Seems you couldn’t make a moive about defeat in the 1960s, you had to find something in the story that sounded victorious. Although the Allied landings at Anzio in January 1944 eventually led to the liberation of Rome, the whole operation was a mess. So instead of concentrating on outnumbered American and British troops being pounded to pieces on the beaches, director Edward Dmytryk (Alvarez Kelly, 1966) opts for the men-on-a-mission angle.
Somewhat bizarre is the insertion of war correspondent Ennis (Robert Mitchum) into the story. Sure, because he’s not going to get busted for insubordination, he can challenge and/or lambast fictional commanding officers General Carson (Robert Ryan) and Major General Lasky (Arthur Kennedy) but it seems odd that he goes around spreading anti-war sentiment when the people escorting him are in serious danger of ebing killed. On the plus side are three sequences depicting the brutal reality of war in a way that no other picture of the period dared.
After landing unopposed Laskey decides not to risk moving forward, leaving his troops open to being trapped by advancing Germans even though Ennis, after commandeering a jeep, managed to reach Rome with encountering any opposition.
A Ranger battalion is sent to scout the surrounding countryside and the movie chooses to concentrate on a small platoon unit within that, headed by Sgt Stimmler (Earl Holliman) and including the fun-loving Corporal Rabinoff (Peter Falk), the kind of guy who spends the night before the landing entertaining three sex workers in the back of stolen ambulance who are of course desperate to learn the words to “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.”
After the Rangers are cut to pieces at the Battle of Cisterna, the unit escapes through a minefield, discovers a massive German construction site, holes up in house with three Italian women, is pinned down by snipers in a field of shell-holes and finally makes it back.
American tropps being slaughtered at Cisterna is a helluva note as the movie switches tack from exposing leadership folly to just getting the platoon out of this mess. Pursued by a flame-throwing Panzer, they pick their way through a minefield using the quite clever device of lobbing onto it large chunks of stone and then walking across on the stones as if crossing a dangerous river.
Wanting to find out more about the mysterious construction work results in Ennis causing the death of one of the gang. When they hide out in the Italian house, eventually killing off investigating Germans, the naïve Ennis wants to take the women with them.
Bit of marketing sleight-of-hand. Slinging a whole bunch of faces at the bottom of a poster was shorthand for all-star cast, which this picture definitely lacked.
Trapped by snipers in open country, they are being picked off one by one with only clever tricks and sacrifice offering a way out. One of the notions is to throw a fake grenade the snipers’ way. The instant reaction to any soldier to an incoming grenade is to get the hell out of the way, turning themselves into a turkey shoot. But the only other way to entice the snipers to reveal themselves is for the soldiers to take turns in presenting themselves as targets.
One of the ongoing themes of the picture is Ennis refusing to bear arms, and although the trailer shows him blasting away with a machine gun that only occurs at this climax when he seizes the weapon from a dead German. Ennis is an odd character for a war picture. None of the soldiers can believe anyone would not just volunteer to participate in a bloody war but carry nothing to defend themselves with. It’s a bit tiresome to hear him being reminded that he doesn’t have to be here, and to turn down the offer or a rifle or a grenade.
And for a non-combatant he’s not exactly uninvolved in strategic matters. A couple of times, as if he’s the most entitled grunt you ever came across, he virtually assumes command, barking orders that the others obey. Admittedly, it’s his cleverness that gets them through the minefield, but it’s his stupidity that gets others killed and to have him pontificating at the end that men go to war “because they like it” is incredibly facile, although in keeping with the anti-Vietnam sentiments of the time (1968, that is, not 1944).
Rabinoff, the only other character about whom we learn anything, is unfortunately on the preposterous side.
While the movie is far from dire, and as I said, very realistic when in portraying war actuality, it’s not the picture I guess audiences expected. While the scene-stealing of Peter Falk (Penelope, 1966) gets in the way, Robert Mitchum (5 Card Stud, 1968) proves an interesting character, although he is also laden down by having to spout a bunch of dumb lines. Arthur Kennedy (Fantastic Voyage, 1966) is the pick, especially at the end facing up to the ignominy of being relieved of command.
This kind of movie is potentially a breakout for the supporting cast. But here, with the exception of Falk, the script lets them down, nobody given the kind of distinctive characterisation that elevated The Dirty Dozen (1967), for example, above the norm. Apart from Earl Holliman (The Power, 1968) and Italian Giancarlo Giannini (The Sisters, 1969) this was not a career-making movie. You can spot Mark Damon (Dead Men Don’t Count, 1968), Patrick Magee (A Clockwork Orange, 1971), Anthony Steel (The Story of O, 1975), Rene Santoni (Guns of the Magnificent Seven, 1969), Wolfgang Preiss (Von Ryan’s Express, 1965) and Robert Ryan (Battle of the Bulge, 1965).
Edward Dmytryk (Mirage, 1965) does a reasonable job with the materials to hand, and the minefield and sniper scenes are first class. Italian veteran Duilio Coletti (Under Ten Flags, 1960) directed the Italian version though I’ve no idea what that was, or if it differed in any way from the Dmytryk cut. Coletti also had a hand in fashioning the screenplay along with H.A.L. Craig (Fraulein Doktor, 1969), Frank De Felitta (Audrey Rose, 1977) and Giuseppe Mangione (Run, Psycho, Run, 1968).
Preminger at a peak, the more I watch this picture, not just the more impressed I become but the more I want to watch it again – three times, as it happens, for this review. A tale of heroism populated by morally wounded heroes, the undertone of critique for the Naval establishment dealt with in brilliant narrative fashion, terrific pacing, one of John Wayne’s very best performances, Kirk Douglas not far behind, great action scenes, and one of the few movies to fulfil this director’s original intent.
You can, of course, argue that it’s the height of political PR. Just as the Americans managed with The Alamo and the British with Dunkirk, the aim was to turn defeat into victory, so this moves beyond the humiliation of Pearl Harbor to the victories beyond. But in some sense Pearl Harbor is just the prologue to a stiffer examination of men at war, rather than sailors taken to task over the complacency that left them so open to cataclysmic attack.
And while there’s a number of sub-plots, these are more expertly handled than I can recall in many another lengthy big-budget picture, no endless cutting between major and minor characters, but the minor characters only entering the frame when they have a dramatic part to play.
Captain “Rock” Rockwell (John Wayne) falls foul of his superiors for basically being in command of a ship sunk by a torpedo. On a technical point, he’s stripped of command, and reduced to a desk job, a casualty of the peace-time hierarchy determined to find someone to blame, only returning to active duty – and promoted to Admiral – when more war-oriented figures are put in charge.
The desk job gives him time to romance feisty nurse Lt. Maggie Haines (Patricia Haines) who has the cojones to take charge of the budding relationship. She happens to share an apartment with another nurse, the much younger Ensign Annalee Dorne (Jill Dorne) who is dating entitled Ensign Jeremiah Torrey (Brandon de Wilde), Rock’s estranged son.
Jeremiah works for slimy glory-hunter Commander Neal Owynn (Patrick O’Neal), a former U.S. Congressman using his political skills to worm his way into the office of by-the-book Vice Admiral Brodick (Dana Andrews). Rock shares his apartment with Commander Egan Powell (Burgess Meredith), a thrice-married playboy, high up in Navy intelligence.
Rock’s second-in-command is Commander – junior to a captain in case you don’t understand the U.S. Navy ranking system – Paul Eddington, a hothead whose mourning for dead wife Liz (Barbara Bouchet) results in him also being reduced to a desk job and exiled to the Pacific. On the fringes of the story are Lt. Commander “Mac” MacConnell (Tom Tryon) and pregnant wife Beverley (Paula Prentiss).
How all these characters enmesh is the consequence of a quite brilliant screenplay by Wendell Hayes (Advise and Consent, 1962). Rockwell and Eddington both seek redemption, the former to prove his Naval worth and regain the affection of his son, the latter to absolve himself for his terrible actions.
You can always tell the hero in war films because they are so rarely a physical casualty of war, all the others are killed and wounded but hardly ever the hero, so it takes something for the Hollywood Hero of the Century to play a character who is wounded not once but twice, and for the early part of the picture walks around with his arm in his sling (not quite an echo of the way he holds his arm in The Searchers, but evoking the same internal conflict).
The only supposed out-and-out hero is MacConnell, but his inaction at the beginning of the movie fails to prevent the death of Eddington’s wife. And his heroism largely takes place off-screen and it’s worth noting that Rock doesn’t raise a rifle or pistol in anger (or even get into a punch-up as was the actor’s wont in other films). Being in charge he’s removed from the core action even if suffering the consequences of battle. In a marvellous touch of irony, Rockwell is the most passive hero to hit the screen. It’s an incredibly bold and self-confident director who would even think of luring audiences into an action picture starring the Hero of the Century and then denying him a single moment of screen glory.
Much has been written about the cinematic arc John Ford took in the beginning and ending of The Searchers, the symbolic opening and closing of doors, but since Preminger is long out of critical favor nobody’s has bothered to notice how much of this film concerns cinematic echo.
To take the most obvious example, the first witnesses of the airborne Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor are illicit pair Liz Eddington and her paramour (Hugh O’Brian) and towards the end it’s her husband Paul, by this point guilty of horrendous behaviour, who leads the airborne fightback against the enemy.
A beach – where Liz and escort make love – is how the director initially pushes the audience towards sympathising with the drunken Eddington. A beach is where we later learn to despise him, as he brutally rapes Ensign Dorne. And it doesn’t take much to work out that his wife’s exuberant wildness explains Eddington’s initial attraction to her, not realising that psychologically it provides him with an excuse for his own darker wildness, initially restricted to self-destruction but when it truly emerges it’s to the detriment of an innocent.
And that’s before we get on to Rockwell as the messenger of death, delivering the bad news to wives, and then being on the receiving end after his son dies in battle. And finally, the political peace-time high-ups get their come-uppance in actual war.
It’s insulting – as some have suggested – that the performance of John Wayne (The Hellfighters, 1968) is the result of undiagnosed cancer when in fact this is a finely nuanced role of a high-ranking figure living out in his life in regret, at times quite shamefaced about abandoning his son at a very early age. Preminger cracked down on Wayne’s habit of splitting his lines in two, so those typical pauses we have come to expect are in large part gone, and it helps the movie’s pacing. For most of the movie the character is saddled with consequence. That passivity that the director saw as essential to the role is virtually present all the time.
Preminger wrings a different performance, too, from Kirk Douglas (A Lovely Way to Die, 1968), equally laden with regret, but not enough to prevent him lashing out and the actor is accorded two quite stunning scenes, the first as he broods in silence over his wife, but for the second, prior to raping Ensign Dorne, the stone-cold look on his face suggests a serial killer held at bay for too long and now about to explode.
Burgess Meredith (Hurry Sundown, 1967) is another brought to directorial heel, his more common scene-stealing and vowel-stretching also eliminated, but in exchange given a larger-than-life character on which to expend screen energy. The entire cast is good-to-excellent and it’s jam-packed: Patricia Neal (Hud, 1962), Tom Tryon (The Cardinal, 1964), Paula Prentiss (Man’s Favorite Sport, 1963), Brandon De Wilde (Shane, 1953), Jill Haworth (Exodus, 1960), Dana Andrews (The Satan Bug, 1965), Franchot Tone (Advise and Consent, 1962), Patrick O’Neal (Stiletto, 1969), George Kennedy (Cool Hand Luke, 1967), Henry Fonda (Battle of the Bulge, 1965), Barbara Bouchet (Danger Route, 1967) and Stanley Holloway (My Fair Lady, 1964) Many of the supporting cast were also playing against type – Prentiss as the young wife falling to pieces, Andrews and O’Neal as slippery political types, Holloway a guerrilla, and perhaps most interesting off Neal, not the typical woman left behind when the man goes off to war but, in her role as nurse, entering harm’s way herself.
And despite criticism of the miniatures used in sea scenes while that might have been obvious on the big screen you don’t notice it on the small screen. The action scenes are very well-done for the time, and quite unusual in that by and large it’s the Americans who appear shell-shocked not the enemy.
Cramming this much narrative into the overall arch of Pearl Harbor and retaliation against the Japanese, while bringing so many different characters to the fore with clear dramatic purpose is an amazing achievement, screenwriter Wendell Mayes (Advise and Consent) doing the heavy lifting in this department.
But Preminger the director is very much to the fore, in his composition and use of the camera for long tracking shots (a particular favorite of mine) such as at the beginning. A riveting watch full of splendid acting. Shooting it in black-and-white might have at one time appeared to date the picture but instead it has rendered it ageless. Five stars without a doubt.
“The Big Reveal” comes too late to save this heist-cum-melodrama. It can’t make up its mind whether it wants to join the canon of superlative 1960s caper pictures – in which case it needed to make a greater effort on the cat burglary front – or whether it’s an odd addition to the menage a trois category, in which case it needed characters you could actually believe. Worst of all, it contains one of the great artistic follies, a robbery carried out in time with an orchestra playing one of the great John Barry compositions, “Romance for a Guitar and Orchestra.”
The only problem, there’s no dramatic reason for this. Since the concert is miles away from the robbery, it’s not as if the music drowns out the shenanigans. Director Bryan Forbes (King Rat, 1965) shoots himself in the foot. It’s too clever a device by half, even if the music is intended as a counterpoint to the robbery’s more dramatic themes or the silence which had become a trope.
Cat burglar Henry (Michael Caine) forms a business partnership with elderly safecracker Moreau (Eric Portman) and falls for his wife Fe (Giovanna Ralli). The husband-wife relationship is off to begin with, he preferring males, and the wife admitting she doesn’t always find men attractive, though quite what she is hinting at is never made clear. The target is millionaire Salinas (David Buck), whom Henry is investigating to the point of pretending to be an alcoholic so he can get to know Salinas in a sanatorium.
Any other movie would get straight to the point – draw up plans and get on with it. But here, for no real reason except delay, Moreau wants them to do a trial run, a safecracking job on the mansion of the kind of couple who drive off in a posh car to attend a concert. The effort put into the planning isn’t really up to scratch, not when compared to the likes of Topkapi (1964) – to which every heist film of the era was measured – or Gambit (1966) or even the less well-known The Happy Thieves (1960) or Seven Thieves (1960).
Apart from some cat burglary skills the whole episode is perfunctory, guard dogs knocked out by drugs. The background music, the aforementioned John Barry opus, just about kills off any prospect of tension. It only sparks into life when Moreau admits the safe is beyond him and Henry has to prise it out of the wall and cart it to the waiting car.
The second heist would have been far more interesting had we known from the start that Salinas welcomes burglary attempts, seeing it as some kind of duel of wits with malfeasants.
In between the two robberies there is time enough – too much time in fact – for Henry and Fe to get it together, for Fe to run off and then return only to learn in The Big Reveal the kind of despicable man her husband is. The movie can’t even deal with the incestuous sub-plot and just lets it hang there. But by that stage you couldn’t care less. Fe isn’t the type of femme fatale to bother crossing the road for, the romance seems too prescribed and the downbeat ending makes no sense.
I’m only giving this any points at all really because it stars Michael Caine (Hurry Sundown, 1967) and features a lengthy slice of John Barry music. Caine has been in enough duds for sure, but this doesn’t have the ring of one of his doing-it-for-the-money numbers or a stab at the Hollywood big-budget scene. Caine is good enough and Eric Portman (The Bedford Incident, 1965) is an interesting study. But it just doesn’t gel, not just let down by Giovanna Ralli (The Caper of the Golden Bulls, 1967) but by the pretentious direction and dramatic miscalculation of Bryan Forbes.
Forbes’ wife Nanette Newman (The Wrong Box, 1966) makes a puzzling appearance in a small role with no dramatic credibility. Leonard Rossiter (Deadlier than the Male, 1967) provides another cameo. For many the high spot will be to see John Barry in the flesh, conducting the orchestra playing his composition.
Too many peculiarities for a small British B-picture that just about makes it over the line after “The Big Reveal.” You can start with the fact that, ostensibly, this was director Cy Endfield’s follow-up to his blockbusting Zulu (1964). In fact, it had been made long before, but sat on a shelf for a year, and only released to cash in on Zulu. And you can see why studio British Lion didn’t know what to do with it.
Diving down a 39 Steps thriller-sized rabbit hole, baffled professor saddled with adventurous female go on the run searching for answers to, wait for it, a crime which hasn’t actually been committed. There’s action on a train, some comedy as the worlds of academia and the sophisticated fast set collide, romance on a barge, Cold War skullduggery, too much chess, a bit of welcome role reversal, a cliff-top fight, and some dry wit that might have fitted better into a straightforward romantic comedy. And it ends with a twist of such audacity that it would either come as a relief to a bewildered audience or send them home frustrated at such a denouement.
Rocket scientist David Garrett (Ian Carmichael) becomes embroiled in not even really a plot when he attempts to return a box, containing an inordinate amount of loot, to its owner, chess grandmaster Dr Melnicker (George Pravda). Luckily, a clue in the form of a chess move takes him to a posh London house in fashionable Chelsea where he encounters the slinky Maggie (Janet Munro) and after hiding in a sandpit in a children’s playground to evade pursuers he ends up on a train with her heading north to a place called Flamboro.
But, wait, his pursuers are also on the train, so naturally the couple have to jump off, fall into a river and hitch a lift on a passing barge whose owner Wilkins (Hugh Griffith) proves most obliging. Indeed, Maggie is even more obliging, taking the lead in bedding the shy professor. Things get interesting when Maggie, at a road sign, takes David in the completely opposite direction to Flamboro. That works for about ten seconds until a henchman Paul (Kieron Moore) captures them at gunpoint.
Rather than just shooting David dead he decides it would be cleaner to chuck him over a cliff. Luckily, David is a shade pluckier than you might expect. After winning this cliff-top tussle and shocked at having chucked a man over a cliff he is even more astonished to discover he is stranded, Maggie having made off in the car. Luckily, a passing policeman on a bicycle ensures David makes it safe to Flamboro, which turns out to be a huge mansion perched on a cliff.
My guess is by now you are so hooked by this story that you’ll want me to reveal The Big Reveal. Well, the whole thing turns out to be a trap. Melnicker, the pursuing thugs, Paul (who, you’ll not be too astonished to learn, ain’t dead) and even Maggie have all been plotting to bring David here so that he can be kidnapped and handed over to a submarine arriving the following day. You see, David has been so outspoken (has he?) against his masters that everyone will put his disappearance down to defection. It’s all been a cleverly worked-out chess move as chief baddie Hubert (Curd Jurgens) takes pains to point out.
But our David isn’t exceptionally brainy for nothing and finds a way to outwit the bad guys with Maggie, by now repenting of her bad ways and fallen in love, along for the ride.
So what’s gone wrong? The casting, unfortunately, for one thing. Star Ian Carmichael (School for Scoundrels, 1960), better known for comedy, doesn’t quite make the switch to more straightforward thriller. And Curd Jurgens (Psyche ’59, 1964), whom you might expect to add some gloss, doesn’t appear till the end.
Worse, the film doesn’t find the right tone, too much comedic British observation, and not enough of the hero being in genuine jeopardy. Only a clueless professor would run from the thugs. If the big twist had occurred halfway through and the audience had time to wonder whose side Maggie was on and feel David was in in genuine danger it might have hit the bullseye because, oddly enough, the romance is believable in a Hot Enough for June (1964) kind of way, where innocent male is scooped up by a more worldly female way above his league.
But the role reversal is fun. She’s the one who goes to his rescue when he falls in the river, she’s the seductress, and gets to tell him he looks better “when he’s cross” (a line more typically with slight variations falling to the male) and delivers the movie’s one cracker: “Being a man you have no respect for a mink coat.” She would be an ideal candidate for femme fatale if only the director had let us in on the story quicker, but she’s certainly an astute lure.
Because I wasn’t expecting much, I have probably been a shade less critical than if I was viewing it as a follow-up to Zulu. In the end, it’s passable enough, especially if you are willing to see how clever it’s been.
As I mentioned Ian Carmichael (Lucky Jim, 1957) is the weak link but former Disney protégé Janet Munro (Swiss Family Robinson, 1960), now blossomed in sexy fashion, steals the show and on this performance you might be surprised she did not have a more illustrious career but she had a heart condition and died prematurely at the age of 38. Curd Jurgens was at the early stages of inventing his villainous persona. The other characters are merely pawns in the plot so end up as stock villains. Cy Endfield’s genuine follow-up to Zulu was worth seeing – Sands of the Kalahari (1965).
Breezy western debut that created five legends: announced the arrival of a new directorial force in Sergio Leone; bestowed screen stardom on Clint Eastwood; instantly created a new mini-genre in the Spaghetti western; provided a platform for the distinctive music of Ennio Morricone; and best of all from the producers’ perspective made a mountain at the box office. You could add in a cavalier attitude to corpses and adding a notch to the development of that 1960s standby, the anti-hero. From now on the good guy could be a bad guy or so morally ambiguous as not to make a difference.
Look no further than the opening scene to note the alternative Leone approach to the western. An anonymous stranger (Clint Eastwood) arriving in town, observes, while drinking water from a well, a gang torment a small boy by firing bullets at his feet. Indifference to the taboo subject of violence to children became a Leone trademark, most evident when children are slaughtered in Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). Most astonishing of all here, the stranger, ostensibly our hero, does not intervene despite, as we shall soon discover, being a ferocious shot.
Who the heck is this Bob Robertson? A pseudonym for Sergio Leone, as if Robertson was particularly any better known than the debut director.Daniel Martin, oddly enough, is correct, but John Wells, Carol Brown and Benny Reeves are all made up.
Instead he learns that the child is being kept from his imprisoned mother Marisol (Marianne Koch), who has been taken from her husband Julio (Daniel Martin) by Ramon Rojo (Gian Maria Volonte). Rather than directly intervene a a good hero should, the stranger decides to profit from the situation. Realizing there are two opposition factions in town, the Rojos and the Baxters, he decides to play them off against each other, taking money in turn from each, demonstrating his credentials by shooting four men. That the Baxter clan includes the town sheriff (Wolfgang Lukschy) shows how powerful the Rojos have become.
In fact the stranger doesn’t orchestrate a straightforward shoot-em-up as you might expect but cleverly gets them to kill each other first of all by arranging for both families to confront each other in a makeshift cemetery where the stranger has deposited the bodies of two men, the supposed survivors of a massacre of Mexican soldiers escorting a gold shipment. The Rojos win this round.
After appearing as nothing but a ruthless opportunist, the stranger now turns into a hero, freeing Marisol, reuniting her with husband and son, and giving them money to go away. This kind act does not go unnoticed, the stranger captured and tortured, the Baxters massacred on the assumption he was acting on their behalf. The stranger escapes in a coffin, fashions himself some chest armour in a tin mine, and confronts the remaining Rojos in an old-fashioned, though with a typical Leone twist, gunfight.
Setting aside the body count, which enraged traditionalists, including the vast majority of critics who would later endorse the even more violent blood-letting of The Wild Bunch (1969), the trio of Leone, Eastwood and Morricone put their innovative stamp on the western.
Stylistically, it was in a class of its own (until, at last, Leone outdid himself with the further adventures of The Man with No Name and Once Upon a Time in the West). The operatic elements which feature so strongly in his later work, are here confined to the plethora of close-ups, more like portraits and extremely well-lit, the circular camera movement for the climax (again, more evident in Once Upon a Time in the West), and the stillness before the shoot-out, the way tension builds through nothing happening for a considerable amount of time, not through characters shifting to more advantageous position, but simply while the camera sits and broods.
Leone cut out exposition, generally a large part of the beginning of any western, the stranger having no emotional involvement in the situation. A normal western would focus on the forcibly estranged husband attempting to free the imprisoned wife, perhaps as in The Magnificent Seven (1960) hiring someone to do it for him. The stranger, in effect, sets out to profit from misery.
And he doesn’t say much. A character this monosyllabic would be a supporting actor in a traditional western, perhaps fulfilling a comic role or given some elaborate emotional back story for why words were so precious he wouldn’t spend them.
And he’s definitely iconic. In a later scene, Leone has Eastwood materializing out of the swirling dust in a scene that would easily have fitted the traditional western. But for the most part, he relies on audience reaction to a character who dresses in far from traditional fashion, most notably with his poncho and cigars. The western hero didn’t squint either. He walked not situations with his eyes open, indicative of his boldness and ability to face any situation.
Leone avoids classic western confrontation, the one-on-one scenes that usually occur close to the start where the hero either exhibits prowess or is humiliated. In what might be called “the Chicago Way” not only does nobody come to a gunfight with a knife, the bad guys come mob-handed.
Sure, that means the hero is shown to be even more deadly with a pistol, but it also permits Leone to extend the action by focusing not just on two opposing characters but a number of different faces. There are some other motifs at play in Leone’s debut – women are not all as submissive as Marisol, Consuelo, the Baxter matriarch, on hiring the stranger, says “I’m rich enough to appreciate the men my money can buy,” her power and wealth finding later echo in Once Upon a Time in the West.
Last but not least, is the Morricone sound. There had been great western themes before, plaintive as in High Noon (1952) and The Alamo (1960) or stirring like The Big Country (1958) and The Magnificent Seven (1960), but this appeared to arrive from a different orchestral planet.
If ever a movie could claim ownership of the title “a star is born” it’s this one. Perhaps it has remained so special because the triumvirate of Leone, Eastwood and Morricone had such illustrious careers, this merely a starting point rather than, as if often the case when Hollywood anoints a new star, the highlight.
Fans of Succession will appreciate this power struggle in a Scottish army regiment set in 1948. In a reverse of The Godfather (1972) where the Corleones complain about needing a “wartime consigliore,” here the powers-that-be have decided this unnamed distinctly Highlander company requires a commanding officer with skills more appropriate to peace time.
Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness) has been in charge of the battalion since the North Africa campaign in World War Two when the original commander was killed. But he has never been promoted to full Lt. Col. Naturally, having been in charge for six years, he feels the job should be his. At a time when the currency of command was wartime experience he’s less than pleased when he loses out to Col. Barrow (John Mills) who spent most of the war as a Japanese POW.
It doesn’t help that they are complete opposites. Sinclair is a tough, hard-drinking, attention-seeking Scotsman who enlisted as an ordinary soldier and rose through the ranks winning two medals for courage during the conflict. Barrow is Oxford-educated English upper-class, a lecturer at Sandhurst Military Academy, and recalls his war experience with terror rather than the braggadocio of Sinclair. Worse, he doesn’t drink.
It doesn’t take long for the pair to clash. Sinclair, who has ruled as much by preying on weakness as force of personality, is quick to start to look for flaws in his opponent’s make-up. Barrow feels discipline has been slipping and enforces tougher measures. That might make him unpopular but an army is built on discipline so soldiers can hardly complain.
But Barrow slips up by misreading the men. He chooses the worst of all issues to make a stand. For the first post-war official barracks party, Barrow insists the soldiers embark on traditional Highland dancing in regulation fashion rather than in their normal exuberant, not to say rowdy, manner. The soldiers are infuriated when Barrow insists they take lessons.
He has just lit the fuse. Naturally, nothing goes according to plan. Barrow is humiliated, Sinclair triumphant. But victory does not turn out the way Sinclair expected.
Somewhat cynical rebranding of the film in Italy as “Whisky and Glory,” possibly trying to cash in on the success of “Whisky Galore” and also misleading in suggesting actual conflict with the fighting in the background.
The main thrust of the narrative, as you might expect, is the stand-off between Sinclair and Barrow and the tensions felt all round, as would be the case in any business (Succession, now, of course the classic example) when a new boss takes control. While everyone might expect, and perhaps fear, change, in the military (as in the navy) there is always the danger, should the new broom try to sweep too clean, of mutiny.
This might not amount to a raising of arms. But there are other effective methods of mounting opposition – laxity, questioning or outright refusal to obey orders – or giving the new chief the cold shoulder. Here, in the background, are other simmering tensions. Not everyone is comfortable with Sinclair’s very laddish approach to command, the back-stabbing and double-dealing Major Charles Scott (Dennis Price) ready to pounce at any opportunity.
Sinclair is also having to deal with his daughter Morag (Susannah York) asserting her independence, having the temerity not just to take a boyfriend, Corporal Fraser (John Fraser), but one from the ranks rather than the officer class. And he feels the harsh tongue of his own paramour Mary (Kay Walsh).
Emotional isolation is rarely commented upon in matters of the armed forces and yet it is so much a driving force. If not adequately compensated by camaraderie, a man at the top can be very lonely indeed, and prone to the most vicious self-torment.
Director Ronald Neame (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1969) superbly invokes an army atmosphere away from the more usual battleground backdrop. The picture is anchored by brilliant performances all round and a roll-call of strong supporting characters. An unflinching look at power, especially leadership and the personal toll it takes. And it was astonishing that the movie could hit the target so well without relying on the usual round of sex, violence or that old stand-by the comic subordinate. It also probes the issues of what happens – in any industry – when the wrong person is put in charge. No less an authority than Alfred Hitchcock called it “one of the best films ever made.”
The sparring between Oscar-winning Alec Guinness (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966) and John Mills (The Family Way, 1966), who won the Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival for this role, is of the highest quality. Dennis Price (The Comedy Man, 1964) is the pick of the support while Susannah York (Sands of the Kalahari, 1965) makes an auspicious debut.
Few films could boast a better supporting cast: former British leading lady Kay Walsh (A Study in Terror, 1965), Gordon Jackson (The Ipcress File, 1965), Duncan Macrae (Best of Enemies, 1961), John Fraser (Tamahine, 1963), Gerard Harper (Adam Adamant Lives!, 1966-1967, TV series) and Peter McEnery (The Moon-Spinners, 1964).
James Kennaway (The Shoes of the Fisherman, 1968) wrote the screenplay based on his own novel.
I’m sticking my neck out on this one – under-rated would be an understatement – and primarily because it’s the Duke’s most intriguing film of the decade and possibly ever. For a start we have John Wayne The Quitter (the hell you say!). Then he ducks out of the picture for a full quarter of an hour (he does what?). Fast forward a couple of years and this would have led the disaster cycle pack – a little tinkering with the structure and you would have all four principals fighting fires in South America in the middle of a revolution (beat that, The Towering Inferno.) But most enthralling of all this is a family drama masquerading as an action picture.
And it led me to thinking if True Grit (1969) had not landed on Wayne’s doorstep whether he would have continued down the dramatic rather than the action road for the tail end of his career. He had just collected his first million-dollar fee so in box office terms he was untouchable. And just for the record, the action scenes, especially given the absence of CGI, are terrific. Sure, the oil’s a little bit too thin to pass for real oil, but it does gets sloshed over all concerned, including the Duke, by the bucketload.
And it might be a shade on the episodic side, Chance Buckman (John Wayne) and compadres racing from one hellish event to another, but it’s wrapped around a tight dramatic core, Chance vs independent daughter Tish (Katharine Ross), Chance vs one-time sidekick and now Tish’s husband Greg (Jim Hutton), Chance vs. Tish’s mother Madelyn (Vera Miles) and Chance vs. all the dimwits on the board of the company he quit his own operation to join.
Chance is based on the real-life Red Adair, an oilman who had invented the extremely scientific but extremely dangerous method of putting out oil-well fires. When a gazillion gallons of oil spurting unchecked out of the ground catch fire you’ve got a helluva problem on your hands. A gazillion gallons of water ain’t going to cut it. The only solution is to cut off the oxygen supply long enough to cap the well. Red Adair’s technique: blast the oxygen out of the way. He’d attach drums filled with massive amounts of nitro-glycerine, roll them into the blaze on the end of cranes, hide behind nothing more resilient than hazard suits and shields made of corrugated iron, and detonate them. The resulting explosion did the trick.
The picture opens with this stunt, although after being accidentally injured, Chance is hospitalized, bringing estranged daughter and ex-wife into the dramatic frame. After a pretty frosty meet-cute, Tish and Greg hit it off and get married, forcing Tish to confront the fear that drove Chance and Madelyn apart, that, like the wife of a Formula One driver, she never knows if her husband will come back. This bothers the feisty Tish a lot less than the weary Madelyn. And she even ignores all protocol and rushes to her husband’s side, regardless of the danger.
Meanwhile, Chance decides not only has he had enough of dicing with danger but he can leave his company in the safe hands of Greg. His life now on a more mundane keel, Madelyn is attracted back. But of course it wouldn’t do for Chance to live out retirement with nothing more testy than board meetings so he comes back into the fray during a rebellion in Venezula and both women have to confront their true feelings.
The action, considering the lack of CGI, or the kind of budget available to The Towering Inferno, is first-class. This is the ideal movie reversal. Instead of running away from a fire, these characters race towards it. There are some hair-raising moments. At one blowout, gas is leaking from the ground, poisoning everyone in sight, Greg is trapped underwater. And should complacency sneak in, fire, being on the unpredictable side, is prone to sudden explosion.
John Wayne (The Undefeated, 1969) has always excelled at restrained emotion and here he gets both barrels. Having got rid of the over-protective wife he’s now saddled with a daughter he’s desperate to protect from the hell he put his wife through. He’s faultless here, given considerably more acting scope than normal and not, as in McLintock (1963), just able to tan a woman’s backside, presenting a more contemporary male, perhaps as puzzled by female behavior as any of his cowboys, but taking a more modern approach to resolving his feelings.
Katharine Ross (Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, 1969) has her best role, not a mere appendage as in her other films of this period, but driving forward the action through her independence. Jim Hutton (Walk, Don’t Run, 1966) is growing on me. I’ve reversed my view of him as a lightweight. Vera Miles (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962) does a pretty good job of playing older – she was not yet 40 – and essays a complicated character, more rounded than was often the case with the female lead in Wayne pictures. Veterans Jay C. Flippen (Firecreek, 1968) and Bruce Cabot (The Undefeated) head the support.
The perennially underrated Andrew V McLaglen (The Undefeated) does a pretty good job with the action, as you might expect, but is also savvy enough to let the dramatic scenes flow. Clair Huffaker (Rio Conchos, 1964) penned the screenplay.
Guilty pleasure personified, you might say, but I’d retort that this is a damn fine picture erroneously ignored – rating only two paragraphs in Scott Eyman’s 650-page biography of John Wayne for example – possibly because it appeared in between the critically-reviled The Green Berets (1968) and the critically-acclaimed True Grit.
Arthur Miller, author of arguably the greatest play of the 20th century, Death of a Salesman, had gone to Reno to get a divorce so he could marry Marilyn Monroe. While there, he befriended some cowboys who took him with them while they caught horses. He turned the experience into a short story The Mustangs, published in Esquire (October 1957 issue). It provided the basis for the screenplay The Misfits. While the character of Roslyn, played by Monroe, was based on another woman, Miller explained, “I had written it to make Marilyn feel good.”
In July 1958 he sent it off to director John Huston, not just on account of a body of work that included The Big Sleep (1946) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), but because he had nursed Monroe through her debut on The Asphalt Jungle (1952) calming her nerves by telling her “if you’re not nervous you might as well give up.” Miller felt Huston would “present Marilyn with the bracing challenge, her fighting her problems through to a fine performance.”
Huston was enthusiastic – he saw the story as representative of a “dog-eat-horse-society” – and called the writer over to his house in Ireland where they spent two weeks putting the finishing touches to the screenplay, except for the last 15 minutes. Originally, it was a lengthy piece, almost an epic, production executives timing it at two hours 47 minutes, too unwieldy for a standard drama, so inevitably compromise would be required.
For tax reasons, Huston wanted to film in Mexico but relented and agreed to shooting it in Nevada. Talent agency MCA, which represented Huston, effectively put the film together as a package. Although Robert Mitchum was initial first choice, when he didn’t respond the screenplay went to Clark Gable, another MCA client, who accepted immediately. Eli Wallach was next on board. At this point, with only six films under his belt and better known for his work on Broadway, Wallach would not have expected to see his name above the title. But he was told that his name would be second to appear on the credits, after Gable.
But as the weeks went by and first Monroe then Montgomery Clift – both MCA clients – signed up his name slipped further down the credits. He consoled himself that his name would be “first position under the title” as that billing position was technically known. That proved an illusion. Thelma Ritter, apparently, boasted greater box office wattage so in the final credit rankings he placed fifth.
Although Monroe was viewed as the most mentally fragile, Clift and Gable also had issues to overcome. Due to the injuries suffered in a car crash and his well-known dependency on drugs, nobody would insure Clift but eventually an agreement was reached. Gable failed the medical, having gained 35lb while filming It Happened in Naples (1960) in Italy, ballooning his weight to 230lb. But two weeks later he was cleared.
The producer for such a heavyweight production was an industry lightweight. Frank E. Taylor’s main claim to fame was that he had been Miller’s publisher before he achieved fame as a playwright, working for the small company that published the author’s non-fiction work Situation Normal (1944) and the novel Focus (1945). Taylor had some Hollywood experience, but after four years employed there managed only one credit, John Sturges’ film noir Mystery Street (1950).
The original plan to start filming in September 1959 was scuppered by the incompletion of It Happened in Naples so it was shelved until the next spring. The next start date – March 3, 1960 – was an unexpected casualty of the Actors Strike which had delaying shooting on Monroe-starrer Let’s Make Love by five weeks. So when that film finished on July 1, there was little of a break for Monroe what with costume and wig fittings and test photographs before reporting on July 18, 1960, for what was expected to be a 50-day shoot, for The Misfits.
The budget was set at $3.5 million – a substantial amount for a black-and-white picture – with $1.6 million going to the principals. Clark Gable was down for $750,000, Marilyn Monroe and John Huston $300,000 apiece – although a generous profit participation scheme could see the actress earn as much as Gable – and Arthur Miller on $225,000. It was shot mainly on location in Nevada at Reno, Dayton and Pyramid Lake (a misnomer because it was all dried out) with a couple of weeks’ studio work at the end. Unusually, it was being filmed in chronological order to assist Monroe achieve her characterization.
Taylor had achieved a publicity coup by convincing famed photographic cooperative Magnum to cover the shoot in depth. Photographers of the calibre of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath and Eve Arnold worked in teams of two, each for a 15-day stint. Bresson would say of Monroe’s ethereal beauty: “I was struck as by an apparition in a fairy tale.”
Before a foot of film was exposed, the movie was in crisis. The script had been refused approval by the Production Code, the self-censorship system to which all studios subscribed. Code head honcho Geoffrey Shurlock complained that “the illicit relationship involving Roslyn and Gay seems to lack effective compensating moral values…(with the) difficulty that your story readily accepts illicit sex rather than condemning it.”
While there was publicity value to be gained from a tussle with the Production Code, it would not sit well with the distributors. The lack of a rating would inhibit many cinemas from risking a booking, despite the box office appeal of the cast.
Everyone had known going into production that getting Monroe on the set at all never mind in a condition to work would be a considerable achievement. Aware of her inability to rise early, Huston had shifted the daily start time by an hour to 10am. Sometimes shooting was restricted to only a couple of hours per day and since she was in most scenes there was a limit to how much the director could shoot around her.
Among the cast nobody knew her better than Eli Wallach. He had met the actress several years before when she had popped backstage after his performance in Teahouse of the August Moon on Broadway. He recalled: “She looked nothing like the movie star I’d seen onscreen; she wore a simple dress and had short blond hair. She was pale, shy, and wore no lipstick.” They became friends and would go out dancing. He introduced her, gradually, to The Actors Studio where she met Lee Strasberg, husband to Paula who became her acting coach.
“By the time we began to work on The Misfits in 1960,” said Wallach, “she seemed to have become a different Marilyn than the one I had known in New York, and the action that happened off-screen during the making of the film seemed to rival what was happening onscreen.”
Even so, the early part of the shoot went well. Commented Wallach, “Her mood waned and she began to lose her self-confidence.” For one scene where she was to do nothing more difficult than cross the road, she kept stopping halfway through. She had forgotten her motivation. Huston advised, “Your motivation comes from your need to cross the street without getting hit by any of the cars.” The next take was perfect.
But the signs of trouble were there from the outset. The evening before her first scene a nervous Monroe nearly took an overdose of Nembutal. Her unpredictability meant that on some days she only managed an hour or two, other days nothing at all. On August 27 she collapsed and was sent to Westside Hospital in Los Angeles for treatment, where she could be weaned off her addiction to barbiturates under the care of her analyst, not returning until September 6. On September 12, 13 and 19, she was indisposed and didn’t turn up for work.
If this was a case of life imitating art – her marriage to Miller was falling apart – she seemed to react to some lines as if the words were intended for Marilyn and not the character she was playing. In one scene Gable says, “You’re the saddest girl I ever met. What makes you so sad?” Monroe burst into tears. Wallach surmised, “Marilyn seemed to feel that the camera could detect her innermost thoughts.” In another scene, where Monroe and Wallach dance she “seemed upset and unhappy.”
Apart from casting her in The Asphalt Jungle, Huston had “saved her from the casting couch” by prior to that film setting up a proper screen test for her opposite John Garfield, providing her with a calling card that would reduce the requirement for her to jump into bed with a producer to get a part. But even on The Asphalt Jungle, she seemed dependent on her acting coach, at this point Natasha Lytess. “At the end of a take,” recalled Huston, “Marilyn would look to her for approval. The coach would nod her head.”
Monroe was taking pills to go to sleep and pills to wake up in the morning. The doctor on location eventually refused to give her any more, but of course she found them elsewhere. After visiting her in hospital, Huston was convinced the worst was over. But her renewed effervescence didn’t last.
“Marilyn returned to her old ways as though she’d never had a break,” recollected Huston. “One Sunday afternoon I visited her in her suite to get an idea of what to expect in the week ahead. She greeted me euphorically – then went into a kind of trance. She was the worst I’d ever seen her. Her hair was a tangle; her hands and feet were grubby; she was wearing only a short nightgown which wasn’t any cleaner than the rest of her.”
Despite her personal problems, Monroe was an extremely skilled actress. Observed Huston, “She could be marvelously effective. She wasn’t acting – I mean she was not pretending to an emotion. It was the real thing. She would go deep down within herself and find it and bring it up into consciousness.”
Huston, not necessarily known for accommodating actors, turned on the charm, always agreeing to another take if Monroe or Paula Strasberg (paid $3,000 a week) asked for it. Although most people disparaged Paula’s presence on the set or, more correctly, Monroe’s dependence on her, Huston acknowledged that without her his job would have been more difficult and he called a halt to crewmen nicknaming her Black Bart after her choice of clothing, habitually a black sack dress and black hat. So integral was Strasberg to Monroe’s life that the actress later moved from a hotel room shared with her husband to Strasberg’s apartment.
When even Strasberg failed to control her client, her husband Lee, the inventor of the Method School of acting which had revolutionised American drama, was flown in from New York. He had a different take on the situation. The problem wasn’t with Monroe but Huston. The director’s – refusing to deal directly with Paula. Raged Lee: “I will not tolerate this treatment of her, she is an artist,” threatening remove his wife from the picture.
Miller saw it differently: “Coach (Strasberg) was a little crazy, she was an opportunist I thought and not competent to help.” However, there was a very real issue to be addressed. Monroe had never come to terms with her fame and could not cope with the pressure of being the screen character with whom the world was infatuated.
Monroe’s technique was very individual. “I don’t want to discuss the Method. I don’t believe I have the experience. I try to use Method to the best of my ability. It makes working more possible…The writer has done the words then it’s up to the actor…I can’t work unprepared, I’d shoot myself. I can’t memorize words by themselves. I have to memorize the feeling.”
Clark Gable was on a career high, at least in terms of remuneration, earning $750,000 a picture, on a par with John Wayne and William Holden, the highest-earning stars at the time. Gable had the privilege of being paired with some of the top female stars – But Not For Me (1959) with Carroll Baker, Doris Day in Teacher’s Pet (1958) and Sophia Loren on It Happened in Naples, the title a twist on his star-making picture It Happened One Night (1934), and more than holding his own against Burt Lancaster in war picture Run Silent, Run Deep (1958).
Despite his commercial appeal he held to a particular ethos when choosing a role. “If I hadn’t liked this story I wouldn’t have done it no matter how much money they offered me,” he said. “I have to like the story or I won’t do it…I never select a part for the part itself. I always look at the overall story first.” Of his character, Gable observed: “He’s the same man but the world has changed. Then he was noble. Now he is ignoble.”
The press was salivating over the prospect of The King falling for The Blonde Bombshell. But regardless of her physical attractions, Gable was put off the actress by her untidiness and her lack of personal hygiene. But he was not perturbed by her behavior. “I’m just unhappy about her problems, her fears, her personal life, but if I were to chastise or criticize her it would only deepen her despair,” he said. When, largely thanks to Monroe’s hospitalization, shooting continued past the original completion date he was compensated to the tune of an extra $48,000.
With the male actors, Gable had a tendency to get off on the wrong foot. Initially annoyed with Montgomery Clift for fluffing lines, they became good friends after trading insults. But it took John Huston to end an unexpected rift between Gable and Eli Wallach.
Prior to their first day working together, Eli Wallach was surprised to answer a knock on his hotel room door to find Gable’s assistant Bama Davis who asked him to read to the visitor the scene they would perform the next day. Somewhat puzzled by this behavior and worried this approach was indicative of the actor, Wallach did not speak to Gable when they first met. It fell to Huston to break the ice by handing both actors a shot of Jack Daniels.
Gable was more sensitive to his own performance than you might imagine. He asked Huston to reshoot the scene where he wakens up Monroe because he “didn’t think he showed the love that was necessary.” He refused a stunt double for the scene where Gable, Wallach and Clift try to throw the mustang. In the film the mare dragged Gable and Wallach around the lake floor. In reality, in long shot it was stunt double Tom Palen being dragged by an actual horse. For close-ups of Gable while there were no horses in sight, the star was still dragged at 35mph for 400ft behind a truck. It took 28 cuts of Gable for the stallion fight to be matched with second unit footage.
Gable was angry at the way the second unit treated Tom Palen. After the stuntman had already endured two injuries Gable drew the line on hearing that he was called upon to be smashed on the face by hooves.
Gable was immensely proud of his work. “I have two things to be proud of in my career – Gone with the Wind and this one.” He later amended that to, “This is the best thing I did in my life.”
John Huston and Reno, where the film crew were housed, were a match made in heaven. The director was an inveterate gambler. He lost $25,000 one night but won it back the next and some. Overall, he left with less than when he arrived.
But he had an artist’s instinct when it came to film. He was not one for giving much direction. Huston expected “actors to be themselves, he didn’t interfere very much with their interpretation.” He prided himself on telling an actor as little as possible. “When I have to step in, I feel defeated.”
But he knew what he wanted and how, technically, to get the best out of an actor. At first Wallach played his drunk scene with rage until Huston pointed out that drunks always try to pretend they’re sober. And Huston knew what he didn’t want. Which was unwanted advice from an actor. For one scene with Monroe, Wallach expected a close up and committed the cardinal error of pointing this out to the director. “Never,” growled Huston, “never tell a director where to set up the camera.”
For Montgomery Clift’s first scene where he is seen talking to his mother in a callbox, Huston wrapped it after the first take, ignoring Clift’s pleas for another shot. ‘You’ll never do it better,’ said Huston, ensuring he did not fall prey to Clift’s lack of self-confidence either.
Monroe seemed to instinctively understand – and approve of – Huston’s technique. “He watches for the reality of a situation and he leaves it alone and he waits until he needs more or less before he comes in.”
Monroe wasn’t the only one whose illness shut down the set. Shooting on October 3 was cancelled because Huston came down with a recurrence of bronchitis due to the alkali dust on the dry lake. He was missing again the following day.
But if the actors in general appreciated Huston’s technique, Arthur Miller did not. It was unusual for a screenwriter to be present during the entirety of a shoot. For all that he brought certain extra intensity to scenes he re-wrote and his improvisation resulted in at least one great scene – Monroe’s paddle-boarding was not originally in the script but incorporated after watching her play with the toy between takes – Miller was generally a pain in the butt.
With no experience of moviemaking he clearly regarded himself as something of an authority and failed to recognise the distinction between the production of a play – where the writer was top dog – and a movie, where he was not.
Miller complained to Huston and Taylor about the lack of atmosphere, calling for more long shots “to constantly remind us how isolated these people are.” He had the temerity to criticize Gable’s performance. For one scene he observed that the actor had not “shown sufficient expression in his eyes.” Gable patiently explained that actions had to be minimized because they would be magnified a hundred times on the screen. “He turned out to be right,” conceded Miller, “he had simply intensified an affectionate look that was undetectable a few feet away.”
“I learnt from John,” said Miller, “ that he would pack the lens with material and let the camera choose…he put a lot of elements in front of the camera and let it find its way. So there’s not a lot of cutting from one face to the other ion conversation.” (In fact, this was old-school filmmaking where characters were grouped together rather than filmed apart). But he complained vociferously about the director’s positioning of Monroe fifty yards from the camera for her “Murderers! Murderers!” scene.
Miller thought such distance would ensure she wouldn’t be heard. But when Miller saw the rushes he realised the director was right. Huston wanted to portray Monroe at this point “as if she were a voice lost in the wilderness.”
Miller also wanted one scene which fades to darkness. Huston had to explain the practicalities. “You can only have one light in any given scene. In plays you can dim the light through a scene but not in a motion picture. You’re asking for values that aren’t there.”
His presence certainly wasn’t doing his wife any good. It might have been better if he had been absent, since the marriage appeared to disintegrate under their noses. He was being prophetic when he said of her first scene: “I couldn’t help feeling her disappointment not only in her character’s marriage but in her own…I had sensed something withdrawn in her, not merely in the character she was playing.”
He was prone to rewriting, in part with what he believed were better ideas, but also to emphasize developments he perceived in the characters as their screen personalities unfolded. By October 6 Gable had enough of the constant script changes and refused to film anything that had been written after September 20. Luckily, he relented and agreed to shoot the much-revised final scene. But even Miller received his come-uppance on a personal level. One day on location miles into the desert, Huston came upon a stranded Miller, abandoned by Monroe and her entourage.
Four-time Oscar nominee Montgomery Clift had an extraordinary success rate in pictures. Up till now he had appeared in only thirteen pictures but at least half were gems – Red River (1948), A Place in the Sun (1951), I Confess (1953), From Here to Eternity (1953), Raintree County (1957), The Young Lions (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). But a bad car accident in 1956 exacerbated his drug and sexuality issues and he was considered an unexploded grenade. “He’s the only person I know who’s in worse shape than me,” said Monroe.
In fact, perhaps encumbered with helping nurse Monroe, he was able to put his own problems to one side. Apart from the early tiff with Gable, his most difficult point was when he received rope burns during his part in the mustang chase. He had forgotten to put on gloves at the start of the scene and he couldn’t suddenly appear with them on when he had to haul on the rope.
The longest scene lasting all of five minutes. The longest Huston had ever shot and one of the longest ever committed to camera was shot “day for night,” the effect achieved by a red lens opening and using red and green filters. The shooting area was covered by a black tarpaulin to kill the direct rays of the sun. Big 10k lights were hauled in to give the effect of moonlight on Monroe and Clift. Second unit director Tom Shaw was on standby with insect spray to keep insects off the actors.
But the long stretches of dialog defeated the actors and finally to save film on wasted takes Huston sent them off to rehearse by themselves. After several takes they completed the scene without missing a line. But there had been a problem with Clift’s bandage so the scene required reshooting. First Clift fluffed a line, then Monroe, then Huston interrupted, objecting to the camera position, “that’s a most unflattering angle.” After Clift fluffed a line once again, it was done.
For another scene at the lake also shot “day for night,” the cowboys did not actually build a camp fire, that was artificial, lit underground using gas, while trees and bushes were planted for the occasion.
If you ever wondered how movie crews get the bashes in bashed cars, the answer is they put them there. Monroe’s new Cadillac was battered by sledgehammers to represent a vehicle dented by admirers wanting to attract Monroe’s character’s attention by bumping into her.
It wasn’t just Monroe who caused problems. Two forest fires on August 20 saw Reno covered in black smoke with 200 firemen attending the blazes. Within a day the fire had consumed 35,000 acres and caused $200 million in damages and cut the power lines to Reno. However, the crew reacted by bringing a lighting truck and generator from Dayton.
On October 24, the crew was shipped back to Hollywood for scenes and footage requiring back projection. Landscape scenes of Pyramid Lake, for example, were screened behind the aeroplane and for scenes taking place in cars. Huston had commissioned 360-degree stereopticon shots of the lake so that single head shots could be used with rear projection.
Among the reshoots was the dance sequence at the Stix house “to show more joy and abandon” and the scene on the truck bed between Gable and Monroe in which Miller had complained “there was a lack of interaction between the two players.”
The scene where Gable was trampled by the horse was reshot with artificial hooves. Buckets of actual alkali from the lake were spread on a wooden platform, the artificial legs in the end manipulated by Huston. The last scene shot was a retake of Gable and Monroe in the station wagon. “For the first and last time on the picture,” observed journalist James Goode, “Huston didn’t ask for another take.”
Final scene was shot on November 4 – 40 days behind schedule and $500,00 over budget. One week later, Miller and Monroe announced their separation. Twelve days after shooting ended Clark Gable was dead.
Although the general impression given was that Taylor was a competent producer, in fact he saw his role in a different light. “I have this absurd Machiavellian function…the screenplay here has been a vindictive instrument which Arthur and John are using to attack each other.” He noted: “All the energy is going downhill when it should be going up,” adding, “the writer is blaming the director and the director is blaming the writer.”
Taylor was enthusiastic about the completed film. He told his Max Youngstein of United Artists, “It’s like an express train. It has a pace, a speed you don’t see in the screenplay itself. The script will get an Academy Award and Clark…this is a major-size hero we have on our hands.” But Youngstein was disappointed, concerned it lacked the Huston touch.
In post-production the Production Code situation was exacerbated by the fact that the completed film could, conceivably, contain a scene where Marilyn Monroe showed her right breast. This appeared to have come about by accident.
Nudity was certainly not in the script as no mainstream studio at that time would greenlight a film showing naked breasts. For the bedroom scene on September 21, as Monroe rises from the bed to put on her bathrobe, nine takes in all were filmed. In Take 7 she revealed her right breast. That was the one originally printed.
There were arguments that the nude scene should be included at least for the overseas market where censorship was seen to be less onerous. But Frank Taylor argued that Take 7 should be included for the domestic market. Since the movie was on course anyway to be denied the Seal of Approval from the Production Code there seemed little to lose by including the nudity.
Although Arthur Miller was undecided, Marilyn Monroe was happy enough. “Gradually, they’ll let down censorship” and she suggested that nudity was one way of pulling viewers away from television. Max Youngstein of United Artists was enthusiastic. It was Huston who nixed it, commenting, dryly, “I have always known girls have breasts.” And finally Taylor gave ground after realising that the film would be forever remembered as the one where Monroe revealed a breast rather than for its artistic merit.
The distribution approach was risky. Usually, at that time, big films went out slowly, launched in one or two cinemas in the major cities, and held over there for weeks at a time until ready to slip down the food chain. Instead, UA planned to make available 1,000 prints simultaneously, a distribution technique known then as “saturation” – what today we would term “wide release.” But that was traditionally reserved for low-budget offerings of the here-today-gone-tomorrow variety where the movie had vanished before bad word of mouth could spread. UA had precedent for taking this route. It had used saturation for The Magnificent Seven (1960). But that had been a flop. In the end The Misfits did decent enough business, though not at the level you would have expected from the cast.
In writing this article I delved deeply into the James Goode book, which I can highly recommend, on the making of the film, especially as he goes in for the kind of detail normally excluded from “making-of” books.
For example, he provides a complete breakdown of costs. Apart from the $1.6 million already mentioned, other costs include $200,000 for production, $85,000 for sets, $45,000 for lighting, $39,000 for sound, $150,000 for transportation, $32,000 for negative film (200,000 feet at 0.454 cents a foot), and $25,000 for positive prints. There was $750 per week to rent the generator, $225 per week for the small camera dolly, $400 per week for the motorized camera crane, $200 per week for folding chairs and $200 per month for Monroe’s trailer.
Hiring Boots the stunt horse cost $150 a week against a 10-week guarantee. There was a $10,000 bill to build the rodeo ground, $500 to rent the saloon, $15,000 went on renting the Stix house and $1,000 for use of the lake. The production paid for 17,570 lunches at $2.75 a head. There was $6,000 for hotel accommodation and $2,000 for the Dodge truck used in the lake scenes.
As many as 1,500 extras were called up and paid immediately. Stunt doubles, whether on contract or salary, were paid a base sum plus a bonus according to how much work they did on a given day. Sometimes the media was given a daily meal allowance, but other times not, the same being true for accommodation.
The final cost of the picture was $3.995 million. I found that a fascinating figure. Sure, it was nearly $500,000 over budget. But the film shot for 90 days instead of 50. In other words, shooting the extra 40 days cost proportionately little. Yes, Clark Gable accounted for another $48,000 in overtime but did this really mean that contracts were so tight that it effectively ensured that everyone, once signed up, could not leave until the movie was finished and not receive compensation on a pro-rate basis?
SOURCES: James Goode, The Story of The Misfits (Bobbs Merrill, 1963); Arthur Miller, Timebends, A Life (Grove Press, 1987); Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad and Me (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005); David Bret, Clark Gable, Tormented Star (JR Books, 2010); Arthur Miller, Serge Toubiana, The Misfits (Phaidon, 1963); John Huston, An Open Book (Macmillan, 1981); Arthur Miller, “Monroe Miller Magnificent Misfits,” Washington Post, December 13, 1987.
A knockout. Stone cold five-star gold label classic. It’s rare for a non-western to turn into one of the greatest westerns of all time. Forget The Wild Bunch (1969) and Once Upon a time in the West (1969) and every other paean to the dying of the Old West. This is all you need. A true insight into just what is left for the cowboy once civilization and modernization have run their course.
What’s perhaps most astonishing is that three major Hollywood stars plus a top director and one of the three greatest American playwrights of all time combined to make an indie. There’s no high drama of the kind Hollywood usually requires, no love dashed, no death or murder, nothing dramatic enough to be called narratively gripping. Made today, it would be the kind of picture that would traipse from film festival to film festival, hoping for a break at Sundance. The cast would be no-namers unless a star, fed-up with actioners, wanted to gain some artistic credibility.
This is as misleading a tag line as you could get. Admittedly, selling the movie’s core sadness in the early 1960s would have been tough.
By some freak of Hollywood magic this was greenlit. There’s plenty good dialog but nothing that’s going to make it into the Classic Line Hall of Fame and there’s only a handful of finely wrought scenes. So beyond the astonishing mustang sequence, what reverberated was the acting, with each big star producing a scene of the highest quality, for pure emotional impact possibly unsurpassed in their entire careers.
The story itself is pretty slim. Roslyn (Marilyn Monroe) in Reno to get a divorce hooks up with washed-up cowboy Gay (Clark Gable) and grieving car mechanic Guido (Eli Wallach). They repair to Guido’s cabin in the country, unfinished after his pregnant wife died because he didn’t have a spare tire. They are joined by hard-drinking man-hungry Isabelle (Thelma Ritter). Roslyn shacks up here with Gay, brightening up the place with decorative ideas and planting vegetables.
At the rodeo they stake drunken Perce (Montgomery Clift), a tough guy with mother issues, self-destructing one rodeo at a time. At various times the trio nurse and console each other, but mostly they get drunk. The three men take Roslyn along to show off their cowboy skills, catching wild mustangs. This is less old-fashioned than you might imagine. It’s more like tracking down the great white shark in Jaws (1975), a primeval battle between man and beast. Man has the advantage of being able to use Guido’s biplane to drive the horses down to Gay and Guido waiting with lassoes.
And tires.
What are the tires for you might well ask? Well, they fulfil the same function as the barrels in Jaws, to weight down the animals so they are easier to track, perhaps exhausting them so much they might just topple over and die. So the odds are not exactly even.
The guys are further disadvantaged by Roslyn’s presence. When she learns of the horses’ fate – not as you might expect to become working horses on a ranch like current television series Yellowstone – she is horrified. The critters will end up as pet food. So much for the Wild West.
This is an absolutely fantastic sequence and I’m surprised it doesn’t turn up on critical lists at all as one of the great western segments of all time. It says more about the end of the West than all the violence of The Wild Bunch or operatic fervour of Once Upon a Time in the West. And it’s a companion piece to The Old Man and the Sea, man, for all his endeavors, ending up with virtually nothing.
There’s a few twists and turns to this sequence so I won’t spoil it for you except to say it is one of the very few sections in movies where character plays out in action.
And this isn’t even Gable’s greatest scene. The moment when, drunken out of his skull already, he bleats in the street about his kids carries awesome power. What he’s saying doesn’t even make a great deal of sense, which is the beauty of it, because what drunk ever makes sense, most of the time he’s effectively addressing the demons inside.
Clift has a horrifically comic scene. His brain is as washed away as his body. He wakes out of a drunken stupor and can’t remember why he has a huge bandage round his head and proceeds to unravel it, again with a monologue that reveals his inner catatonic state.
Monroe is mute in her best scene. She just stares in horror at the mustang incident unfolding. And she has another terrific scene, probably the most ordinary thing she ever did in her screen career, battering a ping-pong.
The title is actually a rodeo term apparently for, unsurprisingly, a horse that was too small or weak to work. I would have preferred something less obvious because it’s quite clear from the outset all the characters are misfits.
This is probably the closest Monroe got to playing a character who reflected her inner turmoil. Roslyn’s beauty brightens up lives but mostly she is depressed, thinking that even when you win you lose, too fragile to cope with reality, and inclined to need consoled as much as she is willing to nurse the others. Gay is a superb creation, who despises men who earn “wages,” that is have a regular job and lose their freedom. Even if freedom means no female companionship and being reduced to catching horses for the few bucks they will bring in from pet food manufacturers, he would rather do that. Perce is just so battered by life he hasn’t a clue what he’s doing. The self-serving Guido whines.
Put all these characters together and they still live in world of their own, and although they occasionally cross the border into another’s existence by and large it is without understanding.
Without John Huston’s empathetic direction it would be unbearably sad, but with virtually nothing in the way of real plot he draws us inexorably in to their small lives. Given its budget and the box office potential of the stars, it was a flop on release. Now it’s a masterpiece.
However tragic or premature, few Hollywood stars could have gone out at the top with a picture of this quality as did Gable and Monroe. Possibly as a result of his exertions on the film, Gable died a few days after shooting completed, Monroe eighteen months later, but what a final legacy.
If audiences rallied to the sight of Raquel Welch wearing nothing more than a fur bikini for the entirety of One Million Years B.C. (1966) and a skin-tight suit in Fantastic Voyage (1966) Twentieth Century Fox must have reasoned they would surely return in droves were the star to spend most of Fathom in a succession of brightly-colored bikinis.
Given such a premise who would care that a sky-diving expert was named after a nautical measurement? Or that Fathom (Raquel Welch) came nowhere near the height indicated by her name? Or that the character as described in the source material (a novel by Scottish screenwriter Larry Forester) had a distinctly harder edge; murder, sex and drugs among her proclivities.
With Our Man Flint (1966), the studio had successfully gatecrashed the burgeoning spy genre and spotted a gap in the market for a female of the species, hoping to turn Modesty Blaise (1966) starring Monica Vitti and Fathom into money-spinning series. The Fathom project was handed to Batman, The Movie (1966) co-conspirators, director Leslie H. Martinson and screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Flash Gordon, 1980).
Female independence was hard-won in the 1960s and there were few jobs where a woman was automatically at the top of the tree. Burglary was one option for the independent entrepreneur (see The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl) and sport was another.
Welch plays an innocent bystander recruited for her top-notch sky-diving skills (her aptitude demonstrated in the opening sequences) to help Colonel Campbell (Ronald Fraser) of British intelligence recover the “Fire Dragon,” a trigger that could explode a nuclear bomb. Her sky-diving skills are required to land in the courtyard of playboy Peter Merriwether (Anthony Franciosa).
That turns out to be baloney, of course, a MacGuffin to point her in the direction of a valuable Chinese heirloom. And then it’s case of double-cross, triple-cross and whatever cross comes next.
There’s an intriguing mystery at the heart of this picture and a couple of top-class hair-raising moments. In one she is trapped in a bull ring and stunt double Donna Garrett had a few very definite close calls trying to avoid the maddened beast. In another she is stalked at sea by a circling motor boat while being peppered with harpoons. There is also an airplane duel and a ton of great aerial work. A couple of comic sequences are well wrung – Campbell pins his business card to one of the prongs of a pitchfork being brandished with menace by Fathom while Peter delivers a classic line: “The only game I ever lost was spin the bottle and that was on purpose.”
You could probably determine something about national character from the color of costume different countries chose to show Raquel Welch in.
The biggest problem is that the film veers too far away from the source material which posited the heroine as a much tougher character, one who can despatch bad guys with aplomb. Instead, Fathom is presented almost as an innocent, bundled from one situation to another, never taking charge until the very end. Minus karate kicks or a decent left hook, she is left to evade her predators by less dramatic means. She has a decent line in repartee and by no means lets the show down. However, the idea, no matter how satisfactory to fans of the actress, that Fathom has to swap bikinis every few minutes or failing that don some other curve-clinging item, gets in the way of the story – and her character. Into the eccentric mix also come a millionaire (Clive Revill) and a bartender (Tom Adams).
There’s no doubt Welch had single-handedly revived the relatively harmless pin-up business (not for her overt nudity of the Playboy/Penthouse variety) and had a massive following in Europe where she often plied her trade (the Italian-made Shoot Loud, Louder…I Don’t Understand in 1966 and the British Bedazzled in 1967) but she was clearly desperate for more meaty roles. Those finally came her way with Bandolero (1968) and 100 Rifles (1969) and Fathom feels like a lost opportunity to provide her with that harder edge.
She’s not helped by the odd tone. As I mentioned she gets into plenty of scrapes and proves her mettle with her diving skills. In the hands of a better director and with a few tweaks here and there it could have been a whole lot better and perhaps launched a spy series instead of languishing at the foot of the studio’s box office charts for that year.
Anthony Franciosa (Rio Conchos, 1964) , still a rising star after a decade in the business, who receives top billing, doesn’t appear for the first twenty minutes. And then he behaves like a walking advert for dentistry, as though his teeth can challenge Welch’s curves. And some of the supporting cast look like they’ve signed up for a completely different movie. Richard Briers (A Home of Your Own, 1965) – Ronald Fraser’s intelligence sidekick – looks like a goggle-eyed fan next to Ms Welch while Clive Revill (The Double Man, 1967) thinks it’s a joke to play a Russian as a joke. Ronald Fraser (Sebastian, 1968) provides decent support.
But it is certainly entertaining enough and you are unlikely to get bored.
Book into Film: A Girl Called Fathom by Larry Forrester (1967)
The blurb gives the game away. The British paperback published by Pan went: “She was blonde. She was beautiful, she was six foot tall. She’d killed the man who had dragged her to the lowest depths of addiction and lust.” The American Fawcett Gold Medal paperback was more succinct: “lady by birth, tramp by occupation and murderess by design.”
If any of that rings a bell, it was not from the film Fathom (1967) starring Raquel Welch which chose to ignore her background and her venomous skillset. The novel opens with the heroine killing a man in cold blood. He had promised her a film career but turned her into a call girl and heroin addict. Her father, now dead, was in the British secret service. Once she has committed her first murder, she is immediately kidnapped by a secret organization (C.E.L.T.S. – Counter Espionage Long-Term Security) and trained to become an even more ruthless government-sanctioned killing machine.
Larry Forrester was a Scottish television scriptwriter who had worked on a stack of British series such as Whirligig (1953), Ivanhoe (1958) and No Hiding Place (1960-1964) before publishing his first novel A Girl Called Fathom. His sole screenplay was Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) after which he concentrated on U.S. television including episodes of Fantasy Island (1980-1983) and Hart to Hart (1983-1984).
A Girl Called Fathom is split into two. Comprising roughly two-fifths of the book, the first section concentrates on her brutal training and on getting her off drugs. There’s a fair amount of sexual intrigue not to mention sex. But also a lover’s betrayal. For the final part of her training she is abandoned in the middle of nowhere in scorching heat and barely makes it home. “She had passed over a great divide. She was empty, hard – dehumanized. Alone. She would always be alone.” And then she is forced to kill again.
As was common with this kind of book in the 1960s, it was fast-moving and globe-trotting with plenty of realistic detail to offset the preposterous plot. For the remainder of the book, which shifts location to Europe, Fathom is up against an organization called W.A.R. (World of Asian Revolution) which aims to destabilize the existing world order. Her arch enemy is an American-born Soviet agent (and whip and knife expert) Jo Soon (who turns up in the film Fathom in slightly different form as Jo-May). Fathom’s team must protect French elder statesman Paul-Auguste Valmier whose playboy son Damon (who fantasizes about burning people alive), a friend from her past, is her main contact.
The book is peopled by interesting and occasionally outrageous characters – for example Tin (shades of Iron Man), who has hardly a human bone left in his body; the far-from-harmless Aunt Elspeth; and a sadistic colleague who loves her but dare not let his emotions out lest he loose on her his love of pain. The central plot is driven by a mass of twists and turns, heroine endangerment, fights with knife and gun and fist, traitors (naturally) and the clever idea of killing off the leaders of the free world with a bomb hidden in the coffin of a man worthy of a state funeral being held in Paris.
At the end she is counting the human cost of victory and sees herself as one of the walking wounded, a reject, driven from the herd. The film was apparently based on an unpublished sequel so it’s conceivable that the plot concerning the Chinese heirloom was pulled from that in its entirety. But even so the film’s heroine was neutered, not a patch on the ruthless killer with a sordid past outlined in A Girl Called Fathom.
The Magnificent 60s 