. Gonzaga’s daughter, present head of Cinedia, has looked but can’t find it. But hope never dies; remember Metropolis. 

*               *               *

A MINOR AFTERTHOUGHT:   There was a version of The Magnificent Ambersons produced in 2002 for A&E — with absolutely no sense of style, period or history, and a lamentable mix of good actors miscast and bad actors who shouldn’t have been cast at all. It would be a kindness not to mention it, but I have to, because it had the gall to pass itself off as a “restoration” of Welles’s original. The writing credit reads only “Based on a Screenplay by Orson Welles”, but there is no relation between the two except that they are, of course, based on the same novel. The 2002 version has no narrator, no opening sequence describing the styles of the period, no showing of Eugene Morgan’s mishap in the serenade, and no prologue of George Minafer’s childhood (these last two are inserted in clumsy flashbacks). The term “comeuppance” is never mentioned. And Isabel Amberson Minafer smokes cigarettes. A&E’s pathetic attempt to hang this abomination on Orson Welles is really beyond the pale. It’s false advertising, and I wish someone had warned me about it before I wasted my time.
 

Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons, Part 5

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In March 1942, Charles W. Koerner replaced Joseph I. Breen as head of production at RKO. The previous July, George Schaefer had lured Breen away from the Hays Office to RKO, and ever since then Breen had served more or less as a rubber stamp for Schaefer’s decisions.
 

Charles Koerner, however, was made of more contentious stuff. His background was in theater operation; before replacing Breen he had been head of RKO’s exhibition arm in New York. In that position he had surely seen the theater owners’ reports in Motion Picture Herald’s “What This Picture Did for Me” column, and in the case of Citizen Kane the verdict had been “Nothing.”

Koerner was the point man and chief organizer of those who were alarmed at RKO’s march toward insolvency under Schaefer’s stewardship; millions of dollars were gushing out of studio coffers, pittances trickling in. The studio had managed to climb out of receivership only in January 1940, and now it was in danger of falling back into it. Koerner was angling to get Schaefer out of the way, then to put RKO back on a sound financial footing, and he meant to curb what he and his allies saw as the studio throwing good money after bad.

Just to show how the wind was blowing, one of Koerner’s first acts in his new Hollywood office was to send out a memo to the studio at large: The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey into Fear and It’s All True would all proceed — for now — but everyone should check with him before entering into any new agreements with Orson Welles or Mercury Productions. Clearly, George Schaefer wasn’t the only one whose days at RKO were numbered.

Koerner brought an exhibitor’s perspective to his new job; it told him that the shorter the feature, the more showings per day and the more money a theater could make. Koerner also believed that the double feature was the wave of the future (giving credit where it’s due, he was right; the double feature would outlast the studio system itself). He decreed that 90 minutes, give or take a few, was to be the target length for all RKO features, and this edict was conveyed to Robert Wise as he and Mark Robson toiled away on The Magnificent Ambersons.

Meanwhile, down in Rio, Orson Welles was devising his latest and last plan for re-cutting Ambersons. He transmitted his instructions to Jack Moss and Wise in a 30-page telegram on March 27. He probably didn’t know about Koerner’s 90-minute cap on feature length, but it may not have made any difference if he did.

We can’t know what the running time of Welles’s March 27 cut would have been because it was never assembled, much less screened for an audience. Welles ordered some major changes from the last version he had called for, the one previewed in Pomona. In the Christmas ball scene, he wanted a dissolve from the moment when George and Lucy dance away from the camera (after she asks “What do you want to be?” and he replies “A yachtsman.”) directly to the scene of Lucy and Eugene putting their horseless carriage away in the barn as they return home (a scene that is not in the release version). As Robert L. Carringer says, this would entail losing this shot of Eugene and Isabel dancing alone after all the other guests have gone, “what many regard as the single most beautiful shot in the film.” 
 
The shot is beautiful and evocative, but much more would have been lost if Welles had had his way. Also out would be the conversation between George and Lucy on the stairs (you can just glimpse them in the background coming down to take their seats on the steps) in which they banter about Eugene’s automobile business (“Papa would be so grateful if he could have your advice.” “I don’t know that I’ve done anything to be insulted for!”) and George presses Lucy for a sleighing date the next afternoon (“Tomorrow? I can’t possibly go.” “I’m going to sit in a cutter at your front gate and if you try to go out with anybody else he has to whip me before he gets to you.”); the party breaking up as the Morgans prepare to leave; George quizzing Uncle Jack (“Who is this fellow Morgan?” “Why, he’s a man with a pretty daughter, Georgie … Do you take this same passionate interest in the parents of every girl you dance with?” “Oh, dry up!”); Lucy finally giving in on that date (“No, I won’t.” “Yes, you will. Ten minutes after two.” “Yes, I will.”); the goodbyes in the snow; and Lucy and Eugene talking about George and Isabel on the ride home (“You liked her pretty well once, I guess, Papa.” “Do still.”) Prof. Carringer marvels that Welles would contemplate cutting Eugene and Isabel dancing; personally, I’m amazed that he would cut everything else. 
 
Welles also called for cutting this shot, the iris-out on the horseless carriage as it trundles along in the snow with everyone singing “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”. This would entail no substantial loss, but the iris-out is a truly lovely moment that evokes the period as vividly as any four seconds in the whole picture. Prof. Carringer calls cutting it “another great surprise”, but I’d go further than that; I’d say it’s a real head-scratcher, a cut that loses far more than the time it saves. I think, just maybe, if I’d been Robert Wise, I might have started to wonder if, in all the bustle and flurry of It’s All True, Orson had perhaps begun to lose touch with the movie he was making before he flew off to Brazil. But never mind, that’s just me thinking out loud; I don’t want to put thoughts into Wise’s 1942 head.
 

I don’t want to put thoughts into Welles’s head either, but I have to speculate on why he was willing to trim so much meat (a little over four minutes) off the tail end of the ball scene after the “yachtsman” line. I suspect Welles was focused on preserving the sequence that made up the centerpiece of the Amberson ball — the one that had consumed nine ten-hour days and occupied a crew of 100 to shift walls, doors and step units in and out of place as Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins et al. strolled and chatted amid their splendid surroundings, alternately basking in them and taking them for granted.

The sequence is represented here by (top) a frame from the release version of Lucy and George strolling across the parquet floor, George wondering why so many “nobodies” at the ball seem already to know this young lady he’s only just met; and (bottom) a production photo of a portion of the shot that didn’t make the final cut, as George and Lucy climb to the third floor of Amberson Mansion, where the dancing and most of the celebrating are going on.
 
This series of long takes, so intricate and time-consuming to get on film, loomed large in Welles’s heartsick memory of Ambersons. “It was the greatest tour de force of my career!” he told Barbara Leaming, and it may well have been. “The entire sequence was one reel without a single cut.” Here, however, Welles’s memory played him false. In fact, according to the 132-min. cutting continuity, the twelve-and-a-half minute sequence consisted of ten separate shots, the longest of which ran 376 feet, a little under four-and-a-quarter minutes. Even so, with all the choreographed movement of actors, sets and camera, it’s no surprise that Welles remembered it as one long uninterrupted take. Nor is it surprising that he would want to preserve it. The scenes of the end of the ball that he wanted to cut run about a minute less than what was eventually cut out of that ten-shot sequence. The question is, did Welles want the earlier footage left in because it advanced the picture as a whole, or because he was proud of it as a technical and logistical achievement all by itself?
 
Welles was similarly protective of the boarding house scene that ended the picture (“much the best scene in the movie”). The loss of these two scenes — the bookends, if you will, of The Magnificent Ambersons — were what Welles most bitterly lamented for the rest of his life (along with that long tracking shot through the deserted Amberson Mansion that Stanley Cortez was so proud of — Welles evidently having forgotten that he never included that shot in the first place). For what came between the bookends, Welles on March 27 had other, rather radical changes in mind.
 

Two scenes — (1) the buggy ride scene, where George and Lucy quarrel over George’s reluctance to “make something of himself”, and (2) the following carriage scene between Uncle Jack and Major Amberson, talking about the changes in their town and the decline in the family fortune — Welles wanted to move to much earlier, before Wilbur Minafer’s funeral. This would, as Robert L. Carringer notes, get on more directly with the development of George and Lucy’s relationship — and perhaps compensate somewhat for the loss of the development of their relationship as they sit on the stairs at the end of the ball. At any rate, this was not done — both scenes remained later in the picture — but another of Welles’s edits was implemented: At Wilbur’s death, instead of the shot of Wilbur’s tombstone that was in place, he ordered a new shot of townspeople, with one saying “Wilbur Minafer. Quiet man. Town will hardly know he’s gone.” (“Phone me to get correct reading for line.”) In the release version the line is spoken by Erskine Sanford as Roger Bronson.

At Welles’s direction, a shot of George Minafer’s diploma was cut, which leads to some inevitable confusion in the beginning of the kitchen scene between Fanny and George (and later Jack); at first it seems to follow Wilbur’s funeral rather than coming months later after George’s graduation and return home. This is probably unavoidable since scenes of George’s life at college, and Jack, Isabel and Eugene attending his commencement — all of which are in the novel — were never shot. Welles also directed that the kitchen scene end before George sees the construction outside in the yard, and this was also done in the final version.

Welles called for keeping the first porch scene, ending it before George’s fantasies about Lucy, but the scene remained out.

As for the “big cut” that so truncated the lingering death of Isabel Amberson Minafer, and which Moss and Wise had restored for the Pasadena preview, Welles wanted that footage taken out again, with other changes and re-shoots that he felt would improve what remained. But he had evidently had second thoughts about the Moss-Wise-Cotten compromise plan he had dismissed out of hand on March 25, and now was willing to go along with some of their suggestions, especially the major restructuring after Isabel’s death: Jack and George’s farewell at the railroad station, the “Indian legend” scene with Lucy and Eugene, the scene of Fanny’s breakdown as she and George discuss their financial straits, George in Bronson’s office giving up his hopes for a career in law, and George’s last walk home to Amberson Mansion, where he gets his come-uppance (“Mother, forgive me … God, forgive me.”)

In a letter to Welles dated March 31, Robert Wise summarized the audience reaction at both previews (“I have never tackled a more difficult chore … it’s so damn hard to put on paper in cold type the many times you die through the showing…”) Wise went through the picture step by step; he didn’t always distinguish between one audience and the other, but he made a point to say how well some of the “big cut” scenes had played, which the Pomona crowd hadn’t seen but the Pasadena audience had. Wise again emphasized the problematic nature of the last scene between Fanny and Eugene: “The boarding house got us several laughs, one on the man’s face when the door opens and several through the scene on Fanny’s strange behavior, and here again we could feel great restlessness.” 

Welles was determined to retain the boarding house scene, and he thought he had the solution to everyone’s concerns. It would come in the closing credits, which were to be spoken by Welles with shots illustrating each name as it came up. “To leave audience happy for Ambersons,” he wired Jack Moss on April 2, “remake cast credits as follows…” First he wanted an oval framed picture of Richard Bennett “in Civil War campaign hat”, presumably made up to look younger than he does in the movie itself; then, “live shot of Ray Collins … in elegant white ducks and hair whiter than normal seated on tropical veranda ocean and waving palm trees behind him … [then, Agnes Moorehead] blissfully and busily playing bridge with cronies in boarding house.” And so on, down to Joseph Cotten looking out a window at Tim Holt and Anne Baxter as they drive away, waving at Eugene/Joseph behind them: ” … they turn to each other then forward both very happy and gay and attractive for fadeout.”
 

“As solutions go,” says Prof. Carringer, “this one could only have raised doubts about how fully Welles comprehended the gravity of the situation.” Indeed so, if Welles thought he could win an audience over with a cheerful curtain call of George/Tim and Lucy/Anne waving and smiling at the audience as they drive off into the sunset. This would surely register only as a breezy non sequitur. The same goes for Welles’s intention to show Richard Bennett in a Civil War uniform or Ray Collins basking on a tropical beach; these poses would have looked particularly odd since no version of the picture ever referred to Major Amberson’s Civil War service or Uncle Jack’s obtaining a South American consulship. To someone who had just sat through the picture, it would look as if Richard Bennett was dressed for a costume party and Ray Collins off on a vacation from Hollywood; if an audience was inclined to laugh at The Magnificent Ambersons, none of this would have persuaded them to stifle their giggles. In the end this suggestion was not followed; the cast list showed the actors in medium closeup, turning to regard the camera with friendly half-smiles.

There is in fact some reason to believe that Robert Wise had begun to think Welles had lost touch with the picture. “I’ve always felt,” Wise said years later, “that if Orson had been at the preview and had seen and heard that reaction, he’d have understood better what did and didn’t work in it. As it was, Mark Robson and I were in touch with him almost every day, these long, long telegrams — 20, 30 pages sometimes. It would have been so much easier if he could have been there.” Schaefer — deciding, perhaps, that the law of diminishing returns was kicking in — called a temporary halt to any activity on Ambersons, to let Wise, Robson and Moss recharge their batteries, and to try to reach some agreement with Welles.

Adding to the fear that Welles had lost touch with Ambersons was the very real fact that he seemed to have lost control of It’s All True — if, indeed, he’d ever had control of it in the first place. After Carnival, the weather in Rio had turned awful and wouldn’t let up — constant bitter cold and thundering rains that made outdoor shooting impossible. An expected shipment of supplies and equipment seemed endlessly delayed. The crew idled and grumbled, piddling along with what interior pickup shots could be managed, often without Welles even being present, and with little sense of exactly what they were shooting (when they were shooting) or why.  “Everything here proceeding beautifully,” Welles blithely wired Schaefer, but production manager Lynn Shores — a querulous, irascible man who was virtually a spy for the anti-Welles faction at RKO — painted a much bleaker picture. Shores carped about everything, from spending all night in “meaningless conferences” with Welles to having to be the one calling “action” and “cut” when Orson wasn’t around. Shores, ever the proud martyr, portrayed himself as the only thing standing between the crew and demoralized, mutinous chaos.

Schaefer probably knew to consider the source, but enough reports were coming in from second, third and fourth parties to suggest that Shores’s sour perspective was closer to the truth than Welles’s. Finally, in mid-April, Schaefer transferred full responsibility for editing Ambersons to Robert Wise and told him just to do whatever was necessary to get the picture in a releasable form.

Actors were called back to shoot retakes and new inserts. There was a new scene (directed by Wise) between George and Isabel after they’ve read Eugene’s letter, omitting or softening some of George’s wilder overreactions (“It’s simply the most offensive piece of writing that I’ve ever held in my hands … if he ever set foot in this house again … I … I can’t speak of it.”). A scene (by assistant director Freddie Fleck) of Eugene being turned away by George, Fanny and Jack as Isabel lies dying upstairs. A shortened opening (directed by Jack Moss) for the scene between George and the hysterical Fanny in the empty Amberson Mansion. Another scene (Fleck again) in which first Lucy, then Eugene, decide to visit George in the hospital after his auto accident.

And, most notoriously, this. Audience reaction and response cards had convinced everyone but Welles that his beloved boarding house scene had to go, so it was replaced with this one between Eugene and Fanny in the corridor outside George’s hospital room. Much of the dialogue was the same, but with a more upbeat reading from Joseph Cotten and a more serenely blissful reaction from Agnes Moorehead; the result was closer to Tarkington’s ending — though a far cry from the melancholy, even sullen tone that Welles had so carefully set, and which Joseph Cotten had found more Chekhov than Tarkington. Simon Callow says this scene was directed by Jack Moss; Prof. Carringer says it was Freddie Fleck. But whoever was responsible, they both hate it, as does nearly everybody who’s ever had an opinion on Ambersons.
 
For the music in this and other new scenes, composer Bernard Herrmann was not consulted. Instead, the studio brought in Roy Webb, more malleable than the notoriously prickly Herrmann, albeit vastly less talented. In the end, 30 of the 56 minutes Herrmann had written were used, supplemented by 6 minutes 45 seconds from Webb. The furious Herrmann threatened to sue unless his name was removed from the picture, and he got his way.
 
Another recut of Ambersons (running time unknown) was previewed in Inglewood on May 4, and yet another (87 minutes) in Long Beach on May 12, with (according to Prof. Carringer) “encouraging results”. But by now, Charles Koerner and his anti-Welles faction were only too eager to stick their thumbs in the Ambersons pie; Schaefer, Wise and Moss were forced into a rear-guard action to try to preserve what they could (within a 90-minute deadline) of the great movie they knew was in there somewhere. Moss was a fish out of water whom nobody outside Mercury Productions regarded with even an ounce of respect. Schaefer, outflanked by Koerner, was increasingly a dead man walking the halls at RKO. The struggle fell largely to Wise, since he was the man most intimately familiar with all the footage, and the one whose job at the studio ultimately proved much more secure than either Moss’s or Schaefer’s. The cutting and pasting continued — this scene out, that scene in, this one trimmed, that one moved, another back in, another back out — as The Magnificent Ambersons inched ever closer to final form, the form (with a few minor differences) proposed in the “compromise” version worked out by Robert Wise, Jack Moss and Joseph Cotten and wired to Welles on March 23. Finally, Schaefer ordered a handful of last-minute tweaks and a print was shipped to him in New York on June 5. Three days later Schaefer screened the print and approved it for release. The picture now ran 88 minutes 10 seconds.
 

The Magnificent Ambersons finally saw release on July 10, missing not only Easter Week, but Memorial Day, Flag Day and the Fourth of July as well. And forget Radio City Music Hall; in New York it played the 4,000-seat Capitol — still a picture palace, but hardly the RKO flagship.  And not all of the picture’s play dates were that prestigious; in some places it ran on a double bill with Lupe Velez in Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost — with Ambersons as the bottom half. Despite RKO’s malign neglect and a $625,000 loss, the picture impressed enough Academy voters by early 1943 to garner four Oscar nominations: for best picture, best art direction/interior decoration, Stanley Cortez’s cinematography, and Agnes Moorehead’s harrowing performance as the neurotic, sexually frustrated Fanny.

But even before the picture’s release, the game was up. George Schaefer, maneuvered by Charles Koerner into a lame duck, finally resigned on June 26. Koerner had been stewing since May over a report from the budget office that It’s All True had cost $526,000 so far and would take at least another $595,000 to finish; now, finally rid of Schaefer, Koerner pounced. He cut off Welles’s money and ordered the unit back to Hollywood forthwith. When Welles, enthusiastic about the Four Men on a Raft episode he was currently involved in, pleaded to finish it, Koerner granted him $10,000, one camera, and 40,000 feet of film; let him see how long that would last. Finally, the killing blow: Koerner evicted Mercury Productions from the RKO lot, giving them 24 hours to vacate the premises. In a telegram from Brazil, Welles tried to buck up his people’s spirits: “Don’t get excited. We’re just passing a rough Koerner on our way to immortality.” In rebuttal, the Koerner faction had a pun of their own: “All’s well that ends Welles.”

To be concluded…