Carl Foreman – The Magnificent 60s

Behind the Scenes: “The Chairman / The Most Dangerous Man in the World” (1969)

Had things run according to the original plan, we could have seen Frank Sinatra return to a Communist country for the first time since The Manchurian Candidate (1962). But if you had wanted to write a script about the guy who wrote The Chairman, you couldn’t have invented a more interesting character than Samuel Richard Solomonick. He was one of those guy who held every job under the sun before reinventing himself as an anticommunist going by the name of Jay Richard Kennedy and subsequently entering the fields of real estate, radio and brokerage, then landing a gig managing Harry Belafonte and writing the screenplay for I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955).

By the time he ended up as an executive at Sinatra Enterprises he had a couple of ideas to sell. Forming Jade Productions in 1966 with director Richard Quine (How To Murder Your Wife, 1965), the pair hooked Sinatra’s interest in two projects, Follow the Runner (which would have co-starred Sammy Davis Jr) and The Chairman plus William Holden eyeing the lead in The Wordlings about the population explosion.

*That’s Gregory Peck trapped on the wrong side of the Russian border with Chinese soldiers closing in.*

Sinatra was known for falling out with directors, shunting Mark Robson off The Detective (1968), so whether Quine would have lasted the pace is anybody’s guess. After success with Tony Rome (1967), Twentieth Century Fox briefly toyed with the prospect of pairing Sinatra and new wife Mia Farrow in The Chairman. Originally scheduled to begin shooting on January 1967, that later shifted to early 1968. The notion that the movie also had parts for Spencer Tracy and Yul Brynner was one of those puff pieces that some journalists swallowed.

Despite some enticing projects – he was first name down to direct Catch 22, after Columbia had spent $150,000 buying the novel, and to helm the screen translation of Broadway hit The Owl and the Pussycat – Richard Quine’s career teetered after the flop of Hotel (1967). Making no headway with Sinatra he made instead another flop, Oh Dad Poor Dad (1967) and was effectively put on furlough for three years after failing to finance a movie to star Alex Guinness and Lee Radziwill.

Quine exited The Chairman in May 1967 when former PR bigwig Arthur P. Jacobs took over the production and with Sinatra in absentia turned to British director J. Lee Thompson who had helmed the producer’s debut picture What a Way to Go (1964). And that proved a lucky break for Thompson who had yet to match the success of The Guns of Navarone (1961).

After successive flops – Return from the Ashes (1965) and Eye of the Devil (1966) – Thompson had plenty projects on the boil including a musical remake of Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) with a score by Richard Rodgers and Peter Ustinov playing the lead. Also on his slate was High Citadel based on the Desmond Bagley bestseller; The Harp That Once for Columbia; an adaptation of James Clavell bestseller Tai Pan; a sequel to The Guns of Navarone called After Navarone that would reunite the director with star Gregory Peck and writer-producer Carl Foreman; and Planet of the Apes (1968) to which he and Jacobs held the rights.

While none of these projects – except Planet of the Apes and minus Thompson – came to fruition, the Navarone connection would lead to Mackenna’s Gold for Foreman. In the meantime he had helmed a modest drama, Before Winter Comes (1968) starring Broadway star Topol. When Arthur P. Jacobs greenlit The Chairman, he hired Thompson who looked no further than Peck, connection re-established via the Navarone sequel. They were a four-time pairing – Cape Fear (1962) and Mackenna’s Gold and The Guns of Navarone. Peck was a controversial choice from the Twentieth Century Fox perpsective given he had broken a contract with the studio in 1960 to star in Let’s Make Love. But Jacobs smoothed ruffled studio feathers and paid his star $500,000 plus a percentage. With Jacobs on hands-on duty with Planet of the Apes (1968) – Mort Abrahams oversaw the production of The Chairman and immediately engaged in a budget dispute with the director. Jacobs had initially stipulated $4 million, Thompson believed he required another million. They didn’t quite split the difference, Fox had the film come in at $4.9 million.

Thompson recognized the problems of the script, pointing out that “the hardest thing for Americans about the film’s concept is accepting that China has some competent scientists.” Rather ingenuously, he averred that the movie would have “no political overtones,” while Abrahams retorted that it might have “some political overtones.” It would been obvious to anyone that a picture featuring Mao was bound to have political repercussions, his Little Red Book a massive bestseller on the campus, an album cut of recitations from the book and Edward Albee in 1968 premiering a play called Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.

Denied access to China, the production team spent four months “reading everything we could get our hands on.” At one point they considered dropping the scene featuring Chairman Mao and lengthening the sequence relating to Peck’s arrival in Hong Kong. In any case, different versions of the Hong Kong environs were shot, some with nude shots of girls in a house of pleasure.

The British Colonial Office in Hong Kong blocked filming there after fears of riots due to the production daring to portray Mao Tse-Tung on screen. Taiwan substituted for China although the locals there were also incensed, so much so they burned an effigy of Peck. Wales, funnily enough, was another location as was London University. Filming began on August 28 and finished on December 3.

Although it might appear that Ben Maddow (The Way West, 1967) wrote his script based on Jay Richard Kennedy’s novel, in fact the novel appeared after the screenplay with Kennedy writing the novelizaton, and it’s more likely that what Maddow adapted was the original Kennedy screenplay. Interestingly enough, around this time Maddow had first crack at the Edward Naughton western novel that became McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971).

It wasn’t the first time Variety got a prediction wrong: “powerful box office attaction” fell far short of the actual results. This proved an annus miserabilis for Gregory Peck. In fact, he had four films, not three, released in 1969. By release date The Stalking Moon technically belonged to the previous year, but it only played a handful of cinemas in 1968, its general release taking place in 1969.

Despite pocketing a total of over $2 million, Peck’s marquee value was in clear decline. Of the Peck quartet, Marooned did best, placing 33^rd on the annual box office chart, with $4.1 million. Mackenna’s Gold (31^st) took $3.1 million in rentals (the amount returned from the gross once a cinema has taken its cut), The Stalking Moon (38^th) on $2.6 million, and The Chairman (41^st) with $2.5 million.

SOURCES: Gary Fishgall, Gregory Peck (Scribners, 2002) p267; James Caplan, Sinatra: The Chairman, (Doubleday, 2015), p724; “7 from 7 Arts,” Variety, March 3, 1965, p4; “Richard Quine,” Variety, July 7, 1965, p20; “Return of Advances,” Variety, October 6, 1965, p7; “Form Jade Prods,” Variety, December 15, 1965, p4; “J Lee Thompson Nearly Finished on 13,” Variety, February 2, 1966, p28; “Catch As Catch 22 Can,” Variety, February 23, 1966, p4; “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Musical Henry VIII,” Variety, Mar 16, 1966, p1; “Inside Stuff – Pictures,” Variety, March 30, 1966, p22; “Lee Thompson Busily Blueprints His Musical Version of Henry VIII,” Variety, April 27, 1966, p17; “Jay Kennedy Script,” Variety, July 6, 1966, p5; “After Navarone,” Variety, April 19, 1967, p14; “Scripting Red Chinese,” Variety, May 21, 1967, p4; “”Personality Chemistry,” Variety, May 24, 1967, p4; New York Soundtrack,” Variety, Sep 20, 1967, p27; “Pat Hall Noel to Col,” Variety, December 27, 1967, p5; “N.Y. Indie Label Grooves Chairman Mao’s Thoughts,” Variety, April 10, 1968, p56; “Man About Town,” Variety, July 17, 1968, p68; “Jas Clavell to Roll Siege,” Variety, August 21, 1968, p7; “Thompson Wraps Up,” Variety, August 28, 1968, p29; “New York Soundtrack,” Variety, October 23, 1968, p18; “British Bar Fox’s Chairman,” Variety, December 4, 1968, p17; Big Rental Films of 1969,” Variety, January 7, 1970, p15; “Big Rental Films of 1970,” Variety, January 6, 1971, p11.

When Time Ran Out (1980) / Earth’s Final Fury ***

The Director’s Cut, can you believe? Or less pompously, The Expanded Version. An extra 30 minutes added to the general release version that traveled the world to general disfavor. (The original 121-minute cut was edited to 109 minutes and this version clocks in at 144 minutes.) Was it a sense of disgruntlement – or sheer opportunism – that led to the Director’s Cut, so many of which scarcely improved on the original version. How many versions can an audience take of The Exorcist (1973) or Blade Runner (1982)? And even where extra length definitely added depth to Kingdom of Heaven (2005) that couldn’t overcome its major flaw, in a massive case of hubris, director Ridley Scott believing he could get away with casting Orlando Bloom instead of waiting till Russell Crowe became available.

When Time Ran Out killed off the disaster cycle and the Hollywood career of uber-producer Irwin Allen who had started that particular ball rolling with The Poseidon Adventure (1972), upped the ante with The Towering Inferno (1974) and dropped the ball with The Swarm (1978) and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979).

This doesn’t feel so much like a disaster movie as a picture tying up all the knots, various relationships coming asunder, and having to accommodate a bunch of well-known supporting actors of dubious all-star-cast status before they suddenly spring into dramatic narrative view. Audiences had never been particularly keen on volcanic pictures, after all what can the trapped characters do but dodge a sludge of soup and hope they don’t run straight into a tidal wave or, worse, have to negotiate a rickety/rope bridge. The chances of you having a tightrope walker coming to the rescue would generally be remote but that’s what we have here (step forward Burgess Meredith).

I had thought from the title and some guy in a hazmat suit wandering over a desolate area that this might be a prophetic eco-disaster, but excepting that there’s, for reasons best known to the scriptwriters, an oil well being drilled close to a volcano and that hotel investor Shelby (William Holden) has the bright idea of using the volcano as a marketing prop, there’s nothing much going on. The special effects are okay on the small screen, but even if they had been spectacular on the big screen their effect on the much smaller environs of DVD would in any case have been diminished.

So, basically, it’s reliant on working up sufficient audience interest in the relationships to make us care for the characters. We’re offered a pair of two-timing teams. First up, we’ve got Shelby’s secretary and marketing guru Kay (Jacqueline Bisset) who’s just turned down the offer to become his sixth “or seventh” wife, but who, presumably is enjoying, this being the 1980s and not the 1930s, some kind of sexual dalliance with him. When Kay meets up with oil driller old flame Hank (Paul Newman), they rekindle their romance, although with doom impending there’s not much time to take it forward beyond a picnic on the beach.

Next up, hotelier Bob (James Franciscus) is cheating on wife Nikki (Veronica Hamel), Shelby’s god-daughter, with staff member Iolani (Barbara Carerra) who is due to be married to childhood sweetheart hotel manager Brian (Edward Albert). To flesh out the tale, both Shelby and Bob have daddy issues, Tom (Ernest Borgnine) is a New York cop on the tail of swindler Francis (Red Buttons), and no doubt audiences will be desperate to find who wins a cockfighting contest being held in a local saloon.

Modern transport proves no match for an eruption, so in quick succession we see a car and a helicopter tumbling down the mountainside. The tsunami wipes out a good chunk of the actors that didn’t make it into the all-star-cast bracket and everyone else takes to the hills, no doubt hoping they won’t encounter a rickety/rope bridge. Disaster turns enemies into pals, Tom and Francis, for example, though it’s only now that Nikki comes across her husband’s infidelity.

And this would be a disaster all round except that having hooked myself into watching this, courtesy of a freebie on YouTube, and nothing of real dramatic interest going on, I found myself, oddly enough, concentrating on the three principals and was treated, even more odd I guess, to fine examples of just what these stars do to earn their crust. Paul Newman (The Prize, 1963) in particular, with very little to react to, does very little but with incredible facial agility, to genuine effect, portraying emotion with infinitesimal gesture. Sure, he’s always had the shrug and the walk, both far more suggestive of inner turmoil than any other actor I can name, but here, with very little dialog coming to his aid, you can tell exactly what’s going on in those baby blues.

Jacqueline Bisset (The Cape Town Affair, 1969), too, dressed a good bit less suggestively than in the posters, essays a confident woman coming unstuck when confronted with a romantic error. The scenes between the pair are not meant to be scorching, so there’s none of the screen charisma audiences might feel they’ve been sold, but instead it’s a slow-burn, a couple trying to come to terms with each other, passing through disappointment and hopefully onto something better. And you can’t find anyone better to carry disillusion than William Holden (The Devil’s Brigade, 1968).

Abject swansong for director James Goldstone (Winning, 1969) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Carl Foreman (The Guns of Navarone, 1961) but Oscar-winning co-writer Stirling Silliphant (Marlowe, 1969) carried on longer. Who wrote the most effective scenes, Shelby’s engagement ploy and Hank’s initial rejection of Kay, is anybody’s guess but there is some quality writing here. Probably the strangest part of the whole debacle was that the source was a piece of non-fiction, The Day the World Ended by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, about a 1902 eruption on Martinique that had nothing to do with oil wells or hotel construction.

There’s always something wrong with a disaster picture if you suggest watching it for the acting, but happily, this is the case.

Behind the Scenes: Book into Film – “Mackenna’s Gold” (1969)

Will Henry’s 1964 source novel was, by today’s standards, a slim volume. The principal idea of Mackenna being given a map by a dying Indian comes from the book, as does the capture of the white woman (named Francie in the novel), and the surprisingly erotic description of Hesh-Ke’s attempted seduction of Mackenna in the pool, the Apache mysticism, and, equally surprisingly, the earthquake denouement.

Some white men do join the party, but they are of rougher stock, the “Good Men” of Hadleyburg entirely producer Carl Foreman’s invention. Foreman turned Mackenna into a lawman rather than just a prospector, made the map more tangible (in the book it was drawn in the sand), gave Mackenna a past with Hesh-Ke and with the outlaw Colorado (named Pelon in the book), and, just as Sergio Leone did with Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West, realized that a handsome attractive villain was far more interesting than the “jug-eared, ugly man” described in Henry’s book.

Foreman made Tibbs a sergeant and added 20 years to the raw-boned youngster of the book. But in the original, Hesh-Ke was killed, accidentally, just after the pool incident, and it was another of the outlaws, Hachita, who killed Colorado so that the climactic fight on the ledge was between the axe-wielding Hachita and the unarmed Mackenna rather than between Mackenna and Colorado, but Henry had the woman taken hostage kill the Indian.

The various shoot-outs and chases are primarily a Foreman invention. He gives Mackenna more depth, and the vices of gambling and alcohol. Most important of all, it was Foreman who added the visual grandeur. There is no Shaking Rock in the source material, and no waiting for sunrise or for a shadow to point the way to the entrance to the canyon.

A writer-producer was the worst kind of hyphenate as far as a director was concerned in that, as suggested previously, the producer might be more apt to protect his original vision and dialog than adapt the screenplay, which is always only ever intended as a blueprint, to other ideas as the movie went into production.

The opening of the picture is pure Foreman, on a par with the introductory section of The Guns of Navarone, and the extensive use of narration ran counter to a director who felt the camera should tell the story. The greed aspect is spelled out well enough in the original novel, and comparisons with the classic examination of how gold turns men inside out was portrayed best as far as most people were concerned in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) so quite why Foreman felt obliged to hammer the point home so obviously in Mackenna’s Gold is anybody’s guess, except that the producer saw himself as a man with a message, the anti-war themes of The Guns of Navarone (1961) and The Victors (1964) having eliciting critical approval. You get the impression the original novel didn’t require as much tampering as this to be turned into a more than adequate picture.

Will Henry was a pseudonym, one of two he used for writing westerns, the other being Clay Fisher. His real name was Henry Wilson Allen and he began in the movies, joining MGM in 1937 as a screenwriter for cartoon shorts. He also wrote screenplays for cartoon shorts under the pen names Heck Allen and Henry Allen. Many of these were Tex Avery cartoons written between 1944 and 1955 which were considered some of the funniest ever made. He also worked on Woody Woodpecker and other cartoon characters. When he started writing novels in the 1950s he did so under a pseudonym to avoid attracting unwanted attention from his studio employers. He was a five-time winner of The Spur Award including for From Where the Sun Now Stands (1960) – which also won The Saddleman Award – and The Gates of the Mountains (1963).

Westerns made from his novels were Santa Fe Passage (1955) starring John Payne, The Tall Men (1955) directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Clark Gable and Jane Russell, Pillars of the Sky (1956) starring Jeff Chandler, and Yellowstone Kelly (1959) starring Clint Walker. At the same time as Mackenna’s Gold was sold, his 1960 book Journey to Shiloh was being set up under the title Fields of Honor to be directed by veteran Mervyn LeRoy and when this fell through was made into a film under the original title in 1969 with newcomer James Caan while Who Rides with Wyatt would be released as Young Billy Young starring Robert Mitchum in fall 1969.

Behind the Scenes: “Mackenna’s Gold (1969)

I should mention the George Lucas connection right away because, for some, that is the movie’s main contemporary connection.

Mackenna’s Gold was originally intended as a three-hour movie[i] for roadshow release to be shot in early 1966 for Columbia Pictures by writer-producer Carl Foreman (Guns of Navarone, 1961) who would also be in the director’s chair.[ii] But outside of How the West Was Won (1962) westerns had foundered in roadshow. The Alamo (1960), John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964) and John Sturges The Hallelujah Trail (1965) were surprising roadshow flops. Foreman persuaded Columbia to increase the budget to $5 million – and then beyond – and film the movie in Cinerama, (over 25 percent of the budget was allocated to Cinerama to license the name and use the equipment – $1.35 million in total of initial negative costs[iii]).

In January 1967 Columbia launched the marketing campaign with full page advertisements in the trade papers promoting the fact that the movie would be filmed on location in the USA in Cinerama and that it would bring together the “creators of The Guns of Navarone,” meaning, at this point, Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson. The advertisement also highlighted author Will Henry, on whose novel the film was based (as the “author of San Juan Hill and From Where the Sun Now Stands”) and plugged the book as “a novel of Apache gold and Apache revenge based on the search for the fabulous Lost Adams Diggings.” By the following year, Foreman’s star was in the ascendant after the Parisian revival of High Noon[iv] and Columbia had another two major roadshows planned for the 1968-1969 season: Barbra Streisand’s movie debut in William Wyler’s Funny Girl also starring Omar Sharif and Carol Reed’s Oliver! [v]

By this time, Columbia had reshaped its marketing effort to provide the specialist support required for promoting roadshows. In early 1967, it had poached sales guru Leo Greenfield from Buena Vista with the express aim of setting up an effective unit to market hard-ticket product – “first assignment Mackenna’s Gold, Oliver! and Funny Girl”[vi] – to the record number of Cinerama theaters[vii] and those desperate to accommodate roadshow. By the end of 1968, both Cinerama and Columbia had reported record revenues and profits, the former turning a $290,000 loss into a $679,000 profit,[viii] the latter on an unprecedented streak of success with a gross profit of $9.3 million profit on a gross income of $239 million.[ix] Columbia soon added another roadshow prospect to its slate, Sydney Pollack’s World War Two drama Castle Keep starring Burt Lancaster, and was so confident about the two non-musicals, for example, that it expected the western and the war picture to run consecutively from late spring 1969 well into the following year at Loews Hollywood in Los Angeles.[x] Funny Girl hit $550,000 in advance sales – $80,000 was the usual figure.[xi] Mackennas’s Gold’s was scheduled to premiere in Phoenix, Arizona, on February 15, 1969, with the roadshow launch set for the DeMille theater in New York five days later.

Within the next month, however, the world premiere was called off, work began on editing down the near-three-hour running time, and plans, two years in the making, for an ambitious roadshow release were quietly dropped. Public reaction to The Stalking Moon – also starring Gregory Peck – was one reason. Two other Cinerama movies, Custer of the West (1967) and Krakatoa – East of Java (1968) had also flopped. If Mackenna’s Gold was to be marketed as a drama in a western setting rather than a shoot-out in the tradition of 100 Rifles, then Columbia looked worryingly at Isadora, boasting a 177-minutes running time, whose roadshow run in Los Angeles was swiftly truncated, and the movie butchered in a bid to find an audience.[xii]

The studio took a different tack. The world premiere shifted to Munich, West Germany, in March[xiii] with most of the rest of the European capitals holding gala premieres (and running it as roadshow or at least 70mm) before the picture made its U.S. debut in Phoenix on May 10. But the picture unveiled in Phoenix was a ghost of the original. The running time technically came in at 128 minutes, but, in effect, was under two hours long, the introductory narration lasting eight minutes and the end credits accounting for further time. However, what was oddest of all was the 18-month gap between completion and world premiere. Filming had begun on May 16, 1967 and wrapped on September 29. Columbia had shelved one of its biggest budgeted movies for nearly 15 months.

The movie had a troubled history. For a start, Foreman didn’t own the rights to the Will Henry source novel. Dmitri Tiomkin, after a debilitating eye condition restricting his composing career, had in 1964 purchased the rights. Tiomkin agreed to sell the rights to Foreman in April 1965 in return not just for a fee and an agreement to compose the music[xiv] but also the vital producer’s credit necessary to launch him on a new career.[xv] Foreman was initially keen on filming the movie in Spain to take advantage of generous government subsidies.[xvi] But Foreman was demoted from director. His last picture as writer-producer-director The Victors (1964) had flopped. The studio did not want to offer the producer any distraction from the complex logistics of a location shoot where much of the time the crew would be 50 miles from the nearest town and where, despite the desert environment, could be subject to storms and flash floods. Instead, J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) came on board as director. (Thompson was also at this point lined up to direct Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, whose rights he co-owned.)

However, the Thompson-Foreman relationship did not run smoothly. Foreman recalled: ‘I was not very happy with the work of J. Lee Thompson on that film and entirely apart from that we still got into trouble in terms of scheduling and so forth and our relationship was always a problem.’[xvii] Logistics were always going to be an issue on a picture of this scale, shot almost exclusively on some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. The buzzard section was filmed in Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border, and other scenic wildernesses included the Glen Canyon of Utah, Spider Rock in Canon de Schelly in Arizona, Kanab Valley, Sink Valley, the Panguitch Fish Hatchery in Utah, and Medford in Oregon.

Gregory Peck was not first choice for the titular role in Mackenna’s Gold. He only got the part after Steve McQueen and then Clint Eastwood had turned it down[xviii] and even then Peck wavered, only agreeing after pressure from Foreman, and in recognition of their work together on The Guns of Navarone.[xix] Depending on your point of view, Omar Sharif was miscast or cast against type, a matinee idol whose character, in ruthless pursuit of gold, eschewed any element of romance. By the time the movie appeared, Sharif’s marquee appeal had taken a tumble. MGM’s Mayerling and Twentieth Century Fox’s Che had flopped, The Appointment (1969) shelved and Funny Girl’s success rightly attributed to Streisand.

Over the past few years, Telly Savalas had discovered the harsh reality of Hollywood. An Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) had done less for his career than the odious Maggott in The Dirty Dozen (1967) after which he was promptly promoted to third billing on Sol Madrid (1968), western The Scalphunters (1968) and The Assassination Bureau (1968). Although he retained that billing on Mackenna’s Gold, he did not appear until halfway through, suggesting that his role as Sgt Tibbs had been a casualty of the editing needed to reduce the running length. Camilla Sparv had been leading lady in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966), Assignment K (1968), and Nobody Runs Forever (1968). Newmar, a decade older, was best known for playing “Catwoman” in the television series Batman (1966-1967). Foreman had given her the leading female role opposite Zero Mostel in Monsieur Lecoq (1967) but the movie was unfinished, although Newmar still attracted attention after stills from the picture appeared in Playboy magazine. Mackenna’s Gold aimed to set a new standard in the quality of actors in supporting roles – the by now requisite roadshow all-star cast including Edward G. Robinson (The Biggest Bundle of Them All, 1968), twice-Oscar-nominated Lee J. Cobb (Coogan’s Bluff, 1968), Burgess Meredith (Skidoo, 1968), Anthony Quayle (The Guns of Navarone), Oscar nominee Raymond Massey (Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1941), Keenan Wynn (How the West Was Won) and Ted Cassidy (“Lurch” in The Addams Family television series, 1964-1966).

The George Lucas Connection

In some respects, the involvement of George Lucas (Star Wars) in Mackenna’s Gold has overshadowed that of director J. Lee Thompson. Committed to bringing through a new generation of talent, Foreman had established an internship for the picture. Lucas was one of four winners and his entry was the first version of THX 1138 (1971). The internship funded the winners to shoot a short film on the location. Foreman became immediately a fan because of the quality of Lucas’s effort. Foreman explained: “He did the shortest one of the lot and the most technically accomplished. It ran only one minute and 47 seconds and it had no title – he gave it a date – and then we agreed we’d call it A Desert Poem because he went out on the desert and did a lot of stop-action photography. George really knew his camera and he played with his camera and it was around and about the film – he was doing the desert more than anything else but in the desert was the film company with its parasols and all that shimmering in the distance and he played around with little things where the sun was shining and the film company was working. And then it began to rain, and it rained like hell, and then the sun came out again. It was awfully good. He did a lot of trick stuff with his camera and that’s what the boys resented, that he could just go out by himself and do that.”[xx]

The “boys” resented Lucas for more than his technical accomplishment but Foreman’s admiration for the neophyte director increased after seeing a display of professionalism that put the other professionals to shame. “We were…in a very difficult location…near the place where we had painted in this great seam of gold…We got to the big scene, the scene where they (the actors) all discovered it (the gold), and they all started running towards it…But it (the location) was in a kind of ravine and there was a problem about the light – you could only shoot it…at that time of year when the sun was more or less directly overhead or had just begun to go down or had just passed the meridian…(but when Foreman arrived on location) the entire company was just sitting there. Lucas therefore pointed out in an indirect manner that the scene had not been rehearsed because J. Lee Thompson was waiting for the sun to rehearse it during the precious moments when the sun was there instead of being ready for when the sun was there.”[xxi]

Reception

Trade magazine Variety came out in overall favor of Mackenna’s Gold: “splendid western, stars plus special effects and grandeur should insure box office success.”[xxii] Hollywood Reporter predicted, “Audiences should queue up,” and Film Daily proclaimed “a fine, exciting western adventure.”[xxiii] However, Vincent Canby in the New York Times called it a “truly stunning absurdity,” The New York News, while generally positive, nonetheless complained it was “sprawling” and “pretentious.” New York magazine and the Washington Post were among the nay-sayers.[xxiv] Perhaps, Peck’s own opinion was the most damning: “Mackenna’s Gold was a terrible western, just wretched.”[xxv]

Star fatigue did not occur in the days of the studio system, when releases were carefully spaced out to give the public a breathing space between each release. Actor independence meant timing of releases was removed from studio control – Gregory Peck’s movies in 1969 came from three different studios, Universal (The Stalking Moon), Twentieth Century Fox (The Chairman) and Columbia (Mackenna’s Gold), and Omar Sharif was in the same position with MGM for Mayerling, Twentieth Century Fox for Che and the western from Columbia. As you might expect, releases were not coordinated, studios did not sit down around a table and discuss how to avoid each other’s movies clashing. So in the first six months of 1969 audiences were treated to three pictures apiece from the stars, the earlier ones flops though Mayerlingr was a big hit overseas.[xxvi] Whatever the reason, Mackenna’s Gold did not race out of the gate. Its final rentals tally of $3.1 million – 42nd spot in the annual chart,[xxvii] ahead of The Stalking Moon and Once Upon a Time in the West, but well below the much less expensive Support Your Local Sheriff and 100 Rifles. In budget terms it was close to a disaster. However, it was a huge hit in India, setting a record in Madras for the best showing for a foreign picture.[xxviii]

SOURCES:

This is an edited version of a much longer chapter from my book, The Gunslingers of ’69: Western Movies’ Greatest Year.

[i] Sheldon Hall has argued that the movie was never intended to be three hours long and that judging from a screenplay of 145 pages the film would have been roughly two-and-half-hours long. He identified a major sequence that was filmed but edited out – of another battle between the Apaches and the gold-seekers (“Film in Focus, Mackenna’s Gold,” Cinema Retro, Issue 43, 40.)

[ii] “Foreman to Start Gold, Delays Churchill Pic,” Variety, September 8, 1965, 4. The Churchill project would eventually become Young Winston made in 1972 for Columbia. The movie was originally postponed due to political unrest in the chosen movie locations.

[iii] Filmmakers licensing the Cinerama name had to pay $500,000 upfront and Foreman was committed to spend $875,000 for Cinerama camera equipment. The cost might escalate because Columbia also had to agree to pay Cinerama 10 percent of the gross (“C’rama Sets Major Int’l Expansion As More Pix, More Theaters Use Process,” Variety, November 15, 1967, 25).

[iv] “Junket for Noon Sparks Nostalgia,” Variety, April 24, 1968, 31. Not only was the revival a critical success but it was a box office hit all over again in Paris.

[v] “Leo Greenfield’s Chore,” Variety, May 31, 1967, 8. Wyler, of course, was the king of the roadshow, having directed Ben Hur. Reed had directed The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) after an initial chastening experience with roadshow having pulled out of MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after clashing with star Marlon Brando.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] “C’Rama Sets,” Variety. There were 250 theaters in the U.S. and 2100 worldwide equipped to show Cinerama.

[viii] “13-Week $679,000 Contrast Year Ago,” Variety, November 20, 1968, 14. The figures compared September 1967 to September 1968.

[ix] “News in Col Annual Report Is ‘Solid Solvency,’” Variety, November 4, 1968, 3.

[x] Switching of Isadora from Hard Ducat,” Variety, January 15, 1969, 7

[xi] “Third Road Show Study,” Variety.

[xii] “Switching of Isadora,,” Variety. The film, which had opened on December 18, was set to close on February 8 and go straight into continuous performance.

[xiii] “Col Bows Gold in Munich to Spark Lagging Box Office,” Variety, March 26, 1969, 41; “Mackenna’s Gold Launching Pattern,” Variety, March 5, 1969, 28. While it was true the studios were concerned about falling box office in Europe, the true reason for launching the picture in Europe ahead of America was because Foreman was so much better known there courtesy of his major marketing blitz for The Guns of Navarone and The Victors. It opened in Paris and Rome in March and in April in London.

[xiv] By the time the movie came out, Tiomkin had given up composing and the score was done by Quincy Jones.

[xv] “Tiomkin-Foreman Partners for Col,” Variety, April 21, 1965, 19.

[xvi] “Cash Advantages,” Variety.

[xvii] The Carl Foreman Tapes, Transcripts of Tapes between Sidney Cohn and Carl Foreman, Carl Foreman Collection, ITM – 4408, (Tape V – A, December 20, 1977, British Film Institute, Reubens Library, London).

[xviii] Avery, Kevin ed, Conversations with Clint, Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 35 ; Neibaur, James L, The Clint Eastwood Westerns, 44.

[xix] Fishgall, Gary, Gregory Peck, A Biography (Scribner, New York, 2002), 264.

[xx] The Carl Foreman Tapes

[xxi] Ibid.

[xxii] Review, Variety, March 26, 1969, 6.

[xxiii] Advertisement, International Motion Picture Exhibitor, May 7, 1969, 12.

[xxiv] “Crix Boxscore on New Pix,” Variety, June 25, 1969, 28.

[xxv] Fishgall, Gregory Peck, 265.

[xxvi] Sick Tops Italo ‘68-’69 Box Office,” Variety, July 23, 1969, 31. Mayerling ranked ninth at the box office for this period. .

[xxvii] “Big Rentals of 1969,” Variety.

[xxviii] “Gold Sets Madras Record,” Variety, December 2, 1970, 26.

Mackenna’s Gold (1969) ***

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) set in the West – men driven mad by gold fever. Straightforward plot, however, complicated by an avalanche of characters. And for a two-hour running time it seemed perverse to waste the first six minutes on scenery, narration – explaining the Apache legend of a fabulous hidden seam of gold – and theme song.

The real film begins with a shoot-out between Marshall Mackenna (Gregory Peck and an Indian. “You will wish you never saw this map,” says the Indian before he dies, but Mackenna burns the map. That doesn’t go down well with villain Colorado (Omar Sharif), whose gang has taken Inga (Camilla Sparv) hostage. Convinced the lawman has memorized the map, Colorado adds Mackenna to his hostage quotient.

At Colorado’s hideout Hesh-Ke (Julie Newmar) has a hostile reaction to Mackenna. Like Colorado, they have history. Mackenna and Inga bond when he fends off an Indian intent on raping her. As if this isn’t a pretty straightforward set-up, old foes reunited, potential romance brewing, a treasure hunt, further complications arise in the shape of a posse led by Ben Baker (Eli Wallach), not hunting renegades but also chasing gold. As if that wasn’t already a complication too far now we have a Cavalry troop, who confuse the posse with outlaws thus mostly eliminating a complication before it gets too complicated – the pursuing Apaches finish them off.

And in a nearby pool, we get a deadly twist on the naked attraction, as Hesh-Ke, first trying to lure Mackenna then trying to drown the woman she views as her romantic rival. When the Cavalry reappear, they have turned rogue, led by Sgt Tibbs (Telly Savalas). So now we’ve got the narrative ironed out it’s three separate groups – outlaws, Cavalry and Apaches – searching for gold with various individual old scores to be settled. And, just in time, they’ve arrived at Shaking Rock, the tall pillar visualized in the poster, and a sunrise worth waiting for. It is a glorious scene.

After a close-up of the rising sun and the pillar, and the screen changing color, the shadow of the pillar creeps across the canyon floor and points to a crack in the canyon wall. The crack is a tunnel entrance and on the other side the sun is shining on a seam of bright gold. And that leaves only the various denouements to be played out. And some surprises – straightlaced Inga succumbing to gold fever, the supposedly barbarous Apaches revealed as good guys – treating pillar (and gold) with reverence – and (would you believe it) an earthquake.

The earthquake might just have been too big a temptation given this was filmed in Cinerama. But it’s the least effective use of the process. A fairly standard western trope, crossing a dodgy bridge, is heightened in Cinerama but it’s still a cliché. Much better is the river crossing, the camera’s dizzying effect echoing the rollercoaster ride in This Is Cinerama and the rapids and runaway train of How the West Was Won (1962), audiences pitched headlong into camera point-of-view, racing water, oncoming rapids, thundering waterfall. The final section is triggered by the Cinerama camera racing for two minutes down the twisting track leading to the gold. So, in Cinerama terms, the audience got its money’s worth.

And there should have been enough conflict to keep the narrative on track – Mackenna vs. Colorado, Hesh-Ke vs. Inga, Inga vs Colorado, Calvary vs. outlaws vs. Apaches, plus various fist, gun, knife and belt fights. The individual conflicts, Inga’s genuine fear over her fate, the romantic triangle and especially ruthless Colorado revealed (ditto Butch Cassidy) as a dreamer, imagining life in faraway lands (swap Butch’s Bolivia and Australia for Colorado’s Paris) were more than enough to be going on with without being drowned out by a simplistic message about greed. This is nothing more – or nothing worse – than a decent western wrapped up in the bloated shadow of a roadshow.

Gregory Peck (Arabesque, 1966) and Omar Sharif (Mayerling, 1969) are both pretty good in roles that play against type, both female roles are well-written and well played by Camilla Sparv (Downhill Racer, 1969) and Julie Newmar (The Maltese Bippy, 1969) but the film is overloaded with way too many cameos. As he had proven in The Guns of Navarone (1961) J. Lee Thompson was excellent at handling large casts especially in scenes featuring a host of characters and his visual and aural skills are superb but not so good at putting writer-producer Carl Foreman in his place.

Take away the Cinerama effects and the roadshow elements, and trim another 20 minutes off the picture, and you would have had a tight character-driven picture.

Behind the Scenes – “Puppet on a Chain” (1970)

There was always money involved. For an author whose string of bestsellers made him a fortune, Alistair MacLean found it particularly hard, in part due to poor investment and advice, to hold on to his millions. Victimhood was his default position for he tended to view himself as underpaid, not to mention ripped-off, by filmmakers, especially when the likes of The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Where Eagles Dare (1968) scored so highly at the box office.

That Puppet on a Chain arrived in cinemas the way it did was the result of the financial complications inherent in the novelist’s life. He had been too busy to write a screenplay for When Eight Bells Toll (1971) mostly because he was consumed with unravelling his finances and setting up a more lucrative template for his movie ventures.

He planned to form a partnership whose sole aim was the production and exploitation of his books as vehicles for films. To this end, MacLean alighted on budding director Geoffrey Reeve, then merely a highly sought-after helmer of commercials and promotional films for industry.

You might accuse Reeve of a bit of double-dealing himself since at the time he met MacLean he was working for the author’s nemesis Carl Foreman, producer of The Guns of Navarone. Foreman had adapted that book for the screen, considerably altering the source material in the process. Excluding MacLean from the party, Foreman had his eyes set on a sequel with the dull and very un-MacLean title of After Navarone.

But the instigator of the Reeve-MacLean partnership came from an unusual source, London wine merchant Lewis Jenkins, who in alliance with the other two formed the equally un-MacLean-named Trio Productions.

Jenkins was more than a wine seller. He was a high-flier who moved with a grace the grumpy Scotsman envied in the kind of classy circles that were, despite his fame, closed off to a mere novelist. He had come across details in a trade paper of MacLean’s deal for Ice Station Zebra (1968) and felt the author was being underpaid and, in a letter, he said so.

You couldn’t get MacLean’s attention more easily than plugging into his sense of victimhood. But it wasn’t movie talk that first made Jenkins indispensable. Horrified at the state of the author’s financial affairs, Jenkins put MacLean in touch with international tax lawyer Dr John Heyting who in turn handed him over to David Bishop, one of whose first tasks was to upbraid Foreman about his temerity on jumping the gun on Navarone and excluding the author.

While the triumvirate’s first notion was of approaching Columbia to fund a sequel, soon they were dealing with a much bigger fish. As unlikely as it sounds, David Lean (Doctor Zhivago, 1965) had expressed considerable interest in turning the threesome into a foursome. But the tantalizing possibility of a Lean-MacLean movie fell at the first hurdle as the director was tied up in developing Ryan’s Daughter (1970)..

It cost MacLean £100,000 to extricate himself from a financial muddle in which his advisers raked in more money than the man they supposedly represented. But it wasn’t just money that was wreaking havoc with his life. Though married, MacLean had a complicated love life and was a very heavy drinker, so it was testament to his discipline that he got any writing done at all.

The idea for Puppet on a Chain originated from a trip to Amsterdam with Reeve, who had mooted the notion of a thriller with a drugs background, during which by chance MacLean alighted on the image that sparked the title. What the author saw was harmless enough, a puppet dangling like a toy from a warehouse in the docks, its purpose probably nothing more than advertising the goods inside. It took an imagination like MacLean’s to turn it into something more sinister.

Once MacLean had written Puppet on a Chain, published in 1969 to commercial and critical acclaim, he handed the rights over to Reeve to negotiate a deal with a major studio. And it says something for the solidity of their partnership that it hit the screens one year later, quicker than When Eight Bells Toll, published in 1966, which took five years to be turned into a film.

Although critics tended to argue that little altered from one book to another, most failed to comprehend that Puppet on a Chain represented a subtle evolution. “It was a change of style from the earlier books. If I went on writing the same stuff, I’d be guying myself,” he said.

But the New York Times noticed and in a lengthy review elevated him to stand comparison with Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, the doyens of the literary thriller. “It’s a top-drawer effort,” commented critic Thomas Lask “If you have any red corpuscles in your blood, you will find your heart pumping triple time…The writing is as crisp as a sunny winter morning and MacLean has provided a travelog for a part of Amsterdam the ordinary tourist is not likely to go.”

But to his intense disappointment, the author discovered that his name alone, while it opened doors, did not unlock sources of funding. One of the two top British studios, ABC, its film arm trading as the Associated British Picture Corporation, which also owned the country’s largest cinema circuit (a state of affairs outlawed in the U.S, since 1948), was interested. ABPC wasn’t entirely avowed of MacLean’s potential, having purchased his debut novel H.M.S. Ulysses but left the project on the shelf.

MacLean was so keen to get the green light he sold the project, including the screenplay and Reeve’s fee, for $60,000, a substantial drop from the $100,000 (plus significant profit share) he received for screenplay alone for Where Eagles Dare. There was a caveat. If the rushes didn’t appeal, ABPC could replace Reeve.

Since advertising scarcely qualified as filmmaking at all, the number of directors who made the jump from making commercials (itself in its infancy) to making movies was virtually nil. This was long before the Scott Brothers, Ridley (Blade Runner, 1982) and Tony (Top Gun, 1986), and Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, 1987) established commercials as a feeder route for Hollywood,

Having purchased the script for a bargain basement price, ABPC’s Robert Clark sought to offset the costs by involving an American partner. After softening up MGM’s Maurice Silverstein over lunch about the prospects of a joint production, Clark sent him a rough script of Puppet on a Chain. Silverstein was not impressed. The plot was too familiar. “Thanks ever so much for letting us have a look at the script,” wrote Silverstein. But that was as far as he went. No enthusiasm, no money.

But the MacLean name was sufficient to interest independents. Israeli Kurt Unger, former United Artists European production chief, whose father had been a distinguished producer, was in the market for a prestigious production, having cut his teeth on Judith (1966) starring Sophia Loren and Jack Hawkins. His sophomore effort was less successful, The Best House in London (1969) starring David Hemmings, a feminist comedy set in a brothel.

But he set up the picture, albeit with a good bit less funding than had been available for Where Eagles Dare and unlikely to even approach the $1.85 million it cost to make When Eight Bells Toll.

Lack of finance limited the talent available. There was no question of approaching a Richard Burton, much less a Clint Eastwood. And it’s more likely that Swede Sven Bertil-Taube was approved as a name with European appeal and following The Buttercup Chain (1970) could easily be sold as the next big thing in America, bearing in mind that espionage had paved the way in the previous decade for stars like Sean Connery and James Coburn.

Barbara Parkins (Valley of the Dolls, 1967) would also help guarantee media attention in the U.S. You might be surprised to learn rising British star Suzanna Leigh (The Lost Continent, 1968) was also on board. Her part was cut from the final film. Supposedly, she played a villain, but it’s more likely she was hired for the role of Belinda, one of the hero’s sidekicks in the book.

While hardly a big name, Brit Patrick Allen (The Devil Rides Out, 1968) brought dependable support and was well-known enough in the home market. Pole Vladek Sheybal (Women in Love, 1969) was always good copy, having twice escaped concentration camps in World War Two. Another Pole, Ania Larson, was making her movie debut and is still working – you might have caught her in The Witcher (2021) mini-series. A maiden movie outing for Greek actress Penny Casdagli was also her last.

One of the names in the aforementioned David Bishop’s contact book was Piet Cleverings, Amsterdam’s police chief, so permission for use of locales and, more importantly, the city’s extensive canals, was readily granted. Unusually, and presumably due to his backing of the partnership, MacLean intended to spend time in Amsterdam observing the filming. He brought over quite a party including his brother and wife and publisher Ian Chapman and wife plus Bishop.

But any sense of triumph at his role in putting the picture together was dashed by the news that his protégé Reeve had been replaced. “It was Geoff Reeve’s first film on this scale,” reported Unger, “and there some things not right. We brought in Don Sharp as a second unit director responsible for such scenes as the motor-boat chases.”

Unger had already taken steps to re-shape the script, calling on television writer Paul Wheeler and Sharp to add an extra dimension. In the producer’s view, MacLean “was a good writer but he was not a screenwriter. And what he wrote as a screenplay for Puppet on a Chain, I’m afraid, had to be rewritten.”

Understandably, MacLean was incandescent with rage at this “rubbishy travesty of what I wrote.” You could almost feel his spleen dripping onto the page as he wrote to Unger, complaining about Wheeler’s involvement. “If he can improve on practically everything I write and is clearly of the opinion that he is so much the better writer, why is it I’ve never heard of him?”

He went on: “I feel like a doctor who has been called in after a group of myopic first-year medical students with hacksaws have completely misdiagnosed and performed major surgery on a previously healthy patient.”

It was a poor introduction to the role of co-producer, although clearly MacLean didn’t think he had to protect his screenplay in the way that someone like Foreman would. If surrendering the rights for a low price furnished him with any power, he didn’t know how to use it.

Sharp was an unusual addition. Rather than being a go-to second unit director he was an experienced director in his own right, a favorite of Hammer and independent producer Harry Alan Towers, for whom he had helmed such films as, respectively, The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964) and Our Man in Marrakesh / Bang! Bang! You’re Dead (1966).

Unfortunately, his movie career had turned turtle, film work drying up after The Violent Enemy (1967) – television (episodes of The Avengers and Champion in 1968) paid the bills – and again after the lackluster Taste of Excitement (1969). In fact, aside from Puppet on a Chain, he remained in movie limbo for another four years.

Sharp argued that the script for the boat chase was “not good enough,” especially if it was to be the highlight of the film. “I chose the location,” recalled Sharp, “I talked to the police, got the boats and worked with a wonderful bloke there called Wim Wagenaar, who ran a restaurant.” As well as driving one of the boats, Wagenaar orchestrated jumping the boats in the canal.

“We sketched out a whole sequence, and some of the things, other boatmen said you can’t do this. I wanted his boat to run up on to the back of another boat and push it along. They said it won’t… I said, all right, let’s try it. And it did work. And we ran into bridges and came spinning round the corner.

“One time we had to wait for a little while because I had broken, I think it was, four boat hulls and smashed about eight Mercury engines. And they couldn’t get another one, they had to fly them in from Canada. It got a bit expensive.”

Part of what made the chase so thrilling was the unusual manner in which it was shot. Rather than shooting it in small sections and then editing it all together, Sharp took the advice of his camera operator Skeets Kelly. “(He) said to me, don’t cut it into pieces if you can do it all in one. . . . I had considered doing it in a couple of cuts, and Skeets talked me out of it. He said no, there’s so much more impact if you don’t because the audiences are very intelligent these days, so au fait with cinema, that they will know . . . But to go and do it in the one [shot], it’s absolutely for real.

Four weeks had been allocated for the boat chase and once it was complete Sharp received another call from Unger who was dissatisfied with the Reeve version. Sharp met with Unger and Lenny Lane, who had provided American funding. His opinion was: “bit of a mess.” Unger was a bit more forthright. “We’ve either got to spend more money and fix it or we’ve got to cut our losses and not release it.”

Sharp’s response was: “It’s a great shame because the boat chase is good and there are some good things in it. So I said, first of all, give me a couple of days in the cutting room with it, to look at it and make some notes, then I’ll tell you whether I think you can save it.”

After spending time in the cutting room, Sharp drew up a list of amendments. Unger talked to the financiers, sorted out the extra cash and commissioned Sharp to reshoot certain sequences, alter the plot and change the ending. Working with a Moviola of the original footage, Sharp could ensure new footage matched whatever was in the can.

He noted that Reeve “didn’t have a story sense then, as a director…and each set-up…looked like part of a television commercial and wasn’t there for the drama of it or just to let the audience know what was going on.”

For example, Sharp had to re-edit and re-film parts of the nightclub sequence. “Seventy-five per cent of it was fine…I did have to go and reshoot it because to shoot a couple of really good, important, dialog lines to do with the plot (were shown) in a shot between the legs of a dancer… done for a visual effect” rather than to tell a story.

MacLean went off in the huff to the extent that he failed to show up for a press conference in Amsterdam only to be later found to be so inebriated that addressing the world’s media would have proved an embarrassment.

MacLean, however, had the last laugh. The movie was a huge hit in Britain on initial release, “making a mint of money,” an automatic candidate in 1973 for a reissue double bill with When Eight Bells Toll.

You couldn’t get higher praise that a James Bond producer finding inspiration in your picture. Added Sharp, “The funny thing was that, when it came out, Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, who knew Kurt Unger, said, how did you do that boat chase? Because they’d never thought of one, and from that they did Live and Let Die. And they spent on the boat chase in Live and Let Die more than we spent on the whole film, both units and the reshoot, on Puppet. They did it marvellously, there’s no doubt about it, but cut, cut, cut . . .”

SOURCES: Jack Webster, Alistair MacLean, A Life (Chapmans Publishers, paperback, 1992) p142-145, 152-157; Dean Brierley, “The Espionage Films of Alistair MacLean Part 2,” Cinema Retro, Issue 14, p36-38; Thomas Lask, “End Papers,” New York Times, November 4, 1969, p43; Barry Norman, “Alistair MacLean, Occupation: Storyteller,” Daily Mail, April 27, 1970; Eddy Darvas and Eddie Lawson, Don Sharp, The London History Project, November 1993; John Exshaw, “Don Sharp, Director, An Appreciation,” Cinema Retro, Issue 20.

Behind the Scenes: “The Guns of Navarone” (1961)

It’s time to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of The Guns of Navarone – world premiere on April 27, 1961, in London and New York opening on June 22, 1961. Although the picture set a new benchmark in high-octane entertainment, a fast-moving war thriller packed with twists and a genuine all-star cast, it was far – very far – from the sure thing it appears in retrospect.

For a start, U.S producer Carl Foreman, a victim of the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunt of the early 1950s, was unable to assemble any of the talent he had set his heart on. He lost his preferred male cast of William Holden and Cary Grant and original scriptwriter Eric Ambler, the thriller writer famed for The Mask of Dimitrios and other novels.

He had a registered a major publicity coup by engineering the screen debut of opera diva Maria Callas, one of the most famous people in the world, but she also dropped out as did his other initial choice for leading lady. On top of that, once filming began he lost his director, Alexander Mackendrick, who had not only achieved a critical and commercial success with the British Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1951) but also crossed the Atlantic to make the acclaimed The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, to prove he could handle big Hollywood stars.

On top of that David Niven nearly lost his life during production and by the time the picture appeared Gregory Peck had suffered so many box office flops that he was a potential liability. And Foreman’s own marriage was in trouble.

It was a wonder it was made at all for Foreman was nobody’s idea of a sure thing. Although he had made his name as a screenwriter with three Oscar nominations for Champion (1949), The Men (1950) and High Noon (1952), his career was in ruins after being slung out of America for his supposed communist sympathies. He set up in London where he wrote screenplays under pseudonyms. But in 1956 won a four-picture production deal with Columbia at a time when that studio was investing heavily in making films in Britain to take advantage of the government’s Eady Levy (effectively, a tax rebate) and cheaper costs. But his first film, The Key (1958) with William Holden and Sophia Loren flopped in the U.S. Columbia persevered, seeing Foreman as the man to tackle its biggest-ever European production.

The Guns of Navarone almost fell at the first hurdle. Foreman’s first choice of location was Cyprus which was threatening to erupt into a civil war. At the last minute, he changed his mind and shifted production to Rhodes. Foreman, who also acted as screenwriter, made considerable changes to the book by British bestselling thriller writer Alistair Maclean, not least of which was introducing female characters to a story that had been resolutely all-male.

There was tension on set – four-time Oscar nominee Gregory Peck was annoyed at sharing the screen with two winners David Niven (Best Actor for Separate Tables, 1958) and Anthony Quinn (twice Best Supporting Actor for Viva Zapata, 1952, and Lust for Life, 1956). Replacement director J. Lee Thompson (Ice Cold in Alex, 1958) managed to sink a ship on loan from the Greek navy. The Actor’s Strike in Hollywood nearly forced the departure of the two younger stars.

The set for the titular guns was the largest ever built, costing £100,000, and even though that proved a design miracle, that, too, was not exempt from disaster, having to be rebuilt after a thunderstorm destroyed part of the set. The injury to David Niven was so severe he nearly died, putting the production in jeopardy. Even when the film approached completion there were other obstacles in the way, composer Dmitri Tiomkin (The Alamo, 1960), for example, demanding a record fee and Foreman locking horns with Columbia over his insistence on launching the picture as a roadshow, request which was ultimately denied, and one of the reasons for the film’ release delay,

I’ve written a book about The Making of The Guns of Navarone. Originally published in 2013, it has been revised with over 30 illustrations added for a new edition to tie in with the 60^th anniversary – available both in print and Kindle versions. Needless to say, it would also make an ideal present for Father’s Day.

If you’re interested in this kind of book, you might like to know that I’ve also written The Making of The Magnificent Seven.

The Guns of Navarone (1961) *****

Stone-cold action classic that blazed a trail for the big-budget men-on-a-mission war picture like The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968). Brilliantly structured, written and directed, and featuring a sea battle, storm, shipwreck, mountaineering, chase, interrogation scenes, infiltration of an impregnable fortress, a pair of romances, two traitors, and an awe-inspiring climax make this a candidate for one of the greatest war pictures ever made.

The set-up is simple. Knock out the gigantic guns at Navarone or two thousand men will perish. It’s mission impossible and the clock is ticking. You don’t know who to trust and the enemy is ruthless.

In the early days of the all-star-cast, producer Carl Foreman rounded up an astonishing line-up, bulking out the bestseller by Scottish thriller maestro Alistair Maclean (The Secret Ways, 1961) with three top stars in five-time Oscar nominee Gregory Peck (The Big Country, 1958), double Oscar-winner Anthony Quinn (Heller in Pink Tights, 1960) and Oscar-winner David Niven (Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, 1960). Add in British household names Anthony Quayle (Ice Cold in Alex, 1958), Stanley Baker (The Concrete Jungle, 1960) and James Robertson Justice (Doctor in Love, 1960), a sprinkling of rising stars in James Darren (Let No Man Write My Epitaph, 1960), Gia Scala (I Aim at the Stars, 1960) and Richard Harris (The Night Fighters, 1960) and renowned Greek actress Irene Papas (Antigone, 1961).

Each man is a specialist. Capt. Mallory (Gregory Peck) the mountaineer whose climbing skills are essential to completing the fist part of the mission, explosives expert Corporal Miller (David Niven), mechanic ‘Butcher’ Brown (Stanley Baker), Greek patriot Stavrou (Anthony Quinn) and the ruthless killer Pappadimos (James Darren) who has the contact with the Greek resistance. The stakes are ramped up when we learn both Mallory and Stavrou have bounties on their heads, not to mention the fact they are sworn enemies, and that before the mission even gets under way, spies are discovered in the camp. The ostensible leader of the group Major Franklin (Anthony Quayle) is wounded early on, turning him into a liability and making Mallory the de facto leader.

The stakes are ramped up further – this time through relationships. Their Greek contact turns out to be a woman, Maria (Irene Papas), brother of Pappadimos. She brings with her a mute girl Anna (Gia Scala) for whom Mallory develops romantic feelings while Stavrou has eyes for Maria. Mallory is also torn about Franklin, his best friend.

And from there it pitches into one disaster after another. They are too easily hunted by the Germans. They are shelled with mortars and attacked by dive bombers as they race across open mountains and through caves to reach their destination. They have to shoot their way out of traps and finagle their way into the fortress. There are twists and turns all the way, the clock ticking in almost James-Bond-style as the deadline for the destruction of the troops approaches.

And although this is clearly a war picture it is also as obviously an anti-war one, no end to the killing in sight, people dying pointlessly.

Although the acting was ignored come Oscar time, each of the stars delivers and it is a communal tour de force. Director J. Lee Thompson (Ice Cold in Alex) ensures that in visual terms none of the stars dominates, each given equal screen time while the strong supporting cast each has their own narrative arc. With over two-and-half-hours’ running time, Thompson has both the bonus of time to allow each element to be fully played out and the problem of keeping the picture taut and he succeeds brilliantly in both aims. It is a masterpiece of suspense. And it looked fabulous, the guns themselves, by which the picture might succeed or fail, were awesome.

Thompson was Oscar-nominated as was producer Carl Foreman for both Best Picture and the screenplay, Dmitri Tiomkin for the score (one of the longest-ever), John Cox for sound, Alan Osbiston for editing. Bill Warrington who did the visual special effects and Chris Greenham who did the sound effects were the only winners on the night.

It was a commercial smash, top picture of the year in the U.S., the biggest picture of all time at the British box office and breaking records all over the world.

COMPETITION: Win a Signed Copy of “The Making of The Guns of Navarone”

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the opening of The Guns of Navarone I am offering a copy of my book “The Making of The Guns of Navarone.” This is a revised and enlarged edition – the first time with illustrations (over 30 of them) – of the original version which was published in 2013.

The Royal World Premiere of the film took place at the Odeon Leicester Square, London, on April 27, 1961. But it was not released in the U.S. until June, opening at the Criterion and Murray Hill cinemas in New York. At all three cinemas it broke the box office record.

All you have to do to enter is guess from all the films reviewed in the Blog in April which five proved the most popular (judged from the number of views).

Put the five you have chosen in ascending order.

Email your answers to me at bhkhannan@aol.com

The person who gets the most right in the proper order will be declared the winner.

The book will be posted free of charge anywhere in the world and, being the author, I can arrange for it to be signed. The closing date is Monday, May 17.

Feel free to let your friends know.

Good luck.

The Greatest Movie Never Made

Forty Days at Musa Dagh was a strong contender by the end of the 1960s for The Greatest Movie Never Made. By then an eye-watering one million bucks had been spent without a foot of film being shot.

I came across it while writing my book about “The Making of The Guns of Navarone.” That film’s producer Carl Foreman was slated in the early 1960s to write what I soon discovered was a legendary lost project. It was subsequently fated to become the most high-profile casualty of MGM’s financial problems at the end of that decade.

Forty Days of Musa Dagh was based on the debut novel written in German by Prague-born poet Franz Werfel (who later wrote The Song of Bernadette filmed in 1942). It concerned the infamous Armenian genocide carried out by the Turks in World War One.

The novel had such advance buzz that news of its imminent publication in Germany in 1933 quickly crossed the Atlantic. After studio representatives read the book in the original German, MGM wunderkind Irving Thalberg bought the rights in 1934, prior to its American publication, for $35,000 (equivalent to $650,000 now).

Thalberg promised “one of the most staggering production undertakings of all motion picture history.” With Clark Gable and William Powell heading the cast (there would be 63 roles) and director William Wellman (Call of the Wild, 1935) assigned a million-dollar budget, an enormous amount for the time, and with screenwriter Talbot Jennings (Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935) on board, Thalberg was intent on delivering a prestige product. In publicity material, MGM boasted: “What a picture it will make.”

The novel was a huge success with 170,000 copies sold in hardback even though, priced at $3, it was 50 cents or a dollar more expensive than other bestsellers. It was simultaneously snapped up by the Book of the Month Club and the Catholic Book club and only kept off the top of the bestseller lists by James Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

However, publication was shrouded in controversy. It was banned in Germany shortly after publication. In America, publisher Viking and the author faced a $200,000 libel lawsuit brought by Harutian Nokhudian and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1936 – where it was dismissed. But that was only the beginning of its troubles.

Thalberg had not counted on opposition from Turkey. Or if such a possibility had been considered, it had been dismissed since that country was not a profitable outlet for Hollywood product. However, Turkey had very strong trading relationships and threatened to instigate a ban on all MGM releases in these European countries as well as the entire Muslim world, an action which if successful would put a huge hole in the studio’s foreign receipts.

For the first time studios “had begun to pay attention to foreign repercussions” after Paramount had been forced to withdraw from Spain and many other markets the final Josef von Sternberg-Marlene Dietrich collaboration The Devil Is A Woman (1935) when that movie ruffled the feathers of foreign powers. Unwilling to go ahead with a picture that might cost them heavily at the foreign box office, Thalberg shelved the movie (along with two others).

The idea remained dormant for 15 years until revived by independent producer Walter Wanger (Joan of Arc, 1948) who had originally competed with MGM for the rights and had Paramount waiting in the wings to provide backing should the Thalberg deal fall through. But even a seasoned a producer such as Wanger had no more success in placing it on the launch pad and it struggled along in development hell for another decade until, out of the blue, in 1961 MGM hooked writer-director Carl Foreman.

This was a considerable surprise because Foreman had an exclusive and lucrative deal with Columbia (they split profits on his films down the middle) but as he was coming off that studio’s most successful picture of all time The Guns of Navarone (1961) with a high-octane cast of Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn the studio cut him some slack.

Foreman did not come cheap. In addition to his $27,500 fee for writing the script, Foreman was entitled to 2.5 per cent of the gross after MGM had taken in twice the negative cost. After an arduous four-year slog delivering The Guns of Navarone, Foreman described his new venture as “a bit of a rest” which seemed an odd choice of phrase given that MGM was under pressure to greenlight the picture in 1962.

It was firmly in MGM’s production sights for most of the 1960s. In 1963 it was seen as one of the studio’s biggest upcoming projects along with Doctor Zhivago, the adaptation of James Michener’s Caravans and musical Say It with Music. By the following year it had been allocated a $7.5 million budget – the same as Zhivago – and was on course to be made in Greece in the spring of that year.

By 1965 it landed in the lap of Oscar-nominated British director Guy Green who had nurtured the $1.2 million A Patch of Blue (1965) starring Sidney Poitier into a substantial hit. Although the budget had by now dropped to $5 million it had attracted Omar Sharif, one of four big stars set. There was a new script by Scottish Oscar-winner Neil Paterson (Room at the Top, 1959) and best of all there was a top-flight producer in Pandro S. Berman (Father of the Bride, 1950) with over two decades experience at MGM. Filming, however, though still in Greece, had been pushed back to 1966.

Although Guy Green appeared to have the most solid lock on the project, other names associated with the movie included producer Carlo Ponti (Doctor Zhivago, 1965) and directors William Wyler (Ben Hur, 1959), Henri Verneuil (The 25^th Hour, 1967) and Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, 1954), the last two both born in the former Ottoman Empire now known as Turkey.

It was listed as being on the MGM production schedules for every year till the end of the decade with names like Yul Brynner and Charlton Heston bandied about until it joined a massive bonfire of other expensive projects. By the end of the decade it had racked up over a million dollars in producer and screenwriter fees. According to Variety it was “the most off-again on-again major literary property in the history of American motion picture.”

But it was not alone in being dumped by a studio. Towards the end of the 1960s Hollywood was awash with abandoned projects. The rights to Broadway musical Coco had cost $2.25 million. Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate had a $12 million budget before the plug was pulled. A record $600,000 had been spent on acquiring the rights to William Styron bestseller The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Other high-priced acquisitions lumped in production limbo included The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) author John Le Carre’s A Small Town in Germany, Armageddon by Leon Uris of Exodus (1960) fame, Bullet Park by John Cheever who had written The Swimmer (1968), Caravans despite the success of the author’s Hawaii (1966) and The Inheritors by Harold Robbins who had churned out The Carpetbaggers (1964).

Hit plays were no more successful in reaching the starting grid – Arthur Miller’s After the Fall had George Cukor lined up to direct and Faye Dunaway as star and a total of $350,000 had been spent on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

And there, surely, Forty Days of Musa Dagh should have been laid to rest. Of all these expensive projects, only Caravans would eventually see the light of day. But against all odds, interest in Forty Days of Musa Dagh remained high. Fresh from success with Where Eagles Dare (1968) producing team Elliott Kastner and Jerry Gershwin took a stab at the project, setting their sights on a new script and a 1970 start date. But the duo could not turn the idea into reality. And once again it sank to the bottom of the pile.

Armenian businessman and sometime producer John Kurkjian (The Tears of Happiness, 1974) picked up the rights through his vehicle High Investment and wooed MGM. And in 1976 the project was revived by the studio as a co-production with James B. Harris (Paths of Glory, 1957) overseeing production based on a new script by South African playwright Ronald Harwood (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1970). This was viewed as “the last attempt to revive it” and for a time it appeared as if the project would at last see the light of day. But MGM’s optimism barely lasted the year and, concluding the movie was too rich for its blood, dropped out.

Kurkjian continued to try to interest other studios and was confident. With a new script by Clarke Reynolds (Shalako, 1968), he was convinced he could get the movie off the ground with the backing of the Yugoslavian government were the film to shoot there. United Artists announced the movie would be on its release slate for 1977-1978. But that, too, proved a false dawn.

Redemption came from the most unlikely of sources – American B-picture production outfit Cannon which had been taken over in 1979 for just $500,000 by Israeli writer-director Menahem Golem and his cousin Yoram Globus. Although this pair specialized in low-budget action pictures such as Death Wish sequels and martial arts efforts like Enter the Ninja (1981), they had artistic pretensions, borne out by The Magician of Lublin (1979) directed by Golan and starring Alan Arkin. That same year, a new version of Forty Days of Musa Dagh took shape, part-funded by High Investment and the West Berlin Senate. Charles Bronson was lined up as star. The budget was set at $10 million.

In the end, there was no Bronson and no $10 million budget, but the movie did get made in 1982 for $4 million by Transcontinental Picture Industries with the less stellar cast of Indian star Kabir Bedi (Sandokan mini-series, 1976), American television actress Ronnie Carol and character actor Guy Stockwell (Beau Geste, 1966). It was directed by Israeli Sarky Mouradian (Tears of Happiness). It did not reach the United States for another five years. And it was no epic, coming in at a trim 94 minutes. Nor was it a huge box office success. And it’s pretty impossible to find on DVD.

Footnote: The Promise (2016) covered the same ground. Directed by Terry George, it starred Chistian Bale, Oscar Isaac and Charlotte Le Bon. It was funded by Kirk Kerkorian.

SOURCES: “Double Pan for Reich,” Variety, Feb 27, 1934, 58; “Literati: Best Sellers,” Variety, Jan 1, 1935, 58; “Wellman’s Chore,” Variety, Apr 10, 1935, 2; Advertisement, MGM, Variety, Jun 12, 1935, 25-28; “Foreign Rights Bugaboo,” Variety, Nov 27, 1935, 2; “Thalberg’s Eight; Four at $1,000,000,” Variety, Dec 25, 1935, 4; “H’Wood Foreign Jams,” Variety, Mar 25, 1936, 3; “MGM Scraps Witch of Timbuctoo and Musa Dagh,” Variety Mar 25, 1936, 3; “Film Industry Watching Blockade as B.O. Cue on Provocative Themes,” Variety, Jun 22, 1938, 1; “Carl Foreman to Metro on Loan,” Variety, Feb 1, 1961, 3; “Columbia Waives Rights to Foreman for 40 Days,” Variety, Feb 8, 1961, 59; “Foreman’s Commitment: Doing 40 Days for MGM, Strength for Columbia,” Variety, Jul 5, 1961, 11; “Positive Side of Negatives,” Variety, May 30, 1962, 5; “Berman, 22-Year Man, Stays on MGM Lot,” Variety, Aug 1, 1962, 3; “Upcoming MG Slate May Number 30 Pix,” Variety, Jan 1, 1964, 16; “1965-1967 Will Be Roadshow Years” Variety, Sep 16, 1964, 4; “Pictures: Omar Sharif,” Variety, Dec 9, 1964, 21; “Guy Green Next Helms Musa Dagh,” Variety, Apr 14, 1965, 20; “Musa Dagh Nearer,” Variety, Jul 7, 1965, 9; “MGM Keeps Pledge of 26 Prods,” Variety, Aug 10, 1965, 5; “MGM’s (Hopefully) Final Loan,” Variety, Sep 14, 1966, 3; “3 Ponti Films on Metro O’Seas Slate,” Variety, Apr 19, 1967, 65; “Forty Days (and 34 Years) of Musa Dagh,” Variety, Apr 16, 1969, 19; “Acceptable Script As Invisible Cost Before Production,” Variety, Jul 14, 1971, 3; “Big Investment in Story Values Which Have Not Yet Been Filmed,” Variety, May 9, 1973, 28; “Werfel, After 40 years,” Variety, Jul 28, 1976, 6; “United Artists Looks Ahead; 13 from Metro Inventory,” Variety, Sep 22, 1976, 3; “Shepherd, As MGM Producer, Details Plans, Dropped Films, ” Variety, Dec 15, 1976,3; “Golan-Globus to Film 40 Days of Musa Dagh,” Variety, Feb 14, 1979, 27; “TPI Carves Out Sales Niche,” Variety, Oct 26, 1983, 69; “Film Review,” Variety, Nov 25, 1987, 19; “Cannon Completed Versus Unmade Films,” Variety, Oct 5, 1988, 52.