Marlene Dietrich – The Magnificent 60s

Paris When It Sizzles (1964) ***

Screen charisma can only get you so far. The pairing of William Holden and Audrey Hepburn must have seemed certain to create a box office tsunami given they had worked together before on the hit Sabrina (1954) and were coming off hits, the former in The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and the latter having reinvented herself as a ditzy fashion icon in Breakfast at Tiffanys (1961). But clearly studio Paramount knew something about the outcome of this production that it was keeping to itself, otherwise how to explain that a movie completed in 1962 languished on the shelves for nearly 18 months.

By the time it appeared Hepburn was still a big box office noise after Hitchcockian thriller Charade (1963) but Holden’s flame was dying out following three successive flops, The Devil Never Sleeps, The Counterfeit Traitor and The Lion all released in 1962. Had the studio played an even longer waiting game and held off release until the end of 1964 when Hepburn was enjoying sensational success with My Fair Lady, audiences might have been more likely to be suckered in to this romantic comedy. Although whether they’d be any more appreciative is doubtful.

Problem is, the narrative hardly exists. And what remains is too clever by half. It might have appealed as an insight into how Hollywood works, but it lacks backbone and is more of a series of spoofs as we wait inevitably for the two stars to fall in love.

Alcoholic Richard Benson (William Holden) has writer’s block and having frittered away his time drinking, traveling and romancing, now has two days to deliver a screenplay for producer Meyerheim (Noel Coward) – who incidentally seems to spend his time in the sunshine drinking and surrounded by beautiful women. Benson hires typist Gabrielle (Audrey Hepburn) both to speed up the process and have someone to bounce ideas off.

Primarily a two-hander and virtually contained on a single set, his swanky apartment in Paris, it only ventures out to assist his imagination by playing out various concepts in which the pair act out various scenes in what turns into a relatively ham-fisted satire of the movie business. The only really interesting Hollywood expose is when Benson explains the tricks of the screenwriting trade, the various reversals (they were called “switches” in those days) and conflicts to keep the audience on their toes and prevent the potential lovers getting to the actual loving stage too quickly.

So we watch Gabrielle initially fending off his moves before becoming entranced and ridding herself of a carapace of dustiness before transforming into a flighty fun lass. But when the dialog often centers on arguments over the meanings of words there’s not a great deal for the audience to get its teeth into.

The concept, such as it is, allows Richard and Gabrielle to act out various scenarios, rattling through the genres – spies, musical, the jungle, horror, whodunit and western – while they manage to find a way to turn his title The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower into a movie.

Even though the last thing this needs is further levity – any more froth and it would disintegrate – Tony Curtis (The Boston Strangler, 1968) has a recurrent role in a variety of cameos and you can spot an uncredited Marlene Dietrich (Judgement at Nuremberg, 1961) and Mel Ferrer (Brannigan, 1975). Perhaps the most unusual angle was that it was a remake of the French La Fete a Henriette (1952) directed by Julien Duvivier. Or that it was the first screen credit for Givenchy, who devised Hepburn’s clothes.

While both Holden and Hepburn are very easy on the eye, the actor often topless, and Hepburn going through the fashions, it only works if you want to see screen chemistry at work and are not remotely interested in narrative or if you are so unaware – and of course genuinely interested – in the screenwriter’s craft that you are find out how words on paper are translated into images on the screen. It might well be an audience’s first encounter with such gems as “Exterior:Day.”

Oddly, both Holden and Hepburn are good and it’s solidly directed by Richard Quine (The World of Suzie Wong) from a script by George Axelrod (Breakfast at Tiffany’s) adapting the previous film.

A harmless trifle, you might say, but just too bad that with the talents involved it doesn’t even rise to a soufflé.

Behind the Scenes: “Judgement at Nuremberg” (1961)

Laurence Olivier could have played a Nazi long before his celebrated villainous turn in Marathon Man (1976). He was producer-director Stanley Kramer’s first choice to play Chief Judge Dr Ernst Janning. He turned the role down in favor of getting married to actress Joan Plowright. Kramer had already decided an all-star cast was required to attract an audience for the grim picture.

The screenplay was an extended version of Abby Mann’s teleplay that had screened on the ABC in 1959. Although Marty (1955) had transitioned with box office and critical success from television to cinemas, that boom was long over.

United Artists, with whom Kramer had a multi-picture deal, were not keen. “I did what looked like a compromise to them, but what I had been planning to do anyway. I promised to fill the cast with stars of such magnitude that their presence would almost guarantee the film wouldn’t lose money.”

There were a couple of other obstacles to overcome. A stage version of the teleplay was being planned for London and Paris and Kramer had to take out an injunction against a documentary with a similar title, Verdict at Nuremberg.

Kramer was known as an issues-driven director, his debut Not As a Stranger (1955) tackling the medical profession, The Defiant Ones (1958) racism and in On the Beach (1959) nuclear war. Along with Otto Preminger, he was viewed as a director of “worthy” pictures, not always a recommendation in the eyes of the critics, but as long as the movies made money and attracted Oscar interest likely to remain attractive to studios. Kramer was just about the only producer (High Noon, 1952, and The Caine Mutiny, 1954, on his calling card) who made a successful career-long transition to direction.

With the exception of Olivier, replaced with Oscar-winner Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry, 1960) – not incidentally second choice either, the director preferring to have used a German actor – Kramer hired all his first choices. Spencer Tracy, in fact, was the first recruit. After working with him on Inherit the Wind (1960), Kramer got it into his head when considering a picture to ask himself what part there might be for Tracy.

The actor provided “A depth and candor that would make people notice.” Maximilian Schell (Topkapi, 1964) reprised the role he had essayed on television, a man “living in a complicated gray zone.”

Kramer had a reputation for hiring singers and dancers – Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra – for dramatic roles and he continued in that vein by hiring Judy Garland. It was a difficult decision. He theorized that “the very disorders that made it difficult to work with her fitted perfectly with the role.”

You could have said the same of Montgomery Clift (Freud, 1962), “reduced almost the level of the unsound person he was portraying.” Given the actor’s problems remembering lines, Kramer allowed Clift to basically ad lib, when attacked on the witness stand permitted to reach “for a word in the script” that appeared the correct emotional response to “convey the confusion in the character’s mind.” While Clift did not often adhere to the script, whatever he said worked well enough. Rarely has a director been so sympathetic to a troubled actor. “He needed someone to be terribly kind,” said Kramer, “someone who would consistently bolster his confidence and tell him he was wonderful.

Marlene Dietrich, who had firsthand experience of Nazi Germany at first hand, having fled the country, actually knew the general whose wife she was portraying, which helped to “deepen my understanding of the emotions of Hitler’s victims,” conceded Kramer. Opening up about her experiences and fears allowed Kramer to extend the scope of the character.

While the courtroom where the original trial had taken place was not available for hire – it was in current use – Kramer was permitted to measure and photograph the room to reconstruct it on a soundstage. Only 15 pr cent of the movie was shot in Germany.

The experience of filming Inherit the Wind, another courtroom drama, taught Kramer the need to have fluid camerawork since talk and gesture tends to be static. “I learned to move the camera often to achieve a sense of movement for the viewer.”

Abby Mann was required to open up the teleplay, move the action outside the courtroom – scenes in the judge’s accommodation, on the derelict streets, in restaurants – and avoid cinematic claustrophobia and making it a “pious sermon.” “In my opinion,” argued Kramer, “Judgment at Nuremberg conveys a moral not always honoured, then or now, in the world of politics.”

Kramer had a particular method of pre-production. He built all his sets six weeks before filming began. As part of that process, he sat down with his cinematographer and went through the script scene by scene working out the lighting and camera positions. Then he called in the actors and took them through the sets and roughly his shooting thought-process, taking on board any queries and suggestions. Film like this “sort of demanded it be shot in sequence with a single camera,” explained cinematographer Ernest Laszlo (Fantastic Voyage, 1966).

The 360-degree turning of the camera was not as revolutionary as you might imagine – although, according to critics, Michelangelo Antonioni invented it for The Passenger (1975). Laszlo had done if before on The Hitler Gang (1944) for director John Farrow. But this was infinitely more complicated set-up with the revolving camera in constant use to allow Kramer the required fluidity.

“I used two key lights,” said Laszlo. “Shooting this I used one and then as we went round I used the other.” It wasn’t as simple as it sounds, the lights needed to be positioned with mathematical precision so the audience wasn’t aware of any change in the lighting.

“The circling camera saved us photographically,” said Kramer, preventing the picture from seeming “slow and cerebral.” As smooth as it appears on screen it was cumbersome. The entire crew involved had to carry cables and equipment round in a circle. But it permitted Kramer to pick up the judges without cutting to them.

Kramer also used the camera to achieve another transition. As the picture began, German actors spoke in German (with translators offscreen) to show the trial was mostly in German. But for the movie to work, the dialog needed to be in English. “We started the transition scene with Schell addressing the court in German. Laszlo’s camera zoomed in on him, then turned elsewhere, then turned again to Schell so that we were able to switch his speech from German to English in perfect cadence as the camera came in on him the second time. His English picked up from his German so naturally you could almost let it pass without noticing.”

Kramer conceded there might, in fact, be “too much camera movement.” But that was in part dictated by a “very authentic situation, a long courtroom, very wide, and the spacing between the original attorney’s box and the witness box was at least forty feet. That’s a long distance if your try to photograph it.” Also, it wasn’t like a normal Hollywood or American trial, where the lawyers can prowl in front of judge and jury. Here, the attorneys could not move from their box.

“Unless you want to play ping-pong in the cutting room, you have to move the camera…I felt trapped by these three positions – the judges, the attorneys and the witnesses in that big spread. So, the forty feet was compressed to twenty-eight feet. We had to put a lot of light on the far figures to hold the forms in focus,” resulting in the actors “perspiring a lot during these shots.”

The movie, rolled out as a roadshow, did better than expected, the all-star cast proving a major draw, global box office netting a healthy profit. Schell won the Oscar as did Abby Mann, Kramer was nominated in his dual capacity as producer and director.

SOURCES: Stanley Kramer, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Life in Hollywood (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997) p179-197; Donald Spoto, Stanley Kramer Film Maker (Samuel French, 1990)p230-233; “An AFI Seminar with Ernest Laszlo, American Cinematographer, January 1976, p52; “Judgment at Nuremberg Still Slated for Legit,” Box Office, February 3, 1960, p6; “Kramer Gets Injunction,” Box Office, December 11, 1961, p14.

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Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) ****

Stanley Kramer never caught a decent academic/critical break. Subject matter worthy, execution poor, was the overall consensus. But Judgement at Nuremberg, with its long tracking shots, sometimes turning 360 degrees around a character, should have changed all that. But the kind of critics who would have appreciated such bravura technique weren’t around at the time and even when Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) appeared nobody thought to reference Kramer, believing this was a new cinematic invention by the esteemed Italian maestro.

So, Judgement at Nuremberg is remembered, if at all, for the subject matter and elevated by the performances rather than the director’s input. Most people misremember what the movie’s about. The main concern here isn’t the war criminal, the men personally involved in running the ghettos. Instead, it’s about those behind the scenes who could, theoretically, have prevented the camps flourishing, or at least challenged their opening.

Those on trial were freedom fighters of a different sort. As judges, the top tier of the legal system, their job was not just to uphold law and order and individual freedoms, but to take government to task for illegal action. It’s a basic tenet of the democratic world that governments cannot act in autocratic fashion but work within public accord.

Should the legal guardians find fault with government activity, their job is to take the ruling body to task – the European Court of Human Rights was set up with exactly that principal in mind, and various British and American law agencies have over time called a halt or questioned government proposals.

Some of the judges were clearly ill-fit for the task, lick-spittle jobsworths, desperate to hold onto rank and privilege, many sharing the same anti-semitic views as Hitler. But the Allied forces, being democratic, have to proceed along proper lines, taking potential criminals to court and allowing them legal defence.

So the main target is Dr Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), German’s pre-eminent legal force, a quiet, dignified man, who refuses to fawn or react to the charges. On the attack is prosecutor Col Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark). Acting for the defence is the wily, emotional, Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell) who is not above comparing the Holocaust to the Americans dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima, indiscriminate terror brought on innocent civilians the result of both actions. He also brings to the court’s attention the distasteful theories that once held sway in high American legal circles as promulgated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Supreme Court judge, whose views on eugenics aimed at withholding procreation rights from the mentally handicapped.

As referee we have Dan Heywood (Spencer Tracy), the American chief judge, who didn’t want the job and was way down the pecking order of those best qualified. And he’s a bit of a detective on the side, trying to discover how much ordinary people – such as the flirtatious Mrs Bertholdt, widow of an executed German general, as well as the housekeeper and butler looking after him in some style – knew about the atrocities as they were taking place.

In the background is an Allied command not wishing to stir up any more controversy, conscious of the rising power of the Communist bloc, seeing West Germany as a bulwark against Stalin, concerned that forcing the country’s inhabitants to wallow in the past will turn their political minds towards the east rather than the west.

In due course, a variety of witnesses are called, testifying to ill-treatment under the German government including the backward Rudolph Pedersen (Montgomery Clift) and Irene Hoffman (Judy Garland).

What makes this so different is that innocence or guilt is not what’s under scrutiny, but reason. Why did such high-minded legal experts like Dr Janning give in to Hitler. And when? And do they recognise their role in providing Hitler with credence to continue with his massacre of the Jews?

Individual conscience and, conversely, collective guilt, might have been the driving force then but they are more than relevant today when actions in war come under even greater scrutiny and politicians are held to account. Perhaps, it’s ironic how little judgement was passed in the end on those convicted in these trials. Nobody was hanged, nobody received even a life sentence. In fact, by the time the movie was released, all were free men.

Stanely Kramer, the Scorsese or Nolan of his era regarding running time (it clocks in a just shy of three hours), does a superb job with his even-handed approach. While his technical skills were perhaps under-appreciated, he certainly knows how to command an audience’s attention and draws terrific performances from his actors.

Maximilian Schell, who won the Oscar, is perceived as the standout, but for me the highpoints were Burt Lancaster (The Swimmer, 1968) and Montgomery Clift (Freud, 1962). Abby Mann’s (The Detective, 1968) screenplay was an expanded version of his teleplay of two years before.

Has more than enough humanity to keep you riveted.

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No Highway in the Sky / No Highway (1951) ****

Having just read the Nevil Shute novel on which this movie is based, I was keen to see how it transferred to the screen. It got off to a great start with the casting. James Stewart was several classes above the author’s description of the main character, but Marlene Dietrich more than fitted the bill of the Hollywood star as a passenger in the early days of Transatlantic air travel.

Widowed aeronautics research engineer Dr Honey (James Stewart), accent explained by him being a Rhodes Scholar who stayed on in Britain, is so absent-minded that he tries to enter a neighbor’s house and when he gets angry in a discussion with a visitor to his own house puts on his hat and coat and decides to leave. He has discovered a potential flaw in a new range of British airplanes and is despatched by boss Dennis Scott (Jack Hawkins) to Canada to examine the remains of a crashed prototype, the accident previously ascribed to pilot error.

*It was called “No Highway” in Britain as that was the title of the novel.*

However, once on board, he discovers the plane is perilously close to the danger level of flying time his research indicated. In between frightening the life out of stewardess Marjorie (Glynis Johns) and star Monica (Marlene Dietrich) with his predictions of doom and instructing them where best to hide in the plane in the event of crash-landing in the ocean, he tries to get the pilot to turn back. When that fails, he inadvertently charms the life out of stewardess and star.

When the plane lands, even closer to the danger zone in terms of flying hours, and still no one listening to his concerns, he manages to render the plane unflyable. The aeroplane company refuses to fly him home, leaving him stranded. That provides enough time for Monica and then Marjorie to turn up unannounced at his home in England to help look after his young daughter Elspeth (Janette Scott). When Honey finally returns, he faces an inquiry, and looks set to lose his job, virtually unemployable thanks to his antics in Canada. At the last minute, he is reprieved, fresh evidence from the crashed plane proving his research correct.

Meanwhile, Monica, forced to return to Hollywood, loses out in the battle for Honey’s affections. Marjorie, a former nurse and imminently more practical, is in any case better placed to help look after a growing girl, and eventually Honey sees sense and asks her to marry him.

Really well done with terrific performances all around, but vastly helped by the screenwriters who dumped three sub-plots in order to stick to the knitting of the tale. Honey, far removed from the man in the street persona that saw James Stewart through his Frank Capra movies, attracted female interest through his principled stand. Most importantly, the writers removed the section where Elspeth is seriously ill in her father’s absence. Secondly, in the book Scott was sent to Canada to find the crashed plane, involving a trek through perilous terrain, but that’s been excised, the search completed off-screen by others, the vital information relayed by letter. Thirdly, the remains of the tail, which had previously not been found, were located in the book by supernatural means, Elspeth being called upon to use a planchette to help find it.

In removing all this material, the movie is re-shaped partly as a Capra movie, with the downtrodden Honey achieving success through persistence, but, more importantly, allowing the movie to focus on the potential love interest. Needless to say that is determinedly old-fashioned, both women having forged successful careers now viewing work that was initially exciting rapidly pall. The book sets Monica thinking how much better life would have been if as a humble office girl she had married the kind but not handsome man who had caught her eye instead of now being thrice-divorced. Marjorie is even more old-fashioned, seeing a genius who needs looked after as much as his daughter requires a mother.

So there’s no point going anywhere near this if you’re not willing to accept a past where a woman’s role was primarily seen as a home-maker. But don’t jump to pointing the finger at the author as being equally old-fashioned because a later book, A Town Like Alice, not only turns the main character into a war hero but depicts her as a successful entrepreneur.

James Stewart (The Rare Breed, 1965) takes a considerable chance on playing the absent-minded professor but his endless well of screen charm allows him to pull it off brilliantly. Marlene Dietrich, top-billed when teamed with Stewart for Destry Rides Again (1939), has an excellent role as a rueful prima donna. Glynis Johns (Lock Up your Daughters!, 1969) is equally at home with a part that calls for her not to just fall at Honey’s feet. She was one of handful of British rising stars. Jack Hawkins (Masquerade, 1965) was on the cusp of being named Britain’s biggest box office attraction while Kenneth More (The Comedy Man, 1964) was a few years away from receiving that honor. Janette Scott (Day of the Triffids, 1963) gave notice of her talent.

As much as James Stewart’s career was linked to Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Koster (Mr Hobbs Takes a Vacation, 1962) made five pictures with the actor, all excepting this comedies, including Harvey (1950). He does a fine job of keeping Stewart from spinning away too much in the direction of the geek professor and keeping the story pinned down.

Nevil Shute was an engineer to trade – he had worked in the British airship industry – so his books tend to be peppered with the scientific. That’s easy to digest when reading, but harder to absorb when watching a movie. R.C. Sheriff (The Dam Busters, 1955) and Oscar Millard (Angel Face, 1952) do an excellent job of condensing the novel, finding cinematic ways of getting across important material.

I had come at this, as I said, mainly to see how the author’s work was translated to the screen, but came away totally absorbed in a fine picture. What was left out helped the picture while the author’s later A Town Like Alice (1956) lost half its power by ending halfway through the original story which later saw the courageous heroine go onto to become a serial entrepreneur in a male-dominated society in Australia.

Obviously, I’ve deviated from my chosen field of 1960s pictures, but this is well worth a watch.

You can catch it on YouTube in a number of versions – the original, a colorized version, one with English subtitles and one where a musician has made his own edit and dubbed his own modern score on the picture.

Books by Brian Hannan – “Paisley at the Pictures, The Sequel, 1951”

A couple of years ago, I wrote a book about cinemagoing in 1950 in my local town of Paisley in Scotland which at that time had eight cinemas screening over 1200 movies a year to the 93,000 inhabitants. Six of the theaters were first run and two second-run. A standard program consisted of main feature, supporting feature, newsreel and cartoon and in two cinemas a serial.

*Jane Wyman in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright*.

I got so engrossed in my research for this book that I went back to the source a second time and examined what happened in pictures houses for the following year. This treasure trove of cinematic memories turned into a bigger book with double the number of illustrations and also included a section on reminiscences and a look back to when the two biggest cinemas in the town had opened in the 1930s.

Anyone who was born outside the capital cities of their countries and a few other major cities besides will know that way into the 1970s there was a food chain in operation for movie distribution. Although the reference books and Imdb will show movies as having been made, for example, in 1951, most cinemas would not get to screen them that year. In Paisley, for example, only 11.5 per cent of the movies made in 1951 appeared in the town during the same year. More people went to the movies in those days than now – two or three times a week was not uncommon.

The biggest films of 1951 in Paisley included musical Annie Get Your Gun, marital comedy Father of the Bride with Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor, Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger in MGM blockbuster King Solomon’s Mines, Gregory Peck as Captain Horatio Hornblower, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in John Ford western Rio Grande and Greer Garson in sequel The Miniver Story.

Also topping the popularity league were Mario Lanza in biopic The Great Caruso, British war film Odette starring Anna Neagle, Alfred Hitchcock thriller Stage Fright with Jane Wyman and Marlene Dietrich, Anglophile Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in thriller State Secret, David Niven musical Happy-Go-Lovely (filmed in Edinburgh), Cecil B. DeMille Biblical epic Samson and Delilah, John Garfield in The Breaking Point – a surprisingly speedy remake of To Have and Have Not – and comedy duo Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in At War with the Army.

The year’s number one star in Paisley was Jane Wyman – judged on how many days her pictures played in the town. In second spot came John Wayne. Joan Bennett was third. Glenn Ford and Virginia Mayo rounded out the top five. Cowboy star Gene Autry topped the B-movie brigade.

Among the serials show were Batman and Robin, The Purple Monster Strikes, Atom Man vs. Superman, King of the Rocket Men, The Adventures of Sir Galahad, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, The Monster and the Ape, Pirates of the High Seas and The Daughter of Don Q.