Giving customers value for money – the impetus behind the original double bill that was standard fare at local neighborhood cinemas for decades – was by the 1970s the least of the worries of exhibitors, their audiences slashed by the onslaught of television, the future in serious jeopardy owning to the financially precarious Hollywood studios. As audiences grew more picky, exhibitors, even with fewer films to hand, went back, in certain instances, to the double bill, hoping that the coupling of two relatively unattractive pictures would succeed where one on its own would not. Usually, for films playing the cinema circuits, it was left to the studios to devise the double bill programs.
So where Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972), The Sting (1973), Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) need not worry about being teamed with an unlikely partner, there were plenty movies who would have no choice in the matter. I should point that a) this survey only refers to Britain since I have in my possession books covering all weekly releases on the main circuits and b) it’s not touching upon those barmy programs dreamed up by some clever-dick independent cinema manager.
So I’m only looking at those interesting/odd double-A double bills which might leave you wondering why one or even both of the titles was considered so lacking in appeal that it didn’t merit single-billing. Many of these were tough sells even as a double bill. You could start with The Mind of Mr Soames (1970) featuring Terence Stamp awakening from a lifelong coma coupled with William Wyler’s last, disastrous, effort The Liberation of L.B. Jones. (1970). You got to wonder who would be queueing up for the incestuously-hinting Goodbye Gemini (1970) starring Judy Geeson and Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970) starring nobody and featuring hippies forced into role-playing. Drug drama The People Next Door (1970) headlined by Eli Wallach (hardly a big draw on his own) was linked with C.C. and Company (1970), the movie that tried to make a star out of footballer Joe Namath and nearly wrecked the career of Ann-Margret.
On the other hand some were tailor-made value-for-money packages featuring genuine star wattage. George Peppard in hitman thriller The Executioner (1970) went head to head with James Garner western A Man Called Sledge (1970). Sidney Poitier in They Call Me Mister Tibbs (1970), sequel to the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night (1967), went out with Rock Hudson-Sylva Koscina World War Two number Hornets’ Nest (1970). Top British star Hayley Mills fending off Oliver Reed in Take A Girl Like You (1970) hit the sack with Getting Straight (1970) starring Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen. Underrated Hitchcockian thriller Fragment of Fear (1970) with David Hemmings and then-wife Gayle Hunnicutt touched base with romantic drama Loving (1970) with George Segal and Eva Marie Saint. Charles Bronson-Tony Curtis adventure You Can’t Win ‘Em All (1970) stuck it to Gregory Peck and Tuesday Weld in I Walk the Line (1970).
David Janssen in revenge western Macho Callahan was supported by Charles Bronson French thriller Rider on the Rain (1970). Double bill of the decade has to be Raquel Welch as Myra Breckenridge (1970) and the even camper Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), Russ Meyer’s mainstream paean to T&A. Mia Farrow couldn’t escape Blind Terror (1971) as Dyan Cannon headed up a platoon of Doctors’ Wives (1971). Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-nominated turn in Five Easy Pieces (1971) rode shotgun on Samantha Eggar in The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and the Gun (1971). Western Doc (1971) got the drop on World War One aerial spectacular The Red Baron (1971).
The double bill also opened doors for movies that otherwise wouldn’t stand a chance of reaching a wider audience. French crime flick The Samourai (1967) starring Alain and Nathalie Delon supported bloody western A Town Called Bastard (1970) with Robert Shaw and Stella Stevens. Charles Bronson’s Italian-made Violent City (1970) propped up Elliott Gould sex drama I Love My Wife (1970). Milo O’Shea as a sex-mad Irishman Paddy (1970) sought the shade beneath Last Summer (1970). John Mackenzie’s debut One Brief Summer (1971) clicked with demonic The Mephisto Waltz (1971) starring Alan Alda and Jacqueline Bisset. Ray Milland courtroom drama Hostile Witness (1969) found shelter with Lee Van Cleef western Barquero (1970). Walter Matthau-Ingrid Bergman-Goldie Hawn comedy Cactus Flower (1969) took pity on Machine Gun McCain (1969).
You would have thought the horror double bill was sacrosanct. And so it was in large part. Check Twins of Evil (1971)/Hands of the Ripper (1971), Scars of Dracula (1970)/The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), Count Yorga, Vampire (1970)/Cry of the Banshee (1970), and Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)/Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971). But strange developments were afoot and someone decided that if the vampire happened to be lesbian it was better for the movie to be paired with a biker picture. Hence, Countess Dracula (1970)/Hell’s Belles (1969) and Lust for a Vampire (1971)/The Born Losers (1967).
SOURCES: Allen Eyles, ABC: The First Name in Entertainment (CTA, 1993) p124-125; Allen Eyles, Odeon Cinemas 2 (CTA, 2005) p214-215.
Ancillary – the famed “long tail” – has all but disappeared. Used to be movie studios could count on up to 90 per cent of a picture’s overall earnings coming after it had completed its initial run in the cinemas. Until streaming cut off ancillary at the pass, that long tail consisted of an extraordinary number of revenue streams. Once a film was out of the cinemas, and assuming it wasn’t going to return in a steady reissue pattern like the James Bond or Disney movies or blockbusters such as Star Wars, its ancillary journey would begin with VHS/DVD (of which there were several sub-streams), then television (again, sub-divided into network, cable, syndication, and specialist operations like Turner) and then you could still be talking remake. Plus, you could bunch up an entire library of old pictures and sell them on again. The beauty of the system was that when movies hit whatever ancillary segment, there was rarely any such thing as an outright buy. Movies were leased. That meant every three or four years they could be sold all over again.
The forerunner of ancillary was network television. Television had begun mopping up old movies by the bucketload in the 1950s, and in such quantities that the attraction of old movies on the small screen prevented audiences seeking out new movies on the big screen and in part accounted for the steady decline of the moviegoing habit. By the 1960s, networks were beginning to fork out big bucks for individual pictures – Cleopatra (1963) going for several million.
By the 1970s, the income from a television showing of a movie could exceed what it had made at the cinema. For United Artists, in the period 1970-1972 (this covers the dates films were made not when released), television sales, calculated on an overall annual basis, brought in at least an extra 24 per cent on top of revenue from cinema release. That figure came from 1970, but in 1971 that shot up to 38 per cent and the following year dipped slightly to 37 per cent. And that was just for the United States. Although other countries tended to pay a lot less for movies, they still paid something and in total might bring in half as much again.
The ancillary gold mine had started to pay off big time. In the 1960s, the amounts networks ponied up for television rights depended very much on initial box office, the assumption being there was some obvious correlation between the numbers who would go to see a particular movie at the cinema and the size of the subsequent television audience. And while it was true the biggest cinematic blockbusters tended to attract the biggest television audiences, it was soon equally clear that television audiences were as segmented as much as cinema ones and therefore the amounts paid by networks for individual movies began to show sharp divergence.
There was no doubting that James Bond ruled the television roost as far as UA was concerned in 1970-1972. Diamonds Are Forever and Live and Let Die, regardless of U.S. box office – the former earning $20 million in rentals (the studio’s share of the box office), the latter $16.2 million – were each sold to American television for the same, princely, sum of $5.2 million, by far and away the most any movie pulled in.
Not far behind was Fiddler on the Roof which netted $5.12 million. But here’s the kicker – the musical earned more than both Bonds put together, a colossal $37 million in rentals. but in terms of attracting a television audience was considered a weaker proposition than both. But musicals were believed to be somehting of a golden goose for television, otherwise how to acocunt for Tom Sawyer which cost networks $2.76 million. Comparatively speaking, that made no logical sense because it had only taken in $5 million in rentals. But family-friendly fare was so rare it had networks duking it out for the rights. A third musical Man of La Mancha went to television for $1.7 million having racked up just$3.7 million at the cinema.
Conversely, networks weren’t remotely interested in films with a sex theme, no matter how well they had done at the box office. Last Tango in Paris had harnessed a colossal $16 million in rentals but was worth only $120,000 (yes, that’s right, $120,000) to any television station willing to show it (heavily cut of course). It didn’t even matter if you took a comedic approach to sex. Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex hauled in $8.2 million at the cinema but only $130,000 from television. But maybe Woody Allen was the problem. Bananas, with a highly-profitable $3.3 million at the box office, could only manage less than half a million from television, the comedian perhaps considered an acquired taste which not enough of the public had acquired.
But television, rather than being viewed as the perennial enemy, was often seen as salvation for under-performing movies, maybe not recouping the entire negative costs but going some way to stem the flow of red ink. And perhaps the more interesting statistics relate to those pictures which earned more from television than they did in their entire U.S. cinema run.
Michael Winner espionage thriller Scorpio headlined by Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon notched up $1.35 million at the cinema but $1.56 million from television. Similarly, Robert Altman’s critically-acclaimed The Long Goodbye with Elliott Gould as the iconic private eye picked up a mere $1 million at the U.S. cinema compared to $1.51 million from a network. Another private eye caper, Hickey and Boggs, teaming Robert Culp (who also directed) and Bill Cosby from a Walter Hill script, had snapped up just $900,000 from cinemas but $1.2 million from television. Cops and Robbers hoisted $1.32 million in small screen larceny as against $1.2 million elsewhere.
Westerns The Magnificent Seven Ride, the fourth in the series, and Ted Kotcheff’s Billy Two Hats starring Gregory Peck and with a script from Scotsman Alan Sharp, both did better financially from television than cinema. The former’s small screen take was $1.16 million compared to $750,000 from the cinema, the latter $1.15 million compared to $440,000. But for The Hunting Party with a top-line cast of Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen and Oliver Reed it went the other way, the $460,000 from television going hardly any way to offset the paltry $800,000 from cinemas.
It’s possible that star power, and weighted towards veterans, counted more in television. As well as Scorpio, Lancaster westerns Valdez Is Coming and Lawman tucked away $1.47 million and $1.5 million, respectively, from their television outings.
SOURCE: “Results of Distribution of Released Pictures (by production year),” MCHC 82, Box 1, Folder 8, The United Artists Archive, University of Wisconsin.
In 2012, Raquel Welch was accorded a ten-film tribute at the prestigious Film Society of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York and turned up in person to be interviewed on stage prior to various screenings. One of these was Myra Breckenridge (1970). Though interviewer Simon Doonan kicked off proceedings by mistaking her for Ann-Margret (yep). Graceful as our star was, she didn’t storm off the stage.
She admitted she wasn’t first choice for the picture. “I didn’t get a call,” she explained. “I had heard about the movie. I had read the book. The book was absolutely hysterical, so funny, and I thought it was very innovative because it was the first time I had seen somebody like Gore Vidal, who was really a genius, deal with the duality of the nature of both the male and the female. I never saw that before.
Is that a gun or a are you just pleased to see me?
“I was interested in how they were going to do this movie and then I heard through the trade that Anne Bancroft (after the success of The Graduate, 1969) had turned it down. So I thought, hmmm, I wonder what they’re going for. A little bird told me to call Dick Zanuck (head of 20th Century Fox) so I called Dick, who I was in contract with, and asked what kind of actors they were looking for in this role. I was thinking if a guy was going to change his sex and wanted to be like a movie star kind of girl, don’t you think he might want to look like me? And he said, oh my god, that’s a thought, let me talk to David – that was David Brown (later, producer of Jaws, 1975) and I’m sure Helen Gurley Brown (his wife and editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan) got in on it too. And then I did get the call and they asked me to come in and talk to them and they gave me the role.
“I had not seen the script, it’s true. As much as I loved doing Myra, I was kind of disappointed in the outcome of the movie because the narrative never did really string together. It was very disjointed and it didn’t really tell the story of Myron the film critic who was enamored of all the very very strong swashbuckling women of the golden age of film from Joan Crawford to Bette Davis and Myrna Loy.
“He wanted really to be one of those superwomen and I think that’s where the superwomen thing started because it was women then who used to go to the movies. They used to bring the guys to the movies. That was the way it went then more than it does now…The dialog was both male and female and I felt like now I’m playing the girl’s part. Rex Reed is playing Myron and there’s really hardly any relationship between the two. They’re not one person so there’s no idea of the duality and nature. One minute she likes girls and the next minute she likes studs and the older men are just to use and abuse.”
Asked about how she developed her character, Raquel replied: “The real thing – I know this is going to sound very shallow – but Theodora Van Runkle (who had swept to national fame by starting a fashion trend with her outfits for Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) did these beautiful period costumes which did emulate all of the great film stars…I felt these clothes kind of evoked this attitude.
“I did want to meet Mae (West). I did go out and research her and find out all about her and it turned out she had never made a color movie before. I asked for an audience. (In her apartment) I noticed all her furniture was white and also noticed all these 25-watt pink bulbs (to keep the room dim).”
Raquel had observed of movie stars, “There’s a screen persona and a real side. Mae didn’t have a real side. She was wearing a long peignoir and lots of eyelashes. This was noon. She didn’t bring the chimps out (she was rumored to have a menagerie of them…and young men, and neither were in evidence).”
(On set) “The other thing that got to me a little bit was that Mae never worked before 5pm. Also she never really moved by herself. (The limousine that had driven her to the studio) also brought her on to the set. I kissed her hand and one false fingernail fell to the floor and then I thought I’m getting a vibe, I think she’s a man. She refused to appear in the same frame as me. At 77 (Mae’s age) all bets are off and you’re not going to be able to doll it up that much.”
While stars being able to veto a director and perhaps refuse to work with certain other stars was still a perk for the highest-paid movie actors, Welch discovered that Mae West had a very distinctive unheard-of perk. She had costume approval. Van Runkle had designed a Garbo-esque black dress that Raquel was looking forward to wearing. But when it came time for that particular scene she discovered it had been “confiscated….nobody got to wear non-color (West was always dressed in white) except Mae.”
“Very early on (I realized) this isn’t Gore’s book. Nobody’s going to undertsand it…they hired Michael Sarne who’s only claim to fame was Joanna (1969), a visual montage kind of thing and that’s what he did to this movie. The fact that it had dialog was secondary. He used to carry round this little rectangular box and he used to say, I’ve got this little box for you, Raquel.
“It was sad fun, I didn’t want to make a movie that didn’t make any sense. I thought we were going to make something that was revolutonary. I did think it was kind of a landmark that said it’s very likely that world culture will change from this point on.”
You can catch this interview and another one discussing The Three Musketeers on Youtube.
Every now and then in the writing of my blog an event occurs which comes as a great surprise. Last year, I was contacted from Los Angeles by Claudia Pretelin, a producer working for DVD specialist Vinegar Syndrome. They were planning a 4K restoration of Five Card Stud (1968) and, alighting on my review of the movie, Claudia asked if I would do the audio commentary, especially as I had detected the strong feminist undercurrent that runs through the western.
Five years ago, McFarland had published my book The Gunslingers of ’69: The Westerns’ Greatest Year. But if I had been writing about 1968, Five Card Stud would be one of the standouts. For whatever reason, it’s so under-rated it’s almost been completely forgotten, overshadowed by the three other westerns Henry Hathaway made either side of it, most importantly True Grit (1969) and The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) . Overshadowed because it wasn’t made by John Ford or Howard Hawks. Together with Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood they were the directors most admired by critics. Overshadowed because it didn’t star John Wayne or James Stewart, both considered essential elements to any great western. Overshadowed because nobody gave a damn about Dean Martin (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) as a serious actor.
But from the outset, this is distinctive with recurrent motifs and a visual symmetry – overhead camera, water, strangulation, the card table – that seems to have gone unnoticed, unlike The Searchers. Given the testosterone on display – Robert Mitchum (Secret Ceremony, 1969) in addition to Dean Martin – this is unusually an extremely feminist western. The three female leads are far from docile and screenwriter Marguerite Roberts has changed the source book, Glory Gulch by Ray Gaulden, to exploit those elements.
Entrepreneur Lily (Inger Stevens) runs an upmarket barbershop – generally a male monopoly – with an interesting sideline, but when it comes to romance she’s in charge, choosing – and dumping – the men. Nora (Katherine Justice) is a rancher’s daughter so smart and effective that her father has already decided that he’s going to leave her a half-share in his business rather than, as would be the norm, leaving it all to his son Nick (Roddy McDowell). Mama Malone (Ruth Springford) owns the eponymous saloon and takes no sass from anybody.
Van (Dean Martin) likes to think he has the measure of women, when in fact they have the measure of him. The story avoids the obvious lure of a love triangle, of jealous women competing for Van’s affections. Both the young Nora and the more mature Lily are pretty well grounded and judge their men by the standard of their kissing – that’s equality for you.
The movie was one of the fastest ever made, just five months from the start of shooting to release – that’s efficiency for you. And for many critics that was how they regarded director Henry Hathaway. He wasn’t considered a stylist, but a studio workhorse, apt to take what was offered, work in too many genres. But this is one of his most stylish films. In some ways it harks back to film noir. The story is a mystery. And his extensive use of overhead camera would be considered innovative had it been made now.
This is in fact about a serial killer, a treatise on law and order, almost acting as a conduit between the decade’s previous westerns when the good guys and the bad guys are easily distinguished to the end of the decade when such distinctions were muddied. Here, we don’t know who the bad guy is. He’s not a hero saving a town or enforcing law and order. Not a detective either, trying to nail down a killer. He’s only trying to save his own skin. The whodunit is really a MacGuffin, an opportunity to examine the hypocrisies of the West.
The Sons of Katie Elder, Nevada Smith (1966) and Five Card Stud are all about revenge, justified in you like in the first two. Play this another way and the vengeful preacher Rudd (Robert Mitchum) would be the hero, vindicated as much as characters in Hang ‘Em High (1968), Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) or True Grit.
Producer Hal B. Wallis (True Grit) bought Ray Gaulden’s western Glory Gulch in May 1967, three months after publication by Berkeley Medallion as a paperback original. (Reprinted a year later, it was re-titled Five Card Stud). It came cheap. Nobody else was bidding. Robert Redford (Downhill Racer, 1969) turned down the role of Rudd – he thought the character too obvious and didn’t like the way the narrative developed – so Robert Mitchum was actually second choice.
Filming was due to start in October 1967 but was delayed till February 1968. It was shot in Durango – a popular locale also utilized for Guns for San Sebastian (1968), Shalako (1968) and The Scalphunters (1968) – and Churabasco Studios in Mexico City. There were 22 actors and 52 crew. The main location was 8,000ft up on the Sierra Madre mountains. The actors were billeted in a motel, but Mitchum, demanding peace and quiet, had the end room so got more of the cold and required a portable oxygen tank. Instead of privacy he was frozen. The boilers didn’t work and allocated a single blanket he ended up piling all his clothes on the bed. Roddy McDowell wasn’t hired until after shooting began and he modelled his somewhat hippie sideburns after George Harrison. Mitchum was nearly crushed to death by a falling 18th high camera pedestal. While the two stars didn’t particularly hit it off there was no animosity either.
Some of those involved scarcely needed to work. Dean Martin was one of the richest men in the business. At a time when the very top stars took home $750,000 a picture, say $1.5 million if they made two movies a year, Martin took home closer to $5 million a year when you totted up fees from his television show, movies, records and performing. McDowell was the co-owner of a thriving disco franchise. Hathaway had just sold his stake in an oil business for $18 million.
Marguerite Roberts had been one of the top-earning screenwriters in the Hollywood
Golden Age. Starting out in 1933, her credits included Honky Tonk (1941) with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, The Sea of Grass (1947) starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and MGM’s big-budget blockbuster Ivanhoe (1951) teaming Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor. Around the time of Five Card Stud she had two other projects on studio slates, Hero Suit and Flight and Pursuit, though neither was made and it was perhaps ironic that her next assignment concerned a lawman who took the same no-holds-barred approach to the criminal fraternity, namely True Grit, as the killer in this picture.
Filming began on February 7 and finished on April 14. It opened on July 12. That was a phenomenal turnaround for the period. A Time for a Killing/The Long Ride Home (1967), also starring Inger Stevens, took 16 months to reach the screen. In 1967 there were 125 films in studio backlogs – movies completed but no release date set as yet as yet, studios in no hurry, and often first run cinemas in the major cities clogged up by roadshows or long-running hits.
The western from mid-1960s had become the default for many stars. Where earlier in the decade stars might mix western and war with comedy and drama now for many top names for a period of three, four or five years they appeared either exclusively or almost exclusively in westerns. From 1965 to 1968 except for Matt Helm and one comedy Dean Martin had tackled five westerns. In the same period for James Stewart four out of five were westerns. For Mitchum it was four straight westerns from 1966 to 1968. In two years starting in 1967, four out of five Inger Stevens pictures were westerns. In three years, Glenn Ford made five straight westerns and after Battle of the Bulge (1965) Henry Fonda made four straight westerns. It was the same for directors: between 1965 and 1971 Andrew V. McLaglen made nothing but, and Burt Kennedy, in one year less, seven out of eight.
DVD with 4K restoration and audio commentary by yours truly available to pre-order and comes out in a few days.
Will Henry’s 1964 source novel was, by today’s standards, a slim volume. The principal idea of Mackenna being given a map by a dying Indian comes from the book, as does the capture of the white woman (named Francie in the novel), and the surprisingly erotic description of Hesh-Ke’s attempted seduction of Mackenna in the pool, the Apache mysticism, and, equally surprisingly, the earthquake denouement.
Some white men do join the party, but they are of rougher stock, the “Good Men” of Hadleyburg entirely producer Carl Foreman’s invention. Foreman turned Mackenna into a lawman rather than just a prospector, made the map more tangible (in the book it was drawn in the sand), gave Mackenna a past with Hesh-Ke and with the outlaw Colorado (named Pelon in the book), and, just as Sergio Leone did with Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West, realized that a handsome attractive villain was far more interesting than the “jug-eared, ugly man” described in Henry’s book.
First edition cover.
Foreman made Tibbs a sergeant and added 20 years to the raw-boned youngster of the book. But in the original, Hesh-Ke was killed, accidentally, just after the pool incident, and it was another of the outlaws, Hachita, who killed Colorado so that the climactic fight on the ledge was between the axe-wielding Hachita and the unarmed Mackenna rather than between Mackenna and Colorado, but Henry had the woman taken hostage kill the Indian.
The various shoot-outs and chases are primarily a Foreman invention. He gives Mackenna more depth, and the vices of gambling and alcohol. Most important of all, it was Foreman who added the visual grandeur. There is no Shaking Rock in the source material, and no waiting for sunrise or for a shadow to point the way to the entrance to the canyon.
A writer-producer was the worst kind of hyphenate as far as a director was concerned in that, as suggested previously, the producer might be more apt to protect his original vision and dialog than adapt the screenplay, which is always only ever intended as a blueprint, to other ideas as the movie went into production.
The opening of the picture is pure Foreman, on a par with the introductory section of The Guns of Navarone, and the extensive use of narration ran counter to a director who felt the camera should tell the story. The greed aspect is spelled out well enough in the original novel, and comparisons with the classic examination of how gold turns men inside out was portrayed best as far as most people were concerned in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) so quite why Foreman felt obliged to hammer the point home so obviously in Mackenna’s Gold is anybody’s guess, except that the producer saw himself as a man with a message, the anti-war themes of The Guns of Navarone (1961) and The Victors (1964) having eliciting critical approval. You get the impression the original novel didn’t require as much tampering as this to be turned into a more than adequate picture.
Will Henry was a pseudonym, one of two he used for writing westerns, the other being Clay Fisher. His real name was Henry Wilson Allen and he began in the movies, joining MGM in 1937 as a screenwriter for cartoon shorts. He also wrote screenplays for cartoon shorts under the pen names Heck Allen and Henry Allen. Many of these were Tex Avery cartoons written between 1944 and 1955 which were considered some of the funniest ever made. He also worked on Woody Woodpecker and other cartoon characters. When he started writing novels in the 1950s he did so under a pseudonym to avoid attracting unwanted attention from his studio employers. He was a five-time winner of The Spur Award including for From Where the Sun NowStands (1960) – which also won The Saddleman Award – and The Gates of the Mountains (1963).
Westerns made from his novels were Santa Fe Passage (1955) starring John Payne, The Tall Men (1955) directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Clark Gable and Jane Russell, Pillars of the Sky (1956) starring Jeff Chandler, and Yellowstone Kelly (1959) starring Clint Walker. At the same time as Mackenna’s Gold was sold, his 1960 book Journey to Shiloh was being set up under the title Fields of Honor to be directed by veteran Mervyn LeRoy and when this fell through was made into a film under the original title in 1969 with newcomer James Caan while Who Rides with Wyatt would be released as Young Billy Young starring Robert Mitchum in fall 1969.
I should mention the George Lucas connection right away because, for some, that is the movie’s main contemporary connection.
Mackenna’s Gold was originally intended as a three-hour movie[i] for roadshow release to be shot in early 1966 for Columbia Pictures by writer-producer Carl Foreman (Guns of Navarone, 1961) who would also be in the director’s chair.[ii] But outside of How the West Was Won (1962) westerns had foundered in roadshow. The Alamo (1960), John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964) and John Sturges The Hallelujah Trail (1965) were surprising roadshow flops. Foreman persuaded Columbia to increase the budget to $5 million – and then beyond – and film the movie in Cinerama, (over 25 percent of the budget was allocated to Cinerama to license the name and use the equipment – $1.35 million in total of initial negative costs[iii]).
In January 1967 Columbia launched the marketing campaign with full page advertisements in the trade papers promoting the fact that the movie would be filmed on location in the USA in Cinerama and that it would bring together the “creators of The Guns of Navarone,” meaning, at this point, Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson. The advertisement also highlighted author Will Henry, on whose novel the film was based (as the “author of San Juan Hill and From Where the Sun Now Stands”) and plugged the book as “a novel of Apache gold and Apache revenge based on the search for the fabulous Lost Adams Diggings.” By the following year, Foreman’s star was in the ascendant after the Parisian revival of High Noon[iv] and Columbia had another two major roadshows planned for the 1968-1969 season: Barbra Streisand’s movie debut in William Wyler’s Funny Girl also starring Omar Sharif and Carol Reed’s Oliver![v]
By this time, Columbia had reshaped its marketing effort to provide the specialist support required for promoting roadshows. In early 1967, it had poached sales guru Leo Greenfield from Buena Vista with the express aim of setting up an effective unit to market hard-ticket product – “first assignment Mackenna’s Gold, Oliver! and Funny Girl”[vi] – to the record number of Cinerama theaters[vii] and those desperate to accommodate roadshow. By the end of 1968, both Cinerama and Columbia had reported record revenues and profits, the former turning a $290,000 loss into a $679,000 profit,[viii] the latter on an unprecedented streak of success with a gross profit of $9.3 million profit on a gross income of $239 million.[ix] Columbia soon added another roadshow prospect to its slate, Sydney Pollack’s World War Two drama Castle Keep starring Burt Lancaster, and was so confident about the two non-musicals, for example, that it expected the western and the war picture to run consecutively from late spring 1969 well into the following year at Loews Hollywood in Los Angeles.[x]Funny Girl hit $550,000 in advance sales – $80,000 was the usual figure.[xi]Mackennas’s Gold’s was scheduled to premiere in Phoenix, Arizona, on February 15, 1969, with the roadshow launch set for the DeMille theater in New York five days later.
Within the next month, however, the world premiere was called off, work began on editing down the near-three-hour running time, and plans, two years in the making, for an ambitious roadshow release were quietly dropped. Public reaction to The Stalking Moon – also starring Gregory Peck – was one reason. Two other Cinerama movies, Custer of the West (1967) and Krakatoa – East of Java (1968) had also flopped. If Mackenna’s Gold was to be marketed as a drama in a western setting rather than a shoot-out in the tradition of 100 Rifles, then Columbia looked worryingly at Isadora, boasting a 177-minutes running time, whose roadshow run in Los Angeles was swiftly truncated, and the movie butchered in a bid to find an audience.[xii]
The studio took a different tack. The world premiere shifted to Munich, West Germany, in March[xiii] with most of the rest of the European capitals holding gala premieres (and running it as roadshow or at least 70mm) before the picture made its U.S. debut in Phoenix on May 10. But the picture unveiled in Phoenix was a ghost of the original. The running time technically came in at 128 minutes, but, in effect, was under two hours long, the introductory narration lasting eight minutes and the end credits accounting for further time. However, what was oddest of all was the 18-month gap between completion and world premiere. Filming had begun on May 16, 1967 and wrapped on September 29. Columbia had shelved one of its biggest budgeted movies for nearly 15 months.
The movie had a troubled history. For a start, Foreman didn’t own the rights to the Will Henry source novel. Dmitri Tiomkin, after a debilitating eye condition restricting his composing career, had in 1964 purchased the rights. Tiomkin agreed to sell the rights to Foreman in April 1965 in return not just for a fee and an agreement to compose the music[xiv] but also the vital producer’s credit necessary to launch him on a new career.[xv] Foreman was initially keen on filming the movie in Spain to take advantage of generous government subsidies.[xvi] But Foreman was demoted from director. His last picture as writer-producer-director The Victors (1964) had flopped. The studio did not want to offer the producer any distraction from the complex logistics of a location shoot where much of the time the crew would be 50 miles from the nearest town and where, despite the desert environment, could be subject to storms and flash floods. Instead, J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) came on board as director. (Thompson was also at this point lined up to direct Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, whose rights he co-owned.)
However, the Thompson-Foreman relationship did not run smoothly. Foreman recalled: ‘I was not very happy with the work of J. Lee Thompson on that film and entirely apart from that we still got into trouble in terms of scheduling and so forth and our relationship was always a problem.’[xvii] Logistics were always going to be an issue on a picture of this scale, shot almost exclusively on some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. The buzzard section was filmed in Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border, and other scenic wildernesses included the Glen Canyon of Utah, Spider Rock in Canon de Schelly in Arizona, Kanab Valley, Sink Valley, the Panguitch Fish Hatchery in Utah, and Medford in Oregon.
Gregory Peck was not first choice for the titular role in Mackenna’s Gold. He only got the part after Steve McQueen and then Clint Eastwood had turned it down[xviii] and even then Peck wavered, only agreeing after pressure from Foreman, and in recognition of their work together on The Guns of Navarone.[xix] Depending on your point of view, Omar Sharif was miscast or cast against type, a matinee idol whose character, in ruthless pursuit of gold, eschewed any element of romance. By the time the movie appeared, Sharif’s marquee appeal had taken a tumble. MGM’s Mayerling and Twentieth Century Fox’s Che had flopped, The Appointment (1969) shelved and Funny Girl’s success rightly attributed to Streisand.
Over the past few years, Telly Savalas had discovered the harsh reality of Hollywood. An Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) had done less for his career than the odious Maggott in The Dirty Dozen (1967) after which he was promptly promoted to third billing on Sol Madrid (1968), western The Scalphunters (1968) and The Assassination Bureau (1968). Although he retained that billing on Mackenna’s Gold, he did not appear until halfway through, suggesting that his role as Sgt Tibbs had been a casualty of the editing needed to reduce the running length. Camilla Sparv had been leading lady in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966), Assignment K (1968), and Nobody Runs Forever (1968). Newmar, a decade older, was best known for playing “Catwoman” in the television series Batman (1966-1967). Foreman had given her the leading female role opposite Zero Mostel in Monsieur Lecoq (1967) but the movie was unfinished, although Newmar still attracted attention after stills from the picture appeared in Playboy magazine. Mackenna’s Gold aimed to set a new standard in the quality of actors in supporting roles – the by now requisite roadshow all-star cast including Edward G. Robinson (The Biggest Bundle of Them All, 1968), twice-Oscar-nominated Lee J. Cobb (Coogan’s Bluff, 1968), Burgess Meredith (Skidoo, 1968), Anthony Quayle (The Guns of Navarone), Oscar nominee Raymond Massey (Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1941), Keenan Wynn (How the West Was Won) and Ted Cassidy (“Lurch” in The Addams Family television series, 1964-1966).
The George Lucas Connection
In some respects, the involvement of George Lucas (Star Wars) in Mackenna’s Gold has overshadowed that of director J. Lee Thompson. Committed to bringing through a new generation of talent, Foreman had established an internship for the picture. Lucas was one of four winners and his entry was the first version of THX 1138 (1971). The internship funded the winners to shoot a short film on the location. Foreman became immediately a fan because of the quality of Lucas’s effort. Foreman explained: “He did the shortest one of the lot and the most technically accomplished. It ran only one minute and 47 seconds and it had no title – he gave it a date – and then we agreed we’d call it A Desert Poem because he went out on the desert and did a lot of stop-action photography. George really knew his camera and he played with his camera and it was around and about the film – he was doing the desert more than anything else but in the desert was the film company with its parasols and all that shimmering in the distance and he played around with little things where the sun was shining and the film company was working. And then it began to rain, and it rained like hell, and then the sun came out again. It was awfully good. He did a lot of trick stuff with his camera and that’s what the boys resented, that he could just go out by himself and do that.”[xx]
The “boys” resented Lucas for more than his technical accomplishment but Foreman’s admiration for the neophyte director increased after seeing a display of professionalism that put the other professionals to shame. “We were…in a very difficult location…near the place where we had painted in this great seam of gold…We got to the big scene, the scene where they (the actors) all discovered it (the gold), and they all started running towards it…But it (the location) was in a kind of ravine and there was a problem about the light – you could only shoot it…at that time of year when the sun was more or less directly overhead or had just begun to go down or had just passed the meridian…(but when Foreman arrived on location) the entire company was just sitting there. Lucas therefore pointed out in an indirect manner that the scene had not been rehearsed because J. Lee Thompson was waiting for the sun to rehearse it during the precious moments when the sun was there instead of being ready for when the sun was there.”[xxi]
Reception
Trade magazine Variety came out in overall favor of Mackenna’s Gold: “splendid western, stars plus special effects and grandeur should insure box office success.”[xxii]Hollywood Reporter predicted, “Audiences should queue up,” and Film Daily proclaimed “a fine, exciting western adventure.”[xxiii] However, Vincent Canby in the New York Times called it a “truly stunning absurdity,” The New York News, while generally positive, nonetheless complained it was “sprawling” and “pretentious.” New York magazine and the Washington Post were among the nay-sayers.[xxiv] Perhaps, Peck’s own opinion was the most damning: “Mackenna’s Gold was a terrible western, just wretched.”[xxv]
Star fatigue did not occur in the days of the studio system, when releases were carefully spaced out to give the public a breathing space between each release. Actor independence meant timing of releases was removed from studio control – Gregory Peck’s movies in 1969 came from three different studios, Universal (The Stalking Moon), Twentieth Century Fox (The Chairman) and Columbia (Mackenna’s Gold), and Omar Sharif was in the same position with MGM for Mayerling, Twentieth Century Fox for Che and the western from Columbia. As you might expect, releases were not coordinated, studios did not sit down around a table and discuss how to avoid each other’s movies clashing. So in the first six months of 1969 audiences were treated to three pictures apiece from the stars, the earlier ones flops though Mayerlingr was a big hit overseas.[xxvi] Whatever the reason, Mackenna’s Gold did not race out of the gate. Its final rentals tally of $3.1 million – 42nd spot in the annual chart,[xxvii] ahead of The Stalking Moon and Once Upon a Time in the West, but well below the much less expensive Support Your Local Sheriff and 100 Rifles. In budget terms it was close to a disaster. However, it was a huge hit in India, setting a record in Madras for the best showing for a foreign picture.[xxviii]
SOURCES:
This is an edited version of a much longer chapter from my book, The Gunslingers of ’69: Western Movies’ Greatest Year.
[i] Sheldon Hall has argued that the movie was never intended to be three hours long and that judging from a screenplay of 145 pages the film would have been roughly two-and-half-hours long. He identified a major sequence that was filmed but edited out – of another battle between the Apaches and the gold-seekers (“Film in Focus, Mackenna’s Gold,” Cinema Retro, Issue 43, 40.)
[ii] “Foreman to Start Gold, Delays Churchill Pic,” Variety, September 8, 1965, 4. The Churchill project would eventually become Young Winston made in 1972 for Columbia. The movie was originally postponed due to political unrest in the chosen movie locations.
[iii] Filmmakers licensing the Cinerama name had to pay $500,000 upfront and Foreman was committed to spend $875,000 for Cinerama camera equipment. The cost might escalate because Columbia also had to agree to pay Cinerama 10 percent of the gross (“C’rama Sets Major Int’l Expansion As More Pix, More Theaters Use Process,” Variety, November 15, 1967, 25).
[iv] “Junket for Noon Sparks Nostalgia,” Variety, April 24, 1968, 31. Not only was the revival a critical success but it was a box office hit all over again in Paris.
[v] “Leo Greenfield’s Chore,” Variety, May 31, 1967, 8. Wyler, of course, was the king of the roadshow, having directed Ben Hur. Reed had directed The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) after an initial chastening experience with roadshow having pulled out of MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after clashing with star Marlon Brando.
[xii] “Switching of Isadora,,” Variety. The film, which had opened on December 18, was set to close on February 8 and go straight into continuous performance.
[xiii] “Col Bows Gold in Munich to Spark Lagging Box Office,” Variety, March 26, 1969, 41; “Mackenna’s Gold Launching Pattern,” Variety, March 5, 1969, 28. While it was true the studios were concerned about falling box office in Europe, the true reason for launching the picture in Europe ahead of America was because Foreman was so much better known there courtesy of his major marketing blitz for The Guns of Navarone and The Victors. It opened in Paris and Rome in March and in April in London.
[xiv] By the time the movie came out, Tiomkin had given up composing and the score was done by Quincy Jones.
[xv] “Tiomkin-Foreman Partners for Col,” Variety, April 21, 1965, 19.
[xvii]The Carl Foreman Tapes, Transcripts of Tapes between Sidney Cohn and Carl Foreman, Carl Foreman Collection, ITM – 4408, (Tape V – A, December 20, 1977, British Film Institute, Reubens Library, London).
[xviii] Avery, Kevin ed, Conversations with Clint, Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 35 ; Neibaur, James L, The Clint Eastwood Westerns, 44.
[xix] Fishgall, Gary, Gregory Peck, A Biography (Scribner, New York, 2002), 264.
The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) appeared as part of new British production strategy. In fact, the British had been trying to dominate the global film industry since the silent era when the population of its Commonwealth exceeded that of the United States. At various points, the British had launched various distribution attacks on Hollywood – aligning with U.S. cinema chains, organizing their own distribution system (Gaumont-British in the 1930s for example) and even taking over major Broadway houses as a launch platform for new releases. Come the end of the 1960s , Britain had lost its production grip on the world stage. Though movies were still being made in Britain they were often funded by Hollywood, or were B-movies or genre-specific such as Hammer horror.
In 1969, Associated British Picture Corporation, following a takeover by EMI, relaunched as a major production entity, aiming to provide increased programming for its own 270-strong ABC cinema chain as well as hitting the export market. Bernard Delfont, chairman of ABPC, set up two production strategies that he intended to run in parallel. He brought in director Bryan Forbes (King Rat, 1965) as production chief of ABPC while Nat Cohen, head of ABPC subsidiary Anglo-Amalgamated, would augment that effort.
Full page ads (above and below) were taken in “Variety” to promote the MGM-EMI slate. Of the 26 features planned, only 15 were made.
Forbes took on the role after initially signing a three-picture deal with Delfont which developed into “something wider…at a time of real crisis.” Forbes explained his motivation: “I think if you’ve been a critic as I have over the years…you’ve got to put up or shut up. And if the job is offered to you, you can’t turn it down and then go on criticising.”
The initial slate was being made with no guarantee of foreign distribution. Even getting a foothold in Britain was difficult. “We are very dependent…on getting West End outlets. There’s a long queue and we don’t have any particular pull.”
(In Britain at this point, roadshow – which to a large extent was no longer the favoured release device for big budget pictures in the U.S. – still dominated the West End and the type of picture being envisaged was more targeted towards the circuit. But a West End run was always seen as a mark of quality. The downside of the West End release was that it delayed movies reaching the provinces and by the time they did all the initial media interest was long forgotten.)
Budgets were being assessed to meet the prospect that a very successful film could recover its negative costs on a British release alone, with anything else pure profit. Trying to appeal to the international and/or U.S. market at the outset was too complicated and expensive a proposition. And there was always the prospect that with the production well running dry in American, that a distributor, with a hole to fill, would come calling.
ABPC allocated a total budget of £36 million to make 28 pictures, with Forbes’ outfit taking the lion share, leaving Nat Cohen only $7 million to make 13 movies. According to Delfont, it was the “most ambitious” program ever scheduled by a British company. While certainly an overstatement given the investment by Rank, ABPC and Gaumont-British in the past, it nonetheless captured media attention.
The Forbes project didn’t go according to plan. Hoffman (1970) with Peter Sellers, thriller And Soon the Darkness (1970), The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) starring Roger Moore, The Breaking of Bumbo (1970) and Mr Forbrush and the Penguins (1971) headlining John Hurt and Hayley Mills all flopped, despite costing a lot less than originally expected. The Railway Children (1971) was the only undeniable hit while The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971) made a profit. Raging Moon / Long Ago, Tomorrow (1971), with Forbes directing Malcolm McDowell and Nanette Newman, and Dulcima (1971) with John Mills and Carol White also ended up in the red.
Forbes fared much better heading up MGM-EMI, a co-production unit set up in 1970, which produced hits The Go-Between (1971) and Get Carter (1971). Forbes resigned in 1971.
Nat Cohen, while pandering to a lower common denominator, enjoyed more straightforward success with sex-change comedy Percy (1971), and big screen versions of On the Buses (1971), Up Pompeii (1971) and Steptoe and Son (1972) – and their various sequels – Richard Burton as Villain (1971), Fear Is the Key (1972), and Stardust (1974) while Murder on the Orient Express (1974) with an all-star cast was a huge global hit.
In 1976 Michael Deeley and Barry Spikings became joint managing directors of EMI and aiming for an international audience fronted part of the finance for The Deer Hunter (1978), Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978) and Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) and had significant investment in Columbia pictures like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and The Deep (1977).
But the British invasion amounted to very little in the end, as Hollywood, led by gargantuan hits of The Godfather (1972), Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) swept all before them and made it impossible for British-made films to compete either on a commercial or artistic basis.
The experiment was a massive flop. EMI failed to break into the American market and, in fact, the box office achieved was on the dismal side. Best performers were Get Carter and The Go-Between both estimated to achieve rentals of just under $2 million. Tales of Beatrix Potter didn’t reach $1 million and Villain not $750,000. The Railway Children couldn’t manage $500,000 nor Percy $250,000 and none of the others even crossed the $100,000 mark. It was considered such a footnote in British movie history that it didn’t merit a mention in Sarah Street’s Transatlantic Crossing, British Feature Films in the USA (Continuum, 2002).
SOURCES: Alexander Walker, Hollywood England, (Orion paperback, 2005) p426-440; Advert, Variety, January 21, 1970, p12-13; Derek Todd, “The Emperor of Elstree’s First 300 Days,” Kine Weekly, March 7, 1970, p6-8, 19; “MGM-EMI In Joint Deal On British Filmmaking,” Box Office, April 27, 1970, p7; “MGM Setting EMI CoProds,” Variety, June 10, 1970, p3; “MGM-EMI To Produce 12 Films Annually,” Box Office, July 6, 1970, p6; “From $10-Mil and Up, Rentals, to $100,000 and Less,” Variety, November 12, 1972, p5.
In reality, very much a what-if autobiographical tale. Barbet Schroeder had fallen in love “at first sight” with a “very quiet reasonable girl” but a junkie whose mission was to make him try heroin. She failed but the resulting movie imagines what would have happened had she succeeded. Drawing very much on his own early life on Ibiza, the film also set out the capture the island’s splendor, the sense of a world and way of living untouched for centuries.
Schroeder grew up in the house where the movie was filmed. He lost his virginity there. It had been built by an artist in 1935 and they enjoyed a peasant lifestyle. Rainwater supplied the cisterns, the building was painted once a year with lime manufactured from rudimentary ovens in the local woods, candles provided the lighting. They cooked locally-caught fish on grills fuelled by locally-made charcoal, as the characters do in the film. A great deal that was close to home was incorporated in the movie.
Around the age of 14, Schroeder developed an interest in cinema, and determined he was going to pursue a movie career. But, equally, he decided that “it was not a good idea to start too young” – his idols Fellini and Nicholas Ray had, in his opinion, made their best films in middle age – and would hold back from becoming a director until he was 40. In the meantime, he had become a producer, behind the films of Eric Rohmer such as La Collectionneuse (1967) and Ma Nuit Chez Maude (1969). He spent two years writing a screenplay, along with Paul Gegauf, for More and raised the finance after filming a trailer on location.
His mother was German hence the nationality of Stefan. The aspects of the Nazi character in the film was also autobiographical since his immediate neighbour in Ibiza had displayed similar tendencies, creating such tension between the two households that they kept to separate beaches, although the Germans as well as sun-worshipping proved to be pill-poppers leaving amyl nitrate capsules on the sand.
“I did not want to deal with drug problems,” insisted Shroeder, who viewed the movie in more “esoteric terms.” He saw it as the “story of someone who sets out on a quest for the sun and who is not sufficiently armed to carry it through…so instead finds…a black sun.” The drugs element was only employed “in relation to character…as an element in destruction, only as a motor in the sado-masochistic relationship between a boy and a girl.” Stefan is “passionately in love but unable to really love.”
When in doubt, resort to the old sex sells marketing.
In fact, Schroeder refused to treat the drugs element in didactic fashion, determined to not only show the differences between individual drugs but make plain that this was “one particular case.” He cautioned, “Naturally, there will be spectators, impressed by the dramatic violence at the end, who will forget the nuances shown before and will believe they have seen a film moralizing the use of drugs.” The Ibiza setting was not, in itself, crucial to the tale, and it could as easily have been set on another isle.
He knew the film would be banned in France, due to the extensive and full-frontal nudity as much as the non-judgemental depiction of drug use. Despite acclaim at Cannes, it was on the forbidden list in France for almost a year though the version later released was censored. Regardless of the American funding, Schroeder wanted to make a movie that was European in its sensibilities. “It was less a story of our time and more a timeless story of a femme fatale,” he said. However, the island was at the forefront of an avant-garde movement more interested in the spiritual and an intense communion with nature. Even so, the perspective was “the very opposite of the hippie” ethos. As Stefan explains, there is “no pleasure without tragedy.”
Mimsy Farmer followed a long line of actresses turning to Europe when careers were stymied in Hollywood. Although talent-spotted at the start of the decade and selected as one of the “Deb-Stars,” her role in Spencer’s Mountain (1963) had not led to the kind of parts she might have expected and she had drifted into B-movie fare like Hot Rods to Hell (1966), Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) and Wild Racers (1969). Her Ibiza sojourn led to The Road to Salina (1970) and iconic giallo Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971).
Pink Floyd became involved because the director was captivated by their first two albums “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (1967) and “A Saucerful of Secrets” (1968) and they were susceptible to following his instructions of not writing standard film music but pieces that were “anchored in the scenes.” He showed the band a work print of the movie and they composed and produced the score in less than two weeks. Coming out in the wake of Easy Rider, it plugged into an audience more appreciative of the counter-culture music infiltrating the Hollywood mainstream.
The movie was not as unfavorably received by the critics as supposed (witness the poster shown above) and three out of the four main New York critics gave it the thumbs up. It opened in three cinemas in Paris and ran for over 10 weeks in a New York arthouse, the Plaza, picked up business in London and the response in Germany stimulated a tourist boom in Ibiza.
SOURCES: Interview by Noel Simsolo, published in the Pressbook, 1969, copyright Image et Son/Les Films de Losange; “Making More,” (2011), produced by Emilie Bicherton, BFI.
Originality was rarely the key to open the box office door in the 1960s. Though considerably more expensive than original screenplays, books and Broadway musicals were viewed as a better bet, in part because they came with a perceived built-in audience of readers and theatergoers. And the figures prove that, for once, Hollywood got it right.
All except one, the top ten movies for the decade at the box office derived from bestsellers or stage hits. The exception was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), an original screenplay by William Rose who received a then-record sum for his efforts. The decade’s out-and-out winner, The Sound of Music (1965) was based on both a book, The Story of the The Trapp Family Singers and a West German film The Trapp Family (1956), as well as the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.
The biggest bestseller since “Gone with the Wind.”
Though substantially altered for the screen, runner-up The Graduate (1967) was based on the bestseller by Charles Webb. Doctor Zhivago (1965), Gone with the Wind (1939)* and Ben-Hur (1959) ** were based on bestsellers by, respectively, Boris Pasternak, Margaret Mitchell and Lew Wallace. Mary Poppins (1964) which placed sixth for the decade, despite the musical additions of the Sherman Brothers, was based on a series of much-loved children’s books by P.L. Travers, who didn’t much care for the Disneyfication.
Multiple Oscar-winner My Fair Lady (1964) followed The Sound of Music template, based on a 1913 play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, and a subsequent film of the same name a quarter of a century later, before falling into the hands of Broadway team Lerner and Loewe. The biggest box office surprise was that it didn’t beat The Sound of Music at the movie box office because it had trounced it on Broadway, racking up nearly double the performances. The Sound of Music wasn’t even the best performing of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway portfolio, lagging in third place, a long way behind South Pacific and Oklahoma!.
British author Ian Fleming was the single-best argument for buying novels over screenplays. Books could be purchased for relatively small sums, if the well was tapped early on, and thanks for the development of the sequel business, Thunderball (1965) snapped up ninth spot. You might imagine Cleopatra (1963), especially with its emphasis on the racy Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton romance, was an original work, but that, too, was based on previous publications of the non-fiction variety.
William Rose’s original screenplay was as instrumental in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner reaching tenth place as he was in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) becoming one of only two original screenplays to feature in the next ten movies on the box office chart, that madcap comedy targeting eighteenth. Robert Benton and David Newman’s original screenplay (with a little help from Robert Towne) helped Bonnie and Clyde (1967) after a faltering start to cling on to 13th spot.
You might also imagine James R. Webb delivered an original screenplay for the Cinerama roadshow How the West Was Won (1962) – which finished 12th in the rankings – but while not based on a bestseller it was adapted from an extensive series of non-fiction books on The Old West published by Time-Life.
Of the other films registering in the top 20, five originated as novels, and two were first seen on the stage. The fiction quintet featured another deuce from the pen of Ian Fleming – Goldfinger (1964) and You Only Live Twice (1960). Jacqueline Susann was responsible for the bestseller Valley of the Dolls (1967), E. M. Nathanson for The Dirty Dozen (1967) and E.R. Braithwaite for To Sir, With Love (1967). West Side Story (1961) was another adaptation of a Broadway musical while The Odd Couple (1968) was from prolific playwright Neil Simon.
It probably escaped your notice but this iconic image is taken from the scene where they die.
There was similar reliance on proven hits in the next 20 movies. Only two pictures – Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965) by Ken Annakin and Jack Davies and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) – were original screenplays, though Twentieth Century Fox shelled out a record $400,000 to secure the rights to the latter from writer William Goldman.
Even movies like The Love Bug (1968) and Bullitt (1968) were originally novels. The bulk of these next twenty came from publishing, though Funny Girl (1968), Romeo and Juliet (1968), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and Thoroughly Modern Millie began on stage, the latter not from Broadway but the British West End.
Of course, not much has changed. Half this year’s Best Picture Oscar candidates are based on published works. Poor Things was based on the book by Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray, Zone of Interest from the novel by Martin Amis, Killers of the Flower Moon by the non-fiction work by David Grann, Oppenheimer on the biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Fiction from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure.
*Gone with the Wind was reissued in 1967 as a 70mm roadshow and, coupled with a 35mm wider release the following year, cleaned up at the box office, making more money than it any of its previous four revivals put together.
**Ben-Hur (1959) ran in Nov-Dec 1959 in only a select number of cinemas, collecting, by my calculations no more than $1 million in rentals. Therefore, I deduced that in reality the vast bulk of its box office was taken in the 1960s and therefore in any accounting of that decade’s movie rentals was more fairly to be included then than in the previous decade.
SOURCE: The Magnificent 60s, The 100 Most Popular Films of a Revolutionary Decade by Brian Hannan (McFarland, 2019).
I’ve covered quite a few films now with top stars – The Appointment (1969), The Picasso Summer (1969), The Extraordinary Seaman (1969) – denied cinematic release but I didn’t realize just how endemic the problem was. The bloodbath that followed the financial collapse of major studios at the end of the 1960s you could perhaps understand but, with exhibitors crying out for new movies at a time when supply had stalled, I was astonished to discover that over 120 movies had been shelved in the U.S. long before studios felt the pinch at the end of the decade.
Once the squeeze began to bite, studios threw away over a hundred projects in which they had already invested upwards of $20 million in screenplays, fees for principals and extensive pre-production. Movies for which advertising campaigns and posters had already been designed – such as Avco Embassy’s A Small Town in Germany based on the John Le Carre bestseller were closed down.
Only one of these Avco Embassy movies was made.
It’s always hard to get a grip on what studios have already spent on movies that continue to miss out on actually entering production. But it was estimated that over three decades MGM and another producer had shelled out over $750,000 in a vain effort to bring to the screen the Mildred Cramm bestseller Forever, published in 1940.
As the 1970s beckoned, nobody knew what worked any more. The situation was similar to now. For comic books and multiverses, read roadshows. Audiences had fallen out of love with big-budget all-star-cast pictures that relied on audiences stumping up for increased ticket prices to view movies in 70mm in initial run – equivalent to the IMAX uptick these days. But they hadn’t particularly fallen in love with what studios thought might be adequate replacements.
While box office went some way to pointing out where the industry had catastrophically got it wrong, it didn’t quite explain why so many movies were deemed unfit for cinematic screening in the U.S. even after they might have been given a release (such as American-funded European films) in their country of origin. A PhD student called Norman Kagan (who later published a book on Stanley Kubrick) uncovered a list of 127 movies that had been shelved by American studios.
As well as The Picasso Summer headlined by Albert Finney (Two for the Road, 1967) and The Extraordinary Seaman toplining Faye Dunaway (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) and David Niven (The Impossible Years (1968), Kagan discovered a whole raft of films that had fallen foul of the U.S. distributor that in previous decades would have easily been double bill fodder. These included: Burt Reynolds in Fade In (1968), Ray Milland in Hostile Witness (1968), Anthony Quinn in The Rover (1967), Rita Hayworth in Sons of Satan (1968), Claudia Cardinale in The Adventures of Gerard (1970), Marcello Mastroianni and Rita Tushingham in Diamonds for Breakfast (1968), Geraldine Chaplin in I Killed Rasputin (1967) and Stephen Boyd and Gina Lollobrigida in Imperial Venus (1962).
Good enough for British audiences – but not American.
The list went on – Ann-Margret in Criminal Symphony/Criminal Affair (1968), Jean Seberg in The Road to Corinth (1967), Ginger Rogers in The Confession (1964), Richard Widmark in A Talent for Loving (1969), and Catherine Deneuve in French Mistress/Manon 70 (1968). And on – there were over 100 other pictures that never saw the light of day in an American cinema – and proved just how fragile the marquee value of top stars who at one time or another had solidified their box office status with a string of hits.
You could add to that list a bunch denied release by Warner Brothers such as Sophie’s Place/Crooks and Coronets (1969) starring Telly Savalas, Hammer sci fi Moon Zero Two (1969), Crescendo (1970) with Stefanie Powers, Rabbit Run (1970) starring James Caan and The All-American Boy (1969) with Jon Voigt, all of which, like The Appointment, were first screened in America on television. Some movies, initially apparently as tough a sell, like Performance (1970), gained cinematic exposure.
In 1969 the studios collectively made losses of over $100 million. MGM, the worst-hit, $35.3 million in red, went into meltdown, closing down prestigious projects like Man’s Fate to be directed by Fred Zinnemann (A Man for All Seasons, 1966) and Martin Ransohoff’s production of Tai-Pan with Patrick McGoohan in the lead which between them had budgets approaching $20 million, including $8 million spent on pre-production. Also dropped was She Loves Me to star Julie Andrews and directed by Blake Edwards.
Warner Brothers, facing a $25 million loss, called time on 50 projects including Andrej Wajda’s Hollywood debut Heart of Darkness, William Dozier’s The Well of Loneliness, Edward Dmytryk’s Act of Anger, Nunnally Johnson’s The Frontiersman, God Save the Mark based on the Donald Westlake bestseller, Sentries based on the Evan Hunter thriller and Paradise from the Edna O’Brien story. Two Samuel Peckinpah movies were axed – North to Yesterday and Diamond Story. Mervyn LeRoy saw his pair – musical 13 Clocks based on the James Thurber bestseller and Downstairs at Ramsay’s – go the same way.
Also culled – Bryan Forbes’s Napoleon and Josephine, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Shakespeare biopic The Bawdy Bard and Bud Yorkin’s Hubba Hubba. Some later resurfaced but with different principals – Martin Ritt no longer attached to The Man Who Would Be King (1975) nor Sidney Lumet to 99 and 44% Dead (1974). WB was ruthless and also called time on Francis Coppola ventures Santa Rita and Vesuvius, Stuart Rosenberg’s Julie in Love, Elia Kazan’s Puerto Rico Story, and on adaptations of Robert Heinlein sci fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land, William Faulkner’s Wild Palms and Edna O’Brien’s August Is a Wicked Month as well as a movie based on Crosby and Nash’s song Wooden Ships. Universal scrapped 15 movies whose screenplays or book rights had been purchased just months bore.
Good Times, Bad Times, dead in the water in 1968, was reactivated two years later. Despite strenuous efforts and Elliot Gould and Kim Darby on A Glimpse of Tiger replaced by Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal plus Peter Bogdanovich at the helm that one failed to pass muster though the last-named trio later collaborated on What’s Up, Doc? (1972).
As well as A Small Town in Germany, Avco Embassy curtailed development of The Inheritors from the Harold Robbins bestseller, Willie – a biopic of Somerset Maugham – Little Me from the Neil Simon musical and When the Lion Feeds from the Wilbur Smith novel. In Britain, ABPC scratched A Question of Innocence starring Roger Moore and Feathers of Death directed by Richard Attenborough.
Some of the shelved films were released abroad – Crooks and Coronets, Diamonds for Breakfast, Moon Zero Two and Crescendo finding cinema distribution in the U.K. – but as we have seen from MGM executives dismissing foreign interest in The Appointment there was clearly a two-tier system at work with Hollywood determining that countries abroad had lower standards than the U.S. Equally, Hollywood studios argued that if a film didn’t deliver in a test run in a big city it was “pointless to chase additional bookings beyond the initial engagement and sometimes unwise to open at all.”
PREVIOUSLYREVIEWED IN THEBLOG: What it says about the Blog or my ability to find old lost films I don’t know but the following films have been reviewed in the Blog: The Appointment, The Picasso Summer, Fade In, The Extraordinary Seaman, Hostile Witness, Criminal Symphony/Criminal Affair. And I will endeavour to chase up more.
SOURCES: Advert, Kine Weekly, Dec 21, 1968, “Deferred Film Deals of W7,” Variety, July 23, 1969, p5; “Projects Scratched at Warners,” Variety, October 22, 1969, p6; “Ransohoff Lacks Word on Tai Pan,” Variety, October 29, 1969, p4; “Red Sunset on Write-Downs,” Variety, November 26, 1969, p3; “Universal Bathes in Youth Fountain,” Variety, December 10, 1969, p3; “WB’s 29-To-Come,” Variety, January 14, 1970, p7; “Unsalvageable Cupboard Item,” Variety, August 19, 1970, p3; “ABPC Suspends,” Variety, October 21, 1970, p25; “Picker on Flop Loss-Cutting,” Variety, August 26, 1970, p3; “Glimpse of Tiger Buried 2d Time,” Variety, May 12, 1971, p4; “In Shortage Era, 127 Lost Features, Unsellable Edsels of Celluldoi Mart,” Variety, December 22, 1971, p21; “TV-Bearish WB Cupboard,” Variety, May 29, 1972, p3.
The Magnificent 60s 