Walt Disney discarded much of Eleanor H. Porter’s original best seller not to mention a great deal of the tear-jerking section that played to superstar Mary Pickford’s strengths in the silent 1920 adaptation. Pickford was in her late 20s at the time and a movie mogul to boot (having launched United Artists) so had a depth of emotion Hayley Mills (aged 13 during filming) could not hope to match.
The screenplay, by David Swift (Love Is A Ball, 1963) is an object lesson in how to retain the essential element of a story – a positive-thinking orphan alleviates the gloom in an embittered town – while providing enough worthwhile for adult audiences. Disney assembled an awesome cast with three Oscar-winners – Jane Wyman (Best Actress, Johnny Belinda, 1948), Karl Malden (Best Supporting Actor, A Streetcar Named Desire, 1952) and Donald Crisp (Best Supporting Actor, How Green Was My Valley, 1942) – plus four-time nominee Agnes Moorehead and Adolph Menjou.
Despite no Oscar recognition Nancy Olsen had been leading lady to the likes of Bing Crosby (Mr Music, 1950), John Wayne (Big Jim McLain, 1952) and William Holden (Force of Arms, 1951). In effect, parents would be very familiar with the stellar supporting cast.
Orphan Pollyanna (Hayley Mills) – British accent explained by parents being missionaries – , majoring on optimism, tries to enliven a town torn apart by dissent and petty feuds and in thrall to her intimidating aunt and fading spinster Polly Harrington (Jane Wyman). While she tries to see the good in everyone, the rest of the population is forever pointing out the bad. The main source of contention is a derelict orphanage. The townspeople want it demolished and a new one erected. Polly Harrington wishes it preserved in its dilapidated state as a monument to her father who had built it. It’s the kind of attitude someone would take who was just plain determined to get their own way. Pollyanna tries to sway opinion against her aunt, resulting in no end of trouble.
Various sub-plots include stifled romance, Harrington has driven away boyfriend Dr Chilton (Richard Egan), fire-and-brimstone preacher Rev Ford (Karl Malden),another orphan Jimmy (Kevin Corcoran), the reclusive Mr Prendergast (Adolphe Menjou) coaxed back into communal life, and the mayor (Donald Crisp) trying to repair the rifts.
Unusually for a kid’s picture, Wyman, Malden and Crisp each are given a reflective moment to prove they are doing more than taking an easy salary cheque, bearing some of the weight of the narrative, Malden especially allocated more screen time than would be normal in a movie aimed at kids.
I have never read the book nor (to my shame) seen the Pickford version, so I came to the movie with low expectations, anticipating a lazy, maudlin effort. So I was quite surprised to discover how much I enjoyed it and was shocked by the final piece of action which turned the movie on its head. Sure, it relies on a feelgood drive but there is some decent stuff here – Pollyanna’s determination to find goodness in every event and every person takes her into some strange avenues, the rainbow playing on the walls, the “good parts” of the Bible – that these days makes for an entertaining matinee.
At least in Hollywood terms (Mills made her debut the year before in the British Tiger Bay, 1959) Pollyanna falls into the a-star-is-born category. The actress acquits herself well, with her expressive face, while hearing the emotion she packs into the word “gorgeous” is word admission alone. Being older than the usual child star, she was one of the few who made the transition into adult roles. Karl Malden is the pick of the supporting cast but he is given a good run for his money by Jane Wyman. Disney’s trick of peppering a children’s film with actors well-known to the adult audiences was one he would use again.
Swift, in dual capacity as director (and making his movie debut) played down the saccharine nature, making the main character less just automatically bouncing with happiness and more striving to make the best of difficult situations.
Take twelve condemned men, drop them in the desert hundreds of miles from safety with only enough water to last two weeks, and nothing to eat but dates, and make them work together to effect salvation from their predicament. Not exactly the premise for The Dirty Dozen (1967) but not far off. The Flight of the Phoenix appears a dummy run for director Robert Aldrich’s more ambitious war picture, not least because in terms of structure it is only eight minutes shorter. There are no women in the picture (except those appearing in a mirage) and the men, of all different types, must come together or die in the savage heat.
You might argue that the audience for this kind of picture no longer exists. In the 1960s there was a big market for the Nevil Shute/Hammond Innes/Elleston Trevor type of novel which contained a lot of practical detail at a time when heavy industry – mining, shipbuilding, oil, car manufacture – was a massive employer and the ordinary man had an easy understanding of – and was often fascinated by – the principles of engineering. Bear in mind that this was the era of space rockets and there was excitement about man’s planned flight to the moon.
During a sandstorm a small twin-engined plane carrying passengers from an oil field crash lands in the Sahara. James Stewart as the pilot was a casting trick. In a previous aerial adventure No Highway (1951), Stewart was the ordinary joe challenging authority. Here he is the authority figure, pilot Frank Towns, challenged and part of the film’s guile is the way he has to concede that authority to the one person on board everyone hates, arrogant German aircraft designer Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger).
The global job lot of passengers includes: two soldiers, martinet Capt Harris (Peter Finch) and his mutinous Sgt Watson (Ronald Fraser); alcoholic navigator Moran (Richard Attenborough); oil worker Cobb (Ernest Borgnine) on the brink of insanity; sarcastic Scots troublemaker Crow (Ian Bannen); French Dr Renaud (Christian Marquand0; company accountant Standish (Dan Duryea); Italian Gabriele (Gabriele Tinti); Bellamy (George Kennedy) and Carlos (Alex Montoya); plus a monkey of no fixed abode. The monkey, incidentally, is cleverly utilised. He’s not a sentimental or cute device, there to soften a hard guy or for comic relief, but Aldrich often cuts to his squeals or his face when there is imminent danger.
Two passengers are already dead, one is seriously injured. They have been blown so far off-course they will be impossible to locate. There is only enough water for ten or eleven days. It is a given in such circumstances that tempers will explode and hidden secrets surface. Were they guaranteed rescue those two pegs would be enough to hang a movie on. Since there is no such guarantee, this becomes a picture about survival. The obvious maneuver comes into play on the fifth day. Capt Harris determines to walk to safety, over 100 miles in deadly heat. But it’s not a trek picture either, the engineers present know the risks. Mountains will cause false compass readings and those going will walk around in circles.
Trevor Dudley-Smith wrote under nine other pseudonyms including Elleston Trevor and Adam Hall for the “Quiller” spy series.
What? I can get that magnetism in the mountains can affect a compass but where does the walking round in circles enter the equation? Because, explains Moran patiently, a person does not automatically walk in a straight line if there is no actual road. If right-handed then you’ll walk in a left-hand direction because the right leg is more developed than the other and takes a longer stride and there’s nothing you can do about it. This doesn’t matter if you are walking along an actual path but in the desert with no road markings it’s lethal. And this is the beginning of a bag of what would otherwise be deemed trivia except that such facts are a matter of life and death. This is a movie about reality in a way that no other realistic or authentic picture has or will be. Physics is the dominant force, not imagination.
Finch’s sergeant fakes an injury to avoid going. The mad Cobb, originally prevented from leaving, sneaks away in the night. Towns, in courageous mode, goes after him. While he is away, Dorfmann carries out a character assassination. And continues on his return – “the only thing outstanding about you is your stupidity.” By now though, Moran has warmed to Dorfmann’s insane idea of building a single-engined plane out of the wreck of the twin-engined one. And that becomes the crux of the story. Can they build this weird contraption? Will they manage it before they die of thirst? Will rising tensions prevent completion? Are they fit enough after days in the boiling heat to manage the herculean tasks involved?
Aldrich keeps psychological tension at fever pitch, helped along by the pessimistic Towns and the wildly pessimistic Crow, needling everyone in sight, who delivers lines like “how I stopped smoking in three days.” Towns and Moran have to come to terms with the parts they played in the plane crashing, Sgt Watson with his cowardice. Issues arise over leadership and water theft.
I won’t spoil it for you by mentioning the incident that threatens to demolish the entire project. But the finale is truly thrilling, edge-of-the-seat stuff and the skeletal monstrosity being constructed looks hardly capable of carrying the monkey let alone a full complement of passengers. Aldrich is a master of the group shot with unerring composition and often movement within the frame or just a simple bit of business by an actor, for example George Kennedy at one point tapping his hand against his leg, ensuring that the film does not solely focus on a couple of characters. Sometimes all Aldrich needs to make his points are reaction shots.
Terrific performances all round with Ian Bannen Oscar-nominated. Aldrich called on Lukas Heller for the screenplay, based on Elleston Trevor’s novel, having worked with him on Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) and Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964). Aldrich’s son William and son-in-law Peter Bravos had bit parts, killed off during the crash.
Flight of the Phoenix virtually invented the self-help rescue genre that relied on ingenious mechanical ideas – rather than more simplistic notions – such as later absorbed in movies like Apollo 13 (1995) and The Martian (2015). Aldrich’s mastery of group dynamics would stand in him in good stead for The Dirty Dozen.
The 2004 remake isn’t a patch on the original.
A terrific movie and well worth seeing.
Turning the novel by Elleston Trevor into a movie is illustrative of the process by which the screenwriter eliminates, changes and adds. The Flight of the Phoenix (published in 1964) was a lean 80,000 words, a far cry from the blockbuster airport reads like Exodus by Leon Uris and James Michener’s Hawaii. But its length made it an ideal subject for a film, the shorter novel tending to stick close to the main story. The author’s speciality was authentic detail, an early career as a racing driver and flight engineer inspiring in him a love for all things mechanical.
He knew what made things work and gaps in his knowledge were filled by assiduous research. He was an assiduous man, with 36 books since 1943 under ten pseudonyms, one being Adam Hall whose bestselling spy tale The Berlin Memorandum would be filmed as The Quiller Memorandum. He had tackled aviation before, most prominently in Squadron Airborne (1955).
The film follows the book’s structure with only a couple of deviations. The main one was changing the nationality of the aircraft designer from British to German. Originally named Stringer he was a testy young individual prone to taking offence and going off in big sulks. There was a German in the Trevor version, Kepel, a young man who is injured in the crash. But there was no handy doctor on board and fewer different nationalities.
To build up James Stewart as the heroic pilot and as a consequence to add meat to his clash with German designer Hardy Kruger, in the film he bravely goes out into the desert to find one of the passengers, but that does not occur in the book. Other changes were minor – in the book the passengers are occasionally able to supplement their drinking rations by scraping night frost off the plane and at a later point in the book they drain the blood from a dead camel in order to dilute their drinking water.
While there is an encounter with Arab nomads in both book and film, the book’s approach to this incident is much more straightforward, ignoring some of the detail supplied in the book.
Of course, a novel allows for the inclusion of far greater detail. And while that provides the skeleton for story development, Trevor gives greater insight into the characters than can be achieved on screen. The author allows each character an internal monologue, through which device we discover their motivations, history and fears.
This approach combines the present with the past, presenting a more rounded cast of characters. While the inherent tension of the situation drives the story along, the author switches between characters to keep the reader fully engaged. The cowardly sergeant (played by Ronald Fraser in the film) is the biggest beneficiary, portrayed as a more sympathetic person than in the film.
The book is a stand-alone enjoyment, Trevor’s writing skills, his grasp of character, creation of tension and his engineering knowledge (bear in mind he invented the idea of building another plane out of the wrecked one) make the novel every bit as enthralling as the film.
Standout performance by James Mason (Age of Consent, 1969) holds together this curiosity. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon from 1951, it is updated to the Swinging Sixties and transposed from France to the English provincial town of Winchester (possibly chosen thanks to the hit single the previous year). While featuring an investigation, but minus Maigret, it’s essentially a character study.
Given John Sawyer (James Mason) is a depressed, divorced, retired lawyer, it could easily have sunk under the weight of cliché. Realistic portrayals of depression, except amongst those confined to institutions, were rare in this era. The bulk of the audience would probably view him just as a grumpy old man.
Sawyer is not only estranged from everyone, distancing himself from daughter Angela (Geraldine Chaplin), but sliding into oblivion and even when offered potential redemption can scarcely lift his head above a parapet of boredom, almost catatonic in his attitude, overwhelmed by the loss of wife and, presumably, the esteem that came with his career. A member of the upper middle-class, he shows surprising sensitivity to the underprivileged, outsiders, especially migrants, usually dismissed with a racist epithet, and sex workers whom he treats as victims rather than a corrupting influence.
When the corpse of young American ship’s steward Barney (Bobby Darin) is found in his disused attic, suspicion falls on his daughter’s unemployed Greek boyfriend Jo (Paul Bertoya). Turns out Barney is a nasty piece of work, blackmailing Angels and her friends for trespassing on his ship.
As well as being put up initially in an empty warehouse by Desmond (Ian Ogilvy) whose father, a department store magnate who owns the building, a former cinema, and later in Sawyer’s attic, Barney extracts cash and sexually humiliates his victims. Attempted rape of Angela comes with his conviction that she’ll “thank me for it.”
Eventually, Sawyer is convinced to take on the case and is up against his daughter’s pompous employer and his wife’s lover Hawkins (Bryan Stanion). Maigret would have solved this in a trice but the joy of this is Sawyer’s indifference to the police procedural. He spends most of the time during the trial attempting to make a necklace out of paper clips, asks virtually no questions of witnesses, and makes no pretence of interest in the proceedings.
Among his unusual techniques are summoning up references to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Unusually, the pay-off doesn’t come in a courtroom but at the twenty-first birthday celebration of the entitled Desmond when to attract attention Sawyer whips off a tablecloth, sending glasses and crockery crashing, and introduces a woman in red.
Estrangement from his daughter could easily be his fault, too wrapped up in a high-flying career to pay the child much heed, but that indifference might as easily be ascribed to the possibility, as his wife taunts him, that the girl is not his.
There’s much to admire in the observations of ordinariness, loneliness, a class system filled with puffed-up mediocrities revelling in the slightest sliver of power, female advancement often requiring dispensing sexual favors to predatory employers or some form of begging.
There’s a brief appearance by Eric Burdon and the Animals, a modelling assignment using the cathedral as backdrop, and drugs. Difficult to imagine though that the pistol holstered by a carnival booth operator could be the real thing.
James Mason’s employment of a limp (result of a war wound) probably went against any genuine assessment of the subtlety of his performance. Geraldine Chaplin (The Hawaiians, 1970) builds up her character with action rather than dialog, showing tenderness where you might expect anger. Bobby Darin (Pressure Point, 1962) essays another creepy thug.
Paul Bertoya (Che!, 1969) is underused. Ian Ogilvy (The Sorcerers, 1967) is so smug you want to thump him. Look out for Pippa Steel (The Vampire Lovers, 1970), Moira Lister (The Double Man, 1967) and Yootha Joyce (Our Mother’s House, 1967).
In his sole directorial assignment Frenchman Pierre Louve, who wrote the screenplay, has better luck dissecting English mores than finding the essence of Simenon, whose non-Maigret novels generally concentrated on a man under pressure. While Mason delivers a fine performance, and his depression is obvious, there’s no sense of him teetering on the edge, more a general decline. In fact it’s the opposite, returning to the legal fray provides him with redemption.
Otto Preminger was initially beaten to the punch, rights to Francoise Sagan’s 1954 bestseller already sold to Ray Ventura, forcing the director to ante up $150,000 a year later to retrieve them. The director started working on the script with S.N. Behrman (Quo Vadis, 1951) but, dissatisfied with the result, turned to Arthur Laurents (Rope, 1948), who was permitted to complete his screenplay without any interference.
Shooting began in July 1957 in Paris and locations included Maxim’s and jazz club La Hachette where Preminger filmed Juliette Greco singing the title song. The main locale, a villa in Le Lavandou in the South of France, was rented from French publisher Pierre Lazareff.
By casting Deborah Kerr (The Night of the Iguana, 1964) and David Niven, who had starred in The Moon Is Blue (1953) as principals, it was officially turned into a British production, providing access to Eady Levy monies, although it was shot with a French crew who proved largely hostile to the director’s personality and went on strike on the second day. Due to a scheduling misunderstanding, Niven and Preminger got off on the wrong foot.
But the chief victim of the director’s ire was Jean Seberg, star of his previous effort – and substantial flop – Saint Joan (1957). While not entirely happy with the neophyte’s performance in her debut, he decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. “I refused to believe that I was so wrong and the critics so right, that this girl was so completely devoid of talent,” he complained, offering her a second chance. “He showed a faith in me nobody expected him to show,” commented a grateful (at the time) Seberg.
But Preminger soon regretted his decision. “I don’t like the way you talk, walk or dress,” he told her. Unable to get a better performance from her after four or five takes he would just give up. At one point, she was drenched with buckets of water for a scene where she was emerging from the sea. However, that scene only took seven takes, something of a triumph for Seberg. And it’s worth noting that seven takes was nothing for Preminger if he really wanted to make an actor suffer.
If you think the movie takes a very melodramatic turn, the screenplay toned down much of the book’s melodrama and especially its more serious overtones. Preminger stuck to the script. He invented camera movement and blocking during the day’s rehearsals rather than arriving at the studio with fixed ideas. To allow the camera to move more freely, the floor of the set was treated with gelatin. He relied on only a few takes, expecting the actors to deliver what he wanted, so in some respects it was no surprise he reacted badly when Seberg failed to follow his instructions, although as a last resort he knew he could always cut to another actor.
Niven and Kerr both braced the director about his treatment of Seberg, telling him “to lay off this girl, because she’s had it, and if you continue, we don’t want to keep working. ”
The movie was completed at Shepperton Studios in England. The last shot of the film took an entire day to shoot, Cecile removing her makeup with cold cream in front of the mirror and tears form. Preminger wanted “the face to remain a child’s face.” Two days of flashback shoots had to be re-done as they had by mistake been processed in color rather than black-and-white
Preminger should have been a happy man. He was falling in love with costume coordinator Hope Bryce, a model who had worked with Givenchy, and in due course she became his third wife. Ditto, Seberg, who had fallen for lawyer and nobleman Count Francois Moreuil – a relationship that also ended in marriage – and as a result of the romance grew more relaxed on the set and “didn’t let Preminger’s demands bother her.”
Opinions differ regarding Seberg. Arthur Laurents deemed her “a shrewd cookie, I don’t care what they say about her.” Deborah Kerr averred: “I think any other woman would have collapsed in tears or walked out, but she took calmly all the berating and achieved a very interesting and true Sagan-type heroine.” Co-star Mylene Demongeot said, “For a while she had everything in her hands to have a successful career.” From Seberg’s perspective she viewed Preminger as a father figure, with the attendant hate that often comes with that.
Demongeot, however, fought fire with fire, calmly warning the director he would get a heart attack if he kept on yelling at her. Standing up to him and occasionally dissolving into fits of laughter at his instructions kept him at bay. She saw a different side of the director, although tagging him as “ a nasty man,” she also recalled him as “a very funny, intelligent man…and he could even be charming…outside of work.” Seberg and Demongeot had become friends after the American had stayed with the French actress and her husband in order to learn the lines of French required for her role.
After filming ended, Preminger’s current wife Mary Gardner sued for divorce and Twentieth Century Fox threatened to take him to court for repayment of $60,000 for a film bever made. Preminger sold Seberg’s contract to Columbia. “He used me like a Kleenex and threw me away,” said Seberg. But, interestingly, it was only after that relationship ended that she took acting lessons.
In truth Seberg’s Hollywood career never recovered although she enjoyed a brief mainstream revival a decade later through Paint Your Wagon (1969) and Airport (1970). Hollywood has its revenge on Preminger. After the failure of Skidoo (1968), Paramount chief Charles Bluhdorn exacted “a very slow death” on the director.
NOTE: There’s an update to this called Part Two which is published on Oct 19, 2023. When I did this original article I didn’t have my normal online access which permits me to check through trade magazines. Because I received a query about box office I decided, once the online issue had been cleared up, to check that issue and in the process I uncovered so much fascinating information I took a second stab at it.
SOURCES: Chris Fujiwara, The World and Its Double, The Life and Works of Otto Preminger (Faber and Faber, 2008) pp210-217; Eric Braun, Deborah Kerr ( W.H. Allen , 1977) pp164-165; Garry McGee, Jean Seberg, Breathless, Her True Story, (2017) pp42-48.
You might be forgiven for wondering why Otto Preminger, a past master at film noir, did not simply adapt the source novel by Francoise Sagan by tilting the material in that direction. After all, Preminger had helped create the genre with Laura (1944) and followed up with noir trilogy Whirlpool (1950), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1951) and Angel Face (1952).
The purported saving grace of the Sagan novel is the main character’s guilt at the disaster she triggers, although, from another perspective that could be viewed as author cunning, employing acceptance of culpability to render her more sympathetic. In other words, she gets away with it, and that’s a completely different twist.
Whereas, in another world, she would be doing jail time or at least undergoing psychiatric care, her action appears to make her even more independent, discarding men at whim, turning into the character whom Jean-Luc Godard would use as the inspiration for Breathless (1960).
The tale is told in flashback, allowing a peppering of grief into what otherwise would be a straightforward story of spoiled little rich girl Cecile (Jean Seberg) plotting to rid herself of interloper Anne (Deborah Kerr) who has disrupted the perfect life she shares with doting father Raymond (David Niven).
In some respects it applies a coming-of-age template to all the main characters, adults as well as young required to adjust to the consequences of love and alter their behavior. It’s not just the teenage Cecile who’s spoiled – nothing to do but laze in the sun, swim in the sea and attend parties and night clubs – but Raymond, a charming philanderer/perfect cad, new girlfriend on tap, the beauty of current one, Elsa (Mylene Demongeot), undercut by her propensity to blister under the sun and despite her overall shallowness a mathematical whiz in the casino, a skill which would probably allow her to dispense with her apparent dependence on an older rich lover.
Into this cosy set-up arrives, by an accident of timing, old flame Anne, a successful couturier, whose mental fragility is disguised by an outwardly strong character. Her presence is accepted until Elsa is sent packing and Raymond proposes marriage. Anne makes the fatal mistake of overdoing the maternal, seeking to rein in Cecile, instructing her to chuck her boyfriend Philippe (Geoffrey Horne) and spend her time studying. It says a lot about Anne’s character that she couldn’t have more seriously miscalculated not just Cecile’s character but that of Philippe, who, intending to become a lawyer, seems a sensible choice for a boyfriend.
So, Cecile hatches a plan to bring Elsa back into Raymond’s orbit knowing that fidelity is scarcely his strong suit. Oddly enough, this kind of plotting, especially given the South of France atmosphere, would play better as a standard rom-com ploy, daughter trying to push father in the direction of preferred lover.
Instead, it exposes the cracks in Anne’s psyche and drives her to suicide. But since no one is aware, and Elsa too dumb ostensibly to recognize the part she plays, of the machinations, Cecile gets off scot-free, and in reality using the guilt to make her appear more sympathetic. This probably worked better in the Sagan novel which, with a first-person narrative, allows the author to form the other characters in a manner that makes Cecile’s actions more understandable or at least acceptable, nudging the reader towards sympathy rather than repulsion.
Whatever way the story is pitched, it doesn’t really work. All the characters, save Elsa, are exposed as inherently fragile, unable to accept change and/or reality. The suicide seems a mundane narrative ploy. Raymond is never presented as the love of Anne’s life and her death seems an incredible over-reaction, intended to give the story a more dramatic climax.
However, the characters are all well-drawn and the vivacity of the French lifestyle brings the picture to life, but hardly suited to Preminger who, by this stage, had a tendency to look for a bigger issue to chew over.
Jean Seberg (Moment to Moment, 1966) never managed a successful Hollywood career but this film was a big hit with emerging French filmmakers, and she was a far bigger box office attraction in France. The iconic short haircut and Givenchy attire seemed to present her as a latter-day Audrey Hepburn, but it was her screen independence that appealed more. Deborah Kerr (Prudence and the Pill, 1968), portraying a complex character, would be the pick of the actors except David Niven (Prudence and the Pill) exerts effortless charm and in terms of screen splash you could scarcely fault the effervescent Mylene Demongeot (The Singer not the Song, 1961).
Preminger, as ever, toys with convention. It’s the present day that’s shot in black-and-white rather than the past. Just as he rid John Wayne of his trick of breaking sentences in two in In Harm’s Way (1965), here Deborah Kerr is revealed without make-up, her freckled face providing her with an innocence. He had some fun with the house servants, apt to glug champagne, literally, behind their employer’s back. Arthur Laurents (Rope, 1948) wrote the screenplay.
Not quite sure how it ended up at the Bradford Widescreen Weekend since although it is in Cinemascope it was not one of that process’s more outstanding champions. Nor why it was introduced as Deborah Kerr’s movie when as far as the public was concerned the star was Jean Seberg. Nor even why Kerr was deemed a “Queen of Scope” since you could apply that term to virtually every female star who appeared in the 1950s in Cinemascope (20th Century Fox), VistaVision (Paramount) or Panavision (MGM).
If this were made now, there would be a scene at the end where Cecile tips the wink to the audience and enjoys rather than feels guilty about her clever ploy.
Three main characters playing against type and a feisty, independent, woman are the main pleasures of this conspiratorial rom-com that takes a while to get going. The main obstacle is the subplot involving the education of a klutz, impoverished French Duke Gaspard (Ricardo Montalban), who needs brought up to speed on the niceties of fine dining, horse-riding and dancing in order to represent a decent catch for American heiress Millie (Hope Lange).
So that keeps ex-racing driver John (Glenn Ford), fallen on such hard times he’ll accept a job as chauffeur, confined to the background for the first third of the movie. That is, until he works out that his employer Etienne (Charles Boyer) is a professional matchmaker who makes a living marrying off poverty-stricken aristocrats to wealthy women. However, he poses as a charmer who happens through his connections to put women in contact with eligible men without letting on that he takes a hefty commission or that his clientele is financially illiterate.
But the cunning Etienne realizes that in order to get close to Millie he has to exploit the weakness of her over-protective uncle Dr Gump (Telly Savalas) for gourmet food. All these complications create delay in getting on with the will-they-won’t-they romance of Millie and John.
Millie, channeling the adventurous spirit of the likes of Amelia Earhart, is car mechanic, wannabe racing driver and neophyte ballet dancer, so not quite the hapless rom-com female. And she’s pretty good at putting John in his place when he lacks the necessary subservience, giving him a tight deadline to wash her family’s huge fleet of cars, and forcing him to wear a despised chauffeur’s cap.
Meanwhile, Gaspard is causing problems of his own, not just by his complete ineptitude, but by falling for Etienne’s secretary Janine (Ulla Jacobson). So it’s hitches all round especially as Millie and John spend all their time upsetting each other, so much so that, determined to get married to please her grandmother, she’s on the brink of marrying the next clod in Etienne’s line-up.
To be honest, the script is a bit of a mess and in sticking to it director David Swift (The Interns, 1962) hasn’t quite been able to play to the movie’s strengths – and making more of them – rather than trying for what amounts to not much more than an ensemble piece. What lifts the movie is watching the usually steadfast and take-charge Glenn Ford (Rage, 1966) being put through the wringer by the heiress and forced to swallow humble pie any time he has had more than enough.
Next up is Telly Savalas (The Scalphunters, 1968) who totally switches his mean if not downright villainous screen persona to portray a character who dithers over epicurean delights and turns into a happy individual as long as his appetite is sated. A Jolly Telly is indeed a sight to be savoured.
Lastly, we have Ricardo Montalban (Sol Madrid, 1968), again an actor who errs on the tough-guy side, another of the take-charge fraternity, who always appears completely in command. It’s a bold career move for him to chuck that persona into the mixer and let it spin round a hundred times a minute till he comes out looking frazzled.
Hope Lange (A Pocketful of Miracles, 1961), who had a sporadic career as a female lead, and was at the time involved in an affair with Ford, is excellent as the adventurous headstrong spirit clad in overalls but less convincing as the glamorous heiress especially when simpering.
The screenplay, based on the novel The Grand Duke and Mr Pimm, looks as if it wanted to head in too many heads directions at once, was by Swift and Frank Waldman (Inspector Clouseau, 1968). Farce, at which Waldmann later excelled (he wrote the trio of 1970s Pink Panther films), seems is not a good fit for rom-com.
Worth seeing for Glenn Ford, Telly Savalas and Ricardo Montalban all thumbing a nose at their screen personas.
If a train strike hadn’t forced me to drive to the Bradford Widescreen Weekend and threat of a storm ensured I set off early in the morning, leaving me an afternoon to kill, and if my hotel wasn’t slap bang next to a multiplex, I might not have been tempted. And I guess you could add to this list of possibilities that if cinemas had not been so strapped for product, it might have gone straight to streaming or DVD. So I’m happy to report that the British B-picture is alive and kicking.
Revenge is the order of the day, no surprise there in a crime flick, but here’s the twist: while ostensibly it’s just Tate (Craig Fairbrass) seeking vengeance for the death of a gangster buddy, in fact he’s also got a target on his back, three figures from his past intent on payback.
Previous entrant to the series.
So, the plot is complicated to say the least, but here’s the other twist: it’s the family element that stands out. Not “family” Mafia-style where omerta rules and only women are allowed to shed a tear. But family as in, tough as they are, these criminals have emotions. One particularly hard-boiled specimen bursts into tears in front of his cellmates on hearing of the death of a loved one. A budding gangster, boxer and drag artist (take your pick at which he shows the most talent) Billy the Kid (Ben Wilson) – who, father foolishly uses the same moniker for his stage act as his boxing – is terrified of coming out to trainer father Fergus (Stephen McCole), relying on his aunt Margo (Tara Fitzgerald) for a shoulder to cry on.
Mental and physical scars are on greater display than normal. Every time it looks like the violence quotient is about to up the ante, in sneaks a moment of humanity, a hood with a baby, the aforementioned reactions.
Set in the 1990s drugs scene, the movie has a Point Blank (1967) sensitivity (if that’s the word), Tate constantly confounded by what’s going on. No matter how many people he kills, the situation just gets murkier. To be honest, I’m not surprised, I was confused.
The low-budget dictates we stay pretty well removed from any period detail. The cars and the gentlemen’s club – the movie’s virtually an advert for the real-life Platinum Lace – and the fact that the bright lights of central London conceal a lot, is as far as we go. Hazy backgrounds and longshot keep the past out of sight.The attractions in the club are such that the punters are not diverted by the entrance of bloodied gun-toting gangsters and the first gunshots pass them by.
Neat touches abound. The young girlfriend Charlotte (Emily Wyatt) of chief crook Hexell (Phil Davis) is in reality a safecracker and at the first opportunity heading off to foreign parts with a hefty haul. When Tate makes the mistake of driving into Fergus’s breaker’s yard he has not taken into account how easily his vehicle, shades of Mickey One (1965), can be scooped up and crushed to oblivion. Faulty information results in a heist being a bust. There’s some comedy with an out-of-date grenade and a machine gun firing blanks. In a more horrific echo of The Long Good Friday (1980) a miscreant is trapped in a car and burned alive.
But the best scene, amidst the carnage necessarily for a revenge picture, is a dying man accepting his son’s right to live his own life. And there is some honor among thieves, or at least an old pals act to fall back on.
There’s plenty violence for your buck. Knife, bullet, gas, grenade, fire, the permutations are endless and would need to be because so many people require to be dealt with. In individual combat, of course Tate wins the day, but given he is constantly outfoxed his fists and guns don’t always achieve their long-term purpose.
While Tate is not in the John Wick/Rambo league, he could certainly sit on a second tier that might encompass the movies of Dolph Lundgren, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, though he’s not as athletic as the last two.
The marketeers were handed an unlikely bonus in the shape of a three-star review from normally morally upright British newspaper The Guardian, and my guess it would be for the same reasons as I was impressed, the refusal to toe the DTV line and invest the picture with some humanity.
This series kicked off in 2007 and this is the sixth. The services of original star Ricci Hartnett were dispensed with after the second film. Fairbrass was top-billed for the next pair but ceded that to Vinnie Jones. The original was based on a true-life memoir but has gradually evolved into a more wide-ranging gangster series. Most have gone straight to streaming/DVD.
Good performances all round. Craig Fairbrass (Villain, 2020) should get a shot at something bigger. Directed with some elan on a tight budget by Nick Nevern (The Hooligan Factory, 2014) and the screenplay by producer Andrew Loveday (involved in two others in the series) and Jason Maza, also incidentally a producer, in his screen debut, has left an opening for a sequel.
This shouldn’t work at all. The episodic structure breaks all the narrative rules. Doris Day fans should be disappointed as she’s not in typical prim rom-com mode (Pillow Talk, That Touch of Mink), but a mother – and with four kids for goodness sake. And, beyond for some reason a sotto voce rendering of “Que Sera Sera,” she doesn’t sing until late on. Worse, she hardly qualifies as the main character. That privilege falls to David Niven.
But it has charm in buckets, it plays around with the rules, breaking all narrative conventions, setting up traps for the viewer, and the four siblings are superbly realistic, little cute or adorable about them, given their main occupation is dropping water bombs on unsuspected passers-by and, even adopting sedentary positions, can’t help but cause mischief.
Initial focus is on academic Laurence (David Niven), promoted to Broadway critic, making mincemeat of a play produced by best friend Alfred (Richard Haydn), in the process savaging its star Deborah (Janis Paige). He quickly becomes front page news when Deborah’s revenge is captured by a photographer. Fame goes to his head and wife Kate (Doris Day) feels she is losing him.
But then suddenly we switch to the countryside after they swap their New York apartment for a huge house. Cue the usual slapstick caused by holes in floors and the inevitable paint. Laurence’s lofty attitudes rile the locals. But before you know it we’re onto the third storyline, Kate reviving her dancing career by putting on a show with the local dramatic society.
By now we’re also knee-deep in sub-plots. Taxi driver Joe (Jack Weston), budding playwright friend of Kate’s mother Suzie (Spring Byington), weaves in and out of the tale. You are led to expect that his Biblical musical script, initially dismissed by Laurence, is going to play a part, perhaps turning up at the dramatic society, or being reworked by Alfred into a hit. You are almost certainly going to be convinced that Laurence will end up in Deborah’s bed. And you are even more certain that Alfred is going to get his revenge by bringing a huge squad of critics and celebrities to the first night of Kate’s play. Unknown to Laurence, Alfred has passed to Kate a rejected early embarrassingly bad effort by her husband when he harboured ambitions to be a playwright.
That all these set-ups are brilliantly confounded turns the entire movie on its head. And the reversals don’t involve cheating. It’s not a question of bait-and-switch, red herrings or sleight-of-hand, but down to the believable reactions of the characters.
In the middle of this, romance would be taking a back seat except both Kate and Laurence are aware of the growing distance between them so it’s more of a middle-aged love story, marriage on the rocks, but both parties making the same type of mistakes in trying to rectify the situation as in the usual will-she-won’t-she romantic template.
The central focus could not be more topical – sudden fame, its impact on the lucky person and on those around. And I suppose the newspaper stunt that kicks off Laurence’s sudden notoriety is even more common today.
And I have to mention the kids. One of them gets his head stuck in a chair because “nobody told me not too.” That’s the kind of infuriating children they are, parents driven bonkers trying to anticipate their next unexpected venture. There’s a marvellous scene that pinpoints exactly why this whole picture works – by taking reality as its benchmark: Kate, trying to get ready to go out, is surrounded by apparently docile kids. But one, lying on the couch, has lifted his feet, unseen by her, so that he can tap the bottom of a painting on the wall, swaying it gently from side to side behind her head, just waiting for it to fall off.
Doris Day (With Six You Get Eggroll, 1968) digs a bit deeper than normal into her characterization. David Niven (Guns of Darkness, 1962) acts as if he is in a drama, not a comedy, never playing a scene for laughs, which is why he gets so many. When he does turn on the charm it’s not to seduce but to defuse a situation.
Janis Paige (Welcome to Hard Times, 1967) has a ball as the over-the-top star, posterior a matter of public interest, who is rewarded as much as the rest of the cast with deeper characterization than her initial shallowness could expect. Jack Weston (Mirage, 1965), too, goes through various shades before discovering that he has something unexpected to offer.
There’s a bunch of belly laughs, a joke dog, high-class bitchiness among the cocktail set, and a raft of reversals, but mostly it gets by on charm.
Veteran Charles Walters (Walk Don’t Run, 1966) looks as if he’s having a ball too, pulling the audience in different directions, turning up trumps with every reversal. Isobel Lennart (Fitzwilly / Fitzwilly Strikes Back, 1967) created the cunning screenplay from the book by Jean Kerr.
Highly enjoyable and surprisingly good. Could be viewed as a companion piece to Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), swapping movies for Broadway. I have to confess I had only seen the writing team of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart in the context of movies – Frank Capra’s Oscar-winning You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942). I hadn’t realized these had begun as plays and the movie tells the story of the beginning of their partnership when Kaufman was an established playwright and Hart a neophyte.
Perhaps because this was the only directing gig for Dore Schary, better known as a screenwriter (Boys Town, 1939), producer and head honcho at MGM, there’s none of the melodrama of Two Weeks in Another Town. In fact, except for an occasional appearance by Kaufman’s exasperated wife, there’s hardly a woman in sight and certainly no complicated nuptials or even romance. It’s basically a two-hander, the relationship between the two writers and their struggle to turn the play Once in a Lifetime (1930) into a hit.
It’s helped along by what must be most subdued and subtle performances in the careers of either George Hamilton (Two Weeks in Another Town) or Jason Robards (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1969). This is easily Hamilton at his finest and it is one of Robards’ better performances. Rather than gung-ho turns, all sturm and drang, emotions out of control, the two actors inhabit their characters. Once only is Hamilton let off the leash, in an unfair tirade against buddie Joe (Jack Klugman) and is far more effective in a scene where he doesn’t say a word, and Schary has employed a film noir technique of leaving a face, apart from the eyes, in darkness, as he comes to terms with the realization he has a hit on his hands.
The story simple enough. In 1929, cigar-maker father out of work, family struggling to cope with the onset of the Great Depression, Hart is a struggling playwright, first five serious works rejected. But turning to a comedy about Hollywood, he strikes gold. Or at least some gold dust. Because a play on paper is scarcely the finished work. Teamed up with a recalcitrant, grumpy, introspective, monosyllabic Kaufman, Hart finds out the hard way just what it takes to turn prospect into success.
Mostly, it’s rewrites. And more rewrites. What’s wrong with the initial play is everything bar the idea. What’s wrong after that is everything they haven’t been able to fix. Gets to the stage where Kaufman – remember, the more experienced one – is ready to quit.
So once Kaufman appears, it’s mostly two guys in a room or backstage trying to sort out a myriad of problems. There’s some nice interaction. Kaufman never eats, so Hart is constantly famished. Kaufman hates Hart’s cigar smoke. Eventually, they come to an agreement, constant food in exchange for extinguishing the cigars (a pipe deemed an acceptable substitute).
There’s a cast of interesting characters, famous producer (Eli Wallach) and Hart’s support network, talented unsung writers and actors (including Archie Leach before he went Hollywood and became Cary Grant, his attraction to females a constant refrain), and a scene-stealing George Segal (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966). At a party we briefly meet the Alqonquin Round Table set, all insufferable and barely a bon mot between them.
Movies about the stage invariably involve an actor so this makes a refreshing change. And most films about writers concern the literary artist rather than the more overtly commercial variety. But I’m guessing the level of endeavour is much the same.
But it’s the lack of grandstanding that makes this work. Rather than lading down characters with tons of dramatic dialogue much of the piece is carried by small bits of business, the fastidious Hart snipping loose threads from a shirt, pressing his trousers under his mattress, the equally finicky Kaufman constantly washing his hands and the scourge of sentimentality. Sure, it’s showtime, so there’s a measure of bitchiness, a marvellous scene where Kaufman imagines a producer’s positivity is intended to put him off.
Unexpectedly excellent acting lifts this. Not easy to find, Ebay would be the best place.
Until a technological invention first used in Once a Thief (1965) it was impossible to shoot “day for night” without it appearing very obvious. So when director Vincente Minnelli aimed for as much verisimilitude as possible for the Rome-set drama it meant half the shoot took place at night. “Minnelli could sleep easily during the day,” recalled star Kirk Douglas (The Arrangement, 1969), “sometimes till six o’clock in the evening, but I couldn’t so there were three unpleasant weeks of night shooting and not much sleep.”
But the movie suffered, Douglas later complained, by studio interference at the editing stage. When the movie fell foul of the Production Code, change of MGM management vetoed the more salacious aspects of the movie – the worst aspects of “La Dolce Vita” including a sequence in a nightclub where guests watched an unseen sexual act. Fifteen minutes were cut including a scene that showed Cyd Charisse’s character in a more sympathetic light. In an ironic reflection of the film’s narrative, Minnelli played no part in the editing, not due to production deadlines as in the movie, but out of choice.
The actual producer John Houseman – producer of Douglas starrers The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Lust for Life (1956) though later best known as an actor in Rollerball (1975) etc – backed out of any tussle with MGM head honcho Joseph Vogel. Douglas implored Vogel and editor Margaret Booth, to no avail. Consequently, in Douglas’s opinion, the film was “emasculated.” He argued MGM had turned an “adult” picture into a “family” film. Quite how this could be squared with marketing that promised a “shocking intimate view of Rome’s international film set” (see below) was not mentioned.
Following the commercial and artistic success of Spartacus (1960), Douglas was at the peak of his career, though his last three pictures had been flops. After nabbing an Oscar for Gigi (1959), Minnelli also enjoyed a career high, and although best known for musicals like Meet Me in St Louis (1944) and An American in Paris (1951) was equally adept at drama like The Bad and the Beautiful, Lust for Life (1956) and Some Came Running (1958). But he, too, was running empty, his last three serious films – Home from the Hill (1960), All the Fine Young Cannibals (1961) and big-budget roadshow The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) coming up short at the box office.
Douglas earned $500,000 and a percentage of the profits (though none were forthcoming – it made a loss of $3 million) and top-billing. Although co-star Edward G. Robinson (Seven Thieves, 1960) appeared above the title, Douglas refused to accord female lead Cyd Charisse (Maroc 7, 1967), on one-tenth of his salary, that concession.
Douglas recalled that he build up his acting skills through wrestling. A college wrestling champ, he barnstormed across the country in a carnival, playing the cocky person reputedly from the audience who challenged the giant resident wrestler. “My job was to make the audience think he was going to murder me,” Douglas told the Pressbook/Campaign Manual. “And the way to do this was by expressions on my face. To yell out in pain would seem cowardly. But I learned a hundred and one ways of showing it through use of my eyes and the muscles in my face.”
The actor escaped serious injury when lightning, preceding one of the worst thunderstorms in a decade, struck a 200-year-old clock on the top of the church in Santa Maria Square. Four huge iron numerals were torn off and crashed to the ground, one grazing Douglas’s head.
In fact, the movie’s authenticity owed much to being filmed on the streets of Rome rather than reconstructed on the studio lot. In particular, scenes utilizing the Via Veneto, two long blocks of sidewalk cafes where the movie industry socialized, created a realistic atmosphere, especially when a hundred or so of the extra employed were actually people who would naturally populate the location. So, for example, when the script called for an opera star among the extras, casting director Guidarino Guidi used Bostonian Ann English, an opera singer studying in Rome. Among those sitting in the background at café tables were a promising young painter, a poet and a librettist.
George Hamilton (Act One, 1963), who had worked in Home from the Hill and just finished Light in the Piazza (1962) also shot in Rome, reckoned he couldn’t have been more miscast given his role called for a “funky James-Dean type.” He got the role through the influence of Betty Spiegel, wife of producer Sam, and her friend Denise Gigante, the director’s current girlfriend (later wife). Hamilton drove around in a red Ferrari costing $18,000 (ten times that at today’s prices) and, as he put it, “Italians knew how to worship” Hollywood stars.
Hamilton reckoned part of the problem of the film was that Minnelli was so “besotted with Denise that he had lost his vision.” Jumping to the defence of Cyd Charisse against a tirade from journalist Oriana Fallaci at the Venice Film Festival won Hamilton, unexpectedly, the cover of Paris-Match.
Daliah Lavi owed her career break to Douglas. As a nine-year-old in Hiffa, Israel, she struck up a friendship with the actor when he was filming The Juggler there in 1952. The actor and other stars attended her birthday party, Douglas presenting her with a ballet dress. Later a dancer and then an actress, this was her Hollywood debut. Erich von Stroheim Jr, making his movie acting debut, had his head shaved to make him appear more like his famed director father. Originally employed as an assistant director on the picture, Minnelli decided he would make a good Ravinski, the “fast-talking press agent.”
Chauvinism reared its ugly head, especially when women had to apologise for being on the receiving end. “What goes on in the minds of beautiful women when they get slapped for the cameras?” mused the editor of the Pressbook/Campaign Manual. Rossano Schiaffino’s response regarding being whacked on the behind by Douglas: “He hits hard so charmingly I didn’t mind standing up for a day of two.”
The actress proved tougher than many of her colleagues. She turned down the offer of a double for a scene in which she jumped into a lake. That might not have been such an undertaking had the sequence been shot in the hot Italian sunshine at the height of summer. But the MGM studio tank on Lot 3 was a different – and much colder – proposition. “She shrugged off her stunt with the remark that heated pools are unknown where she comes from.”
Irwin Shaw, author of the best-selling source novel, wasn’t too upset at the way the movie turned out. “An author who wants complete control of his work on the screen is in something of a cleft stick,” he observed. “He can either go into production himself, which is often neither possible nor desirable, or he can refuse to sell his work to the movies. Minor deviations in screen conception don’t send me reeling back a stricken man. I think I’m sufficiently realistic to know that even in the most enlightened films there must be some compromise if they are to be a success. What does matter very strongly to me is that the theme of the novel…should come over on the screen.”
Music trivia: Kirk Douglas was the first big Hollywood star to perform “The Twist” on screen and the song “Don’t Blame Me” was reprised from The Bad and the Beautiful, sung here sung by Leslie Uggams and in the older film by Peggy King.
French designer Pierre Balmain created the dresses, allowing a marketing campaign to be built around those stores which supplied his clothes. TWA, which flew directly to Rome, was suggested to cinema owners as an ideal tie-in. Not only did New American Library issue a new movie tie-in paperback/soft cover but cinemas were encouraged to build a campaign around a director, many of whose films would be well-known to audiences. The marketeers also had material to tie in with stores retailing music, women’s sportswear, menswear, men’s sweaters, beauty and hair styling.
The 16-page A3 Pressbook/Campaign Manual offered a selection of advertisements and taglines. The key advert tagline ran “Another town…another kind of love…one he couldn’t resist…the other he couldn’t escape.” But there were alternatives: “Only in Rome could this story be filmed/Every town has women like Carlotta and Veronica and the kind of man they both want!/From Irwin Shaw’s great best seller.”
Or you could opt for: “Irwin Shaw’s shocking intimate view of Rome’s international film set. The world only sees the glamor. This is the drama behind it!.” Or: “Only in Rome could this story happen. Only in Rome could this story be filmed!”
SOURCES: Kirk Douglas, The Ragman’s Son (Simon and Schuster paperback, 2010) p342-344; George Hamilton, Don’t Mind If I Do (JR Book hardback 2009)pp 155-159; Pressbook/ Campaign Manual, Two Weeks in Another Town (MGM).
The Magnificent 60s 