The gimmick of stars in disguise isn’t enough to spark this routine whodunit and the extended sequences of fox-hunting might deter the contemporary viewer but oddly enough something else of considerable interest is going on and enough to keep you hooked.
Given it’s an actor’s screen persona that tempts you to their movies, how are you going to respond when that’s gone AWOL? Actually, you get a more intriguing performance. Covered in slabs of make-up Kirk Douglas makes out like a latter-day Alec Guinness or Peter Sellers, essaying a number of quite different characters. So the jutting chin, the fierce eyes and the aggressive tone are all gone and in its place he shows he can act. His vicar is especially appealing.
But the same holds true of George C. Scott even though he’s not in disguise. Director John Huston, much as he did with his trio of star names in The Misfits (1961), gets Scott to tone down his screen idiosyncrasies. So the growl is tempered, the flaring eyebrows in cold storage for much of the time, and his jutting chin and aggression set to one side as he depicts a different character to his usual.
The Academy usually hands out Oscars to people who over-act or have some affliction to overcome, and they seem to wilfully ignore it when actors show how well they can act outside their comfort zone.
The story is the usual combination of clever deduction, red herrings and set pieces. Former spy Anthony Gethryn (George C. Scott) is hired by the titular character (John Merivale) to find out if a bunch of people on his list are still alive. Messenger himself is soon bumped off in a plane explosion but not before he leaves a garbled clue with sole survivor of the sabotage Raoul Le Borg (Jacques Roux). Gethryn soon discovers everyone on the list is dead. This may have something to do with the Second World War or it may be that the killer wants to cover up something now before potential scandal can ruin a promising future.
Meanwhile, the killer keeps bumping people off. And just to keep Gethryn from getting distracted by possible romance by Lady Bruttenholm (Dana Wynter) Le Borg pounces on her.
By this point the director was pursuing his dreams of becoming landed gentry with a stately home in Ireland and very keen on all the trimmings including fox-hunting which probably accounts for the length of time accorded the sport.
Kirk Douglas, who’s company produced the picture, thought – either to fire up public interest or to help along a fairly straightforward tale – he would ask a few of his movie star buddies to bury themselves in make-up and play bit parts. Whether audiences spent all their time when they should have been concentrating on Gethryn’s detection on carrying out their own sleuthing trying to detect which of the supporting characters might actually be Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum or Burt Lancaster is anybody’s guess. It does have to be pointed out that some of the make-up is unconvincing, some faces looking as though they’ve come out of a box.
Despite all this, I enjoyed seeing George C. Scott (Patton, 1970) and Kirk Douglas (Cast a Giant Shadow, 1966) playing decidedly against type and showing how easy it is to act if you’re not always having to adopt a screen persona.
John Huston looks as if he’s having a ball. Written by Anthony Veiller (Night of the Iguana, 1964) and Alec Coppel (Vertigo, 1958) from the book by Philip MacDonald.
Audiences weaned on glossy spies surrounded by pretty girls and generally their own country taking a straight moral path turned up their noses at this more realistic portrayal of the espionage business where dirty infighting was the stock in trade. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) was saintly by comparison.
Complaints about a complicated plot were led by critics who rarely had had to work their way through a tricky narrative, unless it was from the likes of Alfred Hitchcock who was apt to add twists to his stories. The fact that the bulk of the characters went by strange monikers – The Highwayman, Sweet Alice, The Warlock etc – also seemed to upset critics. (In the book by Noel Behn, the author points out that these spies were constantly adopting new identities, it made it easier for others to keep tabs on them if they were always referred to by nicknames which were constant.)
A contemporary audience, accustomed to things never being what they seem and all sorts of double-dealing, would be more at home here.
None of the characters, even the supposed good guys/gals, get off lightly. Personal unsavory sacrifice is unavoidable. Charles Rone (Patrick O’Neal) and B.A. (Barbara Parkins), who have fallen in love with each other, both have to prostitute themselves for the cause. And when the going gets too tough, suicide is the only way out. There’s hefty financial reward for those who survive the mission, but the substantial pot will be split between the survivors and not the dependents of those who don’t come home.
At the crux of the story is recovering a letter which promises that the USA and Russia will conspire against China and destroy its atomic weaponry. Espionage expert The Highwayman (Dean Jagger) recruits a team to infiltrate Moscow consisting of Rone, burglar and safe cracker B.A., drug dealer The Whore (Nigel Green), Ward (Richard Boone) and ageing homosexual The Warlock (George Sanders) who is a dab hand at knitting.
More than a few have a dodgy past, Ward an art dealer of ill repute, The Whore a pimp, even Col Kosnov (Max von Sydow), the target of the US operation, betraying his own countrymen. B.A. has to learn how to use sex to trap the enemy and, to get past the starting gate, loses her virginity to the obliging Rone.
The Whore sets up in the brothel business with Madame Sophie (Lila Kedrova), keeping the sex workers docile by filling them up with heroin, which he imports. As instructed, B.A. shares out her favors with the enemy while Rone seduces the wife, Erika (Bibi Andersson), of Col Kosnov.
You always go into a spy picture expecting double cross and this is no different. B.A., The Whore and The Warlock have their covers blown, the latter committing suicide, the girl failing to do so but paralyzed as a result. Ward kills Kosnov. But his motive seems odd – blaming the Russian for betraying his countrymen – and his action only becomes clear at the climactic double cross when Ward is revealed as a double agent in the pay of the enemy. For which, it has to be said, he doesn’t suffer. If anything, with B.A. in his hands, he has Rone over a barrel.
While this was never going to be a by-the-book espionage number, it’s elevated by exploring the emotional price that has to be paid, both in hiding some feelings and feigning others.
While possibly it made sense to present the stars in alphabetical order, suggesting nobody took precedence in the billing, most have the opportunity to play against type. Barbara Parkins (Valley of the Dolls, 1967) is excellent as the girl embarking on a career for which she has, emotionally, little aptitude. Bibi Andersson (Duel at Diablo, 1966), usually cast in repressed roles, has a ball as woman giving in to impulse. Tough guy Patrick O’Neal (Stiletto, 1969) must knowingly betray his true love. Richard Boone (The Night of the Following Day, 1969) is already playing a secret role and effortlessly dupes his colleagues.
There’s not much of the John Huston (Sinful Davey, 1969) visual magic but he makes up for that by allowing the actors to delve deeper into their characters. But he doesn’t attempt to spin a happy ending and the downbeat climax suggests that the USA lost this battle. The one memorable image is a ball of red wool rolling across the ground, indicating that The Warlock is dead. Written by Huston and Gladys Hill (The Man Who Would Be King, 1975) from the bestseller by Noel Behn (The Brink’s Job, 1978).
While the themes didn’t appeal then, they resound now.
Variation on the director’s earlier The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as a pair of British ex-military cheekie chappies whose reach exceeds their grasp come unstuck when confronted by powerful religious elements. Enticingly presents a marvellously ironic puzzle – you can have everything your heart desires except anything that would make you human. And elevated less by John Huston’s cinematic achievement than by terrific performances by the two stalwarts of the British film industry at the time, Sean Connery and Michael Caine, the former taking the acting kudos by a nose as the less intelligent of the duo. Given Connery’s standing at the time, this was somewhat playing against type. Yes, he exudes screen charisma and is a macho as ever, but nonetheless not quite as quick on the uptake as the more calculating Caine.
Story is told in flashback after a maimed Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) turns up as the offices of journalist Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer). They originally met when Peachy had stolen the writer’s watch, returning it on realizing they were fellow freemasons. With buddy Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery), they attempt to enlist Kipling in a blackmail scheme and in due course the soldiers set off to make their fortunes in the forbidding land of Kafiristan, at the top of the Indian sub-continent, where no white man has set foot since Alexander the Great.
Their scheme is simple – to hire themselves out as mercenaries to various tribes, bringing modern warfare skills and weaponry to primitive society and ascending the ranks of power. When Daniel appears unhurt after plucking an arrow out of his chest, the natives confer on him the status of god, and so he is elevated to kingshippery and all the gold he could want. But in this Garden of Eden there is a humdinger of a Catch 22, the apple he must not touch.
He can’t take a wife.
You can see the logic. As a god you should be above base earthly desires. A god could not possibly wish such intimacy with a human. Otherwise he would lose his otherworldly sensibilities, not to mention that the chosen woman would expect to physically explode. While the more sensible Peachy has been all the time calculating just how he’s going make a getaway with as much gold as he can carry, Daniel becomes trapped in the notion that he can have his cake and eat it.
The religious hierarchy says otherwise and it doesn’t end well.
Audiences may well have been disappointed at the lack of action. There’s only one battle and it’s over in a minute, albeit that there’s a timeout to make the point about the power of religion. And although our boys endure a momentous trek it’s fairly standard stuff and Huston lacks the vision of a David Lean to turn the journey into anything more dramatically or visually memorable. A whole bunch of indigenous background material – including the ancient version of polo where the ball is a human head – doesn’t make up.
What does transform this relatively slight tale is the playing. Connery and Caine are a delight, the kind of top-of-the-range double act on a par with the cinemagical pairing of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). They spark each other off just a treat. Caine, surprisingly, is the one in charge, Connery adrift in matters of arithmetic, strategy and, when it comes down to it, common sense even though when called up to judge on civil matters proves himself relatively astute and fair.
The writing, too, seems to understand implicitly how to get the best out of the characters. When they fall out, it is so subtle you would hardly notice. Caine scarcely bristles when Connery explains that Caine really should be falling in line with the rest of his subjects and bowing his head, but if you are astute reader of an acting face you can see the chasm that has opened up in their relationship.
To employ a Scottish phrase, Connery gives it “laldy” – acts with gusto – when playing the part of a madman, whirling around like a demented dervish, but mostly reins it in.
The intricacies of freemasonry would wait a few decades before called to the cinematic altar in The Da Vinci Code (2006) but here the mumbo-jumbo proves less important than, as with the Dan Brown epic, a symbol, and, again with the lightest of narrative strokes, we are left considering its mystic origins.
John Huston (Sinful Davey, 1969) back on top form but he’s more than helped by exceptional acting by Sean Connery (The Hill, 1965) and Michael Caine (Play Dirty, 1968) with Christopher Plummer (Nobody Runs Forever / The High Commissioner, 1968) in unusually subtle form as well. Gladys Hill (Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967) and Huston were Oscar-nominated for the the screenplay based on the Kipling short story.
Impressed by this performance I should warn you I feel a Sean Connery binge coming on.
Major disappointment from a director of the caliber of John Huston. Granted, the quality of his output during the decade had been variable but this marked a new low and the suspicion lingers that he only took on the gig to spend time in Ireland – the movie was filmed there – where he had set up a home in the grand manner of a country squire. Equally odd is James Webb as screenwriter. Having chronicled the American West via How the West Was Won (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Webb had turned his attention to British history, beginning with Alfred theGreat (1968).
But where that had at least historical reality to guide the narrative, here Webb relies on the dubious autobiography of the titular subject, resulting in an episodic, picaresque, sub-Tom Jones (1963) and even sub-Where’s Jack? (1969) tale set in the Scottish Highlands. And much as John Hurt later achieved considerable recognition for his acting, the role, as played, could have been handled just as easily by any number of rising male stars, since, beyond being able to affect two accents – broad Scots and upper-class English – little is required.
In fact, the director clearly couldn’t distinguish between the Irish and the Scottish accent as among the joblot of accents, none more than serviceable, there is many an Irish lilt. As if to make the point that he couldn’t care less, you will also discern on the soundtrack a refrain from “Danny Boy.”
Beyond that it made a good scene, quite why Davey Haggart (John Hurt) decided to announce his desertion from the British Army in such ostentatious manner is difficult to understand. He’s a drummer, marching along, banging said drum, when he takes it into his head to jump off the nearest bridge into the nearest river, complete with drum, only to find himself headed for a mill. In possibly the best line in the script, seeing the mill wheel blocking his escape, he mutters, “Who put that there?”
From here on it’s a tale of pursuit – two actually. Lawman Richardson (Nigel Davenport) leads the merry chase but he’s also got childhood sweetheart Annie (Pamela Franklin) on his tail to ease him out of scrapes in the hope that he’ll reform. Beginning as a pickpocket, he switches to highway robbery and piracy, rarely with particular success. Loaded down with booty on the carriage he has stolen, for example, he loses control of the horses and is left at the side of the road, as poor as when he started.
He’s certainly inventive but contemporary audiences will recoil from the notion of using the head a height-challenged man aloft another’s shoulders to test the rotting rafters inside a jail, leading not to escape but to a home-made pleasure parlor, since it provides entry to the female jail above where our hero establishes himself as a pimp.
But that’s as inventive as this picture gets and in the manner of Cat Ballou and Where’s Jack? you know that whenever a hero heads towards the gallows you can be sure the hanging will be thwarted. The period setting – the 1820s – offers little assistance, as the picture could be set any time before the invention of steam, and could as easily have taken place in a galaxy far far away long long ago called Brigadoon for all the period authenticity shown.
This didn’t lead to instant stardom for John Hurt and possibly just as well as he’d have been wasted in a series of ingenue roles. Pamela Franklin (And Soon the Darkness, 1970) doesn’t have much to do beyond trying to master a Scottish accent. Nigel Davenport (Play Dirty, 1968) was in his element playing yet another frosty authoritarian figure.
John Huston (Night of the Iguana, 1964) did prove one thing – that he lacked the knack for comedy.
Ode to the male gaze. Once a cult vehicle, this will struggle to find favor these days what with its backward attitudes. Virtually impossible to excuse the rampant self-undulgence. The sexually exploited naïve Ewa Aulin in the title role didn’t even have the benefit of being turned into a star. The satire is executed with all the finesse of a blunderbuss. And while, theoretically, picking off a wild range of targets, if this movie has anything to say it’s to point out how easy it is for men to deify themselves at the slightest opportunity.
Not much of a narrative more a series of sketches slung together with the slightest connecting thread. Most its appeal lies in watching huge marquee names make fools of themselves. Or, if you’re that way inclined, seeing how much nudity will be imposed on the star, intimacy rarely consensual, clothes usually whipped off her.
Teenager Candy (Ewa Aulin) has father issues, daddy (Jack Austin) being a dumb angst-ridden teacher. Randy poet McPhisto (Richard Burton) drives a class of schoolgirls into a frenzy with his lusty reading, inveigles Candy into his chauffeur-driven car, ends up in her basement drunkenly humping a mannequin while Mexican gardener (Ringo Starr) with an accent as coruscating as that of Manuel from Fawlty Towers assaults her on pool table. Scandalized father packs her off to his twin brother in New York, that notoriously safe haven for nymphettes, while on the way to the airport they are almost driven off the road by the gardener’s vengeful biker sisters (Florinda Balkan et al).
For no apparent reason she is hitching a lift on a military plane commanded by randy Brigadier Smight (Walter Matthau) who, on the grounds that he hasn’t had sex for six years, commands her to remove her clothes for the good of the nation. In the Big Apple, rock star surgeon Dr Krankheir (James Coburn), entering the operating theater to the same kind of waves of acclaim as McPhisto, finds an excuse to have her undress and submit to him, this just after she’s managed to avoid the attentions of her randy uncle. It should come as no surprise that Krankheit treats women as his personal property to the extent of branding them like cattle.
In due course, she encounters a gang of mobsters, an underground movie director and a hunchback (Charles Aznavour) who, in return for her showing pity for his condition, proceeds to rape her. She is arrested. Guess who wants to frisk her. Naturally, when she escapes she runs into a bunch of drag queens.
Then she finds sanctuary in a semi-trailer truck, home to guru Grindl (Marlon Brando). He’d be convincing enough as a mystic except he, too, finds an excuse to rip her clothes off. There are more cops to contend with and another guru, facial features obscured by white clay. If they’re going to have sex then naturally it must be in a Hindu temple. Turns out the latest person to take advantage of her is her father but he’s been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card because by now he’s brain damaged.
This might all be a dream/nightmare. Candy might even be an alien. It’s dressed up in enough psychedelia to sink a battleship and its highly likely that any lass as gullible as Candy will find herself at the mercy of any man, so in that context it carries a powerful message. I’m sure many beautiful young girls will attest to the truth that men feel they have the right to paw anyone who comes their way without asking permission. And the other message is just as powerful – how many young actresses have been seduced by thoughts of fame to disport themselves in this fashion only to find that all the industry wants is their nudity not their acting talent.
You might say that the target is so obvious it hardly needs pointing out but the MeToo campaign will beg to differ and you would hope that Hollywood has wised up. It’s just a shame that the satire is so heavy-handed. The military and the medical profession are sorely in need to answering tough questions. Unfortunately, this picture doesn’t ask any. It’s like an endless casting couch.
Directed by Christian Marquand (Of Flesh and Blood, 1963) in, thankfully, his final picture, from a screenplay by Buck Henry (The Graduate, 1967) and Terry Southern (Dr Strangelove, 1962) based on the novel by Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. Nobody comes out of this well and it’s rammed full of cameos from the likes of Elsa Martinelli (The Belle Starr Story, 1968), John Huston (Myra Breckenridge, 1970), Anita Pallenberg (Performance, 1970), Marilu Tolo (Bluebeard, 1972) and boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.
Ewa Aulin (Start the Revolution Without Me, 1971) isn’t given much of chance, her character whimsical, pallid and submissive and she didn’t become a major marquee name.
Proof that time can be kind to even the unholiest of unholy messes. Previously only appreciated/mocked for its camp values, the thin story this has to tell suddenly carries contemporary weight. Not so much the transgender elements but now revealed as the first picture to bring the MeToo agenda to light.
While it’s still terrible, with a tendency towards the really really obvious and, when that doesn’t work, bombard the audience with a That’s Entertainment smorgasbord of sexual innuendo. In fairness, even in those more feminist-awakening times, you probably still had to batter the viewer over the head to get them to accept any of the points being made.
Candy-striped oufit pure invention of the poster designer.
The first, while theoretically in a theoretical twist tranposed to the female, was the sexual predator, closely followed by the notion that every woman wanted “it”, regardless of them expressing otherwise. Even the dumbest cinemagoer could not have failed to see that putting an exclusively male casting couch at the disposal of Hollywood agent Leticia (Mae West) was actually a clever way of showing just how the movie business at its worst worked, though in reverse, the females queuing up (apparently) for the kind of sexual transaction that could give them a shot at stardom.
That it’s Myra (Raquel Welch) herself who spends most of the movie degrading men (anal rape anyone?), and women indiscriminately (I’m surprised the posters didn’t scream “Raquel Goes Lesbian”), it’s again just a play on what went on in the virtually exclusive male enclave of Hollywood. Just as pointedly it points the finger at the way Hollywood has destroyed the American Dream, snaring thousands of hopefuls who spend fortunes, whittle away their lives and prostitute themselves (and still do) in the vain hope that taking acting lessons for an eternity will somehow provide them with a talent they weren’t born with.
The narrative – what narrative? – concerns Myron (Rex Reed) having a sex-change operation to become the aforesaid Myra and then claiming an inheritance, on exceptionally spurious grounds, from her kinky uncle Buck (John Huston). And trying to part hunk wannabe Rusty (Roger Herren) from his wannabe girlfriend (Farrah Fawcett, the Major came later). You might argue that the continuous loitering presence of Myron is a distraction but occasionally it’s welcome as the movie runs out of punchbags.
And in case you didn’t get the message in what passes for dialog, Myra takes to just delivering straightforward lectures on the male-dominant Hollywood that posited the notion that women were there for the taking if you were just male enough to take them and that any women who showed the slightest ounce of onscreen intelligence and the ability to swat away predatory males was just a predatory male in disguise.
Nobody comes out of this with any dignity and though it destroyed the career of director Michael Sarne (Joanna, 1969) and Roger Herren, John Huston (The Cardinal, 1963) was inclined to self-indulgence on-screen if not restrained by a strong director, while Farrah Fawcett and, in a bit part, Tom Selleck survived to become television legends. The less said about wooden Rex Reed the better.
Quite where this left Raquel Welch is anyone’s guess. While she held the narrative together in convincing fashion, as an actress she wasn’t provided with enough material beyond the sensational to convince as a dramatic actress of anything more than middling caliber. Yet, it was an incredibly brave career decision. The contemporary likes of Joanne Woodward, Jane Fonda, Maggie Smith et al would have balked at the thinness of the material, and would have run a mile from expressing themselves in such sexual terms, despite probably recognizing what the movie was attempting to achieve.
It needed someone larger than life to play the part and, possibly with higher expectations than seemed plausible, the bold Raquel stepped up to plate. Perhaps the element that appeared most to her was that she took revenge on Rusty because (shock, horror) he didn’t fancy her at a time when she was presented as the most fanciable woman on the planet.
So discretion left at the door, blunderbuss in full operational mode, but even now it’s that approach that is wakening the industry up to the sexual misbehavior of many of its to male personnel. What was once top of the so-bad-it’s-good tree is now revealed as not too bad after all, if you swap the phantasmagoria for the stinking reality underneath.
My discovery that Hayley Mills’ career could have taken an entirely different turn had either Deep Freeze Girls or When I Grow Rich entered production in 1965/1966 and therefore prevented the star returning to Britain for The Family Way (1966) – and, as it transpired, love and marriage – made me look again at the huge volume of movies that were either never made at the time initially announced or never made at all.
I’d covered a couple of classic examples previously, 40 Days of Musa Dagh for example taking nearly half a century from initial proposal to some kind of fruition. And, of course, the financial collapse of studios at the end of the 1960s put an end to the prospects of such big budget movies as Man’s Fate, to be directed by Fred Zinnemann.
But sometimes as many as half the movies announced by a studio or independent for their forthcoming schedule never made it to the big screen. Others such as This Property Is Condemned (1966), initially to star Elizabeth Taylor and directed by John Huston, still got over the line but with new players, Natalie Wood as star and Robert Mulligan in the hot seat. On the other hand, of the quartet of movies – Lie Down in Darkness, Guardians, Grass Lovers, and Linda – that producer William Frye (The Trouble with Angels) thought would make his name, none were made.
Everyone knows moviemaking is a dicey business, but you don’t realize just how tricky it is unless you count up just how many pictures, often trumpeted with big stars signed up, just don’t make it to the cinema screen. Not that Hollywood was unwilling to gamble. Studios snapped up anything – novel, Broadway play – that appeared a decent prospect.
In the early 1960s talent agency Famous Artists earned for its clients a grand total of $850,000 (equivalent to $8.5 million now) for a disparate bunch of properties. King Rat by James Clavell went for $160,000 plus a percentage and was made in double quick time. As was Lilith by J.R. Salamaca, costing $100,000, and Sylvia ($20,000 purchase price) by E.V. Cunningham (aka Howard Fast). Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest went for $85,000 to Kirk Douglas’s Bryna outfit, which explained why, a decade later, it ended up being produced by his son, Michael.
But Broadway play The Perfect Set-Up by Jack Sher, sold to Hollywood for $400,000 and with Angie Dickinson signed up for the lead, was never made. You might recall George Peppard in a TV movie Guilty or Innocent: The Sam Sheppard Murder Case (1975) but that wasn’t based on The Sheppard Murder Case by Paul Holmes that someone shelled out $25,000 for in 1962.
Director Paul Wendkos had planned to follow up Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) with Native Stone, an architectural drama in the vein of The Fountainhead based on the Edwin Gilbert book that cost him $10,000 but that hit the buffers. Two novels by thriller writer John D. MacDonald, hot after Cape Fear (1962) – the aforementioned Linda costing $15,000 and A Child Is Crying $5,000 – were not made either. Nor, out of this batch, were Indian Paint by Glenn Balch or Fish Story by Robert Carson.
Even as powerful a producer as Ross Hunter (Midnight Lace, 1960), couldn’t get onto the starting grid The Public Eye as a vehicle for Julie Andrews, Laurence Olivier and director Mike Nichols (it would have been his movie debut) – when made in 1972 starring Mia Farrow and Topol it was under the aegis of Hal Wallis. Hunter also spent $350,000 on Dark Angel to star Rock Hudson but that fell at the first hurdle as did Broadway play A Very Rich Woman to star Katharine Hepburn.
Tony Curtis was down for a remake of Casablanca (1942) called The Fifth Coin and relocated in Hong Kong and to co-star Nancy Kwan. Shooting on the Seven Arts production had a start date: November 15, 1965. But never went in front of the cameras. Kwan was particularly unlucky. The aforementioned Deep Freeze Girls also had a budget ($1.5 million) and a start date (October 1965) but it didn’t get off the ground either.
And of course Seven Arts had become enmeshed in the long-running John Huston saga of The Man Who Would Be King. This version, to star Richard Burton, had been set a $4 million budget and was due to start in April 1966. No go. At least The Owl and the Pussycat, budgeted then at $1.6 million and due to start on Dec 1965, was worth waiting five years for – when it was eventually filmed, though by Rastar not Seven Arts, it starred Barbra Streisand and George Segal.
In 1964 Columbia had 77 movies on the stocks. Richard Brooks was setting up Catch 22, Peter Sellers was being lined up for the musical Oliver!, and Carl Foreman was prepping Young Churchill. All these projects dropped off the roster, only to pop back up several years later with different stars (Ron Moody in Oliver!) or directors (Mike Nichols for Catch 22) or even studios (Paramount for Catch 22).
But others were simply shunted aside. Whatever happened to The Gay Place to team James Garner and Jean Seberg? Or The Fabulous Showman to be directed by Blake Edwards? Or another long-running saga, Andersonville with Stanley Kramer at the helm? Or Stephen Boyd as Richard the Lionheart? Even though The Ipcress File (1965) proved a big hit the same author’s Horse Under Water stalled at the starting gate, as did Robert Rossen’s Cocoa Beach and Ann-Margret in Strange Story.
When Robert Evans ushered in a new era at Paramount he placed his faith in writers. He doubled production and had over 40 writers working on projects. Some had little or no experience of movies but were big literary names. John Fowles, the adaptation of whose The Magus (1968) was an expensive flop, was hired to write Dr Cook’s Garden, but it was never made. Edna O’Brien had Three into Two Won’t Go on the stocks at Universal so she was set to write Homo Faber. Another casualty.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Edward Anhalt (Becket, 1964) was to make his directorial debut with We Only Kill Each Other. It didn’t happen. Nobody had ever managed to film Thomas Wolfe’s epic novel Look, Homeward Angel, so Paramount took a tilt at that without success. Escape from Colditz went into cold storage and an adaptation of Harold Robbins bestseller 79 Park Avenue ended up as a television mini series in 1977 and at a rival company, Universal.
It’s still standard operating procedure for Hollywood to snap up any big bestseller or Broadway hit without ever knowing whether it will ever see the light of day but willing to take the risk.
SOURCES: “Famous Artists,” Variety, August 8, 1962, p5; “Sanford and Frye of TV To Make Theatrical Films,” Box Office, January 7, 1963, p10; “Col-Frye TV Pact,” Box Office, August 19, 1963, p10; “Columbia Policy,” Variety, May 6, 1964, p13; “Seven Arts Pix Multiply,” Variety, March 31, 1965, p4; “Ross Hunter’s Crowded Future,” Variety, May 12, 1965, p7; “Bob Evans Pays Chip Service To Writer As Star,” Variety, May 1, 1968, p19.
Your leading man is an alcoholic drug-addled star with substantially impaired sight. Your leading lady, in her first major role, decides she knows more about acting than the very experienced director. But in the world of victimhood, who gets the blame? Not of course Montgomery Clift (The Defector, 1964) or Susannah York (Sands of the Kalahari, 1965), but director John Huston (The Night of the Iguana, 1964).
Huston had been trying to put together a movie about the flawed god of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, for 13 years. In 1949, with a screenplay by Charles Kaufman and backed by Twentieth Century Fox, it was going to be called Dr Freud. That version was still on the stocks a couple of years later. It wasn’t the first attempt to put the Viennese genius’s life on film, in 1940 Warner Brothers announced Edward G. Robinson in The Life of Freud with a script by Gary Endore.
Huston began serious work on the movie in 1956, but it was only greenlit two years later, after he signed a five-picture $20 million deal with new production unit Seven Arts, set up by Ray Stark and Eliot Hyman, future kingpins at Columbia and Warner Bros, respectively. It was to follow The Man Who Would Be King (not finally made until 1975), for which Huston was scouting locations in Afghanistan. At that point Freud was scheduled for 1959. Then it was Unforgiven (1960) and The Misfits (1961) that came first.
Mostly, the delay was caused by the screenplay. Huston had handed the task to celebrated French philosopher and playwright, who with what amounts to contempt for Hollywood, had written a 300-page script. His next attempt was 780-pages. Read that and weep, Christoper Nolan and Martin Scorsese, this was a 10-hour movie. When questioned, Sartre retorted “so make a 10-hour film.” Huston contemplated turning the script into two unrelated movies, perhaps in the vein of Young Tom Edison and Edison, the Man (both 1940).
Sartre spent two weeks at Huston’s home in Ireland, with Reinhardt on hand as well, trying to condense the material. But he spoke so rapidly that Huston confessed “I could barely follow even his basic thought processes….sometimes I’d leave the room in desperation, on the verge of exhaustion from trying to follow what he was saying.” Huston could not fault Sartre’s diligence. The playwright rose at 5am and would have 20-25 pages ready for discussion five hours later.
Sartre was paid $40,000 for his screenplay. Kaufman was brought back on board but his work didn’t gel with Huston’s vision. Wolfgang Reinhardt, whose name also appeared as producer, was more involved on the script. His relationship with Huston went back to Juarez (1939) on which they were co-writers and Dr Ehrlich’s MagicBullet (1940), for which Huston was credited with one-third of the script and Reinhardt was producer. But Reinhardt hadn’t received a screenplay credit since Juarez and his last Hollywood picture as a producer was Caught (1953). More recently, he had found work in Germany on The Trapp Family (1956). According to Huston, he was “misunderstood, distrusted and ill-used in Hollywood.”
Eliot Hyman questioned Reinhardt’s contribution. In addition to snagging $30,000-$35,000 and a 7.5 per cent profit share for his producer duties, Reinhardt was being paid $300 a week plus expenses for screenwriting, fees Hyman considered “out of line.”
Huston was determined that “Freud’s descent into the unconscious should be as terrifying as Dante’s descent into Hell.” Sartre was viewed as having not just objectivity but as someone who knew Freud’s work intimately. But clearly major work was required to trim the Sartre script. It took six months to reduce the material into a workable script. Naturally, Sartre objected to the reworking and wanted his name removed.
Eventually, with the project at an impasse, Huston turned to leading British psychiatrist Dr David Stafford-Clark to provide clarification. Clift, who as a patient had considerable experience of psychiatrists, insisted on joining their discussions, but “his presence served only to delay and confuse.” When asked to leave, he stood outside the door and cried, then “drank himself unconscious.”
That should have been warning enough. Having worked with an equally addled Montgomery Clift on The Misfits (1961), Huston might have thought twice about going back into the lion’s den. But, while not covered in box office glory, The Misfits was superlative, with all three principles turning in excellent performances. And in any case, Clift was the go-to actor for the tortured character.
Eva Marie Saint (The Stalking Moon, 1969) was first choice for the role of troubled teenager Cecily and after she turned it down Huston approached Marilyn Monroe whose psychiatrist advised against it. So, it went to 22-year-old English actress Susannah York, who had attracted Hollywood’s attention after two British films – Tunes of Glory (1960) and Loss of Innocence / The Greengage Summer. Unusually, this was not a romantic part, treatment of this patient critical to Freud’s analytical breakthrough. Karl Malden (Pollyanna, 1960) was offered the second male lead, but due to his unavailability it provided a comeback for Larry Parks (The Jolson Story, 1946) who hadn’t worked in Hollywood since 1954.
Huston recalled, “He had deteriorated to a shocking degree… I should have dropped Monty…but I didn’t. I thought that when we got on the set and he had lines he would be all right.”
Clift continually tried to rewrite the movie. He had got hold of previous copies of the script and produced his own indecipherable version and spoke the lines in an infantile manner. “Finally, I realized this was primarily a stall for time,” said Huston. “Monty was having difficulty memorizing the lines. I was surprized at this because he had done so well during The Misfits.” But those lines were simple compared to the long, complicated speeches of Freud.
“I’m sure Monty had almost no conception of what he said in the picture – yet he had the ability to make you believe what he did.” Eventually, his lines were written on boards, on the labels of bottles, door frames and other places on the set. Added Huston, “There was a mist between him and the rest of the world that you simply couldn’t penetrate.”
Huston also encountered problems with York. “Susannah was the personification of the uninformed arrogance of youth. Shortly, under Monty’s influence, she became convinced she was entitled to scientific opinions regarding a subject of which she was woefully ignorant.”
She and Monty would collaborate to rewrite their scenes. York refused to do a scene as originally written until a call to her agent changed her tune.
It took all Huston’s experience to hold onto his temper but a confrontation with Clift in his dressing-room resulted in a door slammed so hard it shattered a mirror. That was later conflated into Huston smashing furniture and tearing the couch apart. Huston was also blamed for Clift receiving rope burns during the climbing sequence. In fact, the shots were arranged so that after just holding on to the rope for the short period required, the actor could let go and land a few feet down on a pile of mattresses. Instead, he slid down the rope, holding on with his hands.
“My reputation for cruelty appears to stem directly from this one scene,” complained Huston, convinced the rope burns were Clift “for his own reasons beating himself up.”
Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe developed a technique of three-plane camerawork to help audiences distinguish between reality, dreams and memory. Scenes where characters recalled memories were shot through a small clear-glass plate mounted on the lens matte box. Dreams acquired an extreme black-and-white effect with chalky faces and other details standing out as luminous in tunnels of darkness. This was achieved through a combination of dramatic contrast in photography, stock and lab work.
The production spent five weeks at the Bavaria Studios in Munich before shifting to Vienna, which included 10 days of night shooting.
Universal underwrote the movie, and with To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) also on its roster, intended to celebrate its golden anniversary in fine style with “record rentals” from a raft of movies appealing to the public and the critics.
Freud’s daughter Anna and son Ernest didn’t take kindly to Hollywood’s interpretation of their father’s life and disassociated themselves from the movie and the Viennese hierarchy objected to the film’s louche elements.
Filming began in August 21, 1961, including three weeks on location in Vienna, and was due to wrap on December 5. That it took another two months to complete, (final shooting date was February 10, 1962) inflating the budget, was laid at the foot of Clift. Never mind the drink and drugs he was consuming in mighty proportions, he had cataract problems and could hardly see.
Universal sued Clift for $686,000 for not acknowledging his cataract problems prior to filming, an issue that prevented him memorizing his lines. Clift counter-sued for the remaining $150,000 owed from his $200,000 fee, claiming the problems had developed during filming. “I refuse to accede to the defendant’s demand that this condition…was responsible for delays to the picture.” Firemen’s Fund Insurance, whose policy covered the actor for a year from April 1, 1961, with the proviso the movie finished by December 5, 961, denied liability.
Universal was concerned that the title would mean little to the general public and pre-release toyed with changing the title to Freud: The Dark Passion but agreed, in the end, not to “tamper” with it. However, exhibitors disagreed. And once Minneapolis second-run and neighborhood cinema owners refused to book it under the existing title, it was changed to The Secret Passion, which at least got it through the door with bookers even if the public remained wary. On posters, The Secret Passion part of the title grew bigger and bigger until the Freud element almost disappeared. The film was cut after initial release but the DVD shows the full version.
Despite critical approval and a 12-week run in New York and some decent runs in smaller houses in the country’s bigger cities, it was a flop, not managing the $1 million in rentals required to earn a spot on Variety’s annual box office chart.
SOURCES: John Huston, An Open Book (Columbus books, 1988) p294-305; “Memo from Eliot Hyman,” July 15, 1959, United Artists Archive, University of Wisconsin, Box 7, Folder 7; “Endore for Freud,” Hollywood Reporter, February 24, 1940, p2; “Robinson As Freud,” Box Office, March 2, 1940, p2”; “Dr Freud Bio On Fox Docket,” Box Office, September 17, 1949, p19; “20th Lead with Five in Biopic Sweepstakes,” Variety, January 24, 1951, p5; “Freud Biopic 1st Hyman 7-Arter,” Variety, July 30, 1958, p3; “John Huston’s Next Spot – Afghanistan,” Variety, October 15, 1958, p19; “Huston Seeks Saint,” Hollywood Reporter, November 10, 1958, p2; “Universal Unchained,” Variety, August 19, 1959, p5; “Huston in on Freud Biography,” Variety, October 28, 1959, p11; “Sartre Script on Freud: 780 Pages,” Variety, June 29, p3; “Freud Rolls August 21,” Variety, July 26, 1961, p5; “Freud Moves Location,” Hollywood Reporter, October 12, 1961, p6; “Freud on Night Shift,” Hollywood Reporter, October 24, 1961, p3; “Freud Film Not To Liking of Kin,” Variety, November 1, 1961, p2; “Three-Plane Photography Developed for Freud,” Hollywood Reporter, December 19, 1961, p11; “Huston’s Freud Ends Photo Phase,” February 14, 1962, p4; “Universal Sues for $600,000,” Hollywood Reporter, April 30, 1962, p3 “Montgomery Clift’s Eye Trouble,” Variety, June 5, 1963, p5; “U’s Insurance Claim on Monty Clift,” Variety, June 27, 1962, p7; “It’s Plain Freud, U Won’t Tamper,” Variety, October 3, 1962, p3; “Never Heard of Freud,” Variety, October 9, 1963, p5; ’“Top Rental Films of 1963,” Variety, January 8, 1964, p37.
Would appear resolutely old-fashioned except for Forrest Gump (1994) adopting same premise of the main character present at major events. Here it’s issues affecting the Catholic Church between last century’s two world wars and the protagonist is an American priest, Father Stephen Fermoyle (Tom Tryon) of Irish stock, who rises to the position of Cardinal.
So we move at a relatively stately pace through abortion, inter-denominational marriage, racism, a miracle, challenging church philosophy, and Hitler’s annexation of Austria on the eve of the Second World War, in which the church played an inglorious part. Along the way Fr Fermoyle is afflicted so badly by doubt that he takes a sabbatical only for his flesh to be sorely tempted.
Astonishingly, I saw this on YouTube (it’s still there) in a beautiful 70mm print preserved by the National Film and Television Archive. The roadshow print, to be exact, which begins with a marvellous five-minute overture. Oddly enough there’s something very settling about sitting in the darkness with the curtains drawn watching a blank (black) screen and listening to the majestic score by Jerome Moross (The Big Country, 1958).
And then it’s another few minutes of a stunning credit sequence, all sunlight and shadow, before the movie begins. The movie itself is over three hours long, so if you are put off by this kind of epic now’s the time to check out. But if you do, you will miss something genuinely to be savored.
For Otto Preminger (Hurry Sundown, 1967) certainly knows how to tell a story, even one as sweeping as this. For all its pomp, he manages to retain intimacy.
Immediately after his ordination just as America enters the First World War, Fr Fermoyle faces a crisis. His sister Mona (Carol Lynley) wants to marry a Jewish dentist (John Saxon) who refuses to convert to Catholicism. Fermoyle’s advice, in keeping with the church’s stringent rules: give him up.
A noted intellectual, Fermoyle is astonished to be sent by the worldly piano-playing cigar-chomping Archbishop Glennon (John Huston) to an impoverished parish to learn humility. There, he encounters the blind faith of parishioners and a pastor, Fr Halley (Burgess Meredith), so inclined to put others first that he will not seek help for a debilitating disease.
Meanwhile Mona, now a dancer and drinker, has become pregnant, and not by the dentist. But complications arise and she is forced to choose between herself and the unborn child. According to Church doctrine, as Fermoyle, advises, abortion being illegal, the mother must die to save the baby. Mona, not the sacrificial kind, does the opposite. Fermoyle, racked with guilt, wants to quit the church. Instead, he is promoted to Monsignor, and given a two-year timeout which he spends lecturing in Vienna.
There he falls in love with Annemarie (Romy Scheider). In the nick of time, he is recalled to the States and sent to the Deep South to help the black Fr Gillis (Ossie Davis) who is being harassed by the Ku Klux Klan. In standing by his colleague, Fermoyle undergoes a brutal whipping. Promoted to bishop, he is despatched to Austria “to instruct the princes of the church in the realities of the modern world.” Unfortunately, the clergy, siding with the Nazis, presides over the marriage of Germany and Austria.
Meanwhile, he is reacquainted with Annemarie, who has married a Jewish banker, and witnesses at first-hand Nazi treatment of the Jews, her husband so fearful of his future he jumps out a window. When a mob ransacks a church, Fermoyle isn’t so intent on facing up to them and instead, with Annemarie, manages to escape.
At its best and its worst by the narrative being forced through the prism of an individual. His reactions to issues are regulated by his employers, the Church, which exerts as much control over personal thought as the Communist Party, so, in effect, it becomes a tale of a person initially bristling against authority until, it turns out, the Church shares the same antipathy to the worst of the century’s scandals, the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis.
Father Fermoyle hardly seems suited to high office, given he is so often inclined to temptation, either in a sexual sense, or in taking the opposite view of the Church. And it’s almost as though the splendid backdrop as represented by the immense wealth of the Church has only been achieving by subjugation of the individual. That the worldly Glennon appears as the poster boy for the Church hierarchy is almost Preminger playing with the audience.
It might be sumptuously mounted, but once again Preminger takes no prisoners, showing up an institution that while purportedly set up for the benefit of mankind so often sabotages noble endeavor.
Tom Tryon (In Harm’s Way, 1965) is excellent in the leading role, personal conviction getting in the way of the easy path to the top. But the pick of the performers are the supporting stars, especially John Huston, more famous as a director (The Night of the Iguana, 1964) and here making his acting debut, and Romy Scheider (Triple Cross, 1966). Look out for Carol Lynley (Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1965), silent film star Dorothy Gish in her final movie appearance, Maggie McNamara (The Moon Is Blue, 1953) in her first picture in eight years, and John Saxon (The Appaloosa, 1966) before he was typecast as a heavy.
Otto Preminger (In Harm’s Way) directs in stately fashion from a screenplay by Robert Dozier (The Big Bounce, 1969) and Ring Lardner Jr. (The Cincinnati Kid, 1965).
The eponymous reptile is a rather obvious metaphor for characters trapped by quixotic decisions. Regardless of the Rev Dr. T Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton) being a defrocked priest, he was always going to lead a dissolute life, alcohol the least of his temptations. This heady drama begins with comedy about a man with ideas above his station ending up as an incompetent tourist guide.
And if his behaviour is not scandalous enough for current coach party, middle-aged Baptist ladies, he leads them to a hotel in Mexico run by former lover Maxine (Ava Gardner) who has two younger lovers on the go. And as is the way with author Tennessee Williams there’s a posse of fascinating characters, led by spinster Hannah (Deborah Kerr) who ekes out an itinerant living selling paintings while her aged grandfather (Cyril Devalanti) recites poetry. Raising the moral stakes is under-age Charlotte (Sue Lyon) who has taken a fancy to Shannon, partly in rebellion against her frosty chaperone Judith (Grayson Hall).
For a movie with no great narrative drive, there’s no shortage of drama, whether it’s the Reverend under constant attack from his charges, Charlotte making advances, Shannon succumbing or trying to fight his addictions, Maxine succumbing then rejecting his advances, and Hannah on the sidelines trying to work out why her entire life has been lived in the shadows.
A simple dramatic fuse has been lit, disparate group with secrets set to explode, and you just sit back and enjoy the ride. Exceptionally daring, even if in discreet fashion, for the time, not just the Lolita-style Charlotte, but the middle-aged Maxine cavorting with not one but two men young enough to be her sons, so effectively a Cougar (before the term was invented) in a threesome, a woman in full command on her sex life not at the whim of a male. There’s as overt a gay woman as you would find in this era. And that’s before we come to Hannah, one of whose two sexual experiences involved averting her eyes while her male companion masturbated on a piece of her clothing. That was taking it way beyond the limits of acceptable on-screen behaviour of the day.
Characters are either engulfed by their passions or weaknesses or trying to come to terms with them, sometimes both. Over everything hangs poignancy at the self-deception practised, redemption scarcely a possibility, communication a minefield, acceptance the best anyone can hope for. Quality acting prevents this disappearing down a sinkhole of self-pity.
Richard Burton (Becket, 1964) was on a roll, one brilliant performance after another either with or without Elizabeth Taylor, essaying a wide range of characters. This is one of his best. You should despise the sham he has become, relying on charm to dig himself out of a hole, relying far too much on the kindness of strangers whose sympathy is exhausted. Yet the loss of the only position, a clergyman, for which he was possibly suited, thrown out for committing unforgiveable sin while preaching sanctity, makes him a very relatable human being. This isn’t Days of Wine and Roses reborn, but someone trying to win the pinch of oxygen required to keep his soul alive, and stir the energy inside. And he would be furious if you ever made the mistake of feeling sorry for him.
Ava Gardner (Mayerling, 1968) is superb, staring age in the face, unrepentant, sex an acceptable substitute for love, underlying sadness admirably restrained. But Deborah Kerr (The Chalk Garden, 1964), brings a refreshing dash to her introspective character, a woman with practical solutions except to her own emotional emptiness. Sue Lyon (Lolita, 1962) is only briefly scandalous and the movie’s conclusion suggests she is capable of settling down and not giving into the base desires that afflict all the others.
Just as with The Misfits (1961), director John Huston allows his characters to breathe. It would have been very easy to allow Shannon to have a more heroic or stoic stature, instead of someone stumbling around. Tinges of comedy and wit lighten the load. Huston and Anthony Veiller (The List of Adrian Messenger, 1963) wrote the screenplay from the Tennessee Williams play.
The Magnificent 60s 