The Films of Robert Wise

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In The Films of Robert Wise, Richard C. Keenan examines the nearly forty features that represent the director’s career, from The Curse of the Cat People (1944) to A Storm in Summer (2001), the only television production Wise ever directed. Keenan argues that if there were a flaw in Robert Wise as a director, it was that he lacked the ego and temperament of the artist, which was not necessarily a flaw at all. Indeed, Wise was a conscientious craftsman who primarily saw his work not as a vehicle for his own ideas and visual style but as an opportunity to present narrative that—quite simply—engages, informs, and entertains. It was this perspective that helped produce a number of memorable films, including the gritty noir Born to Kill, the one-two punch of The Set-Up and Somebody Up There Likes Me, the sci-fi prophecy The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the gripping indictment of capital punishment I Want to Live! Wise also won a pair of Oscars for two of the most memorable—not to mention successful—musicals of all time: West Side Story and The Sound of Music. Drawing on more than thirty hours of interviews with Wise, as well as additional interviews with a number of his collaborators, Keenan offers a welcome reassessment of the director’s work. In his analysis of each film, Keenan reveals Wise as craftsman and artist. In doing so, The Films of Robert Wise finally gives this underappreciated director the recognition he deserves.

RICHARD C. KEENAN is chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore.

For orders and information please contact the publisher

SCARECROW PRESS, INC. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 • Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 • fax 717-794-3803 www.scarecrowpress.com

Cover photo courtesy of the author Cover design by Jen Huppert Design ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5885-5 ISBN-10: 0-8108-5885-1

the films of robert wise

rom his early days as a film editor at RKO studios, where he helped Orson Welles shape Citizen Kane, to his success as a director and producer of musical blockbusters of the 1960s, Robert Wise (1914–2005) had a long and illustrious film career. Unlike such contemporaries as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, or Howard Hawks, however, Wise’s films lack any discernible characteristics to signify his work. There are few striking camera angles or visual flourishes that might distract from the primary obligation to present the story. And like Hawks, Wise never specialized in one or two genres but brought his directing skills to all manner of films. His work as a director resists auteur categorization, a chief reason some critics have been unduly negative in their consideration of his work.

KEENAN

FILM • PEFORMING ARTS

the films of robert wise the curse of the cat people

the body snatcher

the house on telegraph hill

born to kill the set-up the day the earth stood still

the andromeda strain

somebody up there likes me

run silent, run deep west side story

i want to live! the haunting executive suite

the sand pebbles

the sound of music star trek: the motion picture

RICHARD C. KEENAN

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The Films of Robert Wise Richard C. Keenan

T H E S C A R E C ROW P R E S S, I N C. Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2007

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SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2007 by Richard C. Keenan All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keenan, Richard C., 1939– The films of Robert Wise / Richard C. Keenan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5885-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8108-5885-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Wise, Robert, 1914– —Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.W569K44 2007 791.4302'33092—dc22 2007008888

⬁™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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To Marion, Liz, and Drew. Thanks for the patience, love, and support.

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To appreciate Robert Wise, it is necessary to return to the highlights of his best thirty years in the business: the decades of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Seeing once again films such as The Set-Up (1949), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Executive Suite (1954), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), I Want to Live (1958), Odds against Tomorrow (1959), West Side Story (1961), The Haunting (1963), and The Andromeda Strain (1971) makes it quite clear that Robert Wise is indisputably a major director in the history of American film.

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

vii ix

The Early Years at RKO The Years with Val Lewton More B Movies Moving Up: From B to A Wise at His Best: The Set-Up The Years at Warner Bros. and Fox Science Fiction and the Cold War: The Day the Earth Stood Still 1952–1958: Documentary Style—And Everything Else . . . “Produced” by Robert Wise From Stage to Film: Preeminent Translator of Musicals The 1970s Searching for New Beginnings

1 10 30 38 42 57 69 75 98 112 139 158

Appendix: An Interview with Robert Wise Bibliography Filmography Index About the Author

167 173 175 201 209

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Preface

In the early 1930s, the young Alfred Hitchcock made a brief and abortive

attempt at directing musical comedy. It simply wasn’t for him. So Hitchcock returned to suspense, created The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), and thereafter steadily built a richly deserved international reputation as the undisputed master of suspense. Like Hitchcock, the most notable directors in the history of motion pictures seem to have made similar discoveries about themselves and developed a personal style, a “signature,” as critic Andrew Sarris once termed it, making it possible for both critics and the public to clearly identify particular directors with the type of film they do best. Directors like Orson Welles, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock have such a distinctive style, and have had a host of imitators over the years. Robert Wise resists such categorization, and that is a large part of the reason some critics, although duly acknowledging the high quality of his more impressive work, continue to deny him admission to the pantheon of Hollywood’s greater directors. Andrew Sarris, for example, praises Wise’s “conscientious craftsmanship,” but laments what he terms the “strained seriousness” of his films of the ’50s and ’60s. Pauline Kael, pleased that Wise’s work is “unpretentious,” laments that it contains too much of the technician, that “nothing has really been left to chance.” There is undeniably that element in Wise that prevents his leaving anything to chance, the virtue of the conscientious craftsman who sees his work not primarily as a vehicle for his own ideas, but as an experience that also serves—as he perceives them—the expectations of his audience. Robert Wise lacks the ego and temperament of the artist—but his painstaking craftsmanship has created such truly great films as the film noir classic The Set-Up (1949) and West Side Story (1961), which Bosley Crowther of the New York Times described as “nothing short of a cinema masterpiece.” vii

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In a critique of The Sand Pebbles, Arthur Knight, the film critic for the highly respected but now defunct Saturday Review, offers what is perhaps the most succinct summary of Robert Wise and the question of personal signature: Robert Wise seems able to do almost anything, from the uncompromising Realism of I Want to Live! to the operatic West Side Story, from the superbly manipulated shudders of The Haunting to the many splendors of The Sound of Music. But whatever the genre, Wise manages to give it the style most suited to the material, in contrast to most directors, who would rather stamp their pictures with the style most suited to themselves.

The feature films that Wise completed since becoming a director in 1944 represent a cross section of American film genre. In his work, Wise maintains an unshakable fidelity to the narrative; there are few striking camera angles and few visual flourishes that might distract from what the director considers the primary obligation and responsibility—to present the story to the audience. Robert Wise’s role as an artist of the cinema is invariably subsumed by his role as the craftsman who uses talent and experience to present a story to his audience that engages, informs, and entertains. The integrity and quality behind the craftsmanship of a Robert Wise film is not always readily apparent in a distinctive or obvious fashion related to or identified by a “signature.” Often it lies beneath the surface, and fully rewards closer examination. In undertaking that examination, I have written what is more accurately termed an essay, a subjective examination of the value and merit of Wise’s accomplishments as a director and producer. This essay is not a synthesis of the views and ideas of other critics, although it draws minimally on what I consider the most relevant ideas and perceptions of Wise’s work presented by critics and reviewers over the years. His long career notwithstanding, there is relatively little written about Robert Wise, beyond reviews and very brief articles. Interviews that I and others conducted over the years do not advance incrementally our understanding of his work. He tended to say very much the same things about his earlier films, partially through a kind of modesty, and partially because there was a part of him that remained, essentially, the journeyman director and producer. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct a series of interviews with Mr. Wise in the late 1970s, and to spend several weeks with him on the set of Star Trek:The Motion Picture. I did a second extensive interview with him in August 1981. Being on the Star Trek set gave me the opportunity to observe firsthand his style of directing and his general approach to all aspects of creating a motion picture. I also had the opportunity to interview a number of his associates in the industry, both past and present. Robert Wise and I continued to correspond for a number of years thereafter, and he responded patiently and helpfully to any questions I asked him, providing a great deal of valuable information unavailable elsewhere.

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Acknowledgments

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y work on Robert Wise has been an on again, off again project over a number of years, and I owe its completion to the support and patience of many friends and colleagues. Some of those who helped the most are no longer with us. I am particularly grateful to the late Robert Wise for the time he took from a busy schedule to grant interviews and respond to correspondence in great detail, frequently sending recorded commentary that proved enormously helpful and meeting with me, when his time permitted, in Washington, D.C., and at his offices in Los Angeles. I am especially appreciative that he responded to my request to watch him work by extending an invitation to spend three weeks on the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, truly an unforgettable experience. I am also grateful to many people who worked with Mr. Wise on that picture and on earlier projects, and who shared freely their thoughts, impressions, and anecdotes. The late Nelson Gidding merits particular thanks for his helpful insights into the working relationship between a director and a screenwriter. Others still very much with us at this writing merit special thanks as well: Jim Welsh, a friend with whom I have shared many thoughts and seen many movies, has been unwavering in his friendship, advice, and support of my study of Robert Wise’s career. Thanks also to John Tibbetts, whose encyclopedic knowledge of film is only the least of his many talents. John was for a number of years the editor of American Classic Screen, and in that capacity published several articles I had written on Robert Wise. For sharing quantities of information with someone who was barely known to them, I am profoundly grateful to film scholars Joel Siegel, Frank Thompson, John Gallagher, and Gerald Peary. Thanks also to Peter Stamelman, who took valuable time from a busy schedule to share ideas about Robert Wise. ix

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Acknowledgments

I would be remiss if I did not specially acknowledge my friend of many years ago, Howard Gelman, a man to whom I owe a special debt. He enabled me to meet and speak with Dore Schary, opened doors for me at the University of Wisconsin Center for Film Research, and assisted in countless other ways, listening to my ideas and offering good council. Wherever he is today, I wish him well. Finally, I am particularly grateful to Chris Widdowson and Donna Hickman, two very good friends who at different stages of completion typed the manuscript. Thanks, at the very last, to Stephen Ryan, the most patient and professional of editors.

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The Early Years at RKO

R obert Wise began his film career as a college dropout during the Great

Depression. In the summer of 1933, his father’s meat packing concern in Connersville, Indiana, was in bad financial shape, and so a second year at nearby Franklin College and the hope of a career in journalism had to be postponed indefinitely. Since the job market was as dismal throughout the Midwest as it was in Connersville, a family conference was held (in his absence) to consider his future prospects. The family decided that the eighteen-year-old younger son would go back to Hollywood with his older brother, David, an accountant for RKO who was home on a visit. David Wise’s experience in California was the American success story on a minor scale. He had gone to RKO as a laborer in 1928 and in five years had worked his way up to a desk job in the accounting department. The family hoped that in Hollywood David might be able to help his younger brother follow the same formula. He was at least moderately successful. While an initial interview with the prop department at RKO came to nothing, Bob Wise did manage to find a position as a film porter, working primarily in the shipping room of the editing department. The job paid twenty-five dollars a week.1 Of the “big five” studios, Wise started his career with the one that has by far the most curious and troubled history. From its inception as a kind of corporate stepchild with a collection of generally indifferent parents, RKO, the creation of RCA’s David Sarnoff and Wall Street’s Joseph P. Kennedy, was subject to constant shifts in management and changes in lower-level corporate policy. In this period of RKO history, the old cliché was quite true: The lettering was hardly dry on the door before one production chief succeeded another. How RKO managed to maintain high production standards over the years is almost beyond understanding, but certainly the bulk of the credit is 1

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due to the talent and imagination of heads of production like David Selznick, Merian C. Cooper, Pandro S. Berman, and Dore Schary. When Robert Wise came to RKO in August 1933, Merian Cooper was in charge and the studio’s future never looked more bleak. Roosevelt had declared a bank holiday the previous March; shortly thereafter the word came down from corporate headquarters that because there were no funds to pay salaries, the studio would have to be closed. To keep things going, Cooper issued an order that employees could be paid in scrip with a two-hundred-dollar limit per pay period and backed the order with his personal funds. In this way he kept the studio going until the banks reopened. Cooper was succeeded in 1934 by Berman, the production chief who was undoubtedly the best of the lot, even though RKO had filed for limited bankruptcy in June of that year. By 1935 Sarnoff also gave up on RKO. Floyd Odlum became the new corporate chief—and RKO realized its first profit in six years.2 Although all of this higher-level corporate fluctuation had little direct effect on the fortunes of Robert Wise, certainly the milieu of studio production did. Carting cans of film from one editing room to another as the strains of “The Carioca” from Flying down to Rio (1933) echoed through the hallways created a heady atmosphere for a kid from the Midwest, and Wise knew very early that he wanted to be part of it. His break came when sound effects editor T. K. Wood needed an assistant. Jimmy Wilkinson, head of the editing department, gave the job to Wise. Initially Wise was an apprentice sound effects editor, but gradually he moved into music editing as well. The master–apprentice relationship was a good one, and Wise learned much from Wood. During one slow period, Wood brought out some south sea island footage that had been shot some years before by a second unit working with Ernest Schoedsack on King Kong. The plans for the additional feature for which this footage had originally been retained were long since abandoned; but eighteen months of periodic editing by Wood and Wise resulted—after stock music and narration had been added—in a ten-minute short that earned each of them a five-hundred-dollar bonus from the front office. The film was titled A Trip through Fijiland (1935). Wise was given his first screen credit (for “dialogue”) and Wood was credited with editorial supervision.3 But regular periods of relaxed creativity were rare in the editing room. The word came down early one morning that George Stevens wanted to have a sneak preview of his new feature, Alice Adams (1935). Wood and Wise worked round the clock, thirty hours straight, building a music and sound effects track out of stock recordings to get a print ready. Wise’s work schedule was often this hectic, but it paid large dividends in experience. During that early apprenticeship period, he worked as a sound effects apprentice on John Cromwell’s Of Human Bondage (1934) and did sound effects editing on John

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Ford’s The Informer (1935). He also did effects editing for Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935), two of the best of the RKO Astaire–Rogers musicals directed by Mark Sandrich. Music and sound effects editing, however, seemed a dead end, and Wise asked Wilkinson for the chance to move up to picture editing. Once again he was lucky; almost immediately he got the chance to be an assistant to Billy Hamilton, one of the master editors of that period. Hamilton too was a progressive in that unlike many of the established conservative technicians of the film industry, he was willing, even anxious, to give younger men the chance to accept responsibility and more than willing to teach them all he knew about the craft of editing. Wise quickly moved up to doing first cuts, sharing coediting credit with Hamilton on some of the more significant 1939 releases at RKO. They shared screen credit for Gregory La Cava’s Fifth Avenue Girl and William Dieterle’s remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. They also did the editing that year for another of the Astaire–Rogers vehicles, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Independently, Wise worked with Garson Kanin as editor and advisor on Bachelor Mother (1939). By 1940 Wise was on his own as an editor, working closely with some of the top RKO directors of the period. He was well into a second but unofficial apprenticeship, this time as a director. In that year he edited Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance and William Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy (also known as The Devil and Daniel Webster). He also edited Garson Kanin’s My Favorite Wife, and Kanin gave him the chance to direct some second-unit shooting. It was after his work on Kanin’s film that he came to the attention of the man who was then RKO’s hottest prospect for big box-office success: Orson Welles. On the strength of a sensational Mercury Theater broadcast in October 1938 of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds—a broadcast so realistic that it panicked its national audience into believing that a Martian invasion force had actually landed somewhere in northern New Jersey—Orson Welles was signed to an RKO contract. The deal was negotiated by then–company president George Schaefer and called for the twenty-four-year-old boy wonder of the entertainment world to write, direct, produce, and act in two films to be produced by Welles’s own company, Mercury Productions, and released through RKO. The contract gave Welles all but total control; he was answerable only to Schaefer, and RKO guaranteed that whatever Welles produced would be released. Consistent with what has been subsequently identified as his dark vision of the human condition, Welles initially decided to bring Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the screen, but that project, along with several other ideas, was never realized. After a good deal of planning— and mystery surrounding the planning—Welles began full-scale production

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on a screenplay he had coauthored with Herman Mankiewicz entitled John Citizen, U.S.A. It was subsequently changed to the title under which it would be released: Citizen Kane.4 Welles and Wise met for the first time in the summer of 1940, just after Wise had completed his work for Kanin. Welles, undertaking his first Hollywood film project, was having problems with various staff and technical personnel, largely the result of an undercurrent of resentment directed against an outsider perceived as coming to Hollywood to show the film capital of the world how it should be done. When Welles was unable to see eye to eye with the editor assigned to him by the studio, Jimmy Wilkinson sent Wise for a preliminary interview. At the time Welles was shooting at Pathé Studios in Culver City, a lot acquired by RKO for additional stage space. The interview was brief, little more than an amiable conversation during a lull in the shooting of the beach party scene with Dorothy Comingore, but Welles was sufficiently impressed. He made no on-the-spot commitment, but soon notified the front office that he wanted Wise on the picture. At that stage in his RKO career, what Welles wanted, he got. Wise was signed for the Kane production. Much has been written in recent years on the filming of Citizen Kane, most of it reinforcing the legend and the enigma now firmly associated with Orson Welles. In their early association, Wise found Welles to be by turns frustrating and cooperative, but always a disciplined artist, stimulating and challenging to all who worked with him. Welles always seems to know what he wanted, although no one else on the production was totally certain. His singular vision and his tacit awareness of his own genius seemed to supply him with the requisite energy to carry through each disparate phase of the project. To his credit, his view of himself as an artist never made him unapproachable or unreceptive to suggestions. He listened to anyone on the production who had something to offer: from Gregg Toland, who showed Welles what the camera was truly capable of doing, to Robert Wise, who put together Welles’s now-famous breakfast sequence with Ruth Warrick, a sequence in which the visual timing and the device of starting dialogue a second before the outgoing scene whips to the incoming one make it an enduring and classic example of film-editing technique.5 The artistic achievements, however, were greatly overshadowed by the controversy that Citizen Kane generated as a loosely biographical caricature of William Randolph Hearst, head of the powerful Hearst newspaper syndicate. Despite the threat of lawsuits coming from different directions—one from the Hearst people if the film was released, one from Welles if it was not—RKO released Kane at a New York premiere in May 1941. The decision, however, came only after it gained a form of consent from the industry at large. In the early spring of 1941, just after the final dubbing, Wise took his first trip to

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New York with a print of Citizen Kane. The purpose of the trip was a special showing of Kane before a very select audience: the top executives of the motion picture industry, the Schencks, the Kents, et al. who would either decide to okay the Kane release and risk making an adversary of Hearst or to pressure RKO to shelve the picture in the best interests of the industry. The screening was to be held in a small projection room at the RKO Music Hall. The magnates—many with their lawyers—duly filed in and took their seats. Before the running of the film, Welles stepped before the group to say a few words. What he said was not recorded but, according to Robert Wise,6 Welles was at his best: charming, persuasive, giving the greatest unrecorded performance of his career. He prepared them not only for what they were about to see, but for the way he wanted them to see it. It was decided after the screening that a few names should be altered and a minor trim should be made here and there, but that was it. Welles had effectively eliminated any significant opposition. Wise spent the next six weeks in New York getting all of the actors available to do some dialogue looping, while Mark Robson, his assistant out on the coast, did some of the additional editing. Wise held a second closed screening in New York (this time just for the lawyers) and Citizen Kane was granted the motion picture industry’s approval to release.7 The film garnered several very good reviews, and initially did well at the box office when it opened in San Francisco and Denver. Kane received nine Academy Award nominations, including one for Robert Wise’s editing, but only one award, which went to Welles and Mankiewicz for original screenplay. Despite the film’s proven merit, the attack from the Hearst people was unrelenting. Some characterized Kane as dangerously left-wing, largely because of its implicit attack on capitalism. Hearst himself was alleged to have branded it “un-American” and his newspapers were forbidden to carry any advertising for the picture. The pressure finally proved to be too much for the exhibitors, who avoided getting involved in the controversy by the simple expedient of not booking the film. Its problems with Citizen Kane notwithstanding, RKO still had a contract with Welles for another film and Schaefer—not without some hesitation— okayed Welles’s next project, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons. Once again Welles wanted Wise to do the editing, but William Dieterle, about to start his newest picture, Syncopation (1942), also wanted Wise and officially requested his services in mid-July 1941. Just before he went to work on Citizen Kane, Wise had edited Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy (1941). Dieterle and Welles were each aware of the other’s desire to have the same editor at the same time, and each offered to put Wise on the payroll of his respective budget. When the studio front office hesitated, Welles offered to pay Wise out of his own pocket in order to be assured of having

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him. Dieterle countered by doing the same. According to interoffice memos in the RKO archives, Dieterle had made the first request for Wise and had been promised his services by the front office. A compromise of sorts was proposed by which Wise would edit Dieterle’s picture and at the same time act as an editing supervisor for the Welles project.8 Eventually Welles was the winner, perhaps on the strength of his contract and Schaefer’s support, but more likely because Ambersons was the first to start actual shooting. On Citizen Kane, Welles had been a highly disciplined artist, applying himself with total concentration. On the Ambersons production, that self-imposed discipline began to fade as he took on additional projects—more than he could comfortably handle. A contemporary advertisement for the forthcoming production of The Magnificent Ambersons contains a cartoon caricature of Welles, “Hollywood’s most amazing citizen,” with eight arms, all working in different directions on various projects. One hand operates a camera while Welles peers intently through the viewfinder; another designs costumes. Others, respectively, write in long hand, peck at a typewriter, erect a model set, point assertively with extended index finger, and rub the director’s chin, emphasizing his pensive expression.9 The caricature of disparate activity is only slightly exaggerated. Welles had his full share of ego and ambition, and tried his best to live up to all that multitalent publicity. As a result, the Ambersons project suffered. While working on Ambersons as producer, director, narrator, and scriptwriter, he did a series of dramas for the Lady Esther radio series on weekends and undertook a second film project, Journey into Fear (1942). This latter venture, intended to clear away any lingering obligation to RKO, was shot largely at night in order to accommodate Welles’s hectic schedule. Welles was the producer and one of the principal actors; he also wrote the script in collaboration with Joseph Cotten, and was the original director until Norman Foster was brought in to take over.10 Six weeks before the completion of Ambersons, Welles undertook yet another project. At the invitation of Nelson Rockefeller, who was then the State Department’s troubleshooter for Latin American Affairs, he became a goodwill ambassador to South America as part of the government’s Good Neighbor policy. This made the situation even more hectic. Welles was scheduled to leave for Washington at the end of February, shortly before going to Brazil. As the time schedule tightened and the pressure increased, Welles was frequently unavailable, and Wise was called upon to direct short sequences, most notably a scene with the venerable stage actor Richard Bennett, who played the part of Major Amberson. At the time Bennett was sixty-nine, in ill health, and also working nights playing the ship’s captain in Journey into Fear. One scene with Bennett had been particularly troublesome, and Welles asked Wise to direct the reshooting. In this scene Major Amberson, his face illuminated by firelight,

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delivers his incoherent, dying monologue. But Bennett was having considerable difficulty remembering his lines, making a series of retakes necessary. It took several days—and a good deal of patience—before the scene was satisfactorily completed.11 Welles finished the shooting and left for his government assignment. There was, however, a good deal of visual, sound, and music editing still to be done and some additional narration needed from Welles. To do this, an arrangement was made by which Wise and Welles would meet in Florida, prior to Welles’s leaving for Brazil. They met in a small cartoon studio in Miami and spent three days working on the final editing and recording additional narration from Welles. When Welles finally had to leave, Wise took the film back to Hollywood with the understanding that when he and his assistant Mark Robson had completed the final editing—including the sound and music—Wise would fly down to Rio with a final version for Welles to see, and they could determine any last-minute changes that might be necessary. But the day before Wise was to leave for Brazil, the government issued a wartime restriction on all civilians flying out of the country. The only alternative was to send a print to Welles in Rio and let him contact RKO about any necessary changes. Welles found dozens of necessary changes. Shortly thereafter, there were transcontinental phone calls—replete with static and other interference—and one thirty-fivepage cable (which Wise kept for some time but subsequently lost moving from office to office over the years).12 Wise followed all of Welles’s directions, but the sneak previews at theaters around the area declared the 131-minute opus a disaster. Audiences yawned, and many walked out during key scenes. Wise knew that Ambersons was slow by Hollywood standards; he also knew—as did most of the others who worked closely with Welles on the production—that in its original form, it was, production problems notwithstanding, first-class cinematic art. Nonetheless, it was firmly rejected by a moviegoing public that in wartime preferred lighter, more escapist fare. During this period, RKO began running into heavy losses, losses that in the view of the New York corporate office called for changes in studio administration. George Schaefer was out and N. Peter Rathvon was in as president of RKO. As production chief, Rathvon brought in Charles Koerner, head of the RKO theater chain. Koerner, it was believed, would be more aware of and sensitive to the desires of the moviegoing public. In the midst of this corporate shakeup, Wise was ordered to cut The Magnificent Ambersons to a more acceptable running time and edit it into something to which audiences would be more receptive. In the editing rooms, Wise became the servant of two masters. Welles and RKO were poles apart on this picture, and Wise was caught in the middle. The cuts demanded by the studio made it necessary to shoot additional short sequences to provide continuity where

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wide gaps in the story line appeared. Wise directed several of these, most notably the scene in which George Minafer (Tim Holt) brings the letter to his mother (Dolores Costello) in her bedroom. The hospital corridor scene at the conclusion was shot by assistant director Freddie Fleck.13 When the studio was finally satisfied, some forty-odd minutes had gone to the cutting room floor. The cuts, however, did not save the situation. The Magnificent Ambersons still failed at the box office and was frequently relegated to second feature on a double bill. Koerner continued his austerity measures by firing Welles—who was still in South America—and canceling It’s All True, the film Welles was in the middle of shooting. RKO and their publicly acclaimed genius of Mercury Productions were effectively finished with each other, and Wise’s working relationship with Welles had also come to an end. In subsequent years, Welles was furious with RKO and all who had, in his view, collaborated in butchering The Magnificent Ambersons. He continued to nurse his grievance for years thereafter, and when he tired of discussing the subject, there was a host of disciples to perpetuate what ultimately became a legend of artistic injustice. Although Wise accepted the label of “guilt by association”—he was admittedly a film editor under contract to RKO—he remained firm in his denial that the editing that was done while Welles was in South America ruined the film, since the extant version of The Magnificent Ambersons has, over the years, become an acknowledged classic on its own merits. That it is such a fine example of Welles’s genius in a form so greatly altered from the director’s original conception of Tarkington’s novel is due in no small way to Wise’s ability to deal with a clearly impossible task: to give the studio heads the significant cuts they demanded and, at the same time, stay true to Welles’s original intent. It was generally believed for many years that Wise, Robson, and others who worked with Welles were demoted, condemned to work on films below the A level as a kind of unofficial punishment for their association with Welles and the Magnificent Ambersons disaster. Wise consistently and emphatically denied this, maintaining that when Welles left, his work as an RKO editor resumed pretty much where it left off prior to Citizen Kane.14 Shortly after Welles’s departure, Wise was assigned to edit Tim Whalen’s Seven Days Leave (1942), a Lucille Ball musicomedy with a “Brewster’s Millions” plot line. Upon its completion, he signed on to edit Richard Wallace’s Bombardier (1943), a typical World War II propaganda film of the type then in production throughout Hollywood with the blessing—and the logistical support—of the War Department. Working with Wallace gave him some additional experience beyond editing, since he was given the opportunity to plan and work out the miniature shots with Vern Walker. At the time, Wise was twenty-nine years old and although classified by the draft board as 4-F, he was soon notified that his classification was being reconsidered: he could be reclas-

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sified 1-A without a second preliminary physical. Deferments for technical staff involved in the civilian production of motion pictures that were considered supportive to the war effort were available because such pictures were considered home-front morale boosters. RKO filed the necessary papers, and Wise was subsequently reclassified 2-A until March 1943, the estimated date of completion for Bombardier. His association with producer Bob Fellows was a particularly good one, and when Bombardier was completed, Fellows requested Wise as the editor for his next picture, The Fallen Sparrow (1943). It was a fortunate assignment, for Fellows gave Wise the opportunity to direct several short sequences. In keeping with the conditions of his deferment, Wise was assigned to edit other pictures that were deemed in support of the war effort. Most notable among these was Ray Enright’s The Iron Major and Leonide Moguy’s Action in Arabia, both released in 1943.15 In the ten years that he had been with RKO, Wise had built a reputation as a highly energetic and creative editor; but his opportunities to direct, albeit short sequences, first with Welles and later with Fellows, made it clear to him that he wanted to be a director. Periodically he petitioned the front office for a directing assignment. He was told on each occasion that they would keep him in mind. It was then that Wise received another big career break, although he hardly recognized it at the time. He was assigned to the RKO production unit that was currently turning out the studio’s entries for the horror market— the unit headed by Val Lewton.

NOTES 1. Samuel Stark, “Robert Wise: Began as a Cutter and Has Retained a Cutter’s Cunning,” Films in Review 14, no. 1 (January 1963): 5. 2. Ron Haver, “RKO Years,” American Film 3, no. 3 (December–January 1978): 28. 3. Robert Wise, personnel file for 1943, RKO Archives. 4. Haver, “RKO Years,” 29. 5. Robert Wise, interview with author, July 26, 1978. 6. Wise, interview. 7. Wise, interview. 8. Sid Rogell, interoffice memo to Reg Armour, August 14, 1941, RKO Archives. 9. Haver, “RKO Years,” 29. 10. Wise, interview. 11. Wise, interview. 12. Wise, interview. 13. Rui Nogueira, “Robert Wise at RKO,” Focus on Film, no. 12 (Winter 1972): 45. 14. Wise, interview. 15. Leon Goldberg, interoffice memo to B. Bender, September 15, 1944, RKO Archives.

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The Years with Val Lewton

Val Lewton was a unique personality who had a profound influence on the

career of Robert Wise. He was a highly literate and sensitive man with truly impressive career accomplishments. He came to RKO from Selznick International, where he had been Selznick’s story editor and general assistant. He worked on a number of diverse projects with the Selznick organization, including Gone with the Wind (1939). His task at RKO was to produce horror pictures on a limited budget. The films produced by the Lewton unit were all B pictures, second features on double bills. Lewton’s unit, it was hoped, would put RKO in a position to capture some of the horror market long dominated by Universal Studios, a monopoly that began in the early 1930s with Frankenstein and Dracula. Val Lewton was not, however, the kind of man to make the quick but lucrative exploitation picture that RKO wanted. According to Joel Siegel, Lewton was a highly unusual producer, very much out of the typical Hollywood vein. Obsessed with quality, Lewton recognized immediately upon his arrival at RKO that if work of any quality were to be accomplished, he would have to set up “a working unit in which each member had a stake in every project.”1 The Lewton unit at RKO was essentially democratic, and Lewton encouraged each member to have a say, to participate in the decisions regarding script and general production. In the five years that it lasted, Lewton’s unit was a happy and highly productive family.2 Wise’s editing work had come to Lewton’s attention through Mark Robson, who had worked with Wise on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Robson had edited three features for Lewton (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and Leopard Man) during the period from July 1942 through March 1943. Shortly thereafter, he got his chance to direct his first feature, The Seventh Victim (1943). Robson’s good fortune made room for an editor, and Wise joined Lew10

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ton’s production unit in midsummer 1943. His initial editing assignment was to edit The Curse of the Cat People, a sequel to Cat People (1942), Lewton’s first and most successful picture at RKO. But shortly after joining Lewton, Wise also got the opportunity he had been waiting for: the chance to direct. On July 26, 1943, Gunther von Fritsch, whose previous experience had been in documentaries, had been signed to direct The Curse of the Cat People for the Lewton unit. Unlike its predecessor, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), The Curse of the Cat People (1944) is not the horror film implied by the title. The titles of both films came about as the result of audience testing, a common practice at the time and one highly favored by C. W. Koerner, RKO’s production chief at the time. The testing was done by George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute, whose forms were distributed in the lobbies of theaters with this sentence at the top: “Which of the following films would you most like to see?” What followed was a list of titles drawn up by the studio’s story department. A title that met with what the studio felt was a significant positive response was considered exploitable and was passed on to a producer who had only to create a film for it. Cat People was considered an exploitable title, and was duly passed on to a producer, in this case Val Lewton, and the film the Lewton unit put together proved a big box-office success. It went a long way toward relieving the financial difficulty at RKO that was largely the legacy of the Orson Welles gamble. Cats were in as the focus of horror films and, again at Koerner’s behest, the Lewton group did The Leopard Man in 1943 and began the inevitable sequel to Cat People in the same year.3 Unknown to Koerner and his staff, this was to be no sequel in the usual sense of the word—only a very misleading title suggesting one. Val Lewton was a highly cultured and intelligent man who felt, quite rightly, that he was capable of better things. He was frankly tired of being stuck with absurd titles, and when the latest, The Curse of the Cat People, came down from Koerner’s office he was determined, somehow, to circumvent it. He began by simply developing an idea for the kind of picture he would like to make. He put together a brief story about a little girl, a sort of fictionalized psychological study relating how, in time of emotional need, she deals with and relates to the world around her. To allay any possible suspicion that might arise in the front office, Lewton assigned DeWitt Bodeen, who had scripted Cat People, to write this one, and assembled members of the original cast—Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, and Elizabeth Russell—for prominent roles in the sequel. Given a schedule of eighteen days, Fritsch began shooting in late August. By mid-September, he had gone well beyond the scheduled date of completion, but had shot only half the script. Anxious to please Lewton and nervous at his first big assignment, he had fallen victim to perfectionism and procrastination, a particularly bad combination in studio production. Lewton urged

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him to speed it up, but without success. Convinced by the daily rushes that he was directing a film of high quality, Fritsch had become increasingly certain that the front office, when made aware of the film’s merits, would revise the shooting schedule. He was wrong. Sid Rogell, head of B unit production, finally conferred with Lewton and it was decided between them that Fritsch would have to go. It was then a question of who was available to replace him. Jacques Tourneur, who had directed Cat People, had recently been promoted to A pictures; Mark Robson was putting the postshooting finishing touches on The Ghost Ship (1943) and was preparing to start shooting on Are These Our Children? (subsequently released in 1944 as Youth Runs Wild); Assistant Director Harry D’Arcy was familiar with what Fritsch had been shooting; but so was Robert Wise, who, as film editor, had been working with the actual footage shot to date. He was, in Lewton’s view, clearly the one to take over. Early on a Saturday, Wise received a call from Rogell and Lewton telling him that as of Monday, Fritsch was out and Wise was in. Wise accepted the offer and thanked them, but not without mixed feelings. He had worked closely with Gunther von Fritsch and that very evening they were scheduled to work on the cutting of the most recent footage. Although Wise wanted very much to direct, he didn’t want to push Fritsch out of his job. Wise explained his concerns to Rogell, who responded with characteristic bluntness: Fritsch was being taken off the picture; on Monday morning there would be a new director, and if it wasn’t Robert Wise, it would be someone else. In any case, it would not be Gunther von Fritsch. It was a take-it-or-leave-it situation, and Wise took it. RKO covered the dismissal by releasing a story that Fritsch had been drafted. At the same time, Wise was given assurance that the new direction his career had taken would not be interrupted by the war. According to the Activities and Occupational Bulletin number 29 of the regional office of the War Manpower Commission, the position of motion picture director was now considered critical to the war effort. On September 20, 1943, Robert Wise began the second phase of his motion picture career as the director of The Curse of the Cat People.4 Wise had no illusions about why he had been selected. He knew little or nothing firsthand about the craft of film acting; as for directing, his varied experience was still limited. He had done second-unit work for Welles in Ambersons and for Bob Fellows in Fallen Sparrow. He was, however, as Lewton was well aware, a skilled and creative editor. In the nine years that he had been working for RKO, he had proven himself to be both efficient and highly dependable. In his brief tenure with Orson Welles, he had had the opportunity to see the so-called rules of direction and cinematography observed, bent, and, quite frequently, broken, all to the advantage of the finished product. It had all been

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valuable experience, stored for the day when it would be needed. Now Wise had been placed in the director’s chair and given a picture to finish—and only ten days in which to do it. The transition from one director to another was decidedly smooth, aided in no small degree by the closeness with which the Lewton film unit worked together. As editor, Wise was frequently on the set and was no stranger to the group working behind the camera. With the actors, however, he felt considerable anxiety. Faces seen through a moviola were snipped and sorted into various sequences without any real difficulty; now they assembled before him and waited to be told what to do, among them Julia Dean, a sixty-five-year-old actress with considerable stage experience, and a very inexperienced six-year-old, Ann Carter. Although he lacked the artistic temperament and nervous intensity that so often afflict young directors on first assignments, Wise was far from totally sure of himself and was troubled with the very predictable question of whether his ambition had not outrun his ability. Nonetheless, he took the initiative. Careful of his ten-day shooting schedule, he approached the script and the day’s shooting with the low-key confidence and tactful candor that would come to characterize his entire career as a director. He was articulate, he was personable, and above all he was patient. An on-the-set rapport with the cast developed without difficulty, but to overcome his nervousness and insecurity about working with actors, he sat in periodically on acting seminars conducted by Michael Chekhov, one of the highly respected teachers of the 1940s.5 His handling of actors, however, was not entirely free of front-office criticism. Quinn Martin, later a prominent television producer and executive of the 1970s and at that time a general production assistant at RKO, wrote a memo to Bill Gordon of the front office production staff on the day before the final shooting—expressing concern about the way six-year-old Ann Carter was being handled: I would suggest to the director that if he wishes to turn out a completed, near perfect performance by Miss Carter, which it very well could be, he will, in his own way, disabuse her of the notion that her words are (1) supposed to be lyrical and polished to the brilliance and fullness of a Katharine Cornell, or (2) supposed to be resonantly precious.6

Martin’s motives were in the mutual professional interest of Ann Carter and RKO, but in retrospect his memo seems more quibble than constructive criticism. Martin goes on to say that “the day on which this exceedingly fine little girl goes ham as a result of well-meant but ill-advised coaching will be the day on which a potentially irresistible young performer’s jig is up.”7 But young Miss Carter turned in a fine performance, responding well to the direction of both Fritsch and Wise. If anything, she is a little less precious in the latter part of the film.

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The Curse of the Cat People, ominous title notwithstanding, is the story of a young girl in need of a friend, someone with whom she can share her innermost feelings and her growing sensitivity to the world around her. Her father, Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), has overcome the trauma of his marriage to Irena (the cat woman of Tourneur’s original film, played in both instances by Simone Simon) and has rebuilt his life with a second marriage, this time to Alice (Jane Randolph), the coworker who gave him comfort and support throughout his ordeal. But the peace and happiness of his new life are troubled by his uneasiness over what he considers Amy’s abnormal behavior. Her withdrawal into a personal world of isolated imaginative play recalls to Oliver the moody personality of Irena. Amy’s kindergarten classmates are equally disturbed by her behavior. They regard her lack of interest in and withdrawal from group activities as evidence that she is stuck up, and they respond in kind. Her alienation from friends and classmates is taken a step further when she “mails” the invitations to her birthday party by dropping them into the hollow section of a backyard tree that her father had told her several years earlier was a magic mailbox. The neighborhood children, aware that Amy was to have a party, assume that they were not invited. They respond by shunning her and running away whenever she attempts to join them in play. It is in pursuing her elusive playmates that she comes upon the old Farren House (an RKO legacy from the set of Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons), where curiosity and a voice from an upstairs window draw her inside the gates. Once Amy is inside, a hand appears at the window and tosses her a gift, a small gold ring wrapped in a handkerchief. Amy takes the ring home, where she is told by Edward, the Reeds’ houseboy, that it very much resembles a Jamaican wishing ring. The lonely child immediately wishes for a friend. The friend turns out to be Irena, the ghost (or so Lewton would at first have it seem) of her father’s first wife, who met her terrible end at the conclusion of Cat People. In addition to Irena, Amy also finds another friend in Mrs. Farren, a demented old actress who lives in seclusion and who dropped the wishing ring from the window. She is cared for by her daughter, Barbara, whom Mrs. Farren steadfastly refuses to accept as her daughter, a daughter who she believes never recovered from a serious illness suffered when she was Amy’s age. The Curse of the Cat People offers some very telling observations on the value of a child’s imagination. Audiences found it charming—and confusing. Even the venerable James Agee, who praised it highly in his review in the Nation on April 1, 1944, couldn’t get the plot straight and his error has been perpetuated in nearly every film and library catalogue to the present day. Agee described The Curse of the Cat People as “a brave, sensitive and admirable little psychological melodrama about a lonely six-year-old girl, her inadequate parents, a pair of recluses in a neighboring house, and the child’s dead, insane

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mother, who becomes the friend and playmate of her imagination.”8 He was correct about everything but the last part. Amy is not Irena’s child, as Alice Reed, Oliver’s second wife and Amy’s mother, makes emphatically clear. When her husband, troubled by Amy’s quiet moodiness and irrational behavior, remarks that “she could almost be Irena’s child,” Alice points out to Oliver that “she’s not Irena’s child, she’s my child; there’s nothing of Irena in her.” The confusion is largely the result of Lewton’s attempt to walk a thin line between The Curse of the Cat People and the original Cat People, trying to keep the audience in apprehension of an implied curse carried over from the first picture, but simultaneously to present an engaging story about childhood fantasy and imagination. Thus the film contains several touches of cat-related apprehension that mean nothing and go nowhere. In an early scene, for example, two boys from Amy’s class chase a snarling black cat from a tree as an ominous flourish rises in the score; later, as Amy surreptitiously enters the darkened Farren living room, the scene shifts to a close-up of a stuffed cat on a branch with a bird in its mouth, and once again an extreme close-up backed by ominous background music keeps the audience apprehensive. This brief suggestion of terror in the Farren living room is juxtaposed with a visual allusion to a literary classic of childhood imagination, a touch very much in keeping with the Lewton style. When the slightly dotty old actress Julia Farren finally makes her appearance, suddenly opening the blinds and dramatically releasing the tension, she invites Amy, who is wearing her blond hair at shoulder length and is dressed in a white aproned pinafore dress, to have tea. Julia Farren’s repast is not as bizarre as Lewis Carroll’s tea party, but it is evident that Lewton wanted the Farren house—with its large mirrors by the doorway—to support the visual suggestion of Amy as another Alice exploring another imaginative wonderland. In this way, Lewton effectively enhances the atmosphere of childhood fantasy. Portraying Irena, the pathetic victim of the cat malady in Cat People, as the manifestation of Amy’s imaginary friend presented an excellent opportunity to work the curse motif into the picture in the company of a sound psychological premise. When Amy discovers a photograph of Irena in a drawer, the image of the beautiful woman in the picture provides a substantive physical form for the lonely child’s imaginary playmate. Later, when another photograph of Irena is discovered, Amy innocently informs her parents that the beautiful lady in the picture is her special friend. Her father, who remembers Irena as a cursed and wretchedly obsessed creature, is understandably upset; although Amy is simply a sensitive and imaginative child whose loneliness is dispelled in flights of fancy, her father fears that she is somehow following the same mental direction taken by the fanciful Irena. He overreacts in punishing the child, more through a personal anxiety to discredit any link with the supernatural than through the desire to be a conscientious parent.

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The indirect cat references are further supported by the casting of Elizabeth Russell as Barbara Farren, a role she plays with an effective balance of sympathy and menace. Russell had made a brief but memorable appearance in Tourneur’s film as a cat woman who recognizes Irena and addresses her as “sister” in Serbian.9 Her appearance in the second film was more of Lewton’s implicit connecting of the second film with the first. He had originally intended to establish the connection firmly at the beginning with an exorcism scene. An early treatment of Bodeen’s script has a Catholic priest coming to the Reeds’ Tarrytown home to exorcise the cat’s evil spirit. Bill Gordon, also legal troubleshooter and community liaison man for the production staff, advised Koerner that the scene would have to be cleared with one Father Devlin, who had been designated by Archbishop Cantwell as the Legion of Decency representative.10 Somewhere along the way the exorcism scene was dropped altogether, as were any intentions to give the character of Barbara Farren explicitly supernatural qualities. She does maintain a certain witchy quality throughout, particularly evident in a scene where Amy and the servant, Edward, are unable to open the front door of the house after a visit with Mrs. Farren. While suspense once again wells up in Constantin Bakaleinikoff ’s score, Barbara, her face a mask of inscrutable malevolence, steps between them and, as if releasing a spell, opens the door. Along with the confusing elements in the plot are the inexplicable fragments of images lost in the process of cutting to an acceptable running time. In a scene in which Irena is chanting and dropping leaves into a fire, a penand-ink sketch of some sort of thistle plant appears in gradual double exposure. It reappears during Amy’s numbers lesson, but in all extant prints it has no established relationship to anything in the film. It is more than likely something that Amy had found in a book and unconsciously incorporated into her fantasy. In his study of Val Lewton, Joel Siegel clarifies a similar mystery in the film, noting that: a number of small but artistically crucial details were cut. The most damaging of these excisions was a shot of Amy looking at a picture book illustration of a sleeping beauty princess dressed in a medieval gown. When the imaginary friend appears, she is dressed in this same garment. . . . The omission of the preparatory sequence makes her garb seem inexplicable, even laughable.11

These confusing elements notwithstanding, The Curse of the Cat People remains a thoroughly delightful film and an obvious tribute to the quality and talents of Lewton’s production unit. To this day this first film directed by Robert Wise is highly respected for its poignant and sensitive treatment of the vital relationship between childhood and imagination, and was singled out for

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particular attention by sociologist David Riesman in his now classic study of the changing American character, The Lonely Crowd.12 It was also an auspicious beginning for Wise, who, although coming into the production at the halfway mark, contributed to its success in a way that was neither small nor perfunctory, taking full advantage of the creative freedom that Lewton gave to his protégé directors. Wise directed, among others, the scenes that were shot on the Farren House interior set, most notably the excellent final scene, a splendid example of suspense created by effective cross-cutting and camera angle. Wise carefully set it up with cameraman Nick Musuraca, and worked closely at the moviola with editor J. R. Whittredge. In this scene, Amy has run away from home in a blinding snowstorm and, having nowhere to go, comes to the home of old Mrs. Farren. Amy’s arrival causes great anxiety on Julia Farren’s part, since Barbara, in a fit of temper and hurt feelings at being consistently rejected by her mother, has sworn to kill the child if she ever returns. While attempting to hide Amy upstairs, Mrs. Farren collapses on the staircase and—somewhat melodramatically—dies of a heart attack. As the distraught and terrified Amy sits on the staircase with the body of Julia Farren, the camera cuts to an overhead shot of the stairwell. The curtains on the sides of the stairwell billow and move with air from the front door, left open to the raging storm. There is a close-up of the terrified Amy, followed quickly by an overhead shot of the shadowy stairwell where we see, in the lower left-hand section of the frame, the shadow of Barbara Farren slowly ascending the stairs. She pauses and looks up into the camera, her face lit from beneath for sinister effect. Subsequent shots alternate between Amy’s innocent terror and Barbara Farren’s ascending and threatening presence. Perhaps the greatest tribute to a director and to a shooting concept worked out with his camera crew is imitation; in an expanded version, the same camera angle and editing technique were used with telling effect by Robert Siodmak in his classic thriller The Spiral Staircase (1945), also shot by Nick Musuraca. Wise finished the picture in early October, just a few days beyond the original shooting schedule. Lewton and the front office were more than satisfied with his work, and he was confirmed as a director in the Lewton unit. In March 1944, he began work on his next assignment: an adaptation of two short stories by Guy de Maupassant combined into one script that would ultimately be titled Mademoiselle Fifi. Mademoiselle Fifi, Wise’s first complete picture as a director, is far from the best produced by the Lewton unit. It is, however, the kind of literary project Lewton was particularly fond of doing and it gave Wise the opportunity to experience not only the difficulties of directing from beginning to end a low-budget, tightly scheduled picture but also the myriad details for which the producer is responsible. Wise worked closely with Lewton, operating as a

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kind of apprentice studying Lewton’s ability to innovate and to achieve historical authenticity and a personal standard of artistic quality—all within the limits of a very small budget. It was Lewton’s idea to take two short stories by Guy de Maupassant, “Boule de Suif ” and “Mademoiselle Fifi,” and combine them into one screenplay. Prior to shooting, Wise spent hours with Lewton searching through reproductions of paintings by Daumier, Detaille, and Toulouse-Lautrec in search of images and ideas that would combine in a myriad of small details to give the tone and finish that had come to distinguish a Val Lewton production.13 The picture is set in France in the early 1870s, the period of the German occupation during the Franco-Prussian war. In the coach to Cleresville, nine passengers from different walks of life huddle together, alternately making the best and the worst of a difficult and uncomfortable journey. The group represents the spectrum of French society. In company with the aloof and condescending Count and Countess de Breville, there are a wine wholesaler and a manufacturer, both accompanied by their wives. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Jean Cornudet, a somewhat inept revolutionary; a young priest on his way to become the new prelate at Cleresville; and Elizabeth Rousset, whose patriotic zeal is matched in degree only by her naiveté. Elizabeth is by profession a laundress, an occupation having been “laundered” by Lewton and his writers. De Maupassant’s Elizabeth was a chubby prostitute, known affectionately by her clientele as “butterball” (boule de suif). The last to arrive before the coach departs for Cleresville, she is clearly not welcomed aboard by her fellow travelers. The nobility and the pretentious bourgeoisie are one in their feeling that it is beneath their station to ride with someone quite so common, and their attitude is cruelly obvious. The collective snub is not lost on Elizabeth, but she is by nature such a generous spirit that she simply accepts the line that has been drawn and confines her attention to the priest and Cornudet. But as the journey lengthens into afternoon, the more illustrious members of the group realize to their distress that they have forgotten to bring food. Elizabeth, however, has shown greater presence of mind and has provided herself with an ample picnic hamper. For the moment, the pangs of hunger overcome the smug sense of superiority and their attitude toward her suddenly changes. Without hesitation she shares her provision with the group and for the time being, general good fellowship prevails. The coach arrives at an inn, where the travelers meet Lieutenant von Eyrick, a sadistic Prussian officer nicknamed “Fifi” by his men for his curious habit of using the expression fi!fi donc! (fie! For shame!). Von Eyrick seems to have two governing desires: The first is the total humiliation and subjection of the conquered French; the second, closely related to the first, is his personal need to pressure the parish priest at Cleresville to ring the church bell, the si-

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lence of which has become a symbol of protest and resistance against the Prussian invaders. According to a memo in the RKO archives from Lewton to Sid Rogell, dated October 18, 1943, Lewton had wanted Erich von Stroheim for the role of Fifi, but had to settle for Kurt Kreuger, a former Swiss ski instructor who developed a career playing German heavies in war pictures, most notably in Zoltan Korda’s Sahara (1943). Von Eyrick shows little interest in the group other than to send an invitation to Elizabeth asking her to have supper with him in his room. Unlike the accommodationists with whom she is traveling, Elizabeth is a strong-willed patriot who, on principle, will have nothing to do with Prussians. She firmly refuses von Eyrick’s invitation. Her fellow travelers support her until, on the following morning, they are made aware of the consequences of Elizabeth’s refusal. Von Eyrick has given orders that the coach is to be detained until he gives his personal permission for it to leave. As time passes and the lieutenant does not relent, it becomes clear to the group that they are to be detained indefinitely—or at least until Elizabeth accepts the lieutenant’s invitation. Gradually they go to work on her. Their release from detention, they explain, is in her hands, and she is made to feel selfish and inconsiderate. Even Cornudet, whom she trusted to share her anti-Prussian sympathies, gives in and agrees that she should, for the good of all, accept the invitation. Elizabeth, trusting her gently beseeching “friends” and denying her own principles and better judgment, finally accepts. Shortly after she ascends the stairs to the room where von Eyrick awaits, the travelers in the dining room below indulge in a drunken celebration of their impending release, with only the saddened and reflective Cornudet abstaining from the laughter and the sniggering innuendoes about what might be happening above stairs at that very moment. Motion picture censorship of 1944 clearly limited visual depiction of Elizabeth’s plight, but Wise and Lewton created a scene revealing von Eyrick’s character from which we can certainly get the idea. In von Eyrick’s view, Elizabeth is representative of French womanhood; to humble her and have her completely subjected to him well emphasize—beyond mere military victory— Prussian masculinity and general superiority. In cowardly fashion, the others offer no resistance to his wishes and clearly support them when faced with the choice between her honor and any further inconvenience or delay in their journey. In his room, Elizabeth is subjected to a series of painful humiliations, but only to the spirit. She is required to stand while he sits; he moves close to her only to blow smoke into her face and when he does kiss her, it is only to bite her—sharply—on her lower lip. On the following morning, Elizabeth’s traveling companions are delighted to find that von Eyrick is evidently satisfied and the coach has been made ready for departure. The second half of the journey, however, is remarkably different

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from the first. Elizabeth, despite her sacrifice, is the outcast, and is roundly snubbed by her companions whose continued journey she has made possible. Only Cornudet speaks to her, attempting to make amends, but she will have nothing to do with him. Angry and hurt, she stares straight ahead, tears in her eyes. All around her, her traveling companions bring out their newly acquired luncheon hampers, laughing, talking, munching contentedly. This time it is Elizabeth who has forgotten to bring anything to eat; they ignore her and offer nothing. The rest of the picture is largely anticlimactic, giving Elizabeth the opportunity to avenge herself admirably at a small banquet arranged by von Eyrick and other Prussian officers as a kind of divertissement to the rigors of occupation. She and a bevy of other laundresses are pressed into service, but Elizabeth, her patriotism fired by the recent degradation she has suffered, is determined that what happened at the inn will not happen again. As von Eyrick moves into an embrace at the dinner table with the intention of performing another of his by-now-customary acts of humiliation, she quickly and decisively plunges a carving knife into his chest. At that moment, Cornudet and a crowd of fellow patriots come crashing through the French doors in a veritable nineteenth-century commando raid. In the ensuing confusion, Elizabeth is carried to safety. The fadeout is on Elizabeth, Cornudet, and the priest watching as the bell is finally rung—ironically—for von Eyrick’s funeral. From the very beginning, the production of Mademoiselle Fifi ran into difficulty. Treatments of Mademoiselle Fifi had been presented by other producers in the past, but had always been rejected. De Maupassant and all of his works were largely frowned upon by the Catholic Church and its Legion of Decency, and a “condemned” rating by the Legion was enough to put a film on the shelf; executives had no wish to have their studios and their productions denounced from the pulpit. A series of memos in the RKO Archives production file reveal the degree of concern. Prior to the first day’s shooting, Joseph Breen, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, still known as the Hays Office in Hollywood, cautioned RKO that the project would not be acceptable. “It is our judgment,” he warned, “that your story cannot be told unless, by inference at least, the sympathetic lead is characterized as a prostitute.”14 Lewton wrote to Breen, pointing out the significant changes that should make the script acceptable. Mademoiselle Fifi, Lewton explained, deals with a sociological issue rather than a moral one. Elizabeth Rousset is snubbed by both the nobility and the bourgeoisie simply because she is a laundress, a member, from their point of view, of an unacceptable social class. Such explanations seem to have satisfied Breen, who nonetheless cautioned further that the banquet sequence “avoid any actual scenes of intimacy,” and was particularly concerned that there be “no kissing on the neck.”15

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There was also considerable haggling over the most suitable title. Gallup’s Audience Research Institute ran some tests. Participants were asked to read a brief synopsis of a script and then select an appropriate title from a list. Among men, Toll for Victory and The Silent Bell were the popular choices. Among women, The Heart Holds Hope and Mademoiselle Fifi led the list. For a short time, The Silent Bell was the working title, but Lewton thought it too negative and finally prevailed with Koerner—over the objections of the sales department—to have it changed. Wise and Lewton leaned toward titles like The Coach from Rouen, Flight to Dieppe, and Highway through Normandy, largely because the French place names would give the picture a certain topical appeal related to the European theater of the war. It was the opinion of executive producer Jack Gross, Lewton’s immediate superior, that the title Mademoiselle Fifi, although somewhat misleading, would get “a lot more theater bookings than would otherwise be gotten with less appetizing title.”16 It was one of those rare occasions when Lewton found himself, at least to a limited degree, in agreement with Gross. “There are certain selling points,” Lewton wrote to Koerner, “which I think can be made important by property exploitation. . . . This is the first de Maupassant story to reach the screen and . . . I think Simone Simon’s name has what we might term ‘scandal’ value in conjunction with de Maupassant.”17 Neither the scandal value of Simone Simon nor the literary value of de Maupassant, however, was successful in producing box-office receipts. Mademoiselle Fifi was much more favorably received by the critics, particularly James Agee, who was then writing film columns for Time and the Nation. In his column in the Nation for December 2, 1944, Agee assessed the film and its problems in his usual perceptive fashion: Too much of Fifi is clearly just the best that could be half-translated from a well-edged script in a pathetic race against schedule; and now and then its poverty results in makeshift of a rather stagy, or even musty sort, rather than in bringing out the bones in its face. It seems possible, too, that some of the picture’s inadequacies are inadequacies of depth and keenness of talent rather than of time and money; none of its characters, from the script on out, ever fully identify themselves as characters on a screen rather than in print or on a stage. Yet it has many good and near-good moments, as pure movie; and I don’t know of any American film which has tried to say as much, as pointedly, about the performance of the middle class in war. There is a gallant, fervent quality about the whole picture, faults and all, which gives it a peculiar kind of life and likeableness, and which signifies that there is one group of men working in Hollywood who have neither lost nor taken care to conceal the purity of their hope and intention.18

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Tempering Agee’s judgment of the film’s inadequacies was his awareness of the time and money constraints under which the Lewton group was operating. On this matter, he continued: I could not wish Producer Val Lewton and Director Robert Wise and their associates much more money to work with, because it seems to me that a small budget has on the whole sharpened their resourcefulness and the general quality of all the films Lewton supervises. But I certainly could wish them more money in terms of more time to get things done as they want them.19

Studio executives apparently chose to overlook the irony in observations like Agee’s on time and money restriction, particularly when those remarks were offered in connection with box-office liabilities like Mademoiselle Fifi, which proved a financial failure. The front office at RKO decided that the Lewton group should return to horror films, the genre with which they had had so much success. The studio had recently signed Boris Karloff to a three-picture deal, and the man who had made his reputation playing the Frankenstein monster would be in Lewton’s next picture. Lewton was not happy with the idea, largely because it seemed to restrict him simply to finding a suitable vehicle for the man who had literally personified horror to film audiences for more than a decade, and to deprive him of the freedom and flexibility to do original and creative work. As if to compound Lewton’s problem, RKO also made a deal with Bela Lugosi, whose name, the studio hoped, would provide a solid success formula when coupled with Karloff ’s on a theater marquee. Working with an original draft of an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher written by Phil MacDonald, Lewton (using the pseudonym “Carlos Keith”) developed a screenplay in which the two central characters would be played by Karloff and British actor Henry Daniell. A small but suitably malevolent role was written in for Lugosi, who, as it turned out, was ill at the time and unable to handle anything more demanding.20 Wise was assigned to direct, and started shooting in late October 1944, in the midst of considerable tension between Lewton and Executive Producer Jack L. Gross, a tension that is evident in a series of memos in the RKO Archives production file for The Body Snatcher. Gross had sent Lewton into production with a considerable cut in the budget. Mademoiselle Fifi had had a budget of $200,000, but The Body Snatcher was given a ceiling of $125,000, plus Karloff ’s salary. Lewton wrote a long letter of appeal, citing various ways in which costs could be cut in other areas: costumes could largely be drawn from Western wardrobe holdings, standing sets could be utilized, and the cast could be largely assembled with actors and actresses already under RKO contract. Gross replied in a very short and curt memo, simply re-

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peating his original budget and its restrictions. He also wrote to Koerner, detailing all of Lewton’s unreasonable requests, heading the memo with the phrase “here’s another from our problem boy.”21 The script for The Body Snatcher is based on the short story of the same name written by Robert Louis Stevenson, which was in turn inspired by the true story of Burke and Hare, a notorious pair who for a time eked out a living selling derelict corpses to medical schools, but were ultimately convicted of murdering eighteen people to enhance their sale and meet the growing need for cadavers for medical study. The setting is Edinburgh in 1831. To the medical school of the famous Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell) comes Mrs. Marsh, a young widow, and her daughter, Georgina. Georgina has been injured in a carriage accident, has partially recovered, but is still unable to walk. It is Mrs. Marsh’s hope that MacFarlane will be able to determine the exact cause of the little girl’s paralysis. They have been delivered to MacFarlane’s door by cabman Gray (Boris Karloff ), who, in spite of his slightly sinister appearance, is kind and solicitous to the crippled child, carrying her to MacFarlane’s white horse so that she might pet it, and promising her that the horse will remember her and nicker “hello” when they next meet. In his drawing room, MacFarlane attempts to question the child, but his curtly abrupt, no-nonsense professional manner frightens her. One of his prize students, Donald Fettes (Russell Wade), enters, and MacFarlane asks him to see if he might not have more success. To Fettes’s kindness the child is much more receptive, and doctor and student perform the examination together. From the examination MacFarlane is able to determine that the child has developed a spinal tumor. He acknowledges that the condition is correctable with a very delicate operation, one that has never been performed before; but he declines, despite the mother’s pleas, to perform the operation. Despite his international reputation he is, he protests, not a practitioner but a teacher of doctors, work of the utmost importance from which he can spare no time or energy. After Mrs. Marsh and her daughter leave, Fettes declares that he must leave the school, since he has no money to continue his medical studies. Dismayed at the possibility of losing such a promising student, MacFarlane makes him his chief assistant, a position that guarantees Fettes’s board and tuition. As they are about to leave for the anatomy room to discuss Fettes’s new duties, Meg, MacFarlane’s housekeeper (and secretly his wife), asks to speak privately with the doctor. She urges MacFarlane not to make Fettes his assistant, implying that such a position will have some detrimental effect upon this good lad. MacFarlane reassures her with unwitting irony that Fettes will be no more spoiled by his new position than he himself was spoiled by his position as assistant to his own mentor, the famous Dr. Knox.

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In the anatomy room, MacFarlane explains Fettes’s new duties and informs him of the school’s major problem: the number of paupers’ bodies they receive from the municipal council is woefully insufficient for the needs of the school. It is necessary, therefore, in the interests of medical science, to supplement the number of cadavers received through legal means with additional specimens obtained through the services of “resurrectionists” or grave robbers, to whom they pay ten pounds per specimen. That very evening, while Fettes is working alone in the anatomy room, he has his first encounter with a grave robber who comes with a specimen, as customary, to the side door. The grave robber is Gray, the cabman who had been so kind to Mrs. Marsh and Georgina. The next day, Mrs. Marsh calls to see Fettes, and asks his help in persuading Dr. MacFarlane to perform the operation on Georgina. Fettes, although reluctant to presume upon his relationship with the doctor, finally agrees to help. That evening, at Hobbs’s public house, MacFarlane and Fettes meet Gray, who forces his unwanted company on them. This is the first of several scenes in which Gray and MacFarlane directly confront each other. In each, Wise brings them together in a tight two-shot, visually emphasizing MacFarlane’s struggle against Gray’s influence. Gray seems always to be leaning forward, smiling with menace as MacFarlane struggles vainly, like a fly in a spider’s web. In this meeting it is clear that MacFarlane, whom Gray taunts with the despised nickname “Toddy,” has a dark past he would prefer to forget. But Gray, evidently very much a part of that past, takes a sadistic satisfaction in reminding him of it and exercising a psychological intimidation with overtones of blackmail. Fettes informs MacFarlane of his meeting with Mrs. Marsh and asks the doctor if he won’t reconsider his decision not to operate on the little girl. MacFarlane remains firm in his original decision, but Gray, through a combination of intimidation and subtle references to the doctor’s apparently unsavory past, pressures him into agreeing to perform the operation—solely, as MacFarlane observes, because Gray knows that he doesn’t want to do it. The antagonism between the two men is underscored by the sense that the character of Gray is, in a very subtle way, a manifestation of the darker side of MacFarlane’s own personality. Clearly Lewton in preparing the script borrowed not only from Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher, but from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well. Although a character in his own right, Gray is clearly Hyde to MacFarlane’s Jekyll. Throughout the film MacFarlane fears Gray, the evil element tied closely to him, but over whom he has no real control. The question of whether MacFarlane can ever be rid of him continually arises, but both his wife and Gray frequently make him aware that such freedom will never be his, despite his delusions to the contrary. It is Gray, in his encounter with MacFarlane in the public house, who points out the curious sub rosa inseparability of

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their relationship. Gray tells MacFarlane: “You and I have two bodies, aye, closer than if we were in the same skin.” The following morning, MacFarlane explains to Fettes that since neither he nor anyone else in the medical profession knows enough about the spinal column to ensure success, the operation should not be performed. He would certainly have to research the matter, and at the present time there are no subjects in the anatomy room. Anxious to keep his promise to Mrs. Marsh, in whom his interest has become more than professional, Fettes goes in search of Gray. Searching for Gray’s house, Fettes asks directions from a number of people, including the street singer, a young girl who wanders about the byways of Edinburgh singing for the meager handouts of passersby. Finally locating Gray, Fettes informs him that the school is in urgent need of a subject. Gray, in mock solicitude, agrees to do what he can. The same evening, he murders the street singer and delivers the body to MacFarlane’s dissection room. Wise’s handling of the street singer’s murder is particularly well done, and one of the most unforgettable scenes in the entire horror film genre. Small and vulnerable in her tartan shawl, she is shown walking into a large, dark archway, her back to the camera, singing the plaintive highland melody “Will Ye No Come Back Again?” as she disappears into the darkness. A second later, we hear the softly echoing clip-clop of the hooves of the cab horse as Gray drives slowly into the archway behind her. The camera holds on the archway as the voice of the singer mingles with the echoing sound of the horse’s hooves. Suddenly, the hooves stop and the voice of the street singer is cut off abruptly in midnote. The camera holds on the total blackness of the archway for a second or two longer, as the echoing sounds of the horse’s hooves begin again. It is a murder we hear but do not see, and hearing it in this manner—no moans, no muffled cries, only the abrupt cessation of her voice as the camera remains fixed on the pitch blackness of the archway—effectively heightens both the audience’s apprehension and its sense of helplessness. More than most directors, Wise knew the potential of sound. Drawing on his earlier experience as a sound effects editor, he created an unusual and particularly effective transition to the next scene. As the archway dissolves, Wise overlaps the sound of the hooves, by now a particularly effective leitmotif for the approach of the sinister Gray, into the next scene, where Fettes, writing at his desk, is startled by the sound of that echoing approach. Gray delivers the body, but Fettes recognizes the girl and informs MacFarlane that she was alive and well only hours earlier. MacFarlane, in marked contrast to Fettes’s anxiety, receives the news stoically. Taking full advantage of the influence he has over the younger man, MacFarlane placates him with the explanation that while he abhors what Gray has done, the end does, to some degree, justify the means in that they now have the subject needed for the preparation of Georgina’s surgery.

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MacFarlane performs the operation, and declares it a complete success. Georgina, however, protests that she is still unable to walk. Thoroughly dejected, MacFarlane leaves the drawing room, believing himself a failure. He goes immediately to the tavern and proceeds to get drunk. It is in this condition that he is discovered by Gray, and in this scene Wise offers the audience the most superbly executed of the confrontations between Karloff and Daniell. The early part of their encounter is more like an interior monologue—perhaps a more accurate term would be interior dialogue—in which MacFarlane argues not so much with Gray as with his own doubts and anxieties brought on by the apparent failure of the operation. For the moment, Gray is once again the dark side of MacFarlane’s personality, the part suppressed by the anatomist, the ruthlessly scientific clinician who rationalizes his total scientific detachment from the human condition. At one point, the conversation goes as follows: MACFARLANE: I’m an anatomist! I know the body and I know how it works. GRAY: You’re a fool, Toddy, and no doctor. It’s only the dead ones you know. MACFARLANE: I am a doctor, I teach medicine! GRAY: Like Knox taught you? Like I taught you? In cellars and graveyards? Did Knox teach you what makes the blood flow? MACFARLANE: The heart muscle . . . GRAY: Did he tell you how thoughts come, and how they go? And why things are remembered. . . . And forgotten? MACFARLANE: The nerve centers in the brain. . . . GRAY: What makes a thought start? MACFARLANE: The brain, I tell you! I know! GRAY: You don’t know. You’ll never know, or understand, Toddy. Not from Knox or me would you learn this. Look. Look at yourself. Could you be a doctor, a healing man with the things those eyes have seen? There’s a lot of knowledge in those eyes, but no understanding. You’ll not get that from me. MACFARLANE: I am a doctor, I tell you! A good doctor! I could make her walk, but she won’t. She won’t.22

Once again Wise shoots the confrontation scene in close-up, with both men leaning across a table, staring intently at one another. In the course of the argument, Gray’s calm, smiling intensity wears MacFarlane down, leaving him increasingly desperate, on the edge of hysteria. Although MacFarlane continues to resist the revelations presented by his nemesis, Gray makes it clear that MacFarlane’s fervent pursuit of the organic mysteries of the anatomy has separated him from the human side of medicine, and all but totally destroyed his sensitivity to human feelings and emotions. Thus the significance of an earlier establishing scene in which MacFarlane attempts to examine the frightened Georgina—who is repelled by his sternness and insensitivity but receptive to Fettes’s kindness—becomes clear.

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In addition to his role as the darker side of MacFarlane’s personality, Gray is a character in his own right, one who has a score to settle with his old friend Toddy. Gray reminds MacFarlane that it was he who stood in the witness box and concealed MacFarlane’s identity and involvement in the notorious affair of Burke and Hare, both of whom were convicted of murdering eighteen people and selling their bodies to Dr. Knox, MacFarlane’s mentor. MacFarlane defies Gray, daring him to go to the authorities. MacFarlane maintains that he is, after all, a gentleman of standing, whose word will be given greater credence than the testimony of Gray the cabman. He warns Gray that he is never to come near him or his medical school again. The next evening, however, Gray is visited in his lodgings by Joseph, MacFarlane’s servant. Joseph has listened and observed Gray’s nocturnal visits to the side door and has come to blackmail him. Gray, seemingly acquiescent, plies Joseph with brandy and finally, showing him how his former associates Burke and Hare used to suffocate their victims so that the bodies would arrive with no telltale marks of violence, kills him. In defiance of MacFarlane, Gray delivers Joseph to the anatomy room and deposits the body in the brine tank as a gift to MacFarlane. Realizing that Gray has no intention of separating himself from him, MacFarlane also visits Gray in his quarters, intending to bribe him or be rid of him by any means possible. Gray, however, is not interested in MacFarlane’s money. He explains his position in the following terms: “I’m a small man, a humble man, and being poor, I’ve had to do much that I did not want to do. But so long as the great Dr. MacFarlane jumps at my whistle, that long am I a man—and if I have not that, I have nothing. Then I am only a cabman and a grave robber.” MacFarlane, having reached the breaking point, attacks Gray. In shooting the fight, Wise chose to move the camera to Gray’s cat (ironically named “Brother”), and we watch instead the cat’s reactions to the struggle, the shadow of which is cast on the wall behind. Finally, MacFarlane rises before the camera, having at last gotten rid of Gray. Wise’s handling of this scene is particularly effective in its consistency with the Jekyll–Hyde motif of the script. Two shadows merge in conflict; one person arises. The next day, Fettes is on the parapet of Edinburgh castle with Mrs. Marsh and Georgina. Georgina, sitting in her wheelchair, hears what she believes is the horse of the kindly cabman in the street below. She calls to her mother to lift her so that she might see, but her mother, deep in conversation with Fettes, does not hear her. In desperation, she rises from her chair and takes a few steps to the wall. At that moment, Fettes and Mrs. Marsh see her, and Fettes realizes that MacFarlane’s operation was a success after all. Fettes rushes to MacFarlane’s home to tell him the good news. MacFarlane, however, has gone out of town on business. Fettes, in his great excitement, goes after him, and finds him at a small inn early that evening. Elated with the news of his success, MacFarlane

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plans a whole series of advanced anatomy courses for which, of course, they will need subjects. At the inn they encounter a small group of people who have just come from burying their sister in a remote churchyard. This is timely news for MacFarlane, who decides that he and Fettes will recover the body for the first specimen in the new series of anatomy lectures. In the final scene of the picture, MacFarlane and Fettes drive home in a small carriage with the woman’s body, wrapped in its shroud, propped between them. It is completely dark and raining heavily. As they race along the road to Edinburgh, MacFarlane hears Gray’s voice calling his name. Gradually, the rhythm of the horse’s hooves seems to change to the sound of Gray’s voice echoing rhythmically, repeating the phrase “never get rid of me” as the body propped between the two men keeps falling against MacFarlane. Completely unnerved, he stops the carriage and calls for Fettes to bring the carriage lamp. MacFarlane swears that the body has somehow changed, and opens the cloth to reveal the face—of Gray. Before Fettes can step back into the carriage to see what has upset his traveling companion, MacFarlane screams and the frightened horse runs away with the carriage. MacFarlane struggles with the reins as the corpse, its lifeless arms seeming to wrap about him, bounces along by his side. Suddenly the carriage breaks loose from the horse and crashes over the edge of a small cliff. When Fettes arrives, he finds only the lifeless body of MacFarlane lying beside the shrouded corpse of a woman. Although the script and the basic concepts of key scenes were largely developed by Val Lewton, with The Body Snatcher Wise had clearly distinguished himself as a director of considerable promise, particularly in his handling of the scenes in which Daniell and Karloff contend with one another, and especially in the carriage ride sequence, one of the classic bravura horror scenes in all of Hollywood film. Karloff was delighted with the role of Gray, particularly in the fact that it gave him the chance to doff the heavy makeup, electrodes, platform shoes, and other accoutrements of his previous films and do some genuine acting for a change. As Gray, Karloff gives what is perhaps the best performance of his career. With The Body Snatcher to his credit, Wise had now left his editing career behind and firmly established himself as a director—albeit a B picture director— at RKO. With the intention of widening his options and increasing his chances for more diversified experience, Wise made the decision to leave the Lewton unit as soon as The Body Snatcher was completed.

NOTES 1. Joel Siegel, The Reality of Terror (New York: Viking, 1973), 21. 2. Siegel, The Reality of Terror, 21.

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3. Ron Haver, “RKO Years: Part II,” American Film 3, no. 3 (December–January 1978): 30. 4. J. S. Nolan, interoffice memo to Sidney Lipsitch, October 14, 1943, RKO Archives. 5. Robert Wise, interview with author, July 26, 1978. 6. Quinn Martin, interoffice memo to Bill Gordon, October 10, 1943, RKO Archives. 7. Martin, interoffice memo. 8. James Agee, Agee on Film (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 85–86. 9. Elizabeth Russell, interview with author, March 12, 1978. 10. Bill Gordon, interoffice memo to Charles Koerner, undated, RKO Archives. 11. Siegel, The Reality of Terror, 56. 12. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 52. 13. Jay Telotte, Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 113. 14. Joseph Breen, letter to Charles Koerner, February 24, 1944, RKO Archives. 15. Val Lewton, interoffice memo to Charles Koerner, October 18, 1944, RKO Archives. 16. Jack L. Gross, interoffice memo to Charles Koerner, March 20, 1944, RKO Archives. 17. Val Lewton, memo to Koerner. 18. Agee, Agee on Film, 129. 19. Agee, Agee on Film, 129. 20. Wise, recorded interview, July 26, 1978. 21. Gross, memo to Charles Koerner. 22. The Body Snatcher, DVD, directed by Robert Wise. Perf. Boris Karloff and Henry Daniell (1945; Turner Home Entertainment, 2005).

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he completion of The Body Snatcher marked not only the termination of Wise’s work with Lewton’s unit but a creative dry spell as well. From 1945 through early 1948, Wise directed four more B pictures at RKO: A Game of Death (1945), Criminal Court (1946), Born to Kill (1947), and Mystery in Mexico (1948). Of the four, only Born to Kill merits any serious attention. A Game of Death is a decidedly tired remake of RKO’s The Most Dangerous Game (1932), also known by its British title, The Hounds of Zaroff, a film based on Richard Connell’s well-known short story. For the remake the studio assigned the lead that was played in the 1932 version by Joel McCrea to English actor John Loder, and the role of the villainous Zaroff (renamed “Kreiger” this time around) to studio contract player Edgar Barrier. Kreiger is a passionate hunter who has stalked every conceivable quarry on earth only to discover that the real challenge lies not in hunting animals but in hunting man, whose intelligence makes him a far more challenging adversary. But the hunter soon becomes the hunted, and the audience has the satisfaction of seeing the tables turned. A Game of Death was an uninspired effort at best. Bosley Crowther, devoting little more than a hundred words to it in the New York Times, summed it up effectively with his final sentence: “The stuff that some people pay to see!”1 It’s a cheap film, shot quickly, and a perfunctory effort on the part of all concerned. The budget restriction gave no one but the front office any satisfaction, and the most exciting scenes in the film—particularly those of Great Danes running through the murky swamps in pursuit of their human quarry— were simply lifted from the 1932 original. Wise’s next assignment was a script entitled Manhattan Miracle, subsequently released in 1946 as Criminal Court. From the start he didn’t like the script and didn’t want to do it; but refusal for a contract director having only 30

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three and one-half pictures behind him meant suspension. Anxious to advance his career, Wise rationalized his decision to do it as good experience. Criminal Court turned out to be slightly better than an average B picture, with much of the on-screen credit going to Tom Conway in the role of Steve Barnes, a crusading lawyer who has never lost a case and has decided to run for district attorney. Conway, recently retired from his string of ten Falcon films, brings all of the Falcon’s smooth deportment and polished urbanity to the role. In this one, he’s a flamboyant cross between Perry Mason and Melvin Belli, constantly frustrating his courtroom adversary, District Attorney Gordon (Addison Richards), who seeks without success to convict at least one of Barnes’s many clients. Barnes’s reputation is based on a combination of legal skill and bizarre antics that disarm judges and juries and win cases, but in the opening sequence, he seems about to be defeated for the first time. The DA’s witness stands firm on his testimony that he stood and watched the defendant draw a gun and proceed to commit the crime. Barnes steps forward, seemingly angry. At his request, the witness repeats the statement while the district attorney, seeing this one in the bag, smirks confidently. Suddenly, Barnes reaches into his inside pocket and pulls out a gun. Judge, jury, screaming spectators, and the witness for the prosecution instantly dive for the floor. Barnes is disarmed by the guards (the gun, of course, isn’t loaded) and, unruffled as ever, announces to the court that the witness cannot make a positive identification because, as he has so clearly demonstrated, no one stands and watches carefully while a man pulls a gun! The judge, climbing back into his chair, agrees. District Attorney Gordon once again goes down to defeat as the reporters—in that inevitable movie cliché—rush to the phones to announce to the city desk that Barnes has done it again. It’s clearly the best scene in the picture, and the major credit for it must go to Wise’s supervision of the split-second precision editing. The complication in the plot involves Barnes’s girlfriend, Georgia Gale (Martha O’Driscoll), who, much to Barnes’s displeasure, is the featured singer in the nightclub of mobster Vic Wright (Robert Armstrong). Wright sees the incorruptible Barnes as his nemesis, particularly if Barnes is elected to the office of district attorney. Summoned to the boss’s private office, Georgia enters to find Wright shot to death. With the usual presence of mind accorded to ingenuous B-picture heroines, she first picks up the gun—sans gloves—and, overcome by it all, faints. She recovers just in time to be seen rushing out of Wright’s office, moments before the body is discovered. Barnes of course defends her, his chief legal maneuver being his own confession to the crime— although he is as innocent as she is. In an earlier scene, he and Wright struggled over the gun, which accidentally discharged—killing Wright. Barnes, to safeguard his budding career in politics, slipped away unaware that Joan Mason, Wright’s secretary, secretly witnessed the accidental shooting. Accepting

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plot and premise in this film required more than a touch of English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s celebrated “willing suspension of disbelief.” Barnes, always unruffled and always impeccably well dressed, uncovers the secret witness and ultimately manages to prove everybody innocent, with no evident damage to his potential career in politics. Criminal Court was a modest success. The New York Times saw it as a “glorified rehash of the old cops-and-robbers routine” but nonetheless gave it a “favorable verdict,” deeming it a “worthy second attraction on any neighborhood double feature.”2 Quinn Martin, still troubleshooting censorship problems for the RKO front office, was also impressed. In a memo to Bill Gordon, Martin stated that Criminal Court was “one of the finest, smoothest, most suavely directed and cut films I have seen for a long time.” He was particularly happy with the impression the picture had made on the Breen Office (formerly known as the Hayes Office, its official title being the Production Code Administration of America). The Breen Office, according to Martin, was “quite pleased [with the] manner in which liquor was handled,” which meant that the audience doesn’t see it handled at all.3 One of the very curious aspects of this film is the crowded nightclub where people smoke but no one drinks. Bartenders chat and polish the bar in their time-honored tradition, but there is never a bottle or a glass to be seen. Wise’s next film, Born to Kill (1947), is rightly considered by many as a splendid example of ’40s film noir, a film that has been unjustly neglected by scholars of the genre over the years. Based on James Gunn’s novel Deadlier Than the Male, the story had been an RKO property for some time before Wise unearthed it and brought it to the attention of producer Herman Schlom. The novel was heavy with sex and violence, which certainly meant it was destined to run into conflict with the censors, but hampered as it was by the production code, the script for Born to Kill put together by Eve Green and Richard Macaulay nevertheless managed to suggest a good deal more than it literally stated, and the result was an effective albeit oblique study in moral corruption and criminal aberration. Wise was particularly fortunate in getting an excellent cast to work with. Lawrence Tierney was cast as Sam Wilde, a paranoid psychopath whose primary ambition in life is “to fix it so’s I can spit in anybody’s eye.” He kills his victims—usually those he imagines have betrayed him—without the slightest trace of hesitation or regret. Claire Trevor is Helen Brent, an attractive and fashionably dressed divorcee whose smart exterior hides a closet psychopath. Helen is passionately aroused by violence and murder—and quite naturally forms a compelling attraction to Sam. Intent upon keeping these two from coming together is Sam’s loyal retainer, Mart Waterman (Elisha Cook Jr.), whose interest in Sam transcends friendship and is clearly as compelling as Helen’s. Complicating this and other bizarre triangles in the film is Walter Slezak as Albert Arnett,

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a blackmailing private detective who describes himself as a “man of integrity” who is nonetheless “always willing to listen to an offer.” The film opens in a rooming house in Reno, where Helen Brent has come to get a divorce. In the living room drinking beer and having a good time is Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard), the landlady, and her friend and neighbor Laurie Palmer (Isabel Jewell). Laurie’s company means a great deal to Mrs. Kraft, who enjoys a pleasantly vicarious existence through Laurie’s details of current boyfriends and a free-spirited existence. Laurie’s latest, however, is Sam Wilde, who doesn’t take two-timing lightly. He waits in the kitchen one evening as Laurie returns home from a date with Danny (Tony Barrett), another boyfriend. In a carefully lighted scene in which Wise visually suggests the shadow and darkness that the protagonist brings with him everywhere, Sam Wilde strangles Laurie and methodically beats Danny to death. It is Helen Brent who discovers the bodies, and she decides to head home to San Francisco immediately. Sam takes similar advice from his friend Mart and also heads for the city, where, according to plan, Mart will join him later. Mart generally looks out for Sam, dispensing avuncular advice that consists largely of such inanities as “You can’t just go around killing people whenever the notion strikes you—it’s not feasible.” On the train to San Francisco (in the timeless tradition of movie coincidence) Sam meets Helen. Although as yet unaware of what they have in common, the attraction is mutual and immediate. With the death of Laurie Palmer, life just isn’t the same for Mrs. Kraft. She decides to bring the murderer, who has deprived her of such good company, to justice. Her first step is to hire private detective Albert Arnett to track him down. A smooth opportunist with his eye open for the main chance—or any shady secondary chance that might come along—Arnett is nonetheless good at his work and quickly discovers that Sam Wilde is the murderer. But instead of reporting his discovery to his client, he decides to blackmail Helen Brent, certain that she will pay to keep Sam free and available. But Helen had no sooner introduced Sam to her wealthy foster sister, Georgia Staples (Audrey Long), than he began to work his curious magnetism in that direction. Women, it would seem, simply do not resist Sam, and Georgia is no exception. Much to Helen’s annoyance, Sam conducts a whirlwind courtship and he and Georgia are married. By this time Helen is rapidly being consumed by her love-hate relationship; at the same time that she is irresistibly drawn to Sam, she hates him for the hold he has on her. She refuses to pay Arnett, who informs the police. Before Sam is cornered and shot in the final scene, he has just enough time to dispatch Helen, another in a series of dames who have double-crossed him. Arnett comes through it all unscathed, undoubtedly surprising audiences who must have been certain that his double-dealing would merit some terrible fate at the hands of Sam Wilde.

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Born to Kill doesn’t have much of a plot. For the most part it simply charts Sam Wilde’s juggernaut course to destruction. Along the way, however, there are strong performances by Tierney and Trevor, and excellent supporting work by Slezak and Cook. Tierney, a limited and rather stiff performer at best, generally reprises his role in Dillinger (1945), a performance invested with an amoral viciousness that made him an overnight star. In one particular scene, Wise made it a point to capitalize on this. Mart Waterman (the hapless Elisha Cook Jr.) lures Mrs. Kraft to a vacant lot in a desolate part of the city with the promise of important information about the murder of Laurie Palmer. Having discovered that she is a threat to Sam, he intends to do away with her. Rather than bother Sam with details, he has made this a secret rendezvous. But Mart’s slipping off alone has made Sam suspicious. Just as Mart is making a botch of doing away with Mrs. Kraft, Sam suddenly appears, grabs Mart, and the old lady escapes. Mart offers some hasty explanations but Sam is neither a clear thinker nor a good listener. He is obsessed about being double-crossed, and it’s clear by the set of his jaw and the narrowness of his eyes that the cast is once again about to be reduced by one member. For the murder of Mart Waterman, Wise switches to a subjective camera. The camera moves into a tight close-up of Sam, who smiles warmly, and then cuts to Mart, who, seeing that smile, relaxes and smiles himself in the secure feeling that he is being spared. Wise cuts to Sam’s face in tight close-up, and from Mart’s perspective we see the smile abruptly disappear and the shoulders convulse slightly as Sam thrusts home the hitherto unseen knife. The head-on Tierney close-up, complete with the changes in facial expressions, duplicates the shot in Dillinger in which Tierney, as the title character, murders a waiter with a broken beer mug. Scenes like this were strong but nonetheless standard fare in gangster films, but several of Claire Trevor’s scenes in Born to Kill were another matter. There is a particularly disturbing love scene between Sam and Helen in the kitchen of Georgia’s home, shortly after Sam’s marriage. In a close embrace, Sam brings Helen to a state of high romantic passion not with the time-honored endearments so much a part of love scenes, but with the explicit details of how he murdered Laurie Palmer and her boyfriend. In another scene, Helen goes to see Mrs. Kraft, with the intention of frightening her into giving up the search for Laurie Palmer’s murderer. Dressed for the cover of Cosmopolitan (circa 1947), Helen presents a frightening incongruity between how she looks and what she says as she explains to the old woman the probable consequences of continuing the search: “It’s painful being killed; a piece of metal sliding into your body, finding its way into your heart, or a bullet tearing through your skin, crashing into a bone. It takes a long while to die, too; sometimes a long while.” Scenes like these proved a bit too much for the critics, who gave the film a thorough pummeling. Leading the parade was Bosley

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Crowther of the New York Times, who cited Born to Kill as “a clear illustration of why the movies are sometimes held in low esteem by people who are thoughtful of their influence. . . . This crime flaunting melodrama . . . is not only morally disgusting but is an offense to a normal intellect.” Crowther gradually warmed to his task, at different points referring to Born to Kill as “malignant,” “cheap and unsavory,” a “smeary tabloid fable,” and so on. “Surely,” he concludes, “discriminating people are not likely to be attracted to this film. But it is precisely because it is designated to pander to the lower levels of taste that it is reprehensible.”4 The strident moral tone of these reviews is characteristic of the late 1940s, a period when critics and audiences were receptive to films that were concerned with substantive issues, with films that in one way or another commented on society and its problems. Critics reserved their appreciation for motion pictures that were heavy on didacticism and were presented within a wholly realistic and readily identifiable context. Born to Kill— along with such more notable 1947 A-picture entries as King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun, Byron Haskins’s I Walk Alone, and Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death— was given hard treatment by reviewers, largely for what is today termed gratuitous violence. The character of Sam Wilde has considerable potential, but the Green–Macauley script makes him much too motivelessly destructive and onedimensional. Sam’s obsession with getting the world and his paranoia that centers on the fear of betrayal are the basis for an interesting and complex character, one that would have benefited considerably from being developed in greater detail. Sam would be far more interesting if, for example, we had some idea of how he got to be the way he is. Having completed six pictures as a director, Wise was still looked upon by the studio as a director of promise, but the promise now seemed nothing but a B-picture future. Rather than continue a career cranking out second features, Wise seriously considered a return to editing, preferring to edit A pictures than to direct Bs. He postponed making a decision, and accepted his next assignment, his first involvement with a runaway production. It was a fiscal experiment on RKO’s part, to be shot in Mexico City at the Churubusco Studios, a lot in which RKO had a substantial financial interest. Since the war, the cost of producing B pictures had risen dramatically, and the domestic product was rapidly reaching the quarter-of-a-million-dollar mark. Producer Sid Rogell had an idea that RKO might be able to reduce labor and general production costs by shooting in Mexico, utilizing Mexican personnel and locale for a certain exotic touch.5 Ultimately it proved to be an all-around bad experience that produced an equally bad picture. Released in early 1948 as Mystery in Mexico, the film at least had a promising opening sequence. After credits superimposed on tracking shots of Mexico City and a lively full-orchestra score of Mexican music, Wise opens with

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a man in a waiter’s uniform opening a safe after hours in the darkened back room of the Club Versailles. Suddenly a door opens, the shaft of light spilling on the safecracker as the subjective camera catches him in the act. Startled, he turns to face the camera and then suddenly runs down a corridor toward the door. In the doorway, he is shot in the back by his discoverer, whose perspective remains that of the subjective camera. Although wounded, the safecracker continues to run, the camera slowly pursuing. He runs down a narrow street and disappears around a corner. At this point the camera becomes stationary. The corner proves to be only a curve in the street, and a moment later we see the figure of a man running, almost two hundred yards away. From all indications, he seems to have made good his escape. But a hand holding a revolver slowly rises in front of the camera, and the audience sights the running figure along the barrel of the gun. Wise cuts to a front view of the gun firing into the camera, and then back to the gun sight perspective. As the gun drops slowly from view, the tiny figure in the distance staggers and falls. Unfortunately, the promise of this imaginative opening is never fulfilled. What follows is as weak a production as Wise has ever been associated with. The original story by Muriel Bolton was based on the intriguing premise that Hitler was alive, well, and busily organizing the Fourth Reich somewhere south of Mexico City. But RKO deleted this from Lawrence Kimble’s script for fear of offending the Mexican people. What was left was a rather stock jewel theft–insurance swindle plot held together by an array of clichés and prosaic exchanges that only serve to expose further its thinness. The protagonist in Mystery in Mexico, Steve Hastings (William Lundigan), is an insurance investigator on his way to Mexico City to find out why Glenn Ames, one of the company’s undercover operatives working on a jewel theft case, has broken communication with the home office. On the plane he meets Victoria Ames (Jacqueline White) who is on her way to Mexico to locate her missing brother, Glenn. Victoria’s brother and Hastings’s colleague are one and the same. This coincidence means that Steve and Victoria will inevitably work together. To no one’s surprise, Hastings soon cracks the case, primarily by locating his missing colleague. After being shot twice at the beginning of the film and eluding his would-be assassin, Ames was taken in by a solicitous peasant family who, in the best spirit of the Latin American Good Neighbor policy, nursed him back to health. Regrettably, the cast is as weak as the script. Lundigan’s character is merely cute while falling short in the attempt to be clever, expending more energy on breaking down the heroine’s resistance to his advances than on the investigation. Almost every move in her direction is preceded by self-confident smirking and a series of hair-smoothing gestures that can only be described as sophomoric. White responds consistently with a much too obviously feigned

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irritability. Ricardo Cortez as Norcross, the Mr. Big behind the insurance swindle, gives a restrained and undistinguished performance. Scenes of confrontation between the leading actors, like the one at the conclusion where Norcross is caught by the Mexican police as he is about to dispatch Hastings, are particularly slow and stiff, as if the actors weren’t completely sure about their lines or their blocking. If there is a bright spot in the cast, it’s Tony Barrett’s vibrant and engaging performance as Carlos, the double-dealing taxi driver who guides the hero through the environs of Mexico City. According to the production files in the RKO Archives, Barrett’s presence in the film was a lucky accident. An RKO contract player who had previously performed small roles in Wise’s Criminal Court and Born to Kill, Barrett took over the role of Carlos when Mexican actor Juan Garcia, originally signed for the part, failed to keep his commitment after the first week of production. Many weaknesses in the film might have been corrected had it not been for Rogell’s persistent pressure on Wise to bring the picture in on time and to cut costs whenever possible. In his cables and calls, Rogell continued to stress the point that these were perilous times for the industry and that it was essential to prove that pictures could be made in Mexico more economically. With the front office closely watching his production schedule, Wise cut down on rehearsals and script conferences, and printed a lot of questionable footage, scenes in which awkwardness and bad timing are distressingly apparent. Mystery in Mexico was cranked out to meet daily quotas, and quality, from the studio’s standpoint, was quite evidently a minimal consideration. It was the seventh film Robert Wise had directed, and clearly the worst.

NOTES 1. Bosley Crowther, “Some Game!” New York Times, November 24, 1945. 2. Bosley Crowther, “Court in Session,” New York Times, November 16, 1946. 3. Quinn Martin, interoffice memo to Bill Gordon, May 27, 1946, RKO Archives. 4. Bosley Crowther, “Born to Kill,” New York Times, May 1, 1947. 5. “Robert Wise,” interview with Rui Nogueira, Focus on Film 12 (Winter 1972): 47.

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hortly before his assignment to the Churubusco Studios, Wise and Theron Warth, a former film editor who was now a producer, had begun to rework an old RKO property, a script based on Gunman’s Chance, a Western novel by Luke Short. Their progress was sufficiently promising, and the front office granted permission for Warth to hire a writer to work with them. Subsequently, Lillie Hayward was brought in to put together the final screenplay. If the finished script met with his approval, Rogell agreed to do the picture with Wise directing and Warth producing. It was, for two reasons, a particularly important picture for Wise. First, RKO intended to shoot it as an A picture with a star cast, and Wise would finally get his chance to move up from the ranks of the B directors. Second, he and Warth were responsible for developing the original property; even in his work with the liberal Val Lewton, Wise was never so directly involved with the shaping of a screenplay prior to shooting. The move up to A status, however, was not that easy. Wise came close to being squeezed out of the picture. Half a century later, Wise remained reluctant to discuss the details, but this is the general sequence of events: shortly before leaving Lewton, Wise signed on with a large Hollywood agency (Famous Artists). When casting began for Blood on the Moon, the title given to the finished screenplay, RKO entered into negotiations with the agency for some of the big-name stars it represented. In the course of their discussions, the agency attempted to persuade RKO to accept what amounted to a package deal: a prominent star represented by the agency (James Stewart), provided they accept another high-salaried director whom they also represented (Jacques Tourneur). Wise found himself being negotiated out of a job—on a project that he jointly developed—by his own agent. Wise objected vehemently, and the matter was finally brought to the attention of Dore Schary, who had be38

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come head of production when Charles Koerner died in 1946. Schary, apprised of the facts and of Wise’s efforts on this project, unhesitatingly gave him full support. Whether RKO got the star it wanted or not, it was Schary’s decision that Robert Wise would direct.1 With the director decided upon, the rest of the casting soon fell into place. RKO decided to stay at home and cast Robert Mitchum in the lead role of gunslinger-turned-cowhand Jim Garry. Although not yet a major star, Mitchum was already under contract and was considered potentially valuable property. Despite his limitations as an actor in his early career, Mitchum’s laconic woodenness had a certain appeal, and he had shown considerable promise as a masculine presence in films like Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947) and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947). Sharing the billing were veteran villain Robert Preston as Tate Riling and relative newcomer Barbara Bel Geddes as Amy Lufton. In Blood on the Moon, Jim Garry is a failed rancher who has come up to Wyoming from Texas in search of his old friend Tate Riling, who has promised him a job. Riling, Garry discovers, has engineered a scheme with a crooked Indian agent, Jake Pindalest (Frank Faylen), to cheat rancher John Lufton out of his cattle. Riling has gathered the homesteaders together to prevent Lufton from moving his cattle off government reservation land, where they are in danger of being confiscated. The homesteaders who follow Riling believe that by doing so they are protecting their property from the cattle interests; Riling’s only genuine concern, however, is to buy the herd from Pindalest once it has been claimed by the government. Garry’s conscience soon leads him to discover that his real interests lie with the Luftons, particularly with Amy. Garry stops two of Riling’s gunmen from killing Lufton, thus convincing Amy and her father that he is on their side. After a climactic fistfight with Riling, Garry kidnaps Pindalest, thus preventing the official confiscation. Riling finally tracks them down and Garry, though wounded, manages to escape. With Riling in pursuit, Garry manages to make his way to the cabin of Chris Barden (Walter Brennan), a homesteader who has turned against Riling. A gun battle follows, in which Garry, circling around behind the attackers, confronts Riling once again and kills him. The homesteaders, now aware of how they had been used by Riling, amicably agree to work out their differences with Lufton. On the surface, the story of Blood on the Moon is conventional Western fare: a lone rider becomes involved in a struggle between cattlemen and homesteaders, his decisions and actions determined by principle rather than self-interest. But there is an implied story that never fully emerges. Wise would have liked to develop more fully the relationship between Garry and Riling, their conflicting values and personalities, and the way each had changed since the

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earlier days when they first became friends. The conventional sense of what goes into a good picture, however, dictated otherwise. There was a dual love interest to be dealt with as well as a contingent of character actors needed for the human texture and ambiance that must inevitably surround the central struggle. As it is, Mitchum and Preston have too few scenes together, but those that they do share are among the best elements in the picture. From their first scene together to the climactic fistfight, there is a brooding sense of impending conflict. In the leading roles, Mitchum and Preston literally fill the frame with square-shouldered masculinity, dwarfing by comparison such formidable supporting players as Walter Brennan and Charles McGraw. In their renewed relationship, each of the principals finds himself suspicious and uneasy in the other’s company. Whatever it was that enabled them to be friends in the past no longer holds in the present. Each comes to discover that he has seriously misjudged the other. When the parting of the ways finally comes, Wise sends them off with the aforementioned rousing fistfight that is the action highlight of the production. Totally lacking in the usual kind of saloon brawl choreography that had become so typical of Hollywood Westerns, Wise worked for, and achieved, a very genuine kind of realism. He elaborated on this in an interview: Fights in westerns had become so obvious and predictable, and I felt that it was time to do something different. I approached Mitch and Bob [Preston] to see how they would feel about a “real” fight, one in which at the end they would be totally exhausted, just as if they had been truly intent on beating each other’s brains out. They thought it was a great idea.2

The setting for the fight is a Mexican cantina, where Garry and Riling are the sole customers. Wise and Nick Musaraca, his cameraman from The Curse of the Cat People, shot the entire scene with extremely low-key lighting, the darkness obscuring the visual details of Mitchum’s and Preston’s rough-house scrimmage. The scene was done in several takes, the shadows of the combatants contrasting with the background as they move past a window or a doorway. The volume on the sound track is increased and the grunts, punches, and heavy breathing supply much of the detail obscured by the shadows. As Garry finally drubs Riling insensible, Reardon (Tom Tyler), Riling’s henchman, slowly approaches from behind. Exhausted and helpless, Garry rolls against the wall as the gunman, smiling, intently aims his weapon to administer the coup de grace. Suddenly, a shot rings out from behind and Reardon pitches forward to reveal Chris Barden (Walter Brennan) standing behind, smoking six-gun in hand. As Garry stammers his appreciation, Barden, who holds Riling and all of his kind in total contempt, delivers the best tag line of the film: “Forget it. I always wanted to shoot one of ya, and he was the handiest.” Wise closes the

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scene with a tight close-up of Barden in profile, his face brightly illuminated, marked by deep shadows and surrounded by darkness. It is the tired, thoroughly perplexed face of a man of character, his instinctive judgment of Garry clearly at odds with a new sense of respect. But if the fight between Mitchum and Preston constitutes the high point of Blood on the Moon, the love interest between Mitchum and Bel Geddes is clearly the nadir. Mitchum seems bored and Bel Geddes’s performance is decidedly uneven. In the early scenes she is a woman of high spirit—Amy Lufton and Jim Garry meet after having exchanged shots with one another—but she quickly lapses into a decided blandness, pleading her cause where earlier she vehemently declaimed it. Phyllis Thaxter’s performance as Carol, Amy’s older sister who mistakenly places her trust in Tate Riling and is subsequently betrayed is by contrast brief, spirited, and highly creditable, particularly in the scene in which she terminates her relationship by slapping Riling across the face with a riding crop. Although marking the end of a love affair, it is a far more emotional and dramatically effective scene than the one in which Amy, anxious to reconcile Garry with her father after a misunderstanding, trails after him into the hills, refusing to turn back until he agrees to return with her. Acting more out of bored desperation than emotional feeling, Garry takes her by the shoulders, busses her firmly on the lips, and tells her “you’ll go—unless you want more of that!” Such ardent fervor notwithstanding, she rejects both alternatives and finally succeeds in bringing her lover back—chastened if not impassioned. Blood on the Moon was generally well received, but it was hardly a Western blockbuster to meet the stiff competition of films like John Ford’s Fort Apache or Howard Hawks’s Red River, both of which were also 1948 releases. What Blood on the Moon lacks, other than John Wayne’s box-office appeal, is the sense of a story that is integral with the panoramic sweep of the Western outdoors. The Arizona location shots notwithstanding, there is a slight claustrophobic quality to it, but one that is not inconsistent with the very important psychological dimensions of the story. Stories of this nature appealed to Wise, evident in the success he had had with The Body Snatcher, another film in which the central characters work with and on one another in tight psychological confines. Moving the camera into close quarters for extended observation of individuals under pressure became the closest thing to a Robert Wise signature. It is also the distinguishing characteristic of his next film, The Set-Up, arguably his best.

NOTES 1. Sergio Leeman, Robert Wise on His Films (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1995), 83–84. 2. Robert Wise, interview with author, July 27, 1978.

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ust before Wise directed The Set-Up, RKO underwent another of its periodic corporate spasms. This one, however, would ultimately prove fatal. From a 1946 high of $12 million, RKO’s profits dropped in the following year to a little over $5 million. Floyd Odlum, who had owned the studio for more than a dozen years, was a financier first and foremost and decided it was time to drop RKO from his personal portfolio. He offered to sell his more than 900,000 shares of stock to anyone who would pay him $10 a share. There were no immediate takers, but an offer finally came from Howard Hughes.1 Hughes was the owner of Trans-World Airlines and the Hughes Tool Company, and a genuine eccentric whose wealth allegedly reached into untold millions. Like many things about Howard Hughes, his reasons for wanting RKO have never been completely clear; nevertheless, he had produced two classic American films, Hell’s Angels (1930), which he had also directed, and Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932). In the years when he dabbled as an independent, the motion picture industry had never been one of his primary concerns. A substantial part of his motivation to acquire RKO was tied to the fact that owning his own studio and its network of theaters would give him the opportunity to market more effectively his controversial film The Outlaw. The film was completed in 1943 but did not receive a production code seal of approval because of violations—particularly in the blatantly sexual nature of the advertising campaign. When Odlum finally accepted Hughes’s offer of $9.50 a share, the studio changed hands for a total cash transaction of $8,825,690, the largest in Hollywood history.2 No sooner was Hughes in charge than his heavy and erratic hand was felt in almost every area of studio production. Among the first things he did was to lay off seven hundred studio workers and call a total production halt. Al42

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though Dore Schary had been assured at the time of the sale that he would be permitted to continue operating freely as production chief, he found Hughes’s wide-ranging interference impossible to deal with and resigned to head up production at MGM. Shortly after Schary’s departure came the resignation of studio president N. Peter Rathvon and finally of Floyd Odlum, who had been appointed, immediately after the sale, to the position of chairman of the board. Virtually alone at the top, Hughes himself functioned as production chief—on those occasions when the people actively involved in production could locate him. Among the films that had been halted was The Set-Up, which had originally been cleared for production by Schary. At the time of Hughes’s takeover, the script, loosely based on a long narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March (a journalist whose work had been extremely popular in the late 1920s), was completed in the original draft. It was a first effort by former sportswriter Art Cohn, who took March’s tale of a black prizefighter ruthlessly manipulated by unscrupulous promoters and fashioned from it the story of Bill “Stoker” Thompson, a worn-out and overaged tank town fighter who manages, at a terrible cost, to achieve one final victory. Richard Goldstone was assigned to produce, and at a meeting of those currently in charge of studio production, including Sid Rogell and Jack Gross, it was decided that The Set-Up should be directed by Fred Zinnemann. In a legal deposition for a suit later brought by Howard Hughes, Goldstone recounts the offer made to and the discussions with Zinnemann, who turned it down. He explained to Goldstone that his last two films had been of a violent nature and he felt a personal need to get away from that kind of film for the time being. He had also made plans to leave for Palestine in the near future, to begin location research for a new picture.3 Goldstone then turned to Robert Wise, who read Cohn’s script, liked it, and accepted the assignment. Since his days with Val Lewton it was Wise’s standard method of operation to work closely with the screenwriter to get a script into perfect shape before the start of shooting. He and Cohn went immediately to work. From the beginning, Wise and Cohn shared a mutual intention to do a different kind of fight picture, one that exposed the fight game for the cruel and exploitative Roman circus that it was. In this film, atmosphere was to be all important. Wise and Cohn wanted primarily to convey the sense of a world of sweaty locker rooms, dirty hallways, and the generally seamy environment of the small-town arenas where a win depended on the plans of petty racketeers as much or more than it did on top physical conditioning or the lucky punch. It was a world with which Cohn was thoroughly familiar. In pursuit of the essentials of realistic atmosphere, he and Wise began to search out the concrete details they needed at the small fight arenas down at Long Beach and at the old

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Legion Stadium in Los Angeles. Once inside, however, Wise found himself fascinated not by the action under the center lights, but by the faces in the crowd. Clearly, gladiatorial bloodlust had not gone out with the Romans, as seemingly ordinary, everyday people—office and factory workers, men and women, old and young, from all walks of life—exulted in the spectacle of one poor pug doing his level best to batter another into insensibility. Their observed reactions became a large part of what Wise would have to say. In The Set-Up, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan) is a fighter who’s been at it far too long. After twenty years in the ring he has nothing to show for all the punishment he has taken, other than the love and loyal support of his wife, Julie (Audrey Totter). The years together have been hard on her as well, and at the opening of the film we find her unable to take another night of watching the man she loves soundly beaten to the delight of a crowd whose loyalty always lies with the winner. Although Stoker feels confident that tonight’s bout with Tiger Nelson will be his night, Tiny (George Tobias), his manager, feels otherwise and decides to capitalize on his confidence. He makes a deal with Danny, who works for Little Boy, a vicious racketeer, to throw the fight. The way things have been going, Stoker’s loss seems a sure thing, so Tiny sees no point in letting Stoker in on the deal. But it is Stoker’s night, and in an exhausting battle he manages to knock out Nelson in the final round. Tiny, knowing what Little Boy’s reaction will be, disappears from the arena before the fight is over. Stoker, still unaware that the fight was a fix, is confronted by Little Boy and one of his henchmen in the dressing room. Alan Baxter gives a truly chilling performance as Little Boy, a man with the personality of an ice pick. Little Boy doesn’t believe Stoker when he says he knew nothing of Tiny’s arrangement, and after making it clear how he feels about welshers, he leaves Stoker to dress, telling him that they can discuss it further outside. Alone in the dressing room, Stoker quickly puts on his street clothes and leaves through an alley exit on the side of the darkened arena. But Little Boy and his crew, among them the recently defeated Tiger Nelson, appear at the entrance of the alley before Stoker can make his escape. In a short but spirited battle, they administer the punishing lesson that is the fate of anyone who crosses Little Boy. Stoker manages, however, in the spirit of his recent ring victory, to lash out with one good punch that bloodies Little Boy’s lip. In retaliation, Little Boy and his men crush Stoker’s right hand in such a way that he’ll never be able to use it again as a fighter. Stoker staggers from the alley and collapses in the street, where Julie, who sees the crowd gathering, runs to him. Ironically, Stoker’s defeat is a victory for both of them. The essential simplicity of the plot should not, however, obscure the recognition that this is a film in which many small but excellent performances contribute so much to the effectiveness of the whole. In addition to the per-

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formances given by principal actors Ryan, Totter, and Baxter, Wise drew on his firsthand research to orchestrate a wide range of truly unforgettable performances by character actors, many highly familiar to film and television audiences of the ’40s and ’50s. Each of these performances makes a singular contribution to the human texture of the film, emphasizing, with a kind of visual punctuation, key points in the action. Among the curious collection of spectators are a blind man and his companion, who narrates the fight to him (played respectively by Archie Leonard and John Butler). When Nelson at one point manages to close one of Stoker’s eyes, the blind man angrily shouts, in frustration, for Nelson to “close the other eye.” Dwight Martin plays a threehundred-pound glutton who eats continuously throughout the picture, and in a small bit of comic relief, Brian O’Hara, leaning on the edge of the ring apron, plays a fight fan who constantly raises a cigar to his mouth only to have some action in the ring repeatedly distract him to the point that the cigar never gets there. But the most superb character performance of the spectator group is given by actress Helen Brown. Earlier in the film, she stands by the entrance to the arena complaining to a friend that she comes to the fights only because her husband likes them. The brutality of it all obviously makes her very upset and nervous. While it would seem that her strongest desire is to see the entire evening quickly over, once the action begins she quickly changes into the most bloodthirsty and vocal of the lot. Clinches, with their lack of action, clearly infuriate her; “Make em fight!” she screams to the referee. Wise’s close-ups reveal her at her happiest, her eyes literally gleaming with sadistic glee. Manny Farber, reviewing The Set-Up for the New Republic, aptly describes her as “one of the furies.”4 Other memorable small performances are turned in primarily by the actors portraying the fighters and handlers who share a common dressing room with Stoker. James Edwards as Luther Hawkins is a confident, amiable black fighter who seems to be the only one among the entire tired group with either class or promise. Darryl Hickman as Shanley is the high-school kid whose boyish confidence as he faces his first professional bout slowly fades to the point where he has to throw up before leaving for the ring. He does, however, win his bout. Philip Pine is Souza, a boxer whose strength comes from his religious faith; ironically, he is defeated. The best performance of all the character actors is turned in by David Clarke as the punch-drunk “Gunboat” Johnson. Gunboat is clearly nothing more than a human punching bag. His warm-up movements, in marked contrast to those of Luther Hawkins, are slow and clumsy. No one remembers when he last won a fight and, sadly, no one cares. He talks incessantly, and to the great annoyance of the other fighters, about Frankie Manila, a boxer who lost twenty-one fights before going on

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to become middleweight champion. Shortly after he leaves for the ring, Gunboat is carried back into the dressing room, unconscious. The doctor applies smelling salts and to test his coherence, asks him his name. “Manila!” he shouts, “I’m Frankie Manila!” as they take him to the hospital in a cab. Gunboat’s example is not lost on the pensive Stoker, nor is the injunction by Gus, the trainer (Wallace Ford), that in the game of trading punches, “You can only stop so many.” The center of the picture, around whom these performances revolve, is Robert Ryan as Stoker Thompson, in one of the better performances of a long and distinguished career. In previous films like Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947) and Max Ophuls’s Caught (1949), Ryan had begun to establish a screen reputation as an effective psychotic. But these roles, while sufficiently powerful and verbally dynamic, were stereotypically one-dimensional. In The Set-Up, Ryan has very little dialogue and Wise draws from him a performance that is both powerful and understated. Ryan’s Stoker Thompson is a man of high personal courage and integrity, but he is also a man who is gradually becoming alone and afraid. He wants desperately to grab something from life before it all passes him by, but he simply doesn’t know how to do it. He clings to the old fighters’ saw that he’s “only one punch away” from some meaningful but vague victory. But as he watches younger fighters like Shanley and Hawkins preparing for their bouts, it occurs to him that he had his first fight in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1928—twenty years ago. Suddenly, he is aware that with the possible exception of Gunboat Johnson, he is the oldest fighter in the room. Stoker’s life is a story of advancing loneliness and isolation, and Wise tells that story primarily through effective close-ups that reveal Stoker’s inner anxiety and bewilderment. There are shots of Stoker staring into the mirror, appraising the battered face before him; Stoker staring out of the basement dressing room window, waiting anxiously for the light in his hotel room to go out, indicating that Julie is on her way to the fight and that he won’t be out there alone; and Stoker staring with pained helplessness at the empty seat he had reserved for her. Perhaps the best shot of all, the one that almost by itself says everything that Wise and Cohn wanted to say about the fight game, occurs just after Stoker comes into the arena and is on his way to the dressing room. A sudden roar from the crowd attracts his attention and he stops and walks up to the entryway at the rear of the spectators’ section. As he looks over the bobbing heads to see the action in the ring, Wise closes tightly on the spectator directly in front of Stoker. He’s a cretinous type, a man of hard, thug-like features shouting hoarsely and with rhythmic repetition, “kill im! . . . kill im! . . . kill im!” The camera rack-focuses to pick up Stoker in tight close-up and the pain and bewilderment in his expression say it all.

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A similar pain and bewilderment is the essence of Audrey Totter’s performance as Julie. She is the first of the film’s principals introduced to the audience, and it is clear from her expressions and movements of strained, nervous anxiety that she cannot take another night of sitting in the arena, watching the man she loves mercilessly beaten in a vain endeavor to prove that he is still capable of being a winner. Although Wise provides no detailed exposition to establish what life has been like for the Thompsons, none is really necessary; it’s clear from the beginning that theirs has been a life that has promised little and given less. Bus and train rides from one small-town arena to the next, rundown hotels, and greasy hamburger joints are all signposts of defeat on a road going nowhere. Ten years earlier it may have been a happy and exciting time, but now the happiness and excitement are long gone. There is a gulf opening between them, threatening the love and need they have for each other. From that sense of growing separation, Wise develops a subplot that centers on Julie. While Stoker fights his battle inside the Paradise City arena, Julie, outside, is caught up in her own struggle. As usual, Stoker has provided her with a ticket, but this time she has told him that she can no longer watch him in the ring. Leaving the ticket on the dresser, he leaves for his bout, sadly resolute. She stands with her back to him, reluctant and noncommittal. Finally, her sense of loyalty prevailing, she starts for the arena. But as she is about to go in, a roar goes up from the crowd and she turns away, frightened, disgusted, and unable to enter. Instead she turns and walks the crowded streets of Paradise City, busy streets that reveal the curious mix of humanity, the sordid and corrupt interspersed with the innocent. To tell the Thompsons’ story, Wise alternates between the two struggles, cutting periodically from Stoker battling away in the ring to Julie silently walking, reassessing her life. Like Stoker, the role of Julie Thompson has very little dialogue. In her most important scene, she doesn’t say a word. She stands on a bridge, watching trolley cars and buses passing beneath her. After a period of deep contemplation, during which Wise periodically cuts to the traffic below and increases the sound level, Julie slowly tears up her ticket to Stoker’s fight and lets the pieces flutter down over the tracks and passing cars. It is a scene that relies totally on subtle facial expression to convey the inner conflict and ambivalence that Julie is feeling. Wise and Richard Goldstone, the producer, knew the importance of the role of Julie and had selected Joan Blondell as their first choice to play it. It was Blondell’s performance in Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley (1947) that convinced them she was perfect for the part. Howard Hughes, however, still acting as his own production chief, disagreed. Hughes’s idea of the essential quality for any actress in a leading role was sex appeal. In his view Blondell, as he rather tastelessly phrased it, “looked like she was shot out of the wrong end of a cannon.”5

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Wise and Goldstone maintained that it was unrealistic to see the role of Julie as right for one of Hollywood’s reigning glamour queens. Wise saw Julie as a woman who was hardened by experience but had within her—particularly in her love for Stoker—a soft maternal quality. For weeks there was a tugof-war between them, Hughes on one side and Wise and Goldstone on the other. Hughes continued to send actresses for tests whom they found totally wrong for the part. On the other hand, Wise and Goldstone found their compromise candidates rejected with equal consistency. For a while, Ann Sothern was slated to play the role. Other names under strong consideration were Alice Faye, Claire Trevor, Shelley Winters, Sylvia Sidney, June Havoc, and Dorothy Lamour. Audrey Totter, whose previous roles were of the glamorous—but hardboiled femme fatale—type, became the ultimate compromise. She had sufficient sex appeal to satisfy Hughes, which Wise and Goldstone immediately modified and did their best to obscure.6 Aside from the casting of Julie, Wise’s production problems were relatively minor. Ryan actively campaigned for the part, although earlier, when Schary had originally approved The Set-Up for production, serious consideration was given to Canada Lee for the role of Stoker. The casting of Lee, a black actor who had recently distinguished himself in a small role as John Garfield’s sparring partner in Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947), would have put the film more in keeping with the mood of its literary source. Wise was very much in favor of casting a black actor in the lead, but Lee was finally rejected by the front office, as were other black actors mentioned in passing, because each lacked the name that would ensure at least a modicum of boxoffice appeal. The casting of James Edwards as Luther Hawkins (originally the name given was “Chocolate” Brown!) became the last vestige of Joseph March’s black protagonist. Although he was more than pleased with Ryan’s splendid performance in the lead, Wise maintained that if he were doing The Set-Up in a later, more racially tolerant period, a black protagonist would be essential. Given the national perspective on race in the America of 1948, for obvious reasons it simply wasn’t realistic. There were some minor problems with the Breen office. In particular, they were concerned about Stoker’s facial appearance after the fight and the hand-crushing sequence in the alley. The latter they considered excessive in “brutality and gruesomeness.”7 Wise solved the problem by cutting away from Little Boy, on the line “He’ll never use that hand again,” to the Dreamland Dance Hall just above the alley, where a blaring trumpet and a roll of drums obscure Stoker’s offscreen cry of agony. The facial makeup was modified and made far less gruesome but, in the process, far less realistic. Despite these changes, the film is marked by an air of authenticity, particularly in the boxing sequences. In addition to Wise’s firsthand extensive research in the small fight arenas in southern California and a screenplay written

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by a former sportswriter, Robert Ryan had been an intercollegiate boxing champion at Dartmouth. The ring experience certainly helped but was, in at least one way, a small hindrance. Stoker Thompson is a third-rate fighter whose reflexes are faded and whose punching combinations are all but totally gone. Simply put, Ryan was a far better boxer than Stoker Thompson; therefore Ryan had to work hard to effect a clumsy boxing style that would be consistent with the character he was playing. To add even more to the authenticity, the role of Tiger Nelson, Stoker’s opponent, was played by Hal Fieberling, who at the time was a professional boxer. Fieberling evidently found his first film work far more congenial than professional boxing, for he remained an actor, subsequently changing his name to Hal Baylor. All difficulties finally surmounted, the picture was completed and prints readied for release. It was at this point that Howard Hughes came back into the picture and subsequently embroiled The Set-Up in national legal controversy. Hughes and studio officials had been hearing about another boxing film called The Champion, which was being directed at United Artists (UA) by Mark Robson, Wise’s close friend and former protégé in the editing room, and produced by Stanley Kramer’s Screen Plays II Corporation. The Champion, Hughes alleged, had borrowed significantly from The Set-Up. After a brief meeting and preliminary legal skirmish, both sides took a hard line. In the following deposition, taken from the RKO Archives’ production file on The SetUp, Gordon Youngman, vice president at RKO, presented his studio’s position in a letter to UA written on March 18, 1949. After outlining the details of RKO’s acquisition of the literary rights and the copyright of the screenplay, Youngman came directly to the point: It is the opinion of our counsel after viewing Champion and The Set-Up that Champion clearly infringes a material part of The Set-Up. Your attention is particularly invited to those sequences in both Champion and The Set-Up in which the fighter leaves his dressing room after winning a fight he is supposed to lose, is cornered by gang of men, and is beaten up.8

The similarity, according to Youngman, could not be passed off as merely coincidental, since “access to The Set-Up by a certain person or persons instrumental in the creation of Champion is beyond question.”9 The letter closes with RKO promising direct action: Because we understand that immediate distribution of The Champion is contemplated, we intend to institute injunctive proceedings against you and to impound the prints of Champion unless you notify us forthwith in writing that you will not distribute or exhibit Champion with the infringing portions still in it.10

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Having received the opening shot, Screen Plays II wasted no time in returning fire. Samuel Zagon, Stanley Kramer’s attorney, wrote to Youngman the following day denying any infringement and portraying Screen Plays II as a victim of corporate bullying. Portions of Zagon’s letter (also in the RKO Archives) have the ringing tone of patriotic fervor and principle that was, it would seem, an important factor in the refusal to either concede or compromise: We cannot, of course, prevent you from instituting injunctive proceedings as threatened in your letter. We can, however, and we will resist any such proceedings instituted by you to the utmost. It is unfortunately true that the great wealth and power of your corporation gives you unlimited means with which to harass and annoy the small independent producer such as Screen Plays II Corp., in its own attempt to produce independently motion pictures of a quality which, at least, fairly compete in the open market with motion pictures produced by your company. Nevertheless, with every means we can command, we intend to fight to prevent you from abusing the injunctive process of whatever court you select as a forum in which to make your unwarranted claim.11

Joining forces with Zagon was Edward Raftery, an attorney representing UA. Reporting on the case on March 24, 1949, The Hollywood Reporter pointed out that UA had lost a similar battle to Howard Hughes several months earlier. In July 1948, Hughes had started legal action against Howard Hawks claiming a suspicious similarity between Red River and The Outlaw; but it was UA’s decision that a prolonged court battle would be too costly. Hughes had brought his action at a time when Red River was scheduled for 320 simultaneous openings in Texas, and the possibility of costly and prolonged legal action along with the additional threat of lost bookings made capitulation to Hughes prudent, though unpleasant. Hawks and UA compromised and the offending footage was snipped.12 Determined not to let Hughes get away with this twice, Zagon and Raftery hurriedly began to prepare their combined defense. Hughes formally filed his legal action, requesting an injunction (and estimated damages of $500,000 if The Champion was released intact). The injunction hearing was scheduled for federal court on April 4. Hughes’s next move was to speed The Set-Up into early release and exhibition. The film was booked into New York’s Criterion Theatre for its first public screening on March 29. Since The Champion was not scheduled to open in New York until April 9, Hughes and RKO had beaten Kramer and UA to a Broadway opening by eleven days and also gained the full advantage of the invaluable publicity the controversy had generated. Now UA and Screen Plays II began their legal counterpunching. Zagon and Raftery filed a motion in federal court requesting an immediate dismissal of

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RKO’s injunction request. As supporting evidence, they filed a series of affidavits (in RKO Archives) that, at best, provided highly tenuous support. Sherill Corwin, an independent exhibitor who owned four theaters in the Los Angeles area, stated that “the two are entirely different stories of the boxing game. . . . I would not hesitate to book either of these pictures shortly after the other. I do not feel that the showing of either picture would impair the value of the other.”13 Corwin’s views were echoed by Walter Higgins, a film buyer for the Prudential Circuit that owned forty-eight theaters in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Affidavits by Carl Foreman, who had written the screenplay for The Champion, and ex-boxer Mushy Callahan, who staged the ring sequences, acknowledged the formula common to boxing films, asserting that bribery and racketeering were common practice, both in the world of actual prizefighting and prizefighting films. Foreman’s affidavit referred to Jack Dempsey’s admission to taking a dive from Jim Flynn in 1917 “because he was hungry,”14 and to Rocky Graziano’s suspension in New York in 1947 for not reporting an attempt to fix an upcoming bout with Jake LaMotta. Callahan recalled a 1934 bout in Los Angeles’ Legion Stadium between Les Kennedy and Enzo Fiermonte. Kennedy was supposed to take a dive, but for reasons Callahan does not go into, knocked Fiermonte out in the second round. After Fiermonte was counted out, Kennedy, fearing reprisal for the double-cross, hurriedly left the ring—and the stadium—without bothering to change his boxing togs. Finally, Stanley Kramer, whose indignation and resentment at being outmaneuvered by Howard Hughes was clearly evident, stated that “RKO does not come into court with clean hands; its paramount motive in the bringing of this lawsuit was to gain national publicity timed with its advanced opening dates for The Set-Up.” Despite the battery of affidavits, federal court Judge Campbell Beaumont was unimpressed. UA’s motion for dismissal was not granted. On May 5, 1949, the case went to court and was heard by federal court Judge Pierson M. Hall. Guy Knupp and Arthur Groman, attorneys representing RKO, came well prepared. They contended that the scenes in which Robert Ryan leaves his dressing room after winning the fight he had been expected to throw and is subsequently beaten by gangsters is essentially duplicated by a similar situation and sequence in The Champion. Knupp and Groman had Richard Goldstone, the producer of The Set-Up, prepare for the court the following legal comparison (see table 5.1). In offering an explanation of how these curious similarities may have occurred, RKO attorney Arthur Groman pointed the finger at Robson, referred to as the “certain person” in Gordon Youngman’s initial letter.15 Robson, before coming to work as a director for Kramer, had been at RKO when The Set-Up was in preparation. He knew the script, Groman contended, and had

A GAMBLER, played by Paul Dubov, who supervises the beating of Midge by several men as retribution for a doublecross. Note: The part of this gambler is played by an actor who also appears as a gambler in The Set-Up.

LITTLE BOY, a petty fight promoter and gambler who supervises the beating of Stoker by several men as retribution for an ostensible doublecross.

Fighter’s dressing room after Midge Kelly wins fight. Midge Kelly is apprised by his own manager that gamblers will be laying for him because he has doublecrossed them by winning fight. Midge and his manager, after sending Midge’s brother for a taxicab and realizing that he has been waylaid, leaving dressing room.

Fighter’s dressing room after Stoker Thompson wins fight.

Little Boy and his henchmen enter, apprise Stoker that he has doublecrossed them and leave, threatening to see him later.

Stoker, left alone in dressing room, dresses in panic and leaves.

Photographic Continuity

Midge Kelly, a prizefighter

Stoker Thompson, a prizefighter

Major Characters

By Ring Lardner Original story Screenplay by Carl Foreman

The Champion

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By Joseph Moncure March Original poem Screenplay by Art Cohn

The Set-Up

Legal Comparison of The Set-Up and The Champion

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Table 5.1.

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In the climactic scene of Midge Kelly’s collapse in the dressing room before he dies, he smashes his hand against a steel locker and shows the crumpled hand to his manager before he collapses.

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In the last sequence of The Set-Up, it is revealed that Stoker’s hand is smashed so that he can’t fight again.

Midge and his manager leave the dressing room, spot shadows of waiting gangsters on wall. They reverse their walk and try to get out through an exit which is barred by an iron grill. They now separate and manager goes to wall telephone to call help but is slugged before he can do so. Midge is now alone. He continues his movement through the dark corridor, finally breaks into a panicky run. High angle set-up as he dashes in panic through the huge, empty, deserted arena past the ring. He moves from the ring to the opposite side of the arena, tries to get out a fire door by pulling at the panic bar, finds it locked. He crosses to another door, again tries to get out by rattling at the bar, and once again, finds it locked. He retreats through the arena to a position adjacent to the ring where he sees four or five hoodlums closing in on him down the aisle. He gets into the ring to stand them off and they attack him and beat him brutally. During the fight, one of the gamblers remains aloof until a point where he believes Midge to be overcome. He says “Hold him,” and moves in to continue the beating, which goes on until Kelly is brutally injured. He is still defiant at the end of the beating, however, because even though semi-conscious, he still tries to attack the gambler by grabbing his legs.

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Little Boy holds back from participating in the beating until Stoker is held down by the others. He says “Hold him,” and then steps in to administer the final blows himself. Stoker breaks loose with one hand and slugs him. Little Boy pulls back until the other hoodlums again have Stoker pinned down and then, enraged by the blow, steps in to smash Stoker’s hand.

Stoker comes to main doors of fight arena, looks out through glass window, sees gamblers waiting for him outside. He draws back from the window, turns and starts to run in panic. High angle shot Stoker running through huge empty auditorium past ring and over to fire door at opposite side. He attempts to open locked door by pushing and pulling at panic bolt. Fails to get out. He dashes from this exit to another fire door and repeats this action, which we see in an extreme close shot. He then goes to a third door, yanks at it and finds it open, stepping into the alley outside. Starts to walk down alley to escape to street, finds gangsters waiting for him. He retreats to the end of the alley and finds himself trapped. The hoodlums attack him and beat him up brutally.

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discussed the key scene in the present legal controversy with Goldstone. Groman further pointed out that a treatment of the Lardner story filed for copyright purposes in 1947 did not contain the disputed sequence, and that the disputed sequence did not turn up until January 1948, seven months after Robson read the script of The Set-Up. Robson denied Groman’s charge, but was never given the opportunity to do so in court. Harold Fendler, an attorney for Screen Plays II, requested that both Robson and Carl Foreman be called to testify. The request was denied by Judge Hall as “unnecessary.”16 By now it was becoming clear to the UA/Screen Plays II defense team that their case was weak. Raftery continued to plead against the injunction not on the grounds that there had been no infringement, but on the basis that such an injunction would work irreparable harm to UA, which had an $800,000 investment in the production, including prints and advertising. “We’re not afraid to follow The Set-Up,” said Raftery. “We consider it a nice preview for our great picture. There is no need for an injunction. Champion to us was a Godsend. We had rather a lean year. We haven’t had a hit picture like it—except Red River—for a year and a half.”17 Having heard the contending arguments, Judge Hall took the opportunity to see both films. After doing so, he rendered his decision: The Champion would have to be cut. He recommended that the technical staff at RKO and at Screen Plays II confer in the cutting of The Champion to remove the infringing portions. Specifically, Judge Hall ruled that the cut version that he would see within one week must eliminate 1. A sequence where Kirk Douglas and his manager (played by Paul Stewart) are running around darkened halls in the arena, endeavoring to get out of locked doors. 2. A sequence where Kirk Douglas enters the empty arena and is cornered by gangsters prior to the time the fight takes place in the ring. 3. That portion of the fight in the ring in which the chief gangster says “hold him!” The total footage cut from The Champion amounted to 103 feet and an additional six frames. The original running time was shortened by one minute and approximately nine seconds.18 As he usually did in his business dealings, Hughes came out a winner. For the studio, however, it was a pyrrhic victory. Unofficially, the industry, of which Hughes was never truly a part, sympathized with Kramer and UA. A success with most of the more notable critics, The Set-Up was nonetheless ignored when the time came for the Academy Award nominations. The Champion, with its three leading ladies and the glossy masculinity of Kirk Douglas in the title role,

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triumphed at the box office and received three Academy nominations and one award. Douglas and Arthur Kennedy were nominated for Best Actor and Supporting Actor, respectively, and Harry Gerstad won an Oscar for Best Editing. Clearly, the American industry turned its back on Wise’s best film to date, but it did not go totally unrecognized. The Set-Up gained a degree of international recognition by winning the Critic’s Prize at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival. In addition to the close attention given to realistic detail and the wide range of acting performances, The Set-Up is also noteworthy for its unity-oftime experiment. In a film in which time plays such an important part in the life of the protagonist (time, in effect, running out for the aging Stoker), Wise, Cohn, and producer Richard Goldstone developed a screenplay in which time has a unique structural importance as well. The Set-Up opens with a tracking shot, the camera slowly moving in at a high angle on Paradise City on a Saturday night. Prominent in the foreground is a large street clock. The time is 9:05. The closing shot of the film is also Paradise City on Saturday night, but this time the camera dollies back, slowly rising to pick up the street clock, which reads 10:16. The time elapsed in the plot action and the running time of the film are exactly the same. Aside from his earlier efforts under Val Lewton, The Set-Up was the first film in which Wise showed to this degree a meticulous attention to painstaking detail that would characterize the better films of his career. Ironically, his best at this point in his career was also his last at RKO. The studio declined to pick up his option, and given the apparent direction that RKO was taking under Howard Hughes, that was fine with Wise. After more than fifteen years, in which he had moved from the stock room through the intricacies of editing to the rank of feature director, Wise was through with RKO. NOTES 1. Ron Haver, “RKO Years: Part II,” American Film 3, no. 3 (December–January 1978): 31. 2. Haver, “RKO Years,” 31. 3. Richard Goldstone, legal deposition, January 15, 1949, RKO Archives. 4. Manny Farber, “Low Company,” New Republic, April 25, 1949, 29. 5. Sergio Leeman, Robert Wise on His Films (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1995), 92. 6. Robert Wise, interview with author, July 27, 1978. 7. Wise, interview. 8. Gordon Youngman, letter to United Artists Corp., March 18, 1949, RKO Archives. 9. Youngman, letter to United Artists Corp. 10. Samuel Zagon, letter to RKO Inc., March 19, 1949, RKO Archives.

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11. 1949, 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

“UA Asks for Nix on RKO ‘Set-Up’ Suit,” Hollywood Reporter, March 24, 1. “UA Asks for Nix on RKO,” 10. “UA Asks for Nix on RKO,” 10. “UA Asks for Nix on RKO,” 10. “‘Champ’ Hit by Judge, Staggers,” Variety, May 6, 1949, 9. “‘Champ’ Hit by Judge,” 9. “‘Champ’ Hit by Judge,” 9. “‘Champ’ Hit by Judge,” 9.

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6

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The Years at Warner Bros. and Fox

R obert Wise left RKO with a bright future and his career as a director

never missed a beat. In late 1949, as soon as it was clear that his option would not be picked up, he signed a contract with Warner Bros. to do one picture and almost immediately signed another with Twentieth Century Fox to do six pictures in three years. The script at Warners was called The Rock Bottom, with Eleanor Parker, Patricia Neal, and Ruth Roman slated to star. Just prior to its release the title was changed to Three Secrets. It was a decided change of pace for Wise, whose previous films, with the exception of the misnamed Curse of the Cat People, had all been on the violent side. Three Secrets, largely melodrama, is regrettably marred in spots by touches of rather maudlin soap opera, but it is also distinguished by extended sequences of a realistic, quasi-documentary style that was beginning to inform Robert Wise’s work. The story begins with the crash of a private plane high on an inaccessible ledge of Thunder Mountain. From a sequence of photographs taken by reconnaissance aircraft, the Air Force determines that the body of five-yearold Johnny Peterson has changed position, and concludes that he is still alive. The child’s plight quickly becomes a national headline, and a large-scale rescue effort is immediately underway. Climbers forming a rescue team and reporters from across the country quickly assemble in the lodge at the base of the mountain. The tension builds and among the rescue workers and reporters are three women, each of whom, for her own reasons, anxiously follows the rescue preparation. Each woman has a secret, but it is essentially the same secret. Five years earlier, they had briefly encountered each other at an orphanage called The Shelter. Each had had a child under circumstances that compelled her to place it for adoption. Wise tells the stories in flashback, interspersing them among the realistic scenes of the rescue effort. The first is 57

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the story of Susan Chase (Eleanor Parker), who had had a brief affair with a young marine. Prior to his being shipped overseas, he confesses to her that he still loves the girl he left behind in his hometown. Unselfish creature that she is, she never tells him that she is pregnant. She subsequently attempts suicide, but her mother discovers her in time. Susan’s mother is loving and supportive, but coldly realistic. She convinces Susan that she must put the child up for adoption and begin her life again. After much soul-searching, Susan complies, and shortly thereafter meets and marries Bill Chase (Leif Erickson), a young lawyer. He knows nothing of her past indiscretion, and the Chases are apparently living happily ever after, until Susan hears of the adopted boy in the plane crash. Shortly after her husband leaves on a business trip, she hurries to the lodge at Thunder Mountain. In the second story, Phyllis Horn (Patricia Neal) is an acclaimed newspaperwoman highly respected in her profession. Although she loves her husband, Bob Duffy (Frank Lovejoy), her position as a top journalist, for which she has “fought like a man in a man’s world,” is at least equally important. When she returns to the States after a year of covering the war in Europe, Duffy greets her with the news that he is filing for divorce. Her talents not being limited to newspaper work, they reconcile and she tries to do things his way. But the call of her profession is too strong, and the reconciliation is brief. When she accepts another short-term assignment as a war correspondent, Duffy walks out on her. Some weeks later on an island in the Pacific, an Army doctor tells her that she is pregnant. But Duffy had divorced her two weeks earlier. She hurries home only to discover that Duffy has remarried. When the baby is born, she puts it up for adoption and resumes her career. The final hapless female in the trio is Ann Lawrence (Ruth Roman), a ballet dancer who had a love affair with the ballet company’s playboy producer, Gordon Crossley. For a while she is delightfully happy, but her lover soon experiences a change of heart. Love affairs have to be ended one way or another, but Ann’s lover considers himself above that sort of thing. He delegates an underling, Del Prince (Ted de Corsia), to run interference for him, preventing any meeting between him and Ann. She persists, refusing to believe that she is being thrown over. When she reveals to Prince that she is pregnant with Crossley’s child, he is sympathetic and admits her to Crossley’s office. When Crossley tells her the truth, that she was simply one of many and he has decided to move on, she becomes so distraught that she picks up a heavy statuette from the table and kills him. Convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to prison for one to five years, she has her baby while she is in jail and agrees to place it up for adoption. All three have come to the lodge at Thunder Mountain, each believing that the child in the wrecked plane high above is hers. When two flares are

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fired from the top of the mountain, the signal that the boy has been found alive, Phyllis Horn contacts her publisher with a special request. She wants him to find out from the confidential records of the Shelter who the actual mother of the child is, using whatever dubious methods may be necessary. Shortly thereafter, he calls back with the information and Phyllis reveals to Ann Lawrence that the child is Ann’s. By this time Bill Chase has joined Susan, who tells him her story. Bill replies by saying that her child, as far as he is concerned, is his child. Ann, with Phyllis’s agreement, decides not to reveal that she is the mother. Together, they urge Bill and Susan to adopt the boy. The reviews for Wise’s first film outside the RKO fold were mixed but not, overall, unfavorable. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times found the “true story romances” of the three women “not of high quality,” but he credits Wise with “superior understanding and pictorial naturalness” in the scenes dealing with the rescue preparation. He further credits Wise for having “vividly created . . . the excitement and human drama of a big news story.”1 Otis Guernsey, reviewing Three Secrets in the New York Herald Tribune on the same day, had similar reservations. While he credits Wise with having achieved “quite a lot of realism” in the rescue preparation sequences, he also found Three Secrets to be “an eerie sob story” and at one point refers to it as “a film reminiscent of a sister act singing in a blues song.”2 The realism of the rescue preparation scenes to which both critics refer is clearly one of the outstanding qualities of the film. As the climbers prepare and check their equipment for the ascent, Wise has a radio reporter with a microphone move among them, conducting spot interviews. For this scene, Wise used no professional actors. The climbers were actual climbers from the Sierra Club, and the reporter was on the news staff of a Los Angeles radio station. For the moment the film moves smoothly from dramatized narrative to seemingly authentic documentary. The scene effectively captures the quiet tension and anxiety of the climb preparation in a fine piece of cinematic understatement. Critics like Crowther and Guernsey are much too quick in their dismissal of the performances given by Parker, Neal, and Roman. Admittedly, Eleanor Parker’s rendering of the guilt-ridden housewife is a bit too teary, and Ruth Roman’s effort at portraying admirable toughness and fortitude is ultimately overdone, but Patricia Neal’s performance is in a class by itself. Her exchanges with Frank Lovejoy are first-rate. Clearly Wise gave these sequences a little something extra, and makes the most of his principals. In films like King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949) and Michael Curtiz’s Bright Leaf, released the same year as Three Secrets, Patricia Neal had begun to establish a screen personality as a woman whose wit and charm were inextricably tied to a certain formidability and strength of character. On occasion she could—on the screen—

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be splendidly ruthless. In somewhat tempered form, this persona proves an excellent foil to Lovejoy, the leading “nice guy” character actor of the day, who epitomized solid American postwar values. Here the usual male/female stereotypes are reversed. Phyllis Horn is the aggressive overachiever, a workaholic journalist who keeps her maiden name and goes where the story is, whether it’s in Europe or the Pacific theater of World War II. When she returns, she fully expects to find her husband waiting for her. But Duffy, a slightly rumpled but nonetheless lovable home-based sportswriter, wants a conventional wife, one who’s there when he comes home from a hard day at the sports desk. Despite her beauty, ability, and genuine feeling for him, Duffy finds that Phyllis falls short of his definition of a woman. Much of Wise’s attention in this sequence is given to defining that term as it applies to Phyllis Horn. He makes it clear that despite her successes, there is a certain emptiness in her life, but leaves it ambiguous as to whether filling that void with Duffy will give her what she lacks. In one of the best scenes in the film, Phyllis returns in the evening to the main newsroom. Wise opens the scene with a high-angle long shot, revealing Phyllis walking slowly among the empty desks, making her way to the glassedin cubicle office with her name on the door. The office has about it a barren grayness, notably lacking any element of what might be termed the feminine touch. With the exception of a brief exchange with the receptionist, the entire sequence is done without dialogue. Phyllis looks about the office, clearly taking stock of her life as much as she is of her surroundings. She opens her desk drawer and takes out a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper; she partially unwraps it, pauses, then turns listlessly and tosses it into the wastebasket. She lights a cigarette, which she finds in a pack in the drawer, but with a look of distaste, she stubs it out and tosses the pack away. In this brief scene—silent but for a plaintive rendition of Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick out of You”—a leitmotif that runs throughout the entire Neal–Lovejoy sequence—Wise sums up Phyllis Horn’s view of her life: stale sandwiches, stale cigarettes, stale existence. But Phyllis is a forceful person, one who never fails to take the initiative—even when it involves her capitulation to Duffy. In their reconciliation scene, she tells him that her life with him is “home plate—without you I’d roam around like a houseless alleycat.” She also agrees to give up her present way of life: “I’ll do my writing here; if I can’t, I’ll give it up.” Wise fades out on the reconciliation kiss and fades in on an obvious symbol of domesticity, a pan of meat loaf, which the reformed Phyllis, complete with kitchen apron, is carefully basting. The domesticity, however, doesn’t take. Phyllis succumbs to an offer from her publisher to cover something really big in the Pacific. She pleads with Duffy for a dual life— dutiful, loving wife and professional journalist. But Duffy will have none of it. It’s his way or nothing. With smug condescension, he delivers his parting words:

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“I’m sorry for you, Phyl; you tried very hard to be a woman. You just couldn’t make it.” She may fail to meet Duffy’s rather conventional standards, standards that define the truly accomplished woman from the perspective of the 1950s, but as an intriguing and captivating character she has no trouble meeting those of a perceptive audience. Phyllis Horn is the most interesting of the three principals, a far more interesting person than the housewife Duffy would make of her. Domestic femininity, the lack of which makes Duffy so very insecure, has given way to her career, a choice about which she is finally very honest. The kind of love and support she asks of Duffy is the kind he would expect from her, indeed, accepts as his due. But it’s a double standard, and the situation does not work in reverse. Thus she loses Duffy, someone very important to her. With courage and fortitude, she accepts both her difficult choice and the consequences of her actions. In addition to the Neal–Lovejoy sequence and the documentary realism of the rescue preparation, there are several deft touches by the director that add greatly to the overall effect of the film. When Susan Chase, for example, who has just been given her dismissal by her marine lover, walks away from the compound into the darkness, Wise fades out into blackness and fades in with the darkness of the screen broken only by a barely discernible white object in the lower half of the frame. After a moment we recognize it as a label on a pharmaceutical bottle, lying open and apparently empty on the floor. Suddenly a limp hand drops into the frame from the top. It hangs there, seemingly lifeless, but then the fingers begin to move. From this point the camera moves upward to reveal Susan Chase lying facedown on her bed. The scene is one of several unique transitions between scenes in Three Secrets, transitions that find their origins in Wise’s day in the RKO editing rooms. Although in screen time it’s only a matter of seconds, the combination of the small, white-labeled bottle and the seemingly lifeless hand isolated within the void of the darkened frame provides an unusually effective visual statement linking Susan’s stoic rejection and her subsequent act of despair. In a film such as Three Secrets, which has so many flashbacks and scene changes, such subtle and unobtrusive transitions provide a seamless quality to the fabric of what would otherwise be a fragmented story. All in all, Robert Wise’s tenth film in seven years is distinguished by a combination of technical smoothness and emotional depth in the portrayal of a woman like Phyllis Horn (a liberated woman twenty-five years ahead of her time), who survives as an independent in a man’s world, retaining without compromise all of her strength and integrity. The choices facing all three women are immensely difficult. That difficulty is painfully evident in the silent struggle evident in the face of each, effectively revealed in extended close-ups

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and small revealing gestures that testify, without melodrama or histrionics, to the elusiveness of personal happiness. In Three Secrets, particularly in the character of Phyllis Horn, Wise is highly effective in achieving on the screen that pensive state of mind of a woman on the edge, and bringing his audience to empathize fully with the pain of the dilemma she is experiencing. He had done it with great success a year earlier, with the character of Julie Thompson in The Set-Up; he would do it again, most notably in 1957, with his direction of Susan Hayward’s Academy Award–winning performance as convicted murderer Barbara Graham in I Want to Live. With the completion of Three Secrets, Wise moved on to a six-picture deal at Twentieth Century Fox. Between 1950 and 1953, he directed Two Flags West (1950), House on Telegraph Hill (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Destination Gobi (1952), Something for the Birds (1952), and the Desert Rats (1953). After completing the first three, Wise joined with Mark Robson, his friend and colleague from his early days at RKO, and Theron Warth, the producer of Blood on the Moon, to form their own company, Aspen Productions. Their first venture was Captive City (1952), which Wise directed. Two Flags West, Wise’s first film at Fox, was a cavalry-versus-Indians Western, made at a time when pictures of this genre came up against heavy competition from the legendary John Ford. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the second entry in what would eventually be Ford’s cavalry trilogy, had been released in 1949, the year before. It was a large, robust film done in Technicolor with all the epic sweep of its Monument Valley locale. Two Flags West, shot in black and white, literally pales in comparison. Shot on location thirty miles outside of Santa Fe, it has a rousing Indian attack finale, with action sequences that are every bit as good as anything to be found in Hollywood Westerns, but the film lacks an authentic ambiance and the emphasis, the real feeling, is not in the historical West or in the interaction of men with the dangers of their frontier environment. Just as his mentor Val Lewton had struggled to do, Wise was clearly intent upon transcending the material he had to work with, preferring to concentrate on a tight and competitive interaction between his two male leads, played by Jeff Chandler and Joseph Cotten. His first experience with such interaction had been the conflict between the characters played by Boris Karloff and Henry Daniell in The Body Snatcher, and over the years it would become an important characteristic of his better films. Wise liked a script that enabled him to present the psychological conflict between two men involved in a project of critical importance, men in conflicting positions of power who clash over how the job is to be done. The conflict is never physical, but a battle of wills in which pressure builds and the secondary characters react to and absorb its effects. Frequently the setting is slightly claustrophobic (submarines, board rooms, underground laboratories,

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compartments in dirigible aircraft), with the appropriate close-ups and tight two-shots to enhance the effect. This characteristic of Robert Wise’s work had its origins—albeit in latent form—in the one-on-one encounters in The Body Snatcher and Blood on the Moon and reaches its full form in such later films as Executive Suite (1954), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), Odds against Tomorrow (1959), The Sand Pebbles (1966), The Andromeda Strain (1971), and The Hindenburg (1975). In Two Flags West, the conflict is between Major Henry Kenniston (Jeff Chandler), the Union Army commander of a frontier fort, and former Confederate Army cavalry Colonel Clay Tucker (Joseph Cotten). In the waning days of the Civil War, the United States government has developed a plan to meet the increasing threat of Indian hostility in the far West and, at the same time, take the first steps toward binding up the nation’s wounds. Tucker, along with the men in his command, has been offered his release from federal army prison provided that he will join the Union Army to fight Indians in the far West. Tucker and his men accept the idea with hesitation, reluctant to forsake the gray for the blue. Several, however, are encouraged by the idea that their sojourn at Fort Thorn might provide the opportunity to season their Indian killing with a Yankee or two. The tension between opposing forces runs from the lowest ranks to the top, with the cool competence and aristocratic bearing of Tucker further antagonizing the neurotic Kenniston, a man already close to the breaking point. Kenniston bitterly resents being stationed at Fort Thorn. He wants to get back to the eastern campaign, where there are opportunities for glory and rank, as well as the chance to avenge the death of his brother, who was killed in one of the early engagements of the war. His concern for the memory of his brother includes a strong determination to protect his widow, Laura, to the point of virtually keeping her prisoner. His feelings toward her are, to say the least, confused. The fact that he is falling in love with her only intensifies a dual sense of guilt and betrayal. He suffers because he is unable either to avenge his brother’s death or make love to his widow. The mutual attraction that is felt between Laura Kenniston (Linda Darnell) and Tucker only serves to send Henry Kenniston further around the bend. He becomes more of a martinet day by day, his hatred of Rebels and Indians making him increasingly unstable. The culmination of all of this comes when the son of a chief arrives at the fort to negotiate. Determined that he will demonstrate once and for all who is in charge of this part of the West, Kenniston kills the young Indian on the spot. The Indians attack the fort in full force and Kenniston finally realizes that he has recklessly endangered his command. In directing Kenniston’s act of atonement, Wise reaches back for visual inspiration to a highly effective scene in an earlier picture. It is night,

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and as the Indian drums beat with slow persistence, a contrite but resolute Kenniston realizes that it is he alone whom the Indians want. He gives an order, and in the distance the gate is slowly opened. Kenniston walks steadily toward it. The shot is at a low-angle, fixed position. Beyond the gateway lies the dark void, with atmospheric touches of swirling fog just outside. Kenniston walks through the gate, the camera holding as he disappears into the darkness. Wise holds on the darkness for a second or two, and then we hear Kenniston’s scream. The drums stop, and the soldier on duty slowly closes the gate. Kenniston’s slow walk into the threatening darkness that swallows him up is an almost exact parallel to the scene in The Body Snatcher in which the street singer walks into the dark archway to her death at the hands of Gray the cabman. Both scenes compel unblinking attention to a central area of darkness within the frame. We watch and listen intently as the central figure in the scene disappears into that darkness. We know that the figure is moving toward certain destruction, but the suspense, paradoxically, is nonetheless effective. It’s the best scene in the picture. Despite his display of vindictive hatred of both Rebels and Indians in the early scenes of the film, Henry Kenniston proves ultimately that he is neither a villain nor a coward. That his death is both horrible and painful is clearly evident from the scream of agony in the darkness, but it is also a heroic death. Whatever his failings, Kenniston finally faces them honestly, and in a singular act of courage recognizes that his death at the hands of the Indians is the only alternative to certain massacre. But in the final analysis it is Clay Tucker who wins the psychological conflict. An admirable figure of confidence and competence, Tucker has the born leader’s instinctive ability to recognize and properly deal with desperate situations. He is everything that the mercurial and increasingly unstable Kenniston is not. But the ultimate act of heroism is reserved for Kenniston. By his self-sacrifice he saves the lives of his command and elicits no small amount of redemption and sympathy from the audience. With the completion of Two Flags West, Wise returned to a more familiar genre in House on Telegraph Hill. Like The Body Snatcher, A Game of Death, and Born to Kill, House on Telegraph Hill is a thriller, the story of a psychotic killer intent upon murdering his wife. It opens in Belsen concentration camp, in the closing days of World War II. Two women, Victoria Kowelska (Valentina Cortesa) and Karen Denakova, struggle against malnutrition and all the attendant horrors of the camp, hoping for the day of liberation. Victoria, the stronger of the two, struggles to keep the quickly fading Karen alive in both body and spirit. Karen eventually dies, but not before she tells her friend that she has a young son, Christopher, who had been taken to America before the war, and is being cared for by a wealthy aunt in San Francisco. Before Karen dies, Victoria promises that she will find and care for Karen’s child.

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When Victoria is liberated from the camp, she assumes Karen’s identity, and lays claim to her son in California. Repatriated by the American government, the new Karen comes to America, where she is met by Alan Spender (Richard Basehart), her son’s (whose name is Chris) newly appointed guardian. Aunt Sophie, who had been caring for Chris, has recently died, and since Chris had no known living relative, Alan, a relative of Aunt Sophie’s from the other side of the family, was appointed Chris’s legal guardian. After what is termed a whirlwind romance, Alan and the somewhat bewildered Karen are married, and return to San Francisco to meet Chris. Arriving in San Francisco, Karen’s masquerade continues to be successful. Chris was too young to remember his mother, and only the late Aunt Sophie could have identified the real Karen. The only apparent obstacle to her new life as wife and mother is Margaret, a young and somewhat mysterious governess who watches over Chris. Margaret is obviously surprised and disturbed when she is told that Karen and Alan are married. Shortly after their arrival, Alan gives a party for Karen in the large Victorian mansion on Telegraph Hill. At the party she meets Marc Bennett (William Lundigan), a lawyer and a close friend of the family. He is also the former American army officer who helped Karen shortly after her liberation from the camp. As Alan introduces them, it becomes immediately apparent that there is a quiet antagonism between Mark and Alan. After this encounter, the generally festive atmosphere of the marriage is short-lived and within a few weeks Karen begins to notice a change in her relationship with her husband. When she fired Margaret after an argument and Alan countermands the order, it becomes clear to Karen that she is not the mistress of the house, and that there is more than an employer–employee relationship between Alan and Margaret. After several mysterious accidents, including a car with brakes that mysteriously fail on one of San Francisco’s steeper hills, she also begins to believe that Alan is trying to kill her, and she’s absolutely right. Marc Bennett, who has fallen in love with Karen and who never had much time for Alan anyway, becomes her only ally. In the final scene, Alan has set the stage to murder Karen. Earlier it was established that at Alan’s insistence, they follow a nightly ritual of drinking orange juice before bed. On this particular evening, Karen’s drink contains a lethal dose of sleeping sedative. But when Alan momentarily leaves the room, Karen, as suspicious as ever, switches glasses. As Alan calmly drinks his juice, he relates to Karen his plan to have complete control of Chris’s inheritance, a plan that includes her murder, and eventually Chris’s as well. Karen then tells Alan that he has taken the drink meant for her. Unable to telephone because Alan had earlier removed the receiver from the extension phone to keep her from calling Marc Bennett, Karen runs for help. Margaret comes, but not to

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Alan’s rescue. Although she is Alan’s mistress, she has developed a genuine affection for Chris. To protect the boy, she stands by and allows Alan to die. Finally, the police arrive and arrest Margaret for Alan’s murder. Karen reveals her true identity to Marc and they proceed to pick up the pieces of her life together. Although beautifully photographed and incisively directed, House on Telegraph Hill is flawed by a pedestrian script greatly lacking in originality. The Elick Moll–Frank Partos screenplay portrays the familiar story of the innocent bride who slowly becomes the victim of an alternately affectionate and mysteriously sinister husband. The basic Jane Eyre story is liberally embellished with elements from such other successful productions as Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944). As for the cast, William Lundigan didn’t offer much beyond the quality of his performance in Mystery in Mexico, but Valentina Cortesa, making her American film debut, gave a splendid performance, albeit as a Polish refugee with an Italian accent. Richard Basehart, whose career to this point was largely confined to portraying psychotics, was highly effective as the menacing husband. As a mystery, House on Telegraph Hill is eminently predictable, depending as it does on the short-lived but successful effects of music and lighting to create an illusion of mystery. Like Wise’s first feature, The Curse of the Cat People, it works to create an air of intrigue where there is essentially little. The primary ingredient in creating that sense of mystery and establishing the consistent mood of the picture is Lucien Ballard’s cinematography. Particularly effective are the opening scenes in the concentration camp where Wise and Ballard work with low-contrast lighting to evoke a sense of despair and hopelessness through varying shades of gray that avoid the dramatic extremes of black or white. The ultimate effect is an oppressive sense of gray hopelessness, so that when Victoria/Karen finally survives, her triumph is all the more heroic. Wise noticeably restrains his frame compositions, avoiding extreme angles and high contrast as shortcuts to dramatic effect. As Alan’s psychotic tendencies begin to become apparent, Wise avoids dramatic shadows and makeup in favor of slightly longer takes in which the camera slowly drops to a lower angle. The sense of overbearing menace in Alan is thereby developed more slowly and subtly, and the ultimate psychological effect is worthy of the best of Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, some of the best scenes in the film are clearly imitations of Hitchcock, and Wise freely acknowledged that homage. The scene in which Karen is discovered by Alan in the old playhouse is a notable example. The playhouse floor is rotted away and there is a sheer drop of several hundred feet to the street below. As Alan slowly approaches Karen, her back to the large hole in the floor, Wise shoots the scene in a series of close-ups, a brief montage of six shots in all:

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Alan’s face Karen’s face Karen’s feet Alan’s face Karen’s face

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(an enigmatic smile with a suggestion of menace) (bewilderment and apprehension) (one foot, hesitating, moves backward) (roughly a duplicate of the first shot) (still bewildered and apprehensive, but with a slight tinge of panic, as we hear Chris in the background calling her) (as the floor suddenly gives way beneath the foot that was moving backward)

For the seventh shot, immediately following this sequence of close-ups, Wise chooses a medium shot as Alan, now aware of Chris as a possible witness, grabs Karen just before she falls. Wise does a similar shot sequence in the scene in which Karen, after ascending a steep hill in her car and coming down the other side, finds that her brakes do not work. Wise moves from her face behind the wheel to her foot applying the brakes. The pedal goes immediately to the floor, and Wise cuts to her face for a reaction shot and then back to her foot as she pumps the brake to no avail. Also very much in the Hitchcockian mode are the shots of the glasses of orange juice, placed prominently in the foreground as Karen and Alan, in deep focus, continue their movement and dialogue. Shots like these are all but patented, having played prominent roles in such Hitchcock classics as The Lady Vanishes and Suspicion. In other ways, House on Telegraph Hill proved a more challenging film than any of Wise’s later films. Most of the exteriors were shot on actual location in San Francisco, but photography was hampered not only by fog from the bay, but also by smoke from a nearby forest fire. There was also no house on Telegraph Hill that came even close to the description given in the script. On the summit of the hill was a well-known restaurant and San Francisco landmark known as Julius’s Castle; it was up to Art Director Lyle Wheeler and his crew to convert the restaurant into the mansion described in the script. An entirely new façade was designed, including a garden where the restaurant had its parking lot. The new set was constructed in Hollywood. One weekend night when the restaurant was closed to the public, a landscape crew converted the parking lot into the mansion’s garden as studio carpenters and technicians temporarily reconstructed the front of the building. Only the first floor, however, was reconstructed. The upper stories, with the Victorian gingerbread design and tower-like cupolas, were printed in later by matte process. All efforts coalesced beautifully, and, as in many films of this period, the contribution of the special effects work is ultimately as unobtrusive as it is effective.3 But for all the careful and detailed attention that quite evidently went into House on Telegraph Hill, it comes across today as a rather pedestrian effort. Although technically without flaw, Wise’s first two pictures at Fox have about

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them the peculiar flatness found in many contract films, films shot from scripts that a director accepts when he is under studio contract to do a certain number of pictures within a specified period. It was similar to the old studio system, and contract directors found themselves more often than not directing films in which they felt little sense of personal involvement and commitment. Scripts of high quality and variety were rare, and studios adhered to the usual genre. There is always, however, the exception to the rule, as Wise discovered in his next Fox project, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

NOTES 1. Bosley Crowther, “The Screen in Review,” New York Times, October 2, 1950. 2. Otis Guernsey, “On the Screen,” New York Herald Tribune, October 2, 1950. 3. Herb A. Lightman, “The House on Telegraph Hill,” American Cinematographer (July 1951): 260.

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Science Fiction and the Cold War: The Day the Earth Stood Still

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ntil the mid-twentieth century, science fiction as a film genre had been underutilized. Aside from the mad scientist B pictures cranked out by Universal, nothing of consequence had been produced for almost fifteen years. In 1936, William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come, a masterpiece of production design, had demonstrated the extraordinary screen potential of science fiction. But the genre lay dormant until 1950, when it was resurrected with Irving Pichel’s Destination Moon and Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M. These were followed in 1951 by Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X and Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. The script for Wise’s third film at Twentieth Century Fox was written by Edmund North from a short story by Harry Bates. The project was particularly appealing to Wise for several reasons: it provided an opportunity to offer, within the framework of a solid story, a meaningful commentary on people and international politics at the height of the Cold War. It also offered him the opportunity and challenge of working in a new genre. While the other science fiction films of the period are all but forgotten except by the more ardent sci-fi buffs, The Day the Earth Stood Still has proved to be one of Wise’s most durable efforts. It continues to be shown and was for a while something of a cult film. By Wise’s own reckoning, it had through the 1990s been shown on television more than all of his other films put together. North’s script is an intelligent one, something that cannot be said for many early science fiction films. The basic premise is not nearly as farfetched as one might initially think, the fact notwithstanding that it includes a flying saucer and a large robot with enormous destructive potential, not the least of which is a disintegrating ray that it emits from a visored opening in its head.

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The opening scene takes place on a bright, quite ordinary day in Washington, D.C. Suddenly, a flying saucer appears overhead and lands on the Ellipse. As the crowds gather, the authorities take predictable defensive action and ring the saucer with tanks, artillery, and troops. When the saucer finally opens and the visitor from outer space appears, he announces that he comes “in peace and goodwill.” But a gift he is bringing is mistaken for a weapon, and he is abruptly shot by a nervous soldier. The hostile action provokes a large robot, who suddenly appears on the scene and proceeds to use his disintegrating ray to polish off several military vehicles. Before the robot can do further damage, it is stopped by a few chosen words from the wounded visitor. The wounded visitor is then whisked off to Walter Reed Hospital. In the hospital, the visitor, whose name is Klaatu (Michael Rennie), to the amazement of the doctors attending him, cures his own wound overnight, using a special salve that he brought with him. Under a low-profile house arrest, Klaatu is visited at Walter Reed by an emissary from the State Department to whom he explains his mission. Since the superpowers on earth have moved into the nuclear age, conflict among the nations of the earth now has the potential to threaten the entire universe. Unless the leaders of the nations of the world are prepared to come together, resolve their differences, and form lasting peace, the extraterrestrial powers Klaatu represents are prepared to annihilate earth in order to safeguard the universe from nuclear destruction. Klaatu proposes an immediate conference of world leaders so that he might deliver his message in person. The emissary promises to do what he can, but explains to the incredulous Klaatu that such things take time, that there are matters of diplomacy and a variety of governmental procedures to be considered. Until the necessary arrangements can be made, Klaatu will be kept at the hospital. Obviously an alien from a planet of far superior intelligence and technology will not be kept in place by locked doors. After purloining a suit of clothes (which, coincidentally, fits admirably), Klaatu wanders about the city of Washington getting to know the people rather than the politicians. Using the name “Carpenter” (the name of the owner of the suit, conveniently printed on the inside pocket), he moves into a small boarding house where he meets Helen Benson (Patricia Neal), a war widow, and her son, Bobby (Billy Gray). Bobby and Mr. Carpenter become great friends, and Bobby, unaware that he is in the company of the celebrated Martian, becomes Mr. Carpenter’s tour guide, taking him to the monuments of the nation’s capital and generally introducing him to American culture on planet Earth. In response to Carpenter’s question “Who is the smartest man on earth?” Bobby leads Klaatu to the home of Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe), the worldrenowned mathematician. Carpenter is able to convince Barnhardt of the sincerity and the urgency of his mission, and the professor agrees to use his pres-

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tige and influence to assemble the world’s leading scientists to hear Carpenter. But, Barnhardt maintains, an indisputable demonstration of Carpenter’s power would do wonders (quite literally) to expedite matters. It must be nonviolent, but sufficiently effective to be convincing. Carpenter/Klaatu knows exactly what is needed. Several days later, at precisely twelve noon, the world gets its demonstration of the power that is at Carpenter’s command: all of the electricity on earth is temporarily neutralized. With the exception of airplanes and hospitals, lights go out, automobiles stall, washing machines stop, cops jump on motorcycle starters to no avail. It’s the same in every city and town throughout the world. The entire planet comes to a complete standstill for thirty minutes. The demonstration convinces the scientific community, and Barnhardt proceeds to make the necessary arrangements for the meeting. In the meantime, Helen’s jealous suitor, Tom Stevens (Hugh Marlowe), discovers Carpenter’s true identity and informs the authorities of his whereabouts. An all-points bulletin is issued and the police and the military comb the streets in search of the dangerous alien. Cornered by their pursuers on their way to Barnhardt’s meeting, Carpenter and Helen attempt to run. Carpenter is shot, this time fatally. Before he dies, however, he tells Helen that she must get to Gort, the robot, and say the following words: “Klaatu Barada Nikto.” Without these words to stop him, Gort will destroy the entire planet. Helen reaches Gort just as he’s getting underway and stops him. She faints and Gort carries her into the saucer. He then leaves to retrieve the body of Klaatu. Returning shortly thereafter, Gort demonstrates again just how advanced his technology is by restoring Klaatu/Carpenter to life. Helen Benson is free to go, and Klaatu once more reiterates his warning to the assembled crowd before returning to the distant and unidentified planet from which he came. When The Day the Earth Stood Still was released, it struck squarely at the rampant paranoia of the Cold War years. It was a time when many were convinced that nuclear war on a global scale was imminent and that the Korean conflict of 1950–1953, in which the United Nations forces were opposing North Korea and Communist China, supported by the Soviet Union, was a futile holding action, a prelude to the inevitable. The close of World War II had introduced the world to the devastating power of the atom bomb, and the events of the postwar years steadily increased international apprehension. The news that Russia had gained nuclear capability created further global anxiety and brought about increased atomic testing, nuclear stockpiling, and the growing fear of sudden, catastrophic intercontinental nuclear attack. The Korean War made us aware of the jet plane and supersonic flight as integral parts of modern warfare. As the world moved into the 1950s and into a climate of deepening angst, the idea of space flight was moving out of the realm of pure fantasy and coming closer to reality, bringing along with it a latent fear of alien invasion.

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For many the world’s salvation seemed to lie in divine intervention, and Robert Wise’s film, stopping short of a possible accusation of sacrilege, offers something very close to such an intercession. Klaatu is quite obviously a Christ figure, coming to earth “to bring peace and goodwill” and later assuming the name “Carpenter.” Claude Rains had been the first choice for the part of Klaatu, largely on the basis of previous performances in similar roles, particularly as a supernatural emissary in Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), and Archie Mayo’s Angel on My Shoulder (1946). But Rains was tied up with a play in New York and so the role went to Michael Rennie, an English actor newly under contract at Fox.1 Rennie’s face has the gaunt yet kindly quality suggestive of a modern Christ, and as Klaatu he was particularly effective in conveying a soft-spoken tolerance of those shortsighted lesser mortals around him, to whom he had come to bring a message of salvation. Censorship, however, was still a significant obstacle to moviemaking, and in the case of The Day the Earth Stood Still, the censors were particularly sensitive to the possibility that the Klaatu–Christ parallel was verging on blasphemy. When, for example, Barnhardt asks him if his power is truly unlimited, Klaatu is quick to point out that unlimited power is “reserved to the almighty spirit.” Later, in the scene where Helen Benson witnesses his resurrection, Klaatu makes it clear that he has been “restored for a limited period.” Answers such as these were sufficient to satisfy the censors. Wise was also careful to avoid overdoing special effects that lend themselves so naturally and readily to science fiction. He takes great pains to treat the landing as a genuine news story, going easy on the visually sensational and leaning, as he did in Three Secrets, toward a documentary quality. In addition to shooting in black and white, which in 1951 was still the visual medium that suggested a greater sense of the authentic than did color, he adds to the air of authenticity by including brief appearances by H. V. Kaltenborn, Elmer Davis, Drew Pearson, and Gabriel Heatter (radio voice only), the major news commentators of the day, each reporting in his own inimitable style on the saucer landing. Wise worked to avoid too much emphasis on fantasy and stayed as close to realism and credibility as the story would permit. Aside from the opening overhead flight and landing of the saucer (done by a traveling animated matte process), the scenes in which Gort disintegrates adversaries, and the shots of various cities around the world brought to a standstill, there are no special effects of the type so familiar to a post–Star Wars generation. Special effects technology was not developed to the degree that it is today, and Wise’s restraint in using what was available at the time was a conscious effort to avoid a cheap sensationalism that could have undermined the integrity of the screenplay.

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Although the special effects are relatively few, in their stead we have two of the most impressive and memorable props to be found in the genre of science fiction film: Klaatu’s saucer spaceship and Gort, the giant robot. Much has been written in recent years explaining how Wise achieved those early effects, but John Brosnan’s excellent detail has been equaled but not surpassed. In the following passage, he describes the reality behind the saucer illusion: It consisted of a wooden framework, wire, plaster of paris and silver paint. Inside it was hollow, except for two panes of plastic erected just inside the opening of the dome to give the impression of a complicated interior. The only solid part was the ramp which folded out from the saucer. This had to take the weight of the actors so it was built on a metal framework and covered with sheet metal. Flimsy though the saucer may have been (it was so light it almost took off from the studio back lot during a gale), it measured 350 feet in circumference, stood 25 feet high, and cost $10,000.2

Brosnan also demystifies the creation of Gort, the giant, and very metallic, robot: To construct the suit a mold was first made and around it a fiberglass cloth was sewn into place. The cloth was sprayed with solidifying lacquer. After becoming solid the fiberglass, which had dried to conform to the shape of the mold, was removed from the figure. It was cut into segments and liquid rubber was poured over each segment until it was of a sufficient thickness to appear solid yet still pliable. The head was made of sheet metal. Another head was made for the close-ups of Gort’s visor opening and emitting the disintegrating rays.3

The suit to which Brosnan refers was actually two suits: one with a zipper down the front for shots from the rear, the other with a zipper down the back for shots from the front. Inside the suit was Lock Martin, the seven-foot doorman at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. But having found a man who was big enough to play Gort did not solve all of the problems. Although imposing in height, Martin was not a very strong man. He could neither lift nor carry Patricia Neal in the scenes calling for him to do so. In the scene where she faints and is picked up by Gort and carried into the saucer, Wise solved the problem in the following way: as Neal moves away from Gort, she backs up against one of the flats that has been erected to encircle the chairs that have been placed around the saucer for Barnhardt’s meeting. Behind the obscuring flat a crane hoist is ready to lift her, as Gort bends forward to lift her. The camera angle is from behind Gort and, with careful editing, she seems to be lifted smoothly and effortlessly by the robot. Follow-

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ing this is a long shot showing Gort carrying what appears to be Patricia Neal up the ramp into the saucer, but is actually a dummy. The film audience, however, remains unaware, for the figure in Gort’s arms is totally upstaged by the image of Gort, the robot with seemingly unlimited power, slowly moving into the gleaming spacecraft.4 A number of factors come together to make The Day the Earth Stood Still a memorable film, not the least of which is the polished and urbane performance of Michael Rennie. In support of Rennie, Patricia Neal’s portrayal of the strong but emotionally vulnerable young widow offers, in proper balance, a sense of mystification and hesitant trust. Billy Gray, as her son, is the quintessential American youngster as such a concept might be envisioned through the eyes of Norman Rockwell. Hugh Marlowe is also just right as the shallow, self-centered bureaucrat, masking petty ambition with a veneer of respectability. Sam Jaffe is, as always, the master of wide-eyed wonder. He fills the bill as the woolgathering mathematician, suggestive of Albert Einstein, taking his own brilliance-cum-humility and his awe of Klaatu in stride. Punctuate these carefully orchestrated performances with Bernard Hermann’s eerie and suspenseful score, and the result is Wise’s best film since he left RKO, and one of the best of his career.

NOTES 1. Robert Wise, interview with author, July 27, 1978. 2. John Brosnan, Movie Magic:The Story of Special Effects in the Cinema (New York: New American Library, 1976), 197. 3. Brosnan, Movie Magic, 198. 4. Sergio Leeman, Robert Wise on His Films (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1995), 107.

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•

8

•

1952–1958: Documentary Style— And Everything Else . . .

The Day the Earth Stood Still further revealed Robert Wise’s penchant for

making films that had about them a documentary flavor and a desire to bring to the forefront some significant problem facing society. His next film, The Captive City (1952), confirms that inclination. The Day the Earth Stood Still highlighted the dangers of nuclear brinksmanship; The Captive City, following in the wake of the U.S. Senate’s Kefauver Committee hearings the previous year, takes on organized crime. It was produced by Aspen, Wise’s own company, which began production early in 1952. The original plans for a production company, dating back to 1949, initially called for a three-way partnership that would have included Wise, Robson, and their former mentor, Val Lewton, who at that time was a writer-producer at MGM. Lewton, however, was not part of the final deal. Robson and Wise decided at the last minute to include Theron Warth instead. Simply put, Wise and Robson changed their minds. Lewton had been a primary agent in the launching of the careers of both directors when they were fresh out of the editing rooms at RKO, but he was not the creative talent he had been. It was perhaps a ruthless decision, but one that at the time they considered difficult but necessary. They were convinced that Theron Warth, who had been the producer on Blood on the Moon, would make the greater contribution to the new enterprise. Such a decision was hardly uncharacteristic of young and ambitious Hollywood entrepreneurs. Put together at a time when independent production companies found financial backing hard to come by, Aspen Productions proved a short-lived venture, producing only two films. In addition to Wise’s The Captive City, Mark Robson directed Return to Paradise (1953), a tale of the South Seas based on a James Michener short story. 75

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Making a film for his own company gave Wise a greater freedom than he had ever had before. The entire picture was shot on location in less than a month, using Reno, Nevada, for the small Midwestern town of Kennington. It was the first time that Wise ever shot anything without a studio base, and that freedom, budget limitations notwithstanding, is apparent in the style and technique of The Captive City. Wise used the newspaper office, the city hall, and various other locations around town for his interiors. Not a foot of film was shot in a Hollywood studio. The result has a documentary quality that all but totally dispels the Hollywood slickness that accompanies—and often falsifies— many of the crime films of the period. Shot from an original screenplay by Karl Kamb and Alvin Josephy Jr., The Captive City is the story of Jim Austin (John Forsythe), a small-town newspaper editor who discovers that organized crime, in the form of syndicate-controlled bookmaking, has thoroughly infiltrated his town. At first he doesn’t believe it, attributing it to the overactive imagination of the private investigator who first brings it to his attention. When that investigator is killed, Austin begins to ask questions on his own. It gradually becomes clear that many of the town’s leading citizens, including the chief of police, are covering up their own complicity. Austin starts a newspaper crusade that ends with his having to flee for his life. From the very beginning, Wise gives his story an air of realism and authenticity. The opening credits are superimposed on an official-looking file folder, placed in the center of a desk blotter, the file slightly tilted to the left. As the credits are completed, the camera slowly zooms in on the folder, on the face of which is typed: The Special Senate Committee To Investigate Organized Crime In Interstate Commerce Vol. I

The folder opens to reveal the following statement: “Ordinarily, Americans don’t think much about the existence of organized crime; they know vaguely that it is there, and they let it go at that . . . ” UNLESS PRODDED BY SOME UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES.

Estes Kefauver The implication is that what we are about to see is a true story, straight from indisputable evidence in government files. To complete the framework of authenticity, Wise ends the film with a short clip of Senator Kefauver at his desk, offering additional generalizations, lamenting the insidious nature of organized crime, and praising citizen vigilance.

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The illusion of authenticity continues throughout the narrative. Immediately following the credits, Wise begins the action with an automobile chase, as Austin and his wife are shown fleeing an ominous black sedan. They find refuge in a police station in an adjoining town, and here Austin tells his story into a tape recorder. As he unfolds his tale, Wise presents the story in flashback. The tape-recording sequence, which begins and ends the narrative portion of the film, gives an additional authentic touch suggesting sworn testimony, a sort of verbal and visual affidavit. Another element that added to the authentic flavor of the film was the casting. Wise used no name actors. John Forsythe had had some Broadway experience, but this was his motion picture debut; Joan Camden, who plays his wife, had only recently graduated from UCLA. The smaller supporting roles are filled by the familiar faces of Hollywood’s collection of character actors, but none of these are particularly distinctive types. They all seem to have the very ordinary, small-town quality that Wise obviously wanted. Hal Dawson as Nelson, the private investigator, looks more like a shoe salesman than the conventional Hollywood private eye. He even has a solicitous wife, and they talk about retirement. Martin Milner, as Phil Harding, the aspiring cub reporter who seems to want nothing more from life than to be exactly like Jim Austin, is the clean-cut all-American boy. In this film there are no really bad guys among the natives, only victims. A barber or the owner of a used car lot who accepts a small bookmaking operation on the premises hardly sees himself as an extension of organized crime; he sees this new source of income as a boon to the town’s economy and wonders, whom can it hurt? When Austin attempts to explain to them what the proceeds go to support, they don’t want to hear it. The crusade, then, is to make the people of the town aware of the kind of thing in which they have implicated themselves. The criminal element, the hardboiled syndicate types, stay generally in the background, nonetheless conspicuous (in their dark suits and black cars) as outsiders. They are there to see that their interests are protected. In doing so, they murder Nelson, the private eye, and they beat up Phil Harding when he takes a picture of one of the syndicate people. As Austin presses his newspaper attack, he is rewarded for his efforts with a large dose of middle-American apathy and a growing anxiety that he is stirring up needless trouble. Mrs. Harding blames him for the attack on her son, and his partner pressures him because his campaign is causing a drop in advertising revenues. But Austin is an idealist, motivated by honesty and integrity, and he presses on, determined to save his town from being destroyed and the townspeople from destroying themselves. As The Captive City ends, the camera comes back to Austin at the tape recorder. He speaks directly to the audience, hammering home the point that

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the prevention of organized crime as a viable power in the economic structure of the country is as much or more a matter of citizen vigilance as it is law enforcement. In both The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Captive City, the solution for society’s problems and the hope of the future lie in the hands of an alert, informed, and active citizenry. Thus the optimistic message of The Captive City. Despite his inclinations toward a documentary quality, Wise was unable to resist some interesting parallels to The Set-Up, a film that also placed great emphasis on realism. Quite clearly Wise had The Set-Up in mind when he was shaping the action of The Captive City. Both films have a protagonist who is unwittingly surrounded by corruption but who has sufficient integrity not to give up the fight, even when doing so would make things so much easier for him. In the end, each protagonist, quite literally, runs for his life. The association of the two films even carries over into several small touches by the director, borrowed from the earlier film. Austin, working late in his office, discovers that the mobsters are waiting outside for him. As he gets up quietly to leave, he first reaches to turn out the office light, but then deliberately leaves it on, duplicating the same unsuccessful ruse attempted by Stoker Thompson as he slipped out of his dressing room to avoid Little Boy and his thugs. In the scene in which Nelson, the private detective, is murdered, it happens, like the beating of Stoker Thompson, in a dead-end alley from which there is no escape. As Nelson opens his mouth to scream, the camera zooms in to a tight close-up and Wise abruptly cuts to a close-up of the bell of a blaring trumpet at the country club where Jim Austin and his wife are dining and dancing. The scream and the sound of the trumpet are momentarily indistinguishable. It’s a transition that parallels the one in The Set-Up in which Wise cuts from the close-up of Stoker’s soon-to-be-mutilated hand to the shadows of the Dreamland Orchestra (featuring a long and loud drum roll) on the alley wall above. Much of the credit for the visual quality of these sequences must go to Lee Garmes for his excellent cinematography. Working without studio conditions is particularly hard on a cinematographer, but Garmes manages to create the proper balance of light and shadow to maintain atmosphere where it is psychologically needed, but never at the cost of the cinema verité quality Wise was working for. The Captive City was a personally satisfying project for Robert Wise, as was the film that preceded it, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Each project gave him the opportunity to make a significant statement about the country and the serious problems it currently faced (Cold War tension and organized crime, respectively). Consistent with his early desire and inclination to make documentaries, he found the opportunity to make such commentary highly fulfilling, but now he wanted the challenge of something different. He had been a

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film director for fewer than ten years, and in that relatively brief period he had done horror, crime, and two Westerns, in addition to the political films recently completed. When the opportunity to make a comedy with Patricia Neal at Twentieth Century Fox came his way, it seemed just the welcome change and new challenge he was looking for. Something for the Birds (1952), Robert Wise’s first essay in comedy, is for the most part only mildly amusing. A spoof of bureaucratic Washington, it stars Patricia Neal, Edmund Gwenn, and a woefully miscast Victor Mature. Neal plays a conservationist who comes to Washington to present the cause of the SPCC—The Society for the Preservation of the California Condor. Of course no one’s ever heard of the SPCC, which everyone confuses with the SPCA. Undaunted by her group’s lack of political connections, she has come to Washington because the condor’s chief nesting grounds are currently endangered by certain natural gas interests, intent upon moving into the condor’s habitat and clearing the area for development and exploration. Gwenn, a printer’s engraver by day, is a mainstay at all of the best Washington parties, which he attends by printing his own counterfeit invitations. At first only a sympathetic ear for her plight, he becomes her ally. Acting as a grandfatherly go-between, he introduces her to Mature, a successful Washington lobbyist. Gwenn, of course, is unaware that Mature’s primary client is (as the plot would have it) a California natural gas corporation. Smitten with the lovely condor advocate and the challenge she presents, Mature attempts to keep his double agency a secret, but gradually his cynical view of the Washington bureaucracy clashes with her forthrightness and naïve idealism. Eventually he succumbs, both to her and her ideals. The script for Something for the Birds offers decidedly weak comedy, surprisingly so for something to which I. A. L. Diamond, a longtime Hollywood writer who would later be noted for his scripting of Billy Wilder comedies, had put his name. The only truly funny scene takes place during a senate hearing on the condor issue. Neal has gained the support of an odd ornithologist who, in the course of the hearing, cannot resist giving the proper bird call for any species of bird mentioned. Another scene, in which Neal seductively invites Mature up to her hotel room for something he’ll “really enjoy,” only to dim the lights and treat him to a documentary film on the plight of the condor, aimed for big laughs but misfired. Something for the Birds should at the very least be a passable screwball comedy, but it lacks a certain zaniness that Wise is either unable or uninclined to generate. In the course of his career, Wise had little or no success with comedy, but much of the problem in Something for the Birds lies with casting rather than direction. Not every comedy can have the magic of the Grant–Dunne, Powell–Loy, or Tracy–Hepburn combinations, but the Mature–Neal team doesn’t click at all. Neal is such a

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dominant personality that she seems always on the verge of overwhelming any actor with whom she shares the screen, a quality that even Mature’s broad-shouldered brashness cannot offset. Mature makes an obvious effort to overcome a total lack of comic flair, but ultimately he delivers his lines and little else. Wise’s three war films of the ’50s, Destination Gobi (1953), The Desert Rats (1953), and Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), offer clear indications that he is particularly comfortable with that genre, perhaps because war films lend themselves so readily to the documentary style that is present in much of his best work. Typically, a war film tells a fictional story within a context of actual events and, working in this genre, Wise was able to invest each dramatization with elements of documentary authenticity. Destination Gobi, for example, the film that followed Something for the Birds, opens with the subjective camera moving into classified files of the Navy Department, where we encounter the curious case of a Navy request for sixty cavalry saddles during World War II. From this realistic point of departure we move to the story of Chief Petty Officer Sam McHale (Richard Widmark) and a six-man weather monitoring unit in the Gobi Desert. When they are cut off by the Japanese, they enlist the aid of a group of Mongolian tribesmen, nomadic horsemen who move freely and are seen as no threat by the Japanese. The tribesmen, who passively resent the Japanese presence in their homeland, are effectively seduced by the saddles, which are airlifted to McHale’s isolated unit. The saddles distributed, the tribesmen become the First Mongolian Cavalry, complete with guidon. Disguised as Mongol horsemen, the Navy weathermen—after a series of near encounters and hairbreadth escapes—make their way to the comparative safety of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a wildly improbable story, but Wise works to maintain throughout an air of authenticity. Having implied at the beginning that it’s a true story, he never dispels the illusion. The same authentic structure provides the framework for Desert Rats (1953) and, later, for Run Silent, Run Deep (1958). Desert Rats came to Wise as part of his six-picture contract with Twentieth Century Fox. It was originally slated as a project for Samuel Fuller, who was to write the script and direct, but like The Set-Up, it became for Robert Wise another “inherited” project and another notable success. Fox studios had had great success with Henry Hathaway’s The Desert Fox (1951), a sympathetic treatment of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. In their decision to do a sequel, it was also decided to redress some of the outcry that arose from various veterans groups who, at a time so soon after the end of the war, were offended by the sympathetic portrayal of a German general. James Mason reprised the role of Rommel—now reduced to little more than a cameo—but Richard Murphy’s script invests him with a sneering arrogance and an unmistakable air of ruthlessness, in direct contrast to the portrayal in

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The Desert Fox. There is also an obvious emphasis on Rommel’s failures rather than his successes. Wise prepared for the picture by thoroughly researching all available contemporary records of the siege of Tobruk. It was at Tobruk in western Sahara that the ninth Australian Infantry division held off Rommel’s advance for 242 days, thus giving the allies precious time to fortify Cairo and the Suez Canal. The story centers on an English officer (Richard Burton) assigned to command a relatively green Australian battalion and bring them up to the best standards of British military discipline and combat readiness. The basic conflict emerges as the loose camaraderie of the Australians clashes with what they see as the rigid standards of a heartless martinet. Gradually, however, his men overcome their antagonistic feelings and come to respect him, as their battle experience makes them aware that combat conditions require tough—even heartless—decisions. Wise is particularly effective in re-creating those combat conditions that shape ordinary men into fighting heroes. The fear, the pressure, the anxiety, and the subsequent strength that seems to come out of their interaction are all there, but Wise never lets the heroics go beyond the proportions of realism. Working with cameraman Lucien Ballard, who did such excellent work in House on Telegraph Hill, Wise gives his images a grainy, low-contrast quality that captures effectively the authenticity of newsreel footage. His penchant for realism particularly impressed Arthur Knight, film critic for Saturday Review: Director Robert Wise has gotten an almost documentary quality into his action sequences—the panzer attacks, the night raids, the scenes of handto-hand front-line fighting. Lucien Ballard’s brilliant black-and-white photography is also helpful, capturing the gritty feel of a desert sand storm, the eerie lights of perimeter artillery fire against the night sky, the explosion of an enemy ammunition dump. It’s combat history brought alive with spinetingling realism.1

All told, it’s an impressive film, and unlike many of this genre, it hasn’t dated. It must also take its place as a member of a rather small and select group: a sequel (of sorts) that proves a worthy successor to the original. Wise’s romantic dramas of the 1950s fall into that category of film identified at the time as a women’s picture, the kind of film made primarily for female audiences. In addition to Three Secrets, he directed So Big (1953), based on Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, and Until They Sail (1957), a story about the romantic tribulations of American military personnel in wartime New Zealand. So Big had been filmed twice before: once in 1925 with Colleen Moore and again in 1932 with Barbara Stanwyck. Warner Bros. recognized its perennial appeal as a genuine tearjerker and decided to offer it again, this time as a

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vehicle for Jane Wyman. Wyman plays the role of Selina Pool, a turn-of-thecentury debutante who is reduced to teaching school in a small Midwestern farming community after her father dies from the shock of losing everything in the collapse of the grain market. She falls in love with and marries a farmer, Pervis DeJong (Sterling Hayden), and they have a son, Dirk, nicknamed “So Big.” When Pervis dies, Selina is once again left penniless. Possessed of vast stores of optimism and solid American initiative, however, she ventures into truck farming. With the help of some wealthy friends from her school days who come back into her life at just the right time, she turns her farm into a specialty venture, raising what we are told is the world’s best asparagus. Over the years Selina prospers, and is able to send her son to school to study architecture. All of her life Selina has firmly believed, as her father taught her, that there are basically two kinds of good people in the world: wheat and emerald. The wheat people provide the essential necessities of life; the emerald people use their creative talents to supply the world with beauty. Although Selina is herself a wheat person, she supported and encouraged one of her early pupils with musical talent who eventually became a famous composer, and she firmly believes in and supports the creative side of her architect son. But Dirk, seduced by the lure of the dollar, sells his skills to the world of salesmanship and shoddy materialism when he accepts a junior executive position in sales for an architectural firm. When he falls in love with a dedicated painter, he discovers that he, now neither wheat nor emerald, doesn’t speak her language. After some soul-searching, he regains his perspective and, to his mother’s satisfaction, returns to the pursuit of emerald status. The picture that followed So Big was one of Robert Wise’s very special accomplishments of the period. Executive Suite (1954) is the picture that introduced a new film genre—the business procedural—and brought about a trend in films dealing with intrigue in the boardrooms of corporate America.2 Scripted by Ernest Lehman and produced by John Houseman, it is by no means a flawless film, but it is all but flawlessly directed; the last thirty minutes are as fine as anything Hollywood has ever produced. Working with Houseman was a very special experience for Wise. It was a return to the kind of relationship he had known at RKO with Val Lewton, with whom Houseman shared a similar working style. A longtime associate of Orson Welles, Houseman had helped found the Mercury Theatre and had come to Hollywood to work on Citizen Kane. At the time that Wise was shooting The Set-Up, Houseman was working nearby as the producer of Nicholas Ray’s first film, They Live by Night (1949). By 1953, Houseman was well established as a producer, particularly on the strength of his recent and highly acclaimed The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), directed by Vincente Min-

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nelli, which received five Academy Awards. When Dore Schary brought Cameron Hawley’s novel to his attention, the project had almost immediate appeal for Houseman, whose first step was to engage, on the recommendation of his associate producer, Jud Kinberg, a young, novice screenwriter named Ernest Lehman for the job. Next was the question of who was to direct; there were a number of contract directors at MGM who wanted the job, but Houseman had no difficulty making his choice: I knew exactly whom I wanted, and this made it easier to find sound, logical reasons for rejecting all the “established” directors whom the studio tried to thrust upon me. . . . I wanted Robert Wise, whom I had known for many years—beginning with his days as a film editor at RKO, where he worked on Citizen Kane and Ambersons. I had been around when he directed his first film for Val Lewton’s horror-unit. While [Nicholas Ray] and I were making [They Live by Night] he had been directing Robert Ryan in The Set-Up, which I still consider the best prizefight picture ever made. In his later films he had shown himself to be a calm, well-organized director and a brilliant editor—qualities that would be needed in the making of Executive Suite.3

Since there would be eight major stars playing in Executive Suite, and the final third of the film would place them all in confined space around a boardroom table, Houseman felt that this film called for a director whose skills must include “those of an engineer and a lion tamer,”4 but knew that he had to be more than a disciplinarian of sensitive egos. It was clear to him that Robert Wise filled the bill completely: Among Robert Wise’s particular virtues were those of coolness and modesty. No director with a visible ego could have handled a cast made up of what might well have been the largest collection of stars ever assembled for a dramatic picture—except possibly Grand Hotel. William Holden, Fredric March, Barbara Stanwyck, June Allyson, Walter Pidgeon, Paul Douglas, Louis Calhern, Shelley Winters, Dean Jagger, Nina Foch. They appeared in separate episodes, but finally, they all sat together in that somber, imitationgothic boardroom, nailed to their chairs while the camera turned, twisted and hovered around them in an endless series of master scenes, two-shots and close-ups.5

Executive Suite is the story of the struggle for control of a large furniture corporation. More important, it’s an examination of the responsibility that accompanies power. The film opens with the last fifteen minutes in the life of Avery Bullard, chairman of the board and president of Tredway Furniture. The audience, however, never sees Avery Bullard; instead, through the use of

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the subjective camera, we see what Bullard sees: his associates in his broker’s office saying goodbye, the woman at the Western Union office who sends his telegram announcing an evening meeting of his vice presidents, and, finally, as he walks out onto the sidewalk to hail a taxi, the spinning of the skyscrapers overhead as he collapses and dies of a heart attack. It’s a highly imaginative opening, and one in which Houseman and Wise draw heavily, if subconsciously, on their joint experiences working with Welles on Citizen Kane. As Bullard collapses, he is holding his wallet in his hand. When he hits the sidewalk, the wallet falls into the gutter and remains unnoticed by the gathering crowd. As Bullard is taken away in an ambulance, someone (we see only his hands in tight close-up) quietly picks up the wallet, removes the cash, and drops the wallet into a nearby trash container. Without identification, other than the monogram initials “A. B.” on several of his effects, Avery Bullard is a mystery, the key to his identity falling from his lifeless hand, just as the snow-scene crystal ball fell from the hand of Charles Foster Kane, another tycoon who dies leaving a mystery behind him. Throughout Citizen Kane, the friends and associates of Charles Foster Kane speculate about what the great man was really like; in Executive Suite, there is a similar mystery surrounding Avery Bullard—everyone has a slightly different view of him, but no view is truly clear and satisfying. When the news of Bullard’s death is finally confirmed, the struggle to determine his successor begins. Since Bullard never designated which of his five vice presidents would succeed him, they must meet, along with two other members of the board of directors, to choose his successor. The man who has been with Bullard the longest is Fred Alderson (Walter Pidgeon). As company treasurer and number two man, he seems at first the logical choice; but by his own admission, he has been number two so long he doesn’t know how to be number one. The other possibilities include Walt Dudley (Paul Douglas), sales vice president, a high-performance salesman of the golf-playing, backslapping variety but a man clearly without leadership ability. Jesse Grimm (Dean Jagger) is the vice president who heads up production and workforce, but he has already announced his forthcoming retirement. The primary adversaries in the competition for the new leader’s position soon prove to be Don Walling (William Holden), in charge of design and development, and Loren Shaw (Frederic March), the company comptroller. Shaw is a man who lives by the ledger, a strong, unscrupulous advocate of maximum profits, even if it means a loss in product quality. Outlays for experiment and development are all but pointless expenditures in his view, since they offer no immediate dollar-for-dollar return on investment. He has an intense desire to be president of Tredway, and will stop at little or nothing to get what he wants. In the case of Walt Dudley, who finds solace from an unhappy

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marriage in an affair with his secretary (Shelley Winters), Shaw is not above a little subtle blackmail, nor is he above the bribery and manipulation of the equally conniving George Carswell (Louis Calhern), a member of the board of directors and a stock speculator on the brink of financial ruin. Shaw finally seems to have the presidency in his pocket when he lines up another member of the board, Julia Tredway (Barbara Stanwyck). The aging daughter of the company’s founder, she has spent most of her adult life in love with Avery Bullard. She has finally come to hate him for the love he never returned. Supporting Loren Shaw may be the best way to destroy the company Avery Bullard loved more than he loved her. Unlike Shaw, Walling is not at all sure that he wants to be president of Tredway. He’s much happier working in his lab on his new veneer process. When he finally realizes that the job will go to Shaw by default, he enters the race and challenges his adversary at the climactic board meeting. But Shaw’s highly conservative address to the group is both persuasive and convincing; he argues for stricter fiscal control, for the elimination of anything that does not directly contribute to the immediate maximization of profits for the stockholders. Walling counters effectively, arguing that Tredway is more than dividends on a balance sheet; it is also a complex of workers whose lives and futures are tied up in the product. As for the obligation to those who have invested in the company, Walling responds in a stirring speech that is the climax of the picture: Shaw is right when he says we have an obligation to our stockholders. But it’s a bigger obligation than raising the dividend. We have an obligation to keep this company alive not just this year, or the next, or the year after that. Stop growing and you die. There’s your waste, Shaw! There’s your inefficiency. Turn your back on experimentation and planning for tomorrow because they don’t contribute to dividends today—and you won’t have a tomorrow! Because there won’t be any company!6

And so Walling’s advocacy of responsible capitalism carries the day. No one really likes Shaw anyway, and the personable and sincere Walling is hard to resist, his stirring rhetoric notwithstanding. The real winner, however, is Wise’s direction of the entire sequence. His concept of the scene required a seemingly incredible number of camera setups. Since he worked with variations on some fifteen different angles, the camera operating from almost every perspective in the room, it was highly tedious work for all concerned, but work that the result more than justifies. In a more visually static setting, Walling’s speech might have come off as a rehash of platitudes from highschool civics applied to big business, but Wise’s treatment of the sequence transforms it into something much more, capturing almost every facial nuance

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of the interaction between and among the boardroom participants, and losing none of the tension and suspense that builds slowly but effectively. With this kind of careful and painstaking direction, Walling’s predictable moment of triumph transcends melodrama and becomes high cinematic art. The overall quality of Executive Suite owes much to the performance and direction of the actors, several portraying—effectively and appropriately—the standard kinds of characters they had played in other films: June Allyson, the loyal and supportive wife and indispensable helpmate; Louis Calhern, suave and sophisticated, but ultimately without courage or principle; Walter Pidgeon and Dean Jagger, totally reliable followers never quite up to what it takes to assume full leadership; Paul Douglas, the lovable big lug who is honest, decent, but woefully indecisive; and Nina Foch, an underrated American actress whose roles often presented her as someone able to discern integrity and strength of character in someone (before anyone else could) to whom she gave full support. Although Holden’s performance as the champion of the little guy who also gets the Tredway corporation moving once again in the right direction is the action center of Executive Suite, notable and compelling star turns belong to Barbara Stanwyck and Fredric March. Stanwyck is extremely adept at depicting the embittered victim of unrequited love, her pain effectively hidden to everyone (except the audience) by an outwardly cold and stoic exterior. March is at first the voice of reason and common sense. He uses statistics and company accounts to argue against an emphasis on quality that amounts, in his view, to fiscal suicide. Initially a strong figure, he becomes, by degrees, craven and weak, exhibiting character flaws that are underscored by a barely suppressed nervous irritability and by an interesting bit of stage business in which he constantly wipes his hands with fresh handkerchiefs, kept in supply in his desk drawer. But the cast of Executive Suite is more than a collection of stock characters playing familiar roles. Each is a separate element of color and texture effectively brought together in a cinematic quilt, which Robert Wise seamlessly assembles into an impressive finished product. That finished product offers an unabashedly idealistic view of the way we would all like to see American corporations operate, and idealism rarely seems out of place in American cinema. Following Executive Suite, Wise returned to more conventional genres, directing his first and only sword-and-sandal spectacle, Helen of Troy (1955), his third Western, Tribute to a Bad Man (1956), and his second film about prizefighting, Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). Wise did Helen of Troy for Warner Bros. at a time when the historical spectacle, presented in ever-increasing screen sizes, was Hollywood’s counterattack on television. Several years earlier, MGM’s Quo Vadis (1951), a grandscale spectacle with high production values, fired the opening salvo in the de-

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veloping war in the 1950s between theater viewing and watching the newer medium from the comfort and convenience of the living-room couch. Warner Bros. gambled that the small black-and-white screen could not compete with something like Hector and Achilles, screen images twenty feet high, hacking away at each other as the battle of Troy raged around them in all the glory of wide-screen, Cinemascope action. But Helen of Troy was almost more than Wise could handle. Shooting at the Cinecitta Studios in Rome, he was working with a French leading man (Jacques Sernas); an Italian leading lady (Rosanna Podesta); a technical crew made up of Americans, English, and Italians; and masses of Italian extras. Sernas and Podesta give very stiff performances as Paris and Helen, a situation in which the language barrier and a flat and cliché-ridden script created circumstances all but totally beyond Wise’s control. Add to this a devastating fire at Cinecitta that destroyed 80 percent of an eighteen-unit set, frequent delays from his 2,000 Italian extras who kept wounding each other by being too enthusiastic in the battle scenes, and an irritating Jack Warner who kept calling and wiring almost daily with budget worries, and it’s clear that the completion of the film was a monumental accomplishment in itself.7 What Wise loses in the scenes with his principals, however, he more than compensates for with the best of wide-screen spectacle. His handling of the arrival of the ships carrying the Greek forces, the Trojan horse deception, and the classic battle between Achilles and Hector is surprisingly good. Although the picture went more than $1.5 million over its original budget of $3 million (largely due to the fire damage), Warner Bros. was more than satisfied. The premiere of Helen of Troy was an international event, with simultaneous openings in 126 cities in fifty-six countries. Wise gave Warner Bros. a box-office success, and in passing offered them something else, the value of which they failed to recognize. For the small supporting role of Andraste, he had signed a young and then-unknown French actress named Brigitte Bardot. Her magnetic charm and general charisma were apparent to everyone on the set, and Wise advised Warners to put her under contract. Warners did not but, shortly thereafter, French director Roger Vadim did. And his film And God Created Woman (1956) made her an international star.8 Wise also had more than his share of production difficulties with his next picture, Tribute to a Bad Man. Spencer Tracy was signed for the leading role of Jeremy Rodock, a Colorado horse rancher who makes his own law and subsequently carries it out, acting as judge, jury, and executioner. On location in the Rockies, Tracy proved to be a real problem. At the time the shooting was getting underway, a small growth on his face convinced him that he had cancer, and he didn’t arrive on location until almost two weeks after shooting had begun. Once on location, his complaints multiplied, and he became generally

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impossible to work with. In spite of his many successes on the screen, at this time of his life Tracy suffered from a general anxiety about his ability as an actor. He was extremely insecure and obsessed with a fear of failure. Almost constantly irritable, he protested to Wise that the part was all wrong for him and that the altitude was affecting his health and making him chronically short of breath. He was convinced that he would never be able to get through the film and made every effort to prove it to others.9 After a period of extended shooting delays punctuated by arguments and constant bickering, it was clear to Wise that the situation had reached the point of ultimatum. Wise called Dore Schary at MGM and explained what was happening, making it clear that if shooting was to continue they must have a new star—or a new director; the present combination simply wasn’t workable. Schary wasn’t surprised, since he was thoroughly familiar with what was recognized throughout the industry as Tracy’s characteristic behavior. Schary had in fact experienced it only the year before when Tracy was on location working for John Sturges in Bad Day at Black Rock. Usually the studio made concessions or in one way or another mollified its venerable star, but this time, to Tracy’s surprise, Schary and MGM decided that they had had enough and sided with the director. Wise remembers as a very moving experience the day he got the word from the studio that Tracy would be replaced. Wise recalls, I was very angry with him for all of the delays that he had caused, but I was moved by how shocked he was, and how let down he felt. He had clearly counted on the studio shutting the picture down and doing it later, perhaps on a new location at a lower altitude. When it didn’t happen, he was convinced that his career as an actor was finished.10

Tracy’s career continued for more than another decade, but Tribute to a Bad Man had to shut down for two months while MGM negotiated for his replacement. Three or four actors were approached; the part was offered to Clark Gable, who turned it down. Finally, James Cagney was signed for the role of Jeremy Rodock. A few alterations were made in the script and shooting was once again under way. Tracy, however, wasn’t the only replacement in the cast. During the period that the production was shut down, Robert Francis, who had scored such a hit in Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny and John Ford’s The Long Gray Line, was killed in a plane crash. Francis was playing the important role of Steve Miller, a Rodock protégé. The role had to be recast and the scenes with Francis reshot. The part went to Don Dubbins, an actor who was new to films but who had scored a recent success with the road company of Tea and Sympathy. Although shot in Eastman color with Robert Surtees’s wide-screen cinematography taking full advantage of the scenic locale, Tribute to a Bad Man is

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ultimately a picture in which the lead actor proves a decided distraction. Cagney, so thoroughly stereotyped in the public mind after a quarter of a century playing primarily gangster and tough guy roles in contemporary settings, is a streets-of-Manhattan transplant that doesn’t quite take in the old West. In the same sense, Irene Pappas, making her Hollywood debut as Jocasta, Rodock’s mistress, seems more incongruous than exotic, and Don Dubbins, as the young man who learns a great deal about life from Rodock and Jocasta before moving West, offers nothing distinctive in his performance. Following the completion of Tribute to a Bad Man, with its casting contentions and the general hardships of location shooting in rough Western terrain, Wise vowed to never again do another Western, and he was as good as his word. His next venture brought him back to an urban setting and a familiar genre with which he had had previous success. Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), a boxing biopic on the life of professional boxer Rocky Graziano, offers a highly distinctive performance from Paul Newman as Rocco Barbella, the street kid who became middleweight champion of the world. MGM’s original plan called for James Dean, the matinee idol for the rebellious youth of the early ’50s, to play the role of Graziano, but Dean was killed in a car crash before production got under way. The role then went to Paul Newman, a relative newcomer with only two pictures to his credit.11 Under Wise’s direction, Newman’s performance is nothing short of brilliant, and it was this picture that established him as a star. Wise’s penchant for authenticity resulted in both director and star—but primarily Newman—spending long periods of time with Graziano. Walking through Graziano’s old neighborhood in New York City, listening and watching as he talked and joked with relatives and old friends, Wise began to create his mise-en-scene and Newman, studying his subject carefully, became Graziano: edgy, tough but amiable, constantly moving with nervous energy, a mirror image of the former champ’s mannerisms, right down to the slouch, stammer, and marbles-in-the-mouth enunciation.12 To give Newman’s re-creation its necessary environment, Wise and producer Charles Schnee decided to shoot on location in Rocky’s old neighborhood. All exterior shots in the early sequences of Rocky’s days as a juvenile delinquent were shot in the streets and alleys and on the rooftops where Rocky misspent his youth. Joseph Ruttenberg’s black-and-white cinematography captures the despairing grayness of urban squalor and carries that same quality over into the scenes with Rocky’s mother (Eileen Heckart), a woman worn out by hard work and anxiety, and his father (Harold J. Stone), whose failure in life has left him brutal and insensitive. That Rocky turns to crime early in life seems nothing more than the natural course of events. The film traces Graziano’s career from his period of juvenile delinquency up through his time

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in Leavenworth (for army desertion) and his eventual realization that professional boxing gives him the necessary outlet for the rage within him. He quite literally punches his way to respectability, gaining in the process a sense of confidence and a respect for himself as a human being. Even the period when his license is suspended for failure to report an attempted bribe to the state boxing commission becomes only a temporary setback, which his newfound strength and self-respect enable him to overcome. Although the picture is largely a showcase for the young and dynamic Newman, he was effectively supported by an impressive array of talent, particularly in the performances given by Everett Sloane as Irv Cohen, the manager who guides his career, and Pier Angeli as Norma, the wife who helps to give meaning to his life. There are also some splendid small performances that prove essential parts to the whole: Sal Mineo is poignantly convincing as the childhood friend whose life does not turn in the right direction and in whom Rocky can see what he himself almost became. Steve McQueen, in the briefest of bit parts at the beginning of his career, is another of Rocky’s delinquent friends who comes to a bad end, and Robert Loggia is particularly good as the insidious Frankie Peppo, the “friend” who costs Rocky his boxing license. Wise was doubly fortunate in having not only excellent performances from his actors, particularly those who were young and relatively new, but also in having a truly fine script from Ernest Lehman, crafted from the autobiography written by Graziano and Rowland Barber. Wise and Lehman had worked together for the first time on Executive Suite, and Wise was impressed with the crisp intelligence of Lehman’s work on that project and with the seemingly instinctive understanding of what was wanted. On projects like Executive Suite, with its balancing of interconnecting stories, Lehman’s skill at synthesizing the essential elements of Cameron Hawley’s novel and Wise’s vision proved invaluable to Wise. In the preproduction planning of future projects, Lehman’s availability became a primary consideration. Graziano’s life, as it is set down in his published autobiography, could well be taken as nothing more than the reflective rationalizing of a thug-turnedpunching machine. But Lehman’s script makes him a warm, sensitive, even complex human being, without losing any of Rocky’s toughness and fighting spirit. The humor, never overdone, reveals not only Rocky’s ability to be at ease with himself but also his sensitivity. When Norma, always afraid to see men hurting each other, finally agrees to come and watch him training at Stillman’s gym, Rocky stops sparring as she enters and begins waltzing with his partner. When he stops, he steps back and cuffs him gently on the ear, saying, “You was supoib.” Rocky’s sense of humor also has elements of wit and sarcasm. Badly battered in the ring, he staggers back to his corner between

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rounds, barely able to stand. His manager, to test his sense of coherence, says, “Rocky, tell me your name”; to which Rocky replies, “Gimme a hint.” In the inevitable comparison with Wise’s other fight picture, The Set-Up, Somebody Up There Likes Me must settle for a close second place. The performances of Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter in The Set-Up are far more subdued, thoughtful, and introspective, and the audience is willingly drawn into the complex, personal problems with which they are dealing. The supporting players who surround them effectively complement the feelings and actions of the principals, and give The Set-Up an evenness in pace and plot development that is more satisfying in its consistency than the sometimes erratic progress of Somebody Up There Likes Me. In contrast, Wise and Lehman’s treatment of Graziano’s life has about it a nervous edge consistent with the demeanor and personality of its subject. The suppressed energy at the center of Newman’s performance seems always on the verge of exploding. In each frame he compels rather than draws attention. Newman’s virtuoso performance is the absolute, indisputable center of the film, a performance that is so compellingly good that it overshadows the other characters. Robert Wise made his second attempt at comedy with This Could Be the Night (1957), which benefits particularly from highly engaging performances by Paul Douglas, Jean Simmons, and Anthony Franciosa. Douglas plays a tough but affable bootlegger-turned-nightclub owner, and Franciosa plays his friend, partner, and surrogate kid brother. Into their seamy environment comes the educated and refined Jean Simmons, a young and innocent schoolteacher moonlighting as a secretary. In the interests of good taste, the censors dictated that she be described by such colorful euphemisms as greenhorn (for virgin). Both men are immediately attracted to her, as Douglas makes every effort to protect her from Franciosa, and Franciosa (curiously) attempts to protect her from himself. Supporting the central trio are a colorful cast of Damon Runyon–type characters, including J. Carrol Naish as the club’s temperamental chef, Neile Adams as a stripper whose great ambition is to win a cooking contest, and Rafael Campos as Hussein, the busboy who must pass algebra so that he can achieve what he considers the fulfillment of the American dream: the right to have his name changed! Although much of the comedy is considerably dated, the film remains a fast-paced, bright, and breezy effort, with Neile Adams’s “Hustlin’ Newsgal” number the musical highlight. It was also the picture that gave Robert Wise the idea that at some time in the future, he would like to do a musical. Wise’s next project, Until They Sail, is a romantic drama adapted from a James Michener story. It was originally a property that Wise, in his association with the short-lived Aspen Productions, had owned some five years earlier. In the interim, Burt Lancaster’s production company with Harold Hecht and

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James Hill had picked it up. They had plans to begin shooting, with Burt Lancaster directing, in December of 1955. When that fell through, producer Charles Schnee brought it back to Wise. Unlike So Big, a previous effort at romantic drama, Until They Sail is the story not of one woman but of four, the Leslie sisters of Christchurch, New Zealand. The setting is World War II, and as the army of New Zealand marches off to fight in North Africa, the U.S. Marines move in to begin operations in the Pacific theater. The New Zealand women are lonely but wary of the foreign male presence; the marines are just lonely. A set of genuine romances develops between Anne Leslie (Joan Fontaine), the oldest sister, and Marine Captain Richard Bates (Charles Drake) and between Barbara Leslie (Jean Simmons) and Captain Jack Hardie (Paul Newman). The relationship between Barbara and Jack, however, is far more gradual in its development. At the beginning Barbara is a married woman who watches her husband of a month go off to war. A short time later, she receives word that he has been killed. Jack is a shy and gentle man, uneasy with women but obviously drawn to Barbara. The third sister, Delia (Piper Laurie), who has some sort of quirk about being alone, or at least about being without a man, is too impatient to wait for a marine. She marries a low-life New Zealand draft dodger who, shortly thereafter, is called into service. She soon regrets her hasty marriage. He is a boorish and totally unsalvageable lout and when word comes that her husband is a Japanese prisoner of war, she becomes at least guardedly optimistic about her future. The youngest sister, Evelyn (Sandra Dee), is a young teen whose awakening to love is, in relation to her sisters’ experiences, comparatively uncomplicated. As the fortunes of war would have it, Richard is killed in action and Anne discovers that she is pregnant. Delia’s bad penny husband turns up again and, incensed at her infidelity, murders her. In the midst of all of these human complications, Barbara and Jack come to know, understand, and love each other, providing Until They Sail with the essential happy ending. It’s far from being an exceptional film, but it is notable for foreshadowing the future of Piper Laurie, breaking away from ingénue roles, and Paul Newman, whose quiet yet powerful screen magnetism and romantic star power is unmistakably present in this film (the fifth of his career) for the first time. Wise’s third war film of the 1950s, Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), is a story of submarine warfare in the Pacific that in many ways parallels The Desert Rats. Just as the earlier film was the story of a military commander who must work with men who are initially antagonistic toward him, Run Silent, Run Deep follows a similar pattern. Commander P. G. Richardson (Clark Gable), who had his submarine sunk by a Japanese destroyer at the beginning of the war, is assigned to take command of another submarine, the USS Nerka. The crew of the Nerka resents Richardson (whom they consider a loser), for they had hoped

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that their executive officer, Lt. Jim Bledsoe (Burt Lancaster), would be the new skipper. Although they never hesitate to carry out their orders, the crew divides into factions of conflicting loyalty, one group supporting the captain and another larger group maintaining strong support for Bledsoe. It is Commander Richardson’s intention to pursue the Akikaze, the destroyer that sent his first sub to the bottom of the Bungo Straits, even if it means disobeying official orders. The Nerka succeeds in its mission, but as the Akikaze goes down, Richardson hears a mysterious radio signal that he recalls hearing just before he lost his first sub. He suddenly realizes that the Akikaze travels with her own escort submarine, and that the hidden escort, not the destroyer, is the real danger. The submarine duel is under way, with the Nerka the eventual winner, but Richardson is killed in the action. Bledsoe and the crew bury him at sea before heading for home. Submarine movies are a well-defined subgenre of the war film, and have about them a predictability that their fans have come to expect. No submarine picture seems complete without periscope shots of enemy targets, torpedoes bubbling out of tubes, and all of the requisite metallic sounds and tensionfilled hazards that naturally go with crash dives and the dropping of depth charges. But Wise’s Run Silent, Run Deep is a cut above the usual submarine fare, a fact readily recognized by Bosley Crowther in his review for the New York Times: A better film about guys in the “silent service” has not been made. That is a sweeping statement, considering some of the good ones there have been, including the fairly recent The Enemy Below. But this one . . . has more than drama. It has the hard, cold ring of truth. . . . It doesn’t waste movement, time or words. . . . It’s severely, nail-bitingly tense . . . with superior acting.13

The film to which Crowther refers, Dick Powell’s The Enemy Below (1957), is a good point of contrast to reveal the distinctive qualities of Wise’s film. The Enemy Below offers a duel between an American destroyer, commanded by Robert Mitchum, and a German submarine under the command of Curt Jurgens. Their conflict amounts to a naval chess game, with Mitchum and Jurgens alternately outsmarting each other, making full use of the prerequisite skills of brains, imagination, and unerring seamanship. It’s a gallant conflict, a kind of chivalric jousting on the high seas between two gentlemen-at-arms. At the conclusion, as Jurgens’s submarine is sinking, the two adversaries exchange gallant salutes. The Enemy Below is an exciting film, shot with the panorama of blue skies and the open sea as impressive backdrop—but it’s also highly unrealistic. In Run Silent, Run Deep, Wise discounts such combat chivalry and once again opts for almost stark realism. In order to get an accurate feel for submarine

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conditions, he participated in submarine maneuvers at the San Diego naval base. When the sets were constructed, Wise decided on an unusual departure from custom. Sets for sub pictures are generally constructed considerably larger than the real thing, in order to avoid undue cramping of the actors; but Wise had the set for Run Silent, Run Deep constructed to actual submarine size, in order to incorporate the cramped, claustrophobic conditions of sub duty into the actors’ performances.14 This duplication of the tight living and working conditions of submarine warfare also made it just right for Wise to develop the kind of encounter scenes that he does best: two men in psychological conflict over a matter of critical importance. This one-on-one struggle distinguished such earlier Wise films as The Body Snatcher, Blood on the Moon, and Two Flags West. In Run Silent, Run Deep the encounter between Captain Richardson and Lieutenant Bledsoe begins with a quiet personal antagonism that gradually increases as each seeks in his own way to assert himself and overcome the authority of the other. The tightness of the set dictated that most of the picture would be shot in closeup, thus placing a particular emphasis on the tension and feeling of building pressure that is so much a part of their personal conflict. An additional note of realism is added by the fact that unlike the characters portrayed by Mitchum and Jurgens in The Enemy Below, those portrayed by Gable and Lancaster are not larger-than-life heroes. Gable’s Captain Richardson is motivated not so much by a sense of duty or the responsibility of command as by a desire for personal vengeance. Lancaster’s Bledsoe is no less human; he’s a good officer and is popular with his men, but his ambition, barely suppressed, has more than a touch of ruthlessness about it. The presence of these human failings introduces an air of psychological unpredictability into their encounter that creates compelling interest for the audience. Just after completing principal photography on Run Silent, Run Deep, Wise became particularly aware of the limitations that could be imposed on even the top directors in the profession. This was a troubled production in several ways. Burt Lancaster was a principal actor in the picture, and a partner in the production company. His interest went well beyond his own performance, and he was not above a little impromptu direction on his own, occasionally explaining to others in the cast how they should play their parts. Lancaster’s advice and temerity extended even to Clark Gable, his venerable costar, who was a tired superstar at the end of a long and illustrious career. Gable’s patience with his younger colleague was largely due to illness and fatigue. He was more often than not simply too worn out to work past five in the afternoon. Things became more difficult as the production company of Hecht–Hill–Lancaster began pressuring scriptwriter John Gay for a series of changes. Not surprisingly, the changes were most often favorable to Lancaster,

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giving him the meatier end of dramatic scenes, and making Gable more and more an over-the-shoulder–shot costar. The script was quietly being rewritten, and Wise felt himself gradually being moved from being a director to a technical functionary. Blue pages (rewrites of the script) were coming almost daily and, eventually, neither Wise nor Gable knew the intended conclusion of the picture. Wise was greatly troubled by these developments and he shared his concerns with Gable. Fatigue and the lethargy of illness had for a time dulled Gable’s perception of how the script changes were changing his role and subsuming it to Lancaster’s. When he became aware of what was happening he took a firm stand—and he was still a star to be reckoned with. Before shooting would continue, Gable demanded to know, once and for all, the conclusion of the script. He also demanded certain guarantees regarding camera setups. Scriptwriter John Gay was caught in the middle but eventually developed a final script. It did not please everyone, including Robert Wise, who much preferred the original version. Gay’s revised script, however, was one that all parties felt, albeit with some reluctance, that they could live with. So Wise brought the troubled Run Silent, Run Deep to a conclusion, and took a short New York vacation, intending to return in two weeks for final editing and postproduction looping. But when he returned, he discovered that in his absence, Lancaster, acting in his role as a partner in the production company, had been working steadily with the editors in the cutting room, effectively creating his own final version. Like most directors, Wise had wanted to see the film he had directed through all stages of production, from original script to final cut. What had happened to him in his work with Hecht–Hill–Lancaster was markedly similar to what had happened to Orson Welles in 1942, when RKO determined that Welles, after completing the shooting of The Magnificent Ambersons and leaving for South America, would not be involved in the final cutting of the picture. Producers in the late 1950s were still reluctant to relinquish control of a film property. Initially Wise was annoyed and somewhat discouraged, but he took it philosophically. He simply and quietly divorced himself from the production. It was painfully clear that a director, regardless of his experience and talent, had limited control of any production. Only as a producer would Robert Wise have the kind of control he wanted over the creation of motion pictures.15 Despite the problems associated with Tribute to a Bad Man and the tension on the set of Run Silent, Run Deep, the period between 1952 and 1957 was particularly satisfying for Wise. His experiments in genre were all commercially successful and he was recognized throughout the industry as a man at the top of his profession. The production heads at Fox, Warners, and MGM knew him not only as a director who could give them dramatic quality but, perhaps

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even more important to them, as a man who could keep to the budget and bring a picture in on time. While these are hardly the criteria to elevate him to the pantheon of great American directors, they are most assuredly the qualities that made him a director in demand by the people who were producing pictures. The films of this period in his career are the work of a man who takes very seriously his duties and obligations to the studio with whom he has a contract. He has artistic principles that he does not willingly compromise, but he is also a pragmatist. A star may quit, conflicts may develop with production management, or the musical score may not come up to expectations, but a director like Robert Wise simply accepts and deals with such variables and exigencies, and ultimately—and on schedule—he moves ahead and completes the picture. Much of this practical credo was based on the unforgettable lesson learned from the experiences of Gunther von Fritsch on Curse of the Cat People and, more notably, the example of Orson Welles. But for all that the films of this period reveal about Wise’s versatility and technical ability, most of them served to bring him little more, in the eyes of critics, than lukewarm terms of praise such as highly competent and promising. They fall considerably short of being enduring classics of American cinema. In retrospect, films like Destination Gobi, Something for the Birds, and So Big have proved eminently forgettable. Desert Rats, as fine as it is, will probably always dwell in the shadow of Hathaway’s The Desert Fox, and Somebody Up There Likes Me and Until They Sail are far more identifiable with Paul Newman than with Robert Wise. Tribute to a Bad Man is a very unspecial Western, now seen by some as an unwitting self-parody of Cagney, and Helen of Troy is now only another sword-and-sandal epic, one of many produced in the 1950s. Up to this point in his career, he had made some fine films. In the next ten years, he would make the films that would bring him the prominence and fame that would ensure his place in the history of the American motion picture industry. This rise to prominence would begin with the most controversial and personally taxing project he had yet undertaken: I Want to Live (1958).

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Arthur Knight, “Movies Are Wider Than Ever,” Saturday Review, May 16, 1953, 32. “Hollywood Discovers the U.S. Business Drama,” Newsweek, May 3, 1954, 90. John Houseman, Front and Center (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 419. Houseman, Front and Center, 420. Houseman, Front and Center, 420. Executive Suite, perf. William Holden, MGM, 1954. Robert Wise, interview with author, August 13, 1981.

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8. Wise, interview. 9. Wise, interview. 10. Wise, interview. 11. Allen Eyles, “The Other Brando: The Surprising World of Paul Newman,” Films and Filming 11, no. 4 (January 1965): 8. 12. Peter Maas, “As Rocky—Newman Scores a K.O.,” Collier’s, July 20, 1956, 46–49. 13. Bosley Crowther, “Run Silent, Run Deep,” New York Times, March 28, 1958. 14. Wise, interview. 15. Wise, interview.

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“Produced” by Robert Wise

By 1957, Wise was able to look back and reflect on positive experiences like

directing Executive Suite and Somebody Up There Likes Me and draw considerable satisfaction from being a director at the top of his profession. He had also learned an important lesson about creative control from his experiences directing Run Silent, Run Deep. At this point in his career, he was still a director who was limited to bringing technical ability and general knowhow to projects conceived and developed by others. As an editor-turned-director, Wise was always aware that the creative part of filmmaking did not end when the final scene was shot; he knew there were hours to be spent at the editing table, making sure that the film reached its full potential. He was also a firm believer in the sneak preview, preferably in some small Midwestern city far from southern California. He found the sneak preview invaluable to the final editing and shaping of a picture and, when time permitted, he preferred several such previews in order to gain a varied sample of general audience opinion. The spontaneous, impartial reactions from preview audiences helped him determine, for example, where to cut and tighten and where to add or delete background music. Working with producers like John Houseman, Joe Pasternak, and Theron Warth (to name just a few) gave him the opportunity to see a given film through all the stages of shooting and editing and through the additional final touches that the preview indicated were necessary. But the realization became even more apparent that he was, after all, only the director; the final version of the film was always determined by the studio producer or the production company. If he was to make the kinds of pictures he wanted to make, he needed not only to direct but also to become a producer. Because of a set of unforeseen circumstances, that was exactly what happened in the production of his next picture, with which he found himself more 98

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deeply and personally involved than with any other picture in his career. When producer Walter Wanger approached Robert Wise with a script for a film on the story of Barbara Graham, the central figure in one of the most sensational murder cases in the history of California, it was a project that immediately intrigued him. It was, first of all, the kind of project that would readily lend itself to the documentary style in which he worked so well. Second, within that documentary framework, there was ample opportunity for a good dramatic story. It was in June 1953 that Barbara Graham, along with Emmett Perkins and Jack Santo, was arrested for the bludgeon murder of Mrs. Mabel Monahan of Burbank, California. At the time of her arrest, Mrs. Graham had had three children and four husbands. She had also served a prison term for perjury, worked as a prostitute, been a user of narcotics, and a passer of bad checks. After a long and controversial trial, both in the courtroom and the media, she was convicted and sentenced to die. There were three stays of execution within a short period of time, two of them coming while she was in the death cell. Finally, on June 3, 1955, she died in the gas chamber at San Quentin. She was thirty-two years old.1 Wise had no problem in casting the right actress. Wanger had already lined up Susan Hayward, who agreed to do the part before a final screenplay was completed. This was a highly unusual commitment for a name actress to make; rarely would an actor or actress of Hayward’s stature commit to a role without first seeing an outline. But Hayward found the role highly appealing and seemed to make a personal identification with the plight of the late Barbara Graham from the beginning. She particularly empathized with Barbara as a victim of newspaper sensationalism. In her personal life, Hayward had also been through some rough times, and none of them seemed to have missed the papers. In the early 1950s, her messy divorce and subsequent suicide attempt were items of international interest. Like Barbara Graham, she too felt she had been tried and convicted by the press. Wanger had also had similar experiences with newspapers and notoriety. Some years earlier he had gone to prison for the shooting of Jennings Lang, the agent of his wife, actress Joan Bennett. Both Hayward and Wanger were persons of mercurial and highly independent temperament who, like their subject, had had to deal with a press and public that thrived on sensationalism. Hayward evidently found an additional basis for trust in this similarity, but primarily she had complete faith in Wanger’s judgment and ability as a producer. With the casting of the lead role taken care of by Wanger, the first difficulty for Wise to deal with was an unsatisfactory script. The first version, written by Don Mankiewicz, Wise found all but completely wanting. For the rewrite, he and Wanger brought in Nelson Gidding to rework Mankiewicz’s somewhat long and overly detailed treatment. From the beginning Gidding proved a definite asset to the production. He was an unconventional but highly

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intelligent and imaginative writer who, in the course of the shooting schedule, provided Wise with a series of new ideas and fresh approaches. He completely rewrote the screenplay, salvaging nothing from the Mankiewicz version. Where Mankiewicz, for example, had stressed the murder story aspect, Gidding’s version took up the issue of capital punishment, emphasizing the prison system’s unwitting cruelty to Barbara Graham during the final months and days of her life. With shooting about to start, the production came to a sudden halt when Walter Wanger suffered a serious heart attack. During the weeks of his recuperation, Robert Wise became, for all intents and purposes, the de facto producer. When the shooting began, Wise, frequently with Gidding, would regularly come to Wanger’s bedside to discuss the script and bring items for clearance and official approval. Any matters of controversy or difficulty that might prove unduly upsetting were handled by Wise, who subsequently made the major decisions on the picture. One of the more significant decisions concerned the score. As Wise read the letters of Barbara Graham and spoke with her friends and associates in an attempt to know his subject, he was struck by the fact that she was an ardent lover of music, and was particularly partial to progressive jazz, which was in an extended period of increasing popularity from the early 1940s through the early 1960s. It was about this time that in a small club in Manhattan, Wise happened to hear singer Barbara Carroll. There was in her personality and phrasing a quality that strongly suggested the world of Barbara Graham as he was coming to know it. He returned to hear Barbara Carroll for several nights running, and gradually began to gain from the music a sense of the paradox of free abandon and subdued anxiety that was so much a part of the motivation of his central character. On the basis of this experience, Wise decided that the score for I Want to Live would be jazz.2 Composed and conducted by Johnny Mandel, it was the first all-jazz score for a motion picture. The list of performers, all of whom appear in the opening scene, reads like a list from the jazz hall of fame: Gerry Mulligan, Red Mitchell, Shelly Manne, Art Farmer, Bud Shank, Pete Jolly, and Frank Rosolino. But this was to be something more than the usual kind of score, more than background music that reinforces visual mood or serves simply to aid in the creation of tension or suspense. Wise used Mandel’s anxiety jazz to make a direct dramatic statement: the music often saying something that is not spoken or stated visually. A good example of this occurs in the scene in which Barbara, who has been working as a shill for a gambler, tells her boss that she’s giving up her present way of life to get married. The gambler warns her that it won’t work, and as he talks, he builds a house of cards. She is, however, determined to marry her bartender boyfriend and settle down to what she hopes

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and believes will be a decent and happy domestic life. As she leaves, the gambler smiles cynically; as the camera moves in on the house of cards, he taps it lightly and it collapses. But Wise’s camera holds on the collapsed cards in tight close-up for an unprecedented eight seconds, as Mandel’s jazz music moves gradually from its basic counterpoint rhythms to become more and more frenetic and atonal. It finishes on a squealing trumpet blast as Wise—at long last—jump cuts to a close-up of a baby—Barbara’s baby—screaming in his crib. In the background we hear Barbara and her husband screaming at each other, their shadows moving on the wall behind their child. It is the end of the road for Barbara and Hank Graham (Wesley Lau), her drug addict husband and the last of a line of losers chosen by a woman who seemed to be able to pick nothing else. In the long take that encompasses the collapse of the house of cards and the baby screaming in the crib, Wise tells, through the use of articulate music, of the months leading up to the disintegration of Barbara’s marriage and the futility of her attempt to find happiness. Again, when Barbara lies in prison awaiting word of her appeal, Wise photographs her in a vertical overhead shot as she lies on a cot in her cell. As the camera slowly descends upon her, it emphasizes the narrow confines of the cell in which, it seems, she is slowly being crushed by fate. She moves fitfully, her eyes closed and her head tossing back and forth as if she is fighting a bad dream or saying no to her destiny. As the camera continues its descent, dropping upon her like a slow but predatory force, the score expresses her anxiety and repressed hysteria, moving from melody to cacophony as it increases in volume. She does not scream in fear and panic, but the score—the voice of her nightmare—does. The jazz score, however, is quite literally only half of Wise’s innovative use of sound. The picture is divided into two parts: the period before Barbara’s arrest for the Monahan murder, and the period after. Before the arrest, Barbara lives a carpe diem existence, an amoral life without responsibility. In keeping with this lifestyle, the entire pace of the first half, both visually and aurally, is quicker. At times, it’s even frenetic. After her conviction, the party stops altogether, and the upbeat jazz score with it. In contrast, the second half moves more slowly, as the seriousness of her situation becomes more and more apparent. Most of the music we hear in the latter part of the picture comes from radios and phonographs while Barbara is on the inside. The freedom, the improvisation of her unrestricted existence represented by the unconventionality of jazz, has been taken from her. In the absence of music, we hear instead the amplified sounds of prison: cell doors closing, heavy locks clicking shut, the dismal echo of matrons and guards walking briskly and efficiently through concrete corridors. It is in this bleak and sterile environment that Barbara Graham loses her appeal and is transferred to the death cell at San Quentin. The execution sequence,

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and the days and nights leading up to it, are still among the most harrowing scenes dealing with the depiction of capital punishment ever filmed. After half a century, they have lost little of their impact. Wise was determined not only to be painstakingly accurate but also to be certain that his direction of this sequence would not be unduly influenced by his own prejudices or excesses of imagination. To this end, he carried his quest for authenticity to the extreme degree: he applied to the warden at San Quentin for permission to witness an execution. Wise promised that he would not use the experience for any promotional reasons, and was granted the necessary permission. “At the time I felt rather ghoulish in asking,” Wise said in an interview, “but the accuracy and honesty of what I was doing was very important to me, and I felt that I needed to see an execution in order to do it right.”3 On February 14, 1958, a young black man was scheduled to be executed for murder; Wise, along with production manager Forrest Johnston and art director Ted Haworth, was in the San Quentin execution chamber as a witness. Wise stood with the warden and the doctor, watching as the victim’s death throes continued for almost ten minutes. “At the time,” Wise recalled, “I was convinced that it was necessary for me to do this; but it was the hardest thing I ever had to watch. If I had it to do over, I very much doubt that I would.”4 Whatever his later regrets, the experience gave Wise what he needed to create the most effective indictment of capital punishment every witnessed by a motion picture audience. It begins when Barbara is transferred to San Quentin after her final request for appeal has been denied. She is led by guards into the gas chamber building, past the chamber itself—which is hidden from her view by heavy tarpaulin curtains—to a single cell in the back. With her at all times are a nurse and a matron. During her last days, Barbara’s initial bitterness and hostility begin to soften. But it is still a time of great anxiety, as her attorney continues to argue for a stay of execution and she lives with the grim reality that she is, unless fate intervenes, condemned. Through it all, she struggles to disguise her anxiety with a mask of indifference and forced gaiety. Susan Hayward won an Academy Award for her performance, and clearly the best part of that performance comes in the latter part of the film. In the earlier part of the picture she is a bit too unrelenting in her hardboiled nature, becoming at times shrill and strident. It’s all but impossible to find the inner softness that would help us to sympathize with her as a wife and mother. But after the arrest, she gradually becomes more vulnerable. One of Hayward’s most moving scenes is when Barbara’s toddler son is brought to visit her in prison. She holds him on her knee and begins to sing the “wibbleton to wobbleton” rhyme that she used to sing to him when he was an infant. She sings the first few lines, but her emotions get the better of her. She struggles to continue, but cannot. It’s a short and beautifully acted scene in which Hayward

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moves from a moment of joy and high elation to abject misery in a matter of seconds. There are few single scenes in the picture that are quite as moving. Nothing, however, compares with the climactic scenes in which the chamber—and Barbara—are prepared for execution, beginning with the icy precision of the guards measuring the ingredients that will create the lethal gas. Wise gives us tight close-ups of the guard’s gloved hands measuring the correct level of sulfuric acid, and of the cyanide eggs being carefully tied in cheesecloth and suspended over the acid in the well beneath the chamber chair. They work quietly and efficiently, and the only sounds we hear are the sounds of their preparation, which Wise has amplified for maximum effect. Prepared as best she can for her ordeal, Barbara receives two stays of execution: the first comes before she has left her cell, the second, which seems almost sadistic, comes as she is on the threshold of the chamber. Finally, there are no more stays. Barbara is led to the chamber. There is a highly effective close-up shot of her hand fingering the medal given to her by the priest who heard her final confession. It is a medal of Saint Jude—known in the Catholic Church as the patron saint of lost causes. But the close-up includes, in ironic juxtaposition, her wedding ring and the rubber tube that projects from the stethoscope device attached to her body. Connected to a stethoscope outside of the chamber, it will enable the attending physician to determine when her ordeal is finally over. The scene in which Barbara is strapped into the chair is painful to watch, but paradoxically it is totally engrossing. It is at this point that Nelson Gidding introduces an odd moment of comic relief, which is just enough to take the edge off the tension that is on the verge of becoming too much. As the captain of the guards (Dabbs Greer) straps the blindfolded Barbara into the chair, he advises her in a quiet, kindly fashion, not to hold her breath, but to count to ten and breathe deeply. “It is,” he claims, “easier that way.” Barbara, with biting irony, replies, “How do you know?” Gallows humor of this type is a Gidding trademark, something to be found in all of his scripts. Some of it is highly esoteric, not designated for the audience, but a sort of in joke. For example, the bottle of sulfuric acid and the canister of cyanide eggs we see in the preparation close-ups: the official-looking pharmaceutical label (complete with a large G crest logo) informs us that the acid is a product of the Gidding Chemical Company, and the eggs come from the B & P corporation, B & P signifying the first initials of the director and his wife, Bob and Pat Wise. Introduced at the wrong moment, a touch of humor could well ruin a film like this, but Gidding is a writer who is never heavy-handed, and has a decided knack for this kind of thing. He handles humor with a deft touch, and his dialogue, to the point, never wastes words. When Bosley Crowther of the New York Times reviewed I Want to Live, he offered special kudos to the work

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of Nelson Gidding. I Want to Live has the type of screenplay, according to Crowther, that “contains the right kind of lean, crisp, movie plotting and writing that gets ideas across with a maximum of vivid action and a minimum of useless words.”5 This was the first film on which Wise and Gidding worked together, and they clicked as both friends and professional colleagues. They would go on to do four more pictures together. Wise appreciated Gidding’s freshness of ideas, his sense of daring innovation, and his irreverent and iconoclastic sense of humor. Gidding had particular praise for Wise’s painstaking craftsmanship and—perhaps among the highest compliments from a writer— his awareness and appreciation of a prose style. Most of the critics who reviewed the film were in line with Crowther, who went on to say that I Want to Live is “a forthright drama that makes you feel and in feeling, think. It is a grim invitation to reflection on capital punishment.”6 Arthur Knight in the Saturday Review found it “as impassioned an argument against capital punishment as we are ever likely to get,”7 and Variety called it “the most damning indictment of capital punishment ever documented in any medium.”8 But not everything that appeared in the press was in support of I Want to Live. A story by Roger Beck in the Los Angeles Mirror News detailed the heated controversy that had quickly developed. The Los Angeles chief of police, the chief of detectives, and the attorneys for the prosecution blasted the film, calling it nothing but “half truths and propaganda” for its attempt to lead the public “to believe that Graham was innocent of this vicious murder.”9 As evidence in support of their protests, they cited the fact that two important witnesses for the prosecution were not portrayed in the film, and that other important evidence for the prosecution was either ignored or glossed over.10 In support of their position, Cavalier magazine presented a feature story labeling the entire film a “Hollywood hoax.”11 They claimed that Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Ed Montgomery, whose memoirs are the basis for the script, did not cover a single session of the Graham trial. Montgomery, in turn, successfully sued Cavalier for libel. There were also plans for a rebuttal film, tentatively titled Weep No More for Barbara. Dan Lundberg, a Los Angeles television commentator and screenwriter, signed a contract with Deputy District Attorney H. Miller Leavy, who prosecuted Barbara Graham, giving him access to Leavy’s diary and files for the preparation of the picture. The much-heralded second production, however, never got beyond the initial planning stages. That the police and the district attorney’s office were upset is understandable; the film does imply—as Ed Montgomery and Barbara’s attorney, Al Matthews, firmly believed—that she was innocent. The most telling sequence in the film supporting this implication is the depiction of psychologist Carl Palmberg (Theodore Bikel) claiming that on the basis of his thorough analysis

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of Barbara, she was totally incapable of violence. Palmberg, however, died a short time after Barbara’s first appeal had been denied. But the innocent or guilty question is not the main issue in I Want to Live. Wise and Wanger maintained that it wasn’t a question of whether she was innocent or guilty; it was a question of whether she had been denied her basic rights as a human being. Whether innocent or guilty, the fact that Barbara Graham was treated in a cruel and unjustified manner remains undeniable. She was clearly a victim of what has come to be known legally as entrapment, and an entrapment so blatant that today such evidence would be clearly inadmissible. Her two stays of execution, both coming as she was in preparation for the chamber, the second arriving just as she was about to cross its threshold, may not technically constitute double jeopardy, but the question is certainly open to legal conjecture. For all his efforts toward achieving complete and telling accuracy in depicting technology in the service of one group of human beings about to destroy another, there were elements in the Barbara Graham story that Wise felt couldn’t be shown on the screen. In the film, Barbara Graham’s twitching death agony lasts no more than a minute; in reality, as Wise himself saw in the execution he had witnessed, the body’s reactions frequently continue for some eight to ten minutes. To be correct would also make the scene unacceptable—and unbearable— to the average audience. Perhaps the most shocking of the things that Wise finally decided to leave out concerned the police officer who had entrapped Barbara Graham by posing as a man who was willing to provide her with an alibi that would save her from the gas chamber. Two years had passed since his evidence had convicted her, but according to Wise, on the day of her scheduled execution, that policeman took personal leave from the Los Angeles police force—without pay—and journeyed to San Quentin for the express purpose of watching her die. His name, written in the official visitors’ book, is a matter of record. Gidding and Wise had originally written the incident into the script, but finally decided that the truth, as is often the case, would be beyond belief. But even with the omissions, there is more than enough in this film to make audiences reevaluate their views on legal execution. To this day, the force of I Want to Live as an indictment of capital punishment remains undiminished. Working on I Want to Live was for Robert Wise an experience that was both emotionally draining and exhilarating. The exhilaration came in the spring of 1959 at the twenty-sixth annual Academy Award presentations. Wise was nominated for Best Director, and Nelson Gidding was nominated—along with Don Mankiewicz—for Best Screenplay. Mankiewicz was in the running because he had insisted that he be given a screen credit and had taken his case to the screenwriters’ guild. Despite protests from Wise and Wanger that the script for the film was solely Gidding’s work, the guild decided in Mankiewicz’s favor. Neither Wise nor the reluctant Gidding–Mankiewicz combination won

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that year, but Susan Hayward received a Best Actress Oscar for her truly fine performance. Looking back on the months of work that went into this unique production, Wise was particularly pleased with the new feeling of freedom and complete control that he had been able to exercise regarding production decisions. Walter Wanger, of course, had originated and launched the production; it was he who had secured Hayward and purchased the rights to Montgomery’s memoirs. Wanger’s untimely illness, however, created a situation in which Wise was the man who had to make the key decisions. For the first time in his career, Robert Wise was, regardless of what appears in the credits, both director and producer. Should he, he wondered, continue to work as a producer? Certainly the producer’s lot entailed a good many headaches, and he was after all an independent director very much in demand. Since he had no intention of giving up directing, it would have to be some combination of the two. The opportunity to try that combination in earnest came with his next picture. Harry Belafonte, then at the peak of his popularity as a singer and entertainer, decided that he wanted to return to motion pictures. He had previously appeared in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954) and Robert Rossen’s Island in the Sun (1957). Now he had formed his own production company, Harbel Productions, and had purchased the rights to William McGivern’s novel Odds against Tomorrow. Since this was Harbel’s initial venture and Belafonte knew next to nothing about the production end of the business, he needed someone with Wise’s extensive background. Wise agreed to direct and produce, with Phil Stein, Belafonte’s manager, coming on board as associate producer. Once again there was a problem concerning the official credits for the screenplay. The original script was written by Abraham Polonsky, whose career as a screenwriter and a director had been abruptly cut short when actor Sterling Hayden, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the early 1950s, denounced him as a Communist. Since this testimony placed him on the infamous blacklist, Polonsky’s name could not appear in the official credits without jeopardizing the success of the entire production. To circumvent the problem, Belafonte made an arrangement with novelist John Oliver Killens to lend his name as a front for Polonsky’s. Killens was perfectly willing to lend his name, since he had wanted to get into screenwriting anyway. He subsequently received a screen credit, although, according to Wise and Polonsky, he never produced a word of the screenplay. Although an accomplished writer in his own right, John O. Killens was, on this production, only a front for Abraham Polonsky.12 When Wise began to gear up for shooting, Polonsky came back to make some minor changes, but by the time shooting got under way, he was committed elsewhere. With Polonsky un-

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available, another writer would certainly be needed to enlarge the scope of the action and make a number of significant changes. Wise turned to Nelson Gidding, who came on to handle the necessary revisions as well as any additional rewrite chores that might develop. Odds against Tomorrow (1959) is basically a caper movie, but one that has an underlying theme: the destructive effects of racial prejudice. After almost thirty years as a New York City police captain, Dave Burke (Ed Begley) is summarily fired for being on the take and denied his pension. He sits alone in a room in a fleabag hotel, passing his days by planning a foolproof robbery. To pull it off, he recruits two additional down-and-out types, men who need money desperately and fast. One is Johnny Ingram (Belafonte), a young and personable nightclub entertainer whose penchant for picking slow horses has landed him heavily in debt to some nasty and unscrupulous people. To provide him with an incentive to pay up quickly, they have threatened his ex-wife and young daughter. The other recruit is Earle Slater (Robert Ryan), a psychotic neo-Nazi type who hates “niggers.” Even the slowest audience, with this kind of pairing as an example of Burke’s planning, would begin to despair of the success of his venture. But the focus of the film is not so much on the robbery as it is on the character and background of the men who come together to plan and carry it out. Although Ingram is the more engaging and sympathetic character, Slater is by far the more interesting and complex, and is not without some element of the sympathetic. He is an anachronism, a man whose days in World War II combat were the highlight of his life. A violent killing machine praised for his accomplishments in war, he is an insecure failure in peacetime society. His greatest anxiety seems to be his age and, related to it, what he fears is a fading masculinity. His girlfriend, Lorry (Shelley Winters), pays the rent and keeps him in pocket money, but he lives in dread that, ultimately, she will find someone else and he will be “junked like an old car.” It is to prove to her that he is still formidable, still a man, that he agrees to join in Burke’s plan. The plan is to rob a small bank that carries a big payroll in the upstate New York town of Milton. Johnny will travel by bus, Burke and Slater in separate cars. All three will enter the town separately, and come together at the time of the robbery. Posing as a counterman from a nearby restaurant, Johnny will make the regular after-hours delivery of coffee and sandwiches to the bank tellers, who will be busily counting the day’s receipts. He will come to a side entrance, where the guard will open the door and take in the food. Since the guard keeps the door chained when he opens it, the big obstacle has been getting the guard to release the chain. It is Johnny who solves the problem, by suggesting that they simply pack the food in a box that will be too large to fit through the chained opening.

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Johnny’s solution delights Burke, but fills Slater with a quiet anger and dismay. With all of his other insecurities, he is now confronted with a black man who is smarter than he is! With the door chain problem solved, the rest of the plan calls for Slater and Burke to scoop up the money while Johnny, after getting the keys from Slater, will bring the getaway car to the side door. The entry to the bank comes off smoothly, but once inside, with a gun in his hand and terrified victims before him, Slater goes a little crazy. He viciously pistol-whips the guard and starts shooting. The alarm goes off and it is clear that a quick getaway is imperative—but Slater inexplicably refuses to give Johnny the keys. In his demented panic, he knows only that he, gun in hand, is in charge and that white men do not give keys—symbols of authority and control—to black men. Their planned getaway thwarted, they come out to the street where the police are already waiting. Burke is shot immediately, and lies dying in the street. Slater runs down an alley and Ingram, who could escape, does not. Instead, he grabs Burke’s gun and takes off after Slater. They confront each other, after the customary chase and exchange of shots, atop a large tank in an oil refinery storage yard. Then (with homage to Raoul Walsh’s White Heat), a single shot is fired, but fired by which of them we do not know. Immediately the tank explodes into an instant inferno. In the final scene, Wise offers a closing irony to the smoldering hostility between Johnny Ingram and Earle Slater that has quite literally leaped into flames. When the police finally search through the ashes of the refinery storage yard, they find two bodies. Both are burned beyond recognition and, of course, beyond racial distinction. The blind hatred that fueled Slater’s antagonism and to which Ingram ultimately responded in kind produced nothing for either side. Ingram’s pride and resentment, along with Slater’s sense of white supremacy, have likewise ended in ashes. As the remains are carried away, the camera holds on a large stop sign in the background. Beneath it, another sign reads, “dead end.” Thus the message from Wise and Gidding: unless growing racial antagonism is brought to a halt, the odds against tomorrow, or more succinctly, the odds against the future of civilization, are against us. The vehicle, however, is not equal to the message. Since the robbery fails, it would seem that in an odd fashion racial disharmony has acted in the service of society, thwarting the robbery. Surely Wise does not wish to say that if only the psychotic redneck bigot and the happy-go-lucky black gambler can solve their differences and work in harmony, the beneficial result would be a more efficiently executed bank robbery? But such is the curious statement that concludes the story, and it is only by sifting through the elements of a somewhat muddled liberalism that cloud the conclusion that the screenwriter and the director can at least be given credit for good intentions. The problem lies in what seemed at the time like a necessary departure from the conclusion to McGivern’s novel. In McGivern’s version, Slater and

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Ingram escape together. Slater is wounded, and Ingram is lost in a violent world where he is the object of a police manhunt. Joined by circumstances, they find themselves gradually accepting a series of compromises. First they accept, and then trust one another; ultimately, they go beyond trust to mutual dependence and need. In McGivern’s version human need subsumes the circumstances that originally brought them together. McGivern’s conclusion is less pointed and clearly more effective in promoting a solution that lies in our common humanity. But Wise decided that it was necessary to change McGivern’s ending. The big film of the previous year had been Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958), which placed Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in almost the same situation depicted in McGivern’s novel: racial antagonism gradually disintegrating and being replaced by human tolerance, trust, and need. Rather than have Odds against Tomorrow written off by the critics as a pale imitation, Wise put Gidding to work to come up with an alternative ending, but the pessimistic “hate destroys” conclusion seems makeshift at best, and the racial irony is obscured by what could well be taken as a simple “crime doesn’t pay” finish. In the final analysis, Odds against Tomorrow is an uneven film, but one in which it is clear that Wise did more experimenting and took more creative risks than he had in any of his previous films. Using an entirely New York crew, Wise shot his interiors at the Gold Medal Studios in the Bronx. The town of Milton, where the robbery takes place, was actually Hudson, New York, a small industrial river port about one hundred miles north of New York City. The location was admirably suited to the mood of the story, and Wise and cinematographer Joseph Brun exploit it to fullest advantage in sequences of visual poetry unlike anything Wise had done before. The best of these sequences is the waiting period, in which each of the three novice bank robbers passes the time waiting for night to fall. As Johnny Ingram stands by the river, the scene is a moody study of the gray water, the fallen leaves that roll slowly in the cold wind across the concrete sidewalk, as Johnny is lost in his own thoughts. In front of him, bobbing softly with the movement of the water as it laps against the bulkhead, are large accumulations of trash and debris. In the midst of it all is a child’s doll, torn and dirty, discarded and forgotten. Ingram’s wasted life, the daughter he loves, the current impasse in which he finds himself as he searches hopelessly for alternatives: the entire range of his introspection is there for the viewer to see. For background, as a kind of visual objective correlative, Brun’s wide-angle lens picks up the river, the hills beyond, and the gray clouds in the setting sun. Sequences that depict waiting or the passing of time such as these are most frequently filmed using dissolves—the fading out of one scene overlapping the fading in of another. But Wise is a director who scrupulously avoids using the dissolve in his pictures, preferring—in keeping with his inclination

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toward a documentary style—to have his transitions precise and to the point. His transitions are never abrupt or disorienting, but are usually keyed to a line of dialogue that enables the act of transition itself to make a statement. When, for example, Burke is going over the final details of the robbery while alone with Slater, he extols the entire scheme as being absolutely foolproof. Slater, however, finds that there is one thing wrong. “What’s that?” Burke asks. “You didn’t tell me,” Slater replies with menace, “that the third guy was a nigger.” On the key word, Wise cuts to the affable Johnny Ingram, whom the audience has come to like and with whom they sympathize. The transition not only underscores Slater’s malice, it also clearly foreshadows the failure of the entire operation, a failure that will come through Slater, whose bigotry makes him the weakest link. Another creative and original touch is the score composed and conducted by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Although a bit overstated and occasionally incongruous in some sequences, it’s difficult to imagine a more effective complement to Wise’s study of this bizarre trio. Lewis’s score is at its most impressive in helping to create the mood behind Brun’s brooding camera, particularly in the scenes of contemplation by the Hudson. All told, the experience of Odds against Tomorrow verified Wise’s somewhat hesitant inclination toward producing. Projects took on an altogether different look, with the sense that he would be the one who determined the entire content of the final product. As a director-producer, casting, music, photography, editing, costumes, and so on would be his responsibility and the final result his creation. This, then, was really what filmmaking as an art form was all about. With his experience, Wise was supremely confident that he could—at least as well as any one could—accommodate the commercial realities of the industry to the needs of the filmmaker to make motion pictures that had something meaningful to say. From 1959 on, he would remain a director-producer, but the successful accommodation of commerce and art in balance would prove increasingly difficult.

NOTES 1. Jeff Stafford, “I Want to Live,” background, Turner Classic Movies, www.tcm.com (accessed February 4, 2007). 2. Robert Wise, interview with author, August 15, 1981. 3. Wise, interview. 4. Wise, interview. 5. Bosley Crowther, “I Want to Live,” New York Times, November 19, 1958. Reprinted in Filmfacts 1, no. 45 (December 10, 1958): 210.

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6. Crowther, “I Want to Live,” 210. 7. Arthur Knight, “I Want to Live,” Saturday Review, November 29, 1958. Reprinted in Filmfacts 1, no. 45 (December 10, 1958): 210. 8. “I Want to Live,” Variety, November 24, 1958. Reprinted in Filmfacts 1, no. 45 (December 10, 1958): 210. 9. Roger Beck, “Police, Prosecutors Blast Film on Barbara Graham,” Los Angeles Mirror News, November 28, 1958, 8. 10. Beck, “Police, Prosecutors Blast Film,” 8. 11. Wise, interview. 12. Abraham Polonsky, letter to author, June 28, 1978.

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From Stage to Film: Preeminent Translator of Musicals

T

he 1960s proved to be Robert Wise’s decade, the years in which he produced and directed films that made him internationally famous. His two musicals of the period, West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), shared worldwide acclaim and record-breaking runs. Between them they also shared fifteen Academy Awards, including, for each, an Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture. These two productions brought him more recognition than any of his other films, as well as general acknowledgment throughout the entertainment industry that he was the screen’s preeminent translator of Broadway musicals. In the 1960s Wise also dusted off some of the skills and techniques that he had picked up in his days with Val Lewton and used them to create The Haunting (1963), one of the better and more intelligent horror films of this or any other decade. But his films of the 1960s were not all unqualified successes. The Sand Pebbles (1966), his attempt to make a statement about the clash between Eastern and Western cultures, proved an overambitious project, a frame too large for its picture. There were also some outright failures: Two for the Seesaw (1962), which suffered from woeful miscasting, and Star! (1968), an obvious attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Julie Andrews and their successful collaboration in The Sound of Music, proved to be the resounding flop of his career. The decade began with the film that was up to that time his greatest challenge, but which would prove to be his most conspicuous success: West Side Story. Hardly a critic demurred from the most lavish praise, celebrating it as a bold new direction for the screen musical. Produced and codirected by Wise for the Mirisch Corporation and released through United Artists, West Side Story was the first of his films to bring him universal acclaim. It also brought 112

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the first test of his ability as a director-producer to maintain the balance between the demands of the budget and the demands of the artist, the accommodation, as it were, of commerce and art in delicate balance. In this instance, Wise’s problem took the form of a troublesome triangle: one film and two directors. Initially, Robert Wise seems an odd choice to direct the screen adaptation of a Broadway musical. He had made films that were critically appreciated in almost every Hollywood genre, but the musical, aside from This Could Be the Night with its nine musical numbers in a nightclub setting, had not been one of them. There were two factors that made Wise the best choice to direct the motion picture version of West Side Story: first, he loved musicals and very much wanted to direct one, having developed a special appreciation for them that began in his days working as an apprentice editor at RKO when the onscreen combination of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers defined the movie musical. The desire to do a musical was further enhanced by his experiences directing This Could Be the Night, as well as the jazz sequences for I Want to Live and Odds against Tomorrow. For years he had made frequent trips to New York, going to Broadway for personal pleasure and in search of film possibilities. Quite simply, Wise was intrigued by the pleasure and challenge of doing a musical. He had integrated unique musical scores into such films as Odds against Tomorrow and I Want to Live and had incorporated musical numbers into This Could Be the Night. Second, Harold Mirisch, the senior member of the Mirisch Corporation, which would be financing the production, needed someone with Robert Wise’s seasoned experience as a director and his reputation for fiscal responsibility. The talented but temperamental Jerome Robbins, so closely identified with the music and choreography of the stage production of West Side Story, was considered indispensable to any treatment of this property for the screen; but he was questionable as a screen director. Robbins had choreographed the dance numbers for The King and I (1956), directed by Walter Lang. Other than that, he had no experience with film and was not someone the Mirisch brothers were ready to trust with such complete and potentially expensive responsibility. Wise made his interest known, and he and the Mirisch Corporation came to terms. Wise secured the services of Ernest Lehman, among the most respected of Hollywood screenwriters, who had been with him on Executive Suite and Somebody Up There Likes Me, two projects on which they worked extremely well together. Wise was very comfortable with Lehman, and had great admiration for the intelligence of his contributions in solving problems as well as for his thoroughness and his penchant for hard work. This was particularly apparent to Wise when they worked together on Somebody Up There Likes Me. Lehman spent many hours with Rocky Graziano, the film’s subject, walking the streets of Graziano’s old neighborhood, meeting his boy-

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hood friends, and generally storing up a sense of ambiance and vocal nuance that lent much to the authenticity of the film. That sense of capturing the feel of New York City would prove especially beneficial in preparing the script for West Side Story. It was additionally helpful that Lehman had previous experience in musical adaptation from stage to screen, having written the screenplay for The King and I, the film for which Jerome Robbins had done the choreography. Jerome Robbins, sharing the director’s credit with Robert Wise, was undoubtedly the sine qua non of the Broadway production of West Side Story. He had created the dynamic and exciting dance numbers that had made it such a resounding hit onstage. It was Robbins who did the choreography not only for the New York company but for the national and, when it opened in London, for the British company as well. The original agreement with Wise brought Robbins into all aspects of the film: script, production design, casting, costumes, and, of course, the music. Generally, Robbins would make the decisions concerning the music and dance numbers, and Wise would take the responsibility for the shooting script and all other technical elements. Should disagreements develop that could not be readily resolved through agreement and compromise, it was agreed and understood that Wise, as producer, would make the final decision. Wise’s production called for an authentic New York locale, and several of the longer and more involved numbers, particularly the opening “Jet Song,” were to be staged on the actual streets of New York. Wise wanted a thoroughly realistic background, a New York story in a New York setting, and he readily recognized that the successful blending of the realistic and the imaginative would not be easy. Under these conditions, capturing for film the essence and spirit of what he had done on the stage was a big challenge for Robbins, who was accustomed to the theater, where the abrupt transition from straight drama to highly stylized dance routines within a performance was accepted without hesitation. The time-honored conventions of live performance theatre had conditioned audiences since the days of ancient Greece to accept and transcend such limitations through the simple exercise of imagination. For the motion picture audience, however, thoroughly inured to realism, the camera often seems to have a built-in cynicism that undermines a willing suspension of disbelief. Street gangs in an authentic locale suddenly springing into intricately choreographed dance routines seemed to be asking a lot—both from Robbins and from film audiences. The tandem directors set to work in earnest to adapt the routines to the new settings. They went back to New York for a while, shot a series of daylight tests on the west side of Manhattan, shot more tests on the streets of East Los Angeles, continued rehearsing and shooting tests on the streets of Gold-

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wyn Studios, trying all the while to adapt the dances satisfactorily to the sunlight and the outdoor backgrounds. Gradually they made progress, but the overall pace was far too slow. Well after actual shooting began, Robbins continued to work on all aspects of his choreography. The conditions under which he was working seemed to put increasing strain on him, and he had continuing difficulty getting the dance routines to meet his own very high standards. Wise maintained that what Robbins lacked in these particular circumstances was something that all theater people have and need: an opening night. He needed that inflexible deadline to work toward and then an uninterrupted performance before a live audience to test his dancers and his dances the way they should be tested. Without the perspective that only an opening night could give him, Robbins, working in a kind of artistic vacuum, began to fall behind in the shooting schedule. Wearing his producer’s hat, Wise attempted to get him to speed things up, making it clear that there were times when one simply had to recognize that what you are presently getting on film is about as good as you are going to get and it was time to move on. Robbins chafed at what seemed like philistine practicality, became temperamental, and felt that he and his medium were being grossly misunderstood. The tension between Wise and Robbins increased, until it became clear to United Artists and the Mirisch brothers that the codirection arrangement had begun to impede the production. With approximately 50 percent of the picture shot, Robbins was asked to leave, and Wise took over all directing responsibility. Robbins, however, was by no means through with the picture. With the on-set tension gone, an amicable relationship gradually returned. When he finished shooting, Wise invited Robbins out to see the first cut. With some exceptions, Robbins liked what he saw, made a number of good suggestions, and spent additional time in the editing room making changes in some of his dance routines. Fortunately for Wise, Robbins had thoroughly rehearsed all of the remaining dance numbers still to be shot and beyond doubt earned all of the credit due to him as a codirector.1 Although generally categorized as a musical, West Side Story is a far remove from the typical Hollywood musical, a term usually thought of as a synonym for musical comedy. Part of what appealed to Wise in undertaking this project was the fact that it was not all lightness and fluff. It was a beautiful and tragic love story that effectively indicts bigotry and prejudice (told with beautiful irony in the “America” number) and calls for reconsideration of the social conditions in our society that promote racial hostility and intolerance. The tragic love story is of course Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with Tony (Richard Beymer) as the modern counterpart of Romeo, and Maria (Natalie Wood), the young Puerto Rican girl with whom he falls in love, as a presentday Juliet. Instead of the Montague clan, Tony is supported by the Jets, a street

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gang of native-born kids of mixed ethnic background. Maria’s Capulet family is a rival Puerto Rican gang, known as the Sharks. For the hot-blooded Mercutio of Shakespeare’s play there is Riff (Russ Tamblyn), leader of the Jets, who is dispatched by the Tybalt-like Bernardo (George Chakiris), Maria’s protective brother and the top man in the Sharks. Beyond the Shakespearean framework, however, the story is as contemporary as the crime blotter at the local police station. Getting the proper authentic and contemporary effect to support that story required more than staging the opening number in the sunlit streets of Manhattan. Wise established the feel of New York with the opening prologue and carried it through with a number of painstaking details. Much of the credit for establishing a fine balance, a sense of a genuine west-side ambiance that did not slip over into what Wise termed Blackboard Jungle thuggery—an allusion to Richard Brooks’s Blackboard Jungle (1955), a picture in which highschool juvenile delinquents are depicted as harsh and brutal—was due to Ernest Lehman’s fine-tuning of the script. Balancing suggestions and observations from both Robbins and Wise, he proved to be remarkably adept at being the successful servant of two masters. Lehman, a native New Yorker, knew his town in a way that a strictly West Coast scriptwriter would not. He had done, as previously stated, similar research for Somebody Up There Likes Me, bringing an essential authenticity to the world of the New York streets that spawned Rocky Graziano. But in creating the dialogue for West Side Story, the problem was quite different. Wise and Lehman were in agreement that “the basic structure of the stage show was right, and that it should not be too drastically tampered with.”2 Too much hard-biting reality and authentic street ambiance would make the kids of West Side Story harsh and unsympathetic. An underlying sympathy with the street gangs depicted in this film was essential to the audience’s acceptance of the poignant love story. Lehman and Wise were in agreement that the objective would be to have real New York background and realistic sets but to avoid a film that appeared documentary and unduly harsh in its presentation. In an interview, Wise summarized the problem succinctly: It was exciting to think of West Side off the stage and put into real New York backgrounds and realistic sets. But it is first of all a musical, one that uses most effectively music, songs, highly stylized dancing, and lyrical and theatrical treatment to tell its story. On the stage, with the general acceptance of musical conventions, this offers no problem. But put against real New York streets, playgrounds and other completely realistic locations, the very unreality of parts of West Side Story becomes something that needs very special handling in order that it not be embarrassing to watch. It simply could not be done in any way that could be called “documentary.”3

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All things considered, Wise and Lehman were highly successful in the transition of West Side Story from stage to screen. As a final touch to solving the problem, it was Lehman’s idea to avoid writing dialect features and vocal nuance into the script, but to let the actors create the New York vernacular as they spoke their lines. Ultimately the director could deal with anything that might seem false or excessive. As the film opens, the first thing we see on the screen is a curious kind of abstract pattern that seems to be a random series of vertical lines, not unlike an overpunched 1950s computer program card. The frame subtly changes colors as the score continues to rise in the background and the main title appears below the pattern. Gradually the vertical lines resolve into buildings, and the pattern becomes a helicopter shot of lower Manhattan. The entire visually compelling process lasts for almost four minutes, the duration of the overture. It was created by visual effects specialist Linwood Dunn in response to Wise’s request for something that would be markedly different from the overdone shots of the New York skyline that usually open films with Manhattan settings.4 The next shot is from directly overhead with a slight fisheye distortion, just before it zooms down into the playground at West 110th Street, where the opening action takes place. The idea for this visual prologue was one that Wise actually stole from himself; he had used a similar overhead shot in Odds against Tomorrow. His reason for using this rather startling kind of opening was to avoid the overdone view of New York that usually takes in a low-angle shot of the Statue of Liberty, moves slowly through the uprights of the Brooklyn or Manhattan bridges, or uses some variation on these and other familiar New York landmarks. The authentic backdrops that Wise was looking for were, like all things, constantly changing, but in at least one instance Wise was able to bring change to a temporary halt, at least until he could get the shots he needed. He and production designer Boris Leven found a series of tenement buildings along West 68th Street that were just right for the background they wanted. But the buildings were in the process of being torn down and the demolition contractor had already removed the windows. At Wise’s request, the Mirisch Corporation made a deal with the contractor who was razing the buildings to delay final demolition until the New York location shooting could be completed. Their set saved, Wise’s decorators conducted a temporary restoration, replacing windows and dressing them with curtains, clotheslines, flowerpots, window boxes, and so on, restoring the inhabited look.5 Wise spent thirty days shooting on location in New York, and when he returned to Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood to shoot his interiors, Boris Leven had re-created New York’s West Side on almost every sound stage on the lot. Leven had constructed thirty-seven large sets, many of which could only be

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moved with the use of heavy equipment. Perhaps the most impressive of these was the tenement alley, which contained the fire escape that became for Tony and Maria what the balcony in old Verona was for Romeo and Juliet. To get the proper perspective for low-angle shots, the fire escape went to the top of the sound stage. This created some lighting problems, since the catwalks, the location for most of the basic lighting on a Hollywood sound stage, had to be removed. There were also additional lighting problems with the fire escape’s lattice-work shadows, which tended to turn up unexpectedly. But the motion picture industry rarely (if ever) encounters an insurmountable lighting problem, and the tenement alley set was no exception. The boom that enabled the camera to rise as high as thirty-five feet above the stage floor gave additional flexibility, particularly in dealing with sets that suggested a constricted, boxedin effect, in themselves offering silent comment on the confined and narrow existence of the denizens of the West Side.6 There’s no success quite like a Hollywood success, and the industry gave West Side Story the recognition it had earned. There were ten Academy Awards out of eleven nominations. In addition to the awards to Wise and Robbins, there were Oscars for George Chakiris and Rita Moreno for their supporting roles, an award for Daniel Fapp’s innovative color cinematography, and awards to Boris Leven for production design and Victor Gangelin for the sets. Irene Sharaff won for costumes, and Thomas Stanford for his editing. Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green, Sid Ramin, and Irwin Kostal shared the honors for Best Scoring of a Musical, and Fred Hynes took the award for Best Sound. Only Ernest Lehman, although nominated for his screenplay, was left out in the cold. West Side Story was a stunning success but, unfortunately, Robert Wise’s next picture was a decided misstep. Two for the Seesaw (1962), which Wise directed while he was still in his theater mood, was a Broadway comedy written by William Gibson. The play is an odd-couple tale pairing Gittel Mosca (Shirley MacLaine), a failed dancer from the Bronx who doggedly keeps trying, and Jerry Ryan (Robert Mitchum), a recently divorced and presently disoriented Nebraska lawyer. Theirs is a brief and troubled encounter, in which Gittel, a born loser who suffers from ulcers, tries to help Jerry adjust to New York and a new life. Although she works at being more assertive, Gittel is fundamentally a soft touch. Jerry, who eventually returns to his wife, becomes for Gittel one more bit of scar tissue. In a comic yet poignant scene, she slaps Jerry (twice) without apparent effect and delivers the line that pretty much sums up her situation, as she sees it, with the opposite sex: “All my life I’ve never yet been able to beat up one lousy man; it’s just not fair!” Gittel is a perennial loser in the battle of the sexes, one who will never have the advantage. On Broadway, the role of Gittel was played by Anne Bancroft, but the casting of Shirley MacLaine brought the right sense of one of life’s natural vic-

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tims attempting to overcome emotional and psychological obstacles with a virtuoso chutzpah that in reality runs against her nature. Jerry was played on Broadway by Henry Fonda, an actor particularly adept at portraying the combination of mild despair and boyish confusion that this role called for. Robert Mitchum was clearly a different actor, one who was decidedly all wrong for the part. Mitchum is essentially an outdoors actor, always at his best in Westerns and war films, and particularly effective in the role of a psychopath, as he demonstrated in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955) and J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1962). He was surprised when he was asked to do the role of Jerry Ryan, but undertook it as a challenge—and for the chance to work with Shirley MacLaine. Wise himself balked at the casting, but producer Walter Mirisch was convinced that Mitchum, not by nature a light comedy actor, was just the right offbeat type to play well with MacLaine’s exuberant style. Wise finally agreed, but not without some reservations. Those reservations were not without foundation. Perhaps the scene that demonstrates best the degree to which Mitchum is out of synch with his surroundings is the beatnik party. Gittel has invited Jerry to a party to meet some of her friends and to give him the opportunity to loosen up a bit. In this scene Jerry should feel very out of place, dressed in a suit and tie and holding his hat, while all around him are very spaced-out types, playing bongos, smoking grass, reciting bits of poetry. Occasionally he is favored with a condescending glance, but for the most part they ignore him. But it is perfectly clear that Mitchum’s Jerry is anything but uneasy. Mitchum is all cool, heavy-lidded confidence, just as he was when he walked into the saloon looking for Tate Riling in Blood on the Moon. He is so at ease and exudes such self-possession that the partygoers seem, by comparison, out of place! He is at least a foot taller than anyone else in the room, which in Mitchum’s case makes him more quietly dominant than awkwardly conspicuous. His expression shows bemused contempt rather than uneasiness. If the scene were shown in complete isolation from the rest of the film, it would certainly seem that we were witnessing a plainclothes detective about to make an easy drug bust. Aside from the obvious mismatch, Wise offers some nice touches that subtly define character. There is one scene in which Gittel, with Jerry’s help, has rented a studio where she can practice her dancing. Her partner has developed some new routines, and it’s important that she get ready for her big comeback. Alone in the loft and going through her routines before a large mirror, she grunts, wheezes, and effects such a general clumsiness that what we subconsciously feared becomes painfully evident: Gittel Mosca can’t dance a lick. It’s a silent scene done without dialogue and brilliantly performed by MacLaine, an accomplished dancer who faced the same challenge that Robert Ryan met with when he masked his natural boxing ability to bring off Stoker Thompson’s heavy clumsiness in The Set-Up.

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Robert Wise had never been successful with the comedy genre, and Two for the Seesaw was, perhaps mercifully, his final attempt. For his next project, he turned to something entirely different. It had been almost twenty years since he had directed the highly acclaimed The Body Snatcher for Val Lewton at RKO, and now he returned to the horror film to create a genuine classic. The Haunting was shot in England, and adapted by Nelson Gidding from Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House. It stars Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn. Julie Harris, a versatile actress of extraordinary talent, gives a portrayal of a woman rapidly being consumed by paranoia. Her performance is a tour de force, a performance either overlooked or inexplicably neglected by reviewers and critics. It is the best performance by an actress portraying a deranged mental state since Joanne Woodward’s classic role of a schizophrenic in Nunnally Johnson’s The Three Faces of Eve (1957). In support of Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and even Russ Tamblyn, who very much wanted this role in order to break his chorus boy stereotype, more than rise to the occasion. The Haunting is the story of four people who come together to conduct what is termed “an experiment in psychic research.” Translated, it simply means they move into an old Victorian mansion in order to determine whether or not it is haunted. The organizer and leader of the group is Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), an anthropologist who specializes in the occult and the supernatural. To aid him in his work Markway has selected, after careful investigation, several people who possess certain abilities or characteristics that will be of particular help to his project. The first is Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), a lonely and reclusive woman who has spent her life caring for an invalid mother who has recently died. Markway’s invitation is her first—from anyone to go anywhere. He has invited her because he has discovered from certain records that at the age of ten, she had a poltergeist experience that was verified by witnesses. As Markway sees her, she is someone who has been in touch with supernatural forces. The second person chosen is Theodora (Claire Bloom), an attractive and fashionably dressed Greenwich Village lesbian who has evidently broken with her lover and has accepted Markway’s invitation as something of a lark. She is one of his choices because she has extraordinary powers of ESP, powers that she has conclusively demonstrated in monitored experiments at Duke University. The fourth and final number of the team is Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn), the likable but ne’er-do-well nephew of the present absentee-owner of Hill House. Since he will someday inherit the property, Luke has come along “to protect his interests,” as he puts it. He has no interest in Markway’s project, and quickly becomes the group’s resident cynic. Markway’s other choices, for one reason or another, have either declined or failed to show up.

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The house soon proves to be everything they bargained for, and more. Although they see nothing, they hear, smell, and feel a great deal. The terror of the house manifests itself with thunderous, near-deafening poundings on locked doors, its approach preceded by a subzero chill, which the clairvoyant Theo, the group’s spiritualist thermometer in these experiences, feels more than the others. There is even a cold spot, a term used by psychic investigators to define an area of intense, supernatural cold that cannot be recorded on any measuring device. Markway discovers such a spot right outside of the nursery, the place that he determines is the supernatural heart of the house. The library also has certain idiosyncrasies, but apparently reserves them for Eleanor. At one point she is unable to enter it with the others, repelled, it is later clarified, by a smell like the odor of her late mother’s sickroom. The library also has a tall, circular staircase that climbs, like a giant coiled serpent, to the rafters above. Years earlier, the young companion of the aged Abigail Crain, whose father had built Hill House, had climbed those stairs and, consumed by guilt, hanged herself from the topmost platform. She had nursed the elderly Abigail—just as Eleanor had nursed her own mother—but Abigail had died as she lay in her sickbed pounding on the wall for the companion to come to her. As the helpless Abigail thumped away, the companion, in a distant part of the house, dallied with a lover. Both the library and its staircase hold a particular fascination for Eleanor, who carries her own burden of guilt concerning her mother’s death. Hill House shares its terror with everyone on what is pretty much an equal basis, but seems to have genuinely set its turret for Eleanor. She gradually comes to believe that she belongs at Hill House, that the house and all its terrors are her destiny. It is a feeling that poor Eleanor, who has never felt that she belonged or was wanted anywhere, perversely welcomes. In the end, she is the one victim the house claims, as she drives down the lane and, possibly under the control of the house, crashes into a tree. It is the very same tree, Markway informs us, where the first Mrs. Crain, the late Abigail’s mother, died in a carriage accident. In addition to being first-class nongraphic horror, The Haunting is skillfully constructed, a film in which some of the finest touches have been contributed by highly creative editing and unique visual compositions. Throughout the film, Wise leads the audience to observe and recognize—albeit subconsciously—the careful juxtaposition of combined images that he puts into a single frame. There are notable examples of this in earlier films: the rack-focusing shot in The Set-Up, for example, that captures in one frame Stoker’s look of pain and the cretinism of the fan screaming for blood, or the shot in I Want to Live that combines Barbara Graham’s wedding ring, stethoscope tube, and Saint Jude medal.

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One of the earliest scenes in The Haunting is particularly worth noting in this context. It depicts the carriage accident that carries off the first Mrs. Crain. As the carriage crashes, rolls, and comes to rest beside the ominous tree, Wise does not show us the victim, but instead fills the frame with the spinning wheel of the upset carriage; after a second or so, in tight close-up, the lifeless hand of the late Mrs. Crain drops into the frame. It is followed, a split second later, by her gold bracelet, which drops from her arm to her lower wrist. It’s a combination that Wise has used before, in Three Secrets, when the hand of Susan Chase abruptly drops into the frame in tight close-up, juxtaposed with the prescription bottle she has emptied in her suicide attempt. It’s a visual trope that clearly derives from Wise’s time in the RKO editing room working on the scene in Citizen Kane in which the crystal snow globe rolls from the dead hand of the film’s protagonist and offers the first clue to the mystery of Rosebud. Another brief scene that is particularly effective is the one in which we witness the demise of the second Mrs. Crain. Working with editor Ernest Walter, Wise obviously created this one more on the editing table than on the sound stage. It is an Eisenstein montage that uses a wide-angle lens to achieve a slight fisheye effect as Mrs. Crain comes to the top of the main staircase, reacts to some unseen horror, screams, and tumbles head over heels down the stairs. The scene is put together in such a way that we seem to tumble with her, in a quick succession of hands, feet, stairs, and banister palings. As the montage ends, almost as abruptly as it had begun, the camera locks on a view of the wall facing the bottom of the stairs. The view, however, is upside down; inexplicable until Wise cuts to an extreme close-up of Mrs. Crain’s face, also upside down: her eyes staring, her mouth open, her neck obviously broken. The upside-down wall—complete with picture and adjacent furniture—was the last thing she ever saw. In addition to Wise’s highly creative editing and visual composition, there are a number of influences from his days with Val Lewton in The Haunting. Wise was able to draw on a wide range of cinema experience. It’s obvious, for example, that Hill House is very much like the Amberson mansion and the house where little Amy Reed had her adventures in Curse of the Cat People. Those houses were, in fact, the same RKO property, a holdover from The Magnificent Ambersons set that was also used for interiors in The Body Snatcher. Wise’s Hill House, however, was actually Ettington Hall, an old hotel near Stratford-on-Avon in the heart of England’s Shakespeare country. It is, from the time we first see it, a terrifying structure, a perception enhanced with the slight distortion and stark intensity of a wide-angle lens and infrared film stock.7 Hill House is a menacing structure, and suggests immediately the devouring monster motif that so obsesses Eleanor. The gate where Eleanor has a light run-in with Dudley, the apparently malevolent caretaker, is all points

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and spikes, an ensemble of vicious teeth that opens to admit her. The view of the house beyond is very much the same, with pointed turrets and slanted roofs rising at sharp angles. What captures her attention immediately, however, is a set of large, glassless windows like the dark windows of a bell tower. Shot from a low angle, they seem to have fixed themselves on the hapless Eleanor like the eyes of a predator surveying its prey. At the moment she sees them, Wise cuts from the two windows to an extreme close-up of Eleanor’s eyes, and we hear her voiceover saying “It’s staring at me.” The house as predator manifests itself in other ways. Later, when Eleanor is in her bedroom, she fights her sense of panic but cannot help thinking to herself, “I’m like a small creature that has been swallowed whole by a monster—it feels my tiny movements inside.” Above her bed there is a circular, pleated bed canopy and Wise uses a low-angle tilt shot and composes the shot so that the canopy seems to encircle her head like some sort of organic membrane about to close tightly around her. Later, when Eleanor comes to accept the house as her destiny, the house is once again the predator: “Now I know where I’m going,” she thinks to herself, “I’m disappearing inch by inch into this house.” Yet for all of Eleanor’s awareness of the house as a living presence, Wise is particularly careful to show us nothing specific. In avoiding ghostly apparitions and such, it is clear that Wise is returning to lessons learned working with Val Lewton, who firmly believed that the real impact of horror lies not in what we can see, but in what we cannot see. The real instrument of terror is the human imagination, far more effective than any visual horror that might come roaring out of the special effects department. In Lewton’s production of Jacques Tourneur’s The Cat People, for example, the large cat that stalks Jane Randolph, in the park and later in an indoor swimming pool, is never seen. We hear it, we see bushes move, we see shadows on the wall, but never the cat itself stalking its prey. The closest we come is the panther in the park zoo, with whom the film’s cat woman, Irena (Simone Simon), has an obvious affinity. A particularly good example of Wise’s homage to Lewton in The Haunting is in the scene in which Eleanor and Theo huddle together on the bed as the deafening pounding threatens to smash their door from its hinges. Suddenly, it stops; outside in the hall we hear sounds like those of a huge animal, dragging itself along the floor, rubbing against the walls. It pauses at the door of the room in which the two women cling to each other in panic, and begins scratching around the door frame, as if it were searching for a way in. Underneath the door, there are shadows of something moving in the hall outside. Then, without warning, when Theo says Eleanor’s name, the pounding begins again, louder than before. The sequence, with its doorway of terror and its door that no one would dare open, is reminiscent of Lewton’s production of Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943), in which a young girl is clawed to

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death on the doorstep of her own house. The attack, however, is shot from the inside of the house; we hear it, but we do not see it. Lewton’s only visual concession is a small trickle of blood under the door. Added to his subtle application of the Lewton touch, Wise makes effective use of mirrors and statues as symbols that foreshadow and reinforce the action of the story. The mirror images, for example, seem to suggest, among other things, Eleanor’s rampant paranoia. Standing inside Hill House for the first time, she picks up her bag and is startled by her reflection in the highly polished floor, a reflection that Wise presents with mirrorlike clarity. Moments later, at the top of the stairs, she is startled by her reflection again in an old mercury-stained mirror. There are other scenes in which Eleanor, moving through the old house in fear, suddenly comes upon her own reflection in a mirror. Wise seems to be suggesting that Eleanor, at least in her own mind, is somehow already within the inner structure of the house. In other instances, the camera frequently picks up mirrors as if they were the eyes of the house watching the unwanted interlopers, and all of the mirror shots include Eleanor. In addition to the mirrors, various forms of statuary offer silent and cryptic comment, and are in themselves a curious mix of conflicting elements; generally, they represent various attitudes of suffering, prayer, and laughter, more than occasionally with a touch of the erotic. The door knocker, for example, is the head of an angel with a decidedly satanic smile; there is a similar angel’s head on the harp in the dining room (a harp that occasionally plays by itself ). In one early scene, as Eleanor climbs the stairs to her room, she stops abruptly and stares at the statue of a young girl, hands clasped beneath her chin, looking imploringly upward. Its odd significance is underscored by the fact that Wise presents it as a two-shot, juxtapositioning Eleanor with the head and hands of the statue. There is also a later scene in which Eleanor runs to a doorway, finds the door locked, and turns with arms stretched upward—but this time we see in the foreground a white marble bust of a woman’s head, the face covered with a thin gauzelike veil; the eyes are closed, the face looking downward, suggesting both peace and passive despair. Other shots including statues border on the bizarre. In one scene, as the group leaves the dining room with Eleanor all conspicuous innocence in her white blouse with the choirboy bow at the collar, the camera picks up a statue placed before a mirror. It is a woman with her eyes closed, her head resting on her left shoulder, the hair all loose curls. Her smile is one of gentle seduction, and she is burstingly décolletege. Other statues are used in combinations that are even more comically erotic, as in the shot in which the prim and austere housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley (Rosalie Crutchley), in a black dress in which only her hands and head are exposed, is positioned to share the frame with the statue of a bare-breasted courtesan. The courtesan has her right elbow raised high as

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if she were fixing her softly flowing hair. Mrs. Dudley, in her black dress with her black hair drawn tightly into a bun, offers a striking contrast to the white marble erotica. But as Mrs. Dudley turns to go, the camera picks up another statue—a bust of a young girl that seems to be wearing a crown of thorns. Certainly all of this symbolism offers much for the special interest of semiotic critics, but it was met with little enthusiasm by the reviewers of the day. The problem, they generally agreed, was not with Wise but with Nelson Gidding’s script. Writing in Variety, “Tube” observed that “the artful cinematic strokes of Robert Wise and staff are not quite enough to override the major shortcomings of Nelson Gidding’s screenplay.”8 Its “cardinal flaw,” he continues, is one of inconsistency, of failure to follow through on its thematic motivation. After elaborately setting the audience up in anticipation of drawing some scientific conclusions about the psychic phenomena field, the film completely dodges the issue in settling for a half-hearted melodramatic climax that is a distinct letdown.9

Bosley Crowther of the New York Times found that it had “just about everything in the old-fashioned blood-chilling line except a line of reasoning that makes a degree of sense.”10 Certainly Gidding’s screenplay sets up a conventional horror film situation, the old dark house and the guests from various backgrounds subjected to mysterious perils. But even though it’s written within that framework, it clearly avoids the obvious horror film clichés. In many ways it’s a rather daring script and, like the house itself, it presents a slightly off-center view of the inhabitants and how they are holding up under the pressures of coping with the supernatural. When Wise and Nelson Gidding were negotiating for the book rights, they met with Shirley Jackson to discuss her views on what she had written and on ideas about how to translate her views onto film. During the conversation, Gidding explained that at times Hill House seemed to him like an insane asylum and the things that happen seem to be coming from the demented perspective of the inmates. Was this, he asked, what she had in mind when she wrote the book? “No,” she replied, “but I think it’s a very good idea.”11 Obviously Gidding took Shirley Jackson’s affirmative response as a good foundation for the approach he takes in writing the screenplay. Although Markway, Theo, and Luke are eminently sane, Eleanor is, at the very least, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That Eleanor is close to the edge is clearly apparent in the scene in which we first meet her. Since her mother’s death, she has pooled her resources with her sister and now lives with her, her husband, and their small daughter. The tiny living room in which they discuss Eleanor’s intention to borrow the car (she is half-owner) makes even the audience feel

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a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling underscored by the fact that at night the room becomes Eleanor’s bedroom. They begin to bicker, the sister with an edge of sneering and sadistic competitiveness, the brother-in-law with an air of condescension and patronizing paternalism. They are making it as clear as they can without being overly blunt that they find Eleanor about as responsible as a child or an addled relative (which, they seem to feel, she very well may be). All the time they are talking the child plays a record, an annoying little children’s marching song, but Wise has amplified the sound so that the film audience cannot ignore it and let it recede behind the dialogue as background music. As it begins to work on Eleanor’s nerves, it affects the audience in very much the same way. It is a definite relief when Eleanor, near tears because of the way she is being patronized, finally shouts at her niece and tells everybody to leave her bedroom. To the child, Eleanor’s discomfiture is a matter of amusement, and she begins to sing, tauntingly, “Auntie Nell’s got a headache.” With this scene, Gidding sets a tone for the development of Eleanor’s character. Throughout the film she is established primarily as a repressed personality, a victim of either real or imaginary persecution. She is a pitiable creature, a woman who belongs nowhere and is loved and wanted by no one. She tries to belong, but always without success. To her sister and brother-in-law, she is an obvious burden, and thus Markway’s invitation is to her a delightful opportunity to escape and possibly begin a new life. But after a brief romantic interest in the pedantic and obtuse Markway comes to nothing, and an attempt to be just friends with the lesbian Theo is equally unsuccessful, Eleanor apparently gives up on natural relationships, and accepts, in their place, supernatural ones. This troubled Crowther and other reviewers, who felt they were leaving the theater with no more answers than they had when they entered. Why, they wondered, should The Haunting be exempt from tying up loose ends into a sensible conclusion? But Gidding clearly recognizes, and incorporates into his script, the fact that, in exploring the supernatural, all we have are loose ends, combinations that seem to fit together but ultimately defy any final, pat resolution. What, for example, is the relationship between old bedridden Abigail Crain, who would thump on the wall with her cane for her companion, and Eleanor’s mother, who would pound, in similar fashion, for her daughter in the adjoining bedroom? There would seem to be a connection, but this and the general question of just how much of what happens to Eleanor at Hill House is attributable to her deteriorating mental state is ultimately left unresolved. Gidding and Wise are obviously content to let the audience continue to play with the parts to the puzzle. For contemporary film critics, the puzzle continues. Scholars drawn to hidden meanings in intelligent horror films offer a variety of interpretations of Wise’s The Haunting. Some strain credulity, others offer unique approaches that clearly demonstrate that

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there is more to this film than initially meets the eye. At least one critic offers a curiously compelling argument for the menacing house as a metaphor for Eleanor Lance’s repressed lesbianism. The Haunting was Robert Wise’s first horror film in twenty years, but it demonstrated conclusively that he had not lost his touch. Two for the Seesaw and The Haunting were small films for Robert Wise, and after completing them, he was restless and wanted something with a greater challenge. The exhilaration, the fame, and the appreciative recognition of the industry that came with the successful translation of a Broadway musical stimulated his sense of professional ambition. He wanted to repeat the experience. Three years after the completion of West Side Story, Wise started work on his second musical adapted from a Broadway success, The Sound of Music. The critics would prove to be considerably less enthusiastic than they had been for West Side Story, but for the general public it was the most exciting picture to come out of Hollywood since Gone with the Wind (1939). In box-office receipts it grossed more than $79 million in its initial release in the domestic market alone, compared to the slightly less than $20 million brought in by West Side Story. By 2001, The Sound of Music had grossed (adjusted for inflation) $797 million, making it the third highest grossing film of all time.12 For the 1960s, The Sound of Music was more than a movie; it was a cultural phenomenon. Many of the same critics who lauded West Side Story, however, pounced on The Sound of Music with a vengeance. Those who review films and also cultivate for themselves a reputation as interpreters of American cinema as an art form could not be satisfied with simply dismissing it or finding it wanting in a number of areas; they felt somehow compelled to use it as a prime example of an incorrigible bad taste in motion pictures that epitomized an America too long under the spell of Hollywood. Two notable examples, Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker, and Stanley Kauffmann, in the New Republic, were particularly irritated. Kauffmann, in the sarcasm that seems the special province of academic critics who deign to venture into the world of popular entertainment, found the songs “sickening” and Julie Andrews in danger of “rapidly becoming the most revoltingly refreshing actress in films.” It even led him to ponder the question of an afterlife for people of his particular calling: Is there a special heaven for film critics? I feel confident of it, after enduring all of The Sound of Music. At that, heaven is small enough compensation for sitting through this Rodgers and Hammerstein atrocity, so studiously saccharine that one feels that one has tumbled into the hold of a tanker bringing molasses from the Caribbean.13

Kael was equally scathing, referring to the film as “the Sound of Money.” “The success of a movie like The Sound of Music,” Kael lamented, “makes it even

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more difficult for anyone to try to do anything worth doing, anything relevant to the modern world, anything inventive or expressive.”14 Undoubtedly there is a quality of candy-box confection about The Sound of Music, but certainly nothing that merits this kind of attack. It is exactly what it purports to be: a bright, happy, musical diversion on the grand scale, a Cinderella story set against the background of contemporary Europe. The Nazis are the bad guys, but they’re more caricatures of evil than the real thing, which of course explains why they are so easily outwitted. Even their ideological seduction of poor Rolfe, Liesl’s love interest, renders him little more than a villain of melodrama. The Nazis even serve the purpose of provoking a little endearing cuteness from the youngest of the Trapps, who is faintly aware that as the swastika flags are increasingly more visible in her little Austrian town, the people are becoming more edgy. “Maybe” she asks, “the flag with the black spider on it makes everybody cross.” Maybe so, but it obviously takes more than that to make Kael and Kauffmann cross, if cross is the right word to describe a reaction to something they find so obviously beneath contempt. Underneath it all they’re clearly angry, and the red flag in this case is that the film had widespread popular appeal. The American public, which didn’t read Kael or Kauffmann in significant numbers, turned out in droves for The Sound of Music. In many cases, once wasn’t enough. Many moviegoers, delighted with what they saw as a heartwarming spectacle replete with positive family values, saw it several times. It became common parlance among the enthusiasts for The Sound of Music to boast about how many times they had seen it. With popular appeal, of course, comes the evil of box-office revenues; many film critics believe that a film that makes money cannot have true cinematic value, and The Sound of Music made approximately $50,000,000 in the first 45 weeks of its release.15 The Kaels and Kauffmanns shook their heads in sad lament for the decline of cinematic art and the resurgence of movies. A sweeping indictment posing as objective criticism is actually a form of intellectual myopia, rejecting much that rewards a more discerning consideration. Admittedly, The Sound of Music is generally saccharine and a bit puerile, but there is much in the film that merits praise and appreciation. William Reynolds’s splendid editing in the “Do Re Mi” number, Ernest Lehman’s sharp and concise screenplay, Ted McCord’s color cinematography, and the brief but splendidly understated performance given by Eleanor Parker all merit closer attention and appreciation in any balanced analysis of The Sound of Music. The cinematography, perhaps even more than the music, is the prime element in The Sound of Music appreciated by moviegoers, for whom Wise and McCord make it look easy. The opening helicopter shot, for example, the one that several reviewers found a trite imitation of Wise’s aerial opening of West Side Story, offers impressive Alpine scenery and would seem to require nothing

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more than a competent cameraman and an experienced pilot. One good pass over Julie Andrews, singing her heart out about the hills being alive with the sound of music, and it’s on to the next set-up. But the opening scene is actually a series of helicopter shots, carefully edited to disguise a cut to the camera crane on the ground, ready to pick up Miss Andrews whirling about in the Austrian meadows. As she sings, she dances along what appears to be the edge of a forest, moving before a line of birch trees with the sunlight dappling through, illuminating her with natural light. There were, however, no birch trees, no forest, and—in that cloudy and rainy Austrian summer of 1964—no sunlight, at least for this particular shot. The trees were birch logs dressed with foliage and set into the ground in a careful arrangement to suggest the edge of a forest. There was just enough foliage to drop into the top of the frame, while the real shade was provided by an overhead canvas, beneath which the proper combination of lights and filters gave the dappled sunlight effect. The bad weather caused Wise and company to shoot many of their exteriors under canvas, using artificial light, and it was a challenge that McCord handled brilliantly. The interior sets were not without challenges as well. The scene in the cathedral, for example, in which Maria walks down the aisle to her wedding, presented particular problems. The conflict between the light coming in the large gothic windows and the studio lights on the inside created a lighting imbalance, resulting in a predominance of blue. To solve it, McCord put color correction filters over all the windows to establish a balance with artificial light. The proscenium arch in front of the altar hid a series of lights that rose from floor to ceiling, an arrangement that resulted in the impression that the light on the altar was coming from the large eastern windows directly behind. Even the illumination that seems to come from the window on the right and fall across the cathedral steps before the altar rail is actually coming from a small light on the floor in the lower left of the frame, angled to shoot up toward the window. It’s one of the most impressive scenes in the picture, but one, strangely enough, in which all of the natural light is coming from the opposite direction.16 All of the technical and artistic skill that went into The Sound of Music, however, revolves around the nucleus that is Julie Andrews. For an actress of very limited range, this picture was the peak of her career. She portrayed Maria von Trapp as an ingenuous, earthy Mary Poppins, a delightful creation whose exuberance, innocence, and vivacity provided movie audiences with nothing more or less than three hours of delightful entertainment. Such was Robert Wise’s objective and such was his achievement. It was not, after all, a project that he originated but one that he inherited when William Wyler, who had initially undertaken to do it for Fox, decided that it wasn’t for him. Fox then turned to Robert Wise, who agreed to do if the studio would

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agree to give financial backing for his next project, William McKenna’s novel, The Sand Pebbles. When the deal was made, Wise came on board and gave Fox what they had contracted for: a film translation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit that captured the essential quality of the original. Within two years of its release it had made close to $100 million, and its epithet in the trade became “The Sound of Money.” Around the world it was a box-office blockbuster that proved once again, to the chagrin of the Kaels and Kauffmanns, that movie audiences may not know much about art, but they know what they like. Whatever its lack of relevant statement and its limitations as cinema art, it helped breathe life into a financially ailing Twentieth Century Fox, and into an industry that has shown over the years that its need for occasional economic resuscitation was becoming more and more frequent. The industry’s shot of economic adrenaline for the mid-1960s was The Sound of Music. The Sound of Music played particularly well in Europe and Central and South America, but it did run into a bit of a snag in Germany. In Berlin and Munich, it was pulled after four weeks. German audiences generally resented the portions of the film that portrayed the Nazis; they had apparently had it with Germans as heavies in any film that dealt with Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In order to make the film more acceptable, and possibly to appease certain neo-Nazi elements centered in Munich and elsewhere, Twentieth Century Fox’s Munich branch manager took it upon himself to simply excise the offending footage. The removal of the Nazi portions didn’t seem to help the German market, but it struck a nerve in Robert Wise. For a branch manager to suddenly start making editorial decisions without consulting either the central distribution offices at Fox or, more important, the man who made the film, was more than he could take. It had been Wise’s habit for years to spend a good deal of time in postproduction work, work that for him was often more important than the actual shooting. Where other directors would frequently leave for their next assignment as soon as shooting was completed, staying in touch with the editing team and returning only when the editor’s cut was ready for final review, Wise habitually spent considerable time reviewing the final footage himself, working closely with his technical crew on all looping and editing chores. Because of his painstaking efforts to get the final cut he wanted, it was particularly grating for Wise to see a film mutilated by someone who, for whatever reason, took it upon himself to become an impromptu editor. Arbitrary cutting had become a sore subject in recent years for Wise and other filmmakers, particularly when they saw their earlier films nipped and chopped to accommodate television’s time slots and commercial spots. In this instance Wise complained loudly, both publicly and privately, and the snipped footage was quickly restored. At the very least, he learned that in future contracts he would be careful to clarify the relationship between the

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producer and the distributor, giving particular attention to whatever license might be allowed the distributor’s employees.17 When it came time for the Academy Awards in the spring of 1966, The Sound of Music did well, but only half as well as West Side Story. It received ten nominations and five awards. Wise won for Best Picture and Best Director, as did William Reynolds for his editing and Irwin Kostal for his adaptation. Fred Hynes (who won previously for West Side Story) shared the award for sound with James P. Corcoran. Julie Andrews, not surprisingly, lost out to Julie Christie’s performance in John Schlesinger’s Darling. What was surprising is that Boris Leven, nominated for art direction along with the combination of Walter Scott and Ruby Levitt, who were nominated for set decoration, did not win, losing to John Box, Terence Marsh, and Dario Simoni, who won for Dr. Zhivago. But the Leven team’s highly exact reconstruction of the courtyard interior of the Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg remains one of the finest examples of the work that Hollywood craftsmen can perform. It was also surprising that Ernest Lehman did not receive a nomination from the Academy, although he did receive the award for Best Written American Musical from the Writers Guild of America. An Academy Award for Best Picture without a nomination for Best Screenplay is a rare occurrence. It would not happen again for more than thirty years, when James Cameron would be passed over for Titanic (1997). Unlike Lehman, Cameron had the consolation of winning three other Academy Awards for Titanic, for producing, directing, and editing. The Sand Pebbles (1966), which Wise undertook just after The Sound of Music, presented considerable challenges. It was his most ambitious, large-scale action picture since Helen of Troy, budgeted at close to $12 million. The story takes place in China’s Hunan province and on the Yangtze River, but, with the Chinese mainland off limits to an American film company, most of the location work was done in Taipei, Taiwan. Wise undertook this very involved project for several reasons. First, although he took pride in being referred to as the preeminent translator of Broadway musicals, paradoxically he also wanted to avoid the inevitable stereotype of director of movie musicals that would most certainly attach itself to the man who had produced and directed West Side Story and The Sound of Music. A second and perhaps more important reason was that The Sand Pebbles had the primary ingredients that appealed to him in any potential film project: a good dramatic story presented within a framework of significant comment on some important issue or problem facing the world. In this story of China’s emerging nationalism and its head-on clash with the gunboat diplomacy of the Western powers, Wise saw an intriguing parallel to present-day America’s unwanted intervention into the internal affairs of Southeast Asia. The political message, however, became for many an indirect, confusing, and somewhat obscure comment on the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.

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The story begins in China in 1926, at a time when such traditional enemies as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, the fledgling Chinese Communist Party, and individual warlords find themselves in general agreement that China must be rid of all foreign devils. Included in that group of devils is the USS San Pablo, an American gunboat patrolling the Yangtze River. The patrol is evidently long-term duty, and the sailors have become lethargic and all but indifferent to standard military discipline. Chinese coolies have been subcontracted, so to speak, to handle almost all of the routine duties on board. The sailors, known to the Chinese as “sand pebbles,” a linguistic corruption of the words San Pablo, are abruptly awakened from their lethargy when Chiang decides to consolidate his power and move against the warlords. Such a move is viewed by the U.S. government as a civil war, and the San Pablo is ordered to maintain strict neutrality but also to safeguard the life and property of American citizens in China. The principals in the story are Jake Holman (Steve McQueen), the ship’s machinist-engineer whose only interest, until he meets missionary schoolteacher Shirley Eckert (Candice Bergen), is the smooth and efficient operation of the ship’s engine. For Jake, time spent in the engine room is a labor of love that is both uncomplicated and fulfilling, and initially he resents being told that certain duties in the engine room are routinely performed by the coolies. Jake’s resistance to the status quo puts him at odds with his new shipmates, who see him as a troublemaking nonconformist who has no interest in quietly fitting in with their comfortable lifestyle. He is indeed self-disciplined, strong-willed, and highly confident in his own abilities. His only ambition is to be the best machinist mate in the Navy, and his primary allegiance is to the entrancing machinery of the San Pablo’s engine. But Jake, the loner who wishes only to be left to do his job and has no interest in being accepted, is fated to draw the enmity of his shipmates and the negative attention of Captain Collins (Richard Crenna), the San Pablo’s skipper who believes firmly that men of ability under his command should strive for positions of leadership. Jake’s attitude seems a subtle resistance to authority, and is the cause of the continuing antagonism between them. Jake Holman, however, is not entirely without friends. There are Frenchy Burgoyne (Richard Attenborough), the only sailor who befriends him, and Po-Han (Mako), a young Chinese whom Jake trains, at first with considerable reluctance, as an engineer’s assistant in the operation of the ship’s engine. Both of these friends, however, meet a tragic end. Frenchy dies of pneumonia, contracted from his nightly AWOL swims to visit Maily, his common-law wife, a young Chinese girl educated by missionaries, whom Frenchy and Jake save from a life of forced prostitution. It is through his friendship with Frenchy that Jake, who wanted involvement with nothing but the efficient operation of a

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ship’s engine, finds himself at the center of a developing international incident, accused of murder after the Chinese belligerents put the widowed Maily to death, and accuse him of the crime. The climactic point in The Sand Pebbles occurs when Po-Han is captured by Chinese nationalists and brutally tortured on the beach a short distance from where the American gunboat is safely anchored. The nationalists want the men of the San Pablo to fire on them to provoke an international incident, but it is only Jake who responds, disobeying Captain Collins’s strict neutrality orders. He snatches a rifle from a fellow sailor and mercifully puts Po-Han out of his misery with a single shot. This small rebellion is momentarily quelled, but when word arrives that the China situation has worsened to the point that U.S. Marines have landed in Shanghai, Captain Collins, like Jake, is forced to take action by unforeseen circumstances. Collins orders the ship to head upriver to Jameson’s mission to rescue Mr. Jameson (Larry Gates) and Shirley Eckert, Jake Holman’s ostensible love interest. After a high-action encounter in which the San Pablo breaks through a river barricade of Chinese junks, Captain Collins and the “sand pebbles” proceed to complete the rescue operation. Jameson, however, staunchly refuses the protection of the American flag. He and Shirley Eckert have sent their names to Geneva and declared themselves stateless persons. “Damn your flag,” he cries to Collins, “damn all flags; it’s too late in the world for flags!” Meanwhile, nationalists alerted by the San Pablo’s running of the river blockade surround the mission and, in the ensuing conflict, both Jameson and Collins are killed. While the other members of the rescue operation take Shirley, who wants to stay with Jake, to the safety of the San Pablo, Jake stays behind to cover their escape. After a spirited defense, he is hit, and sits in stunned surprise watching his life trickle away from the gaping wound in his stomach. Just a few months earlier, his only interest was to mind his own business and tend the ship’s engine. Now he lies dying, the unwilling victim of international conflict. He asks in bewilderment the same question that many people would ask in a collective and retrospective analysis of how the United States became so deeply involved in Vietnam: “What happened? What the hell happened?” In the course of those three hours of running time, Wise’s perspective on American presence in the Far East, both then and now, gradually though indirectly comes across. Captain Collins, a man given to pompous, jingoistic, Fourth of July–type speeches, finally realizes with considerable disillusionment that he and his men are not the regional representatives of civilization’s master race, nor is their military presence welcome in a country that has not invited it. Perhaps Mr. Jameson, the stateless missionary, sums it up best when he puts a simple rhetorical question to a group of prointervention chauvinists: “How would you like it if the Chinese ran gunboats up the Mississippi?” How indeed!

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The Sand Pebbles is a broad and entertaining spectacle, with a performance by Steve McQueen that was undoubtedly one of the best of a relatively short career. But McQueen’s performance is just about all there is to this film. The romance with Candice Bergen, whom Time magazine called a “simperingly lovely leading lady,” is flat and tepid, with barely a hint of recognizable passion. Whatever action occurs in the film seems to occur reluctantly, from Jake’s mercy killing of Po-Han to Collins’s eleventh-hour mobilization of his command. It’s a film in which all the characters seem content with the status quo, as events unfold around them and finally draw them into action. Another significant flaw is that at 191 minutes (with intermission), it’s simply too long. Time found it to be a “very slow boat to China.”18 There are several sequences that should have been trimmed, most notably the love affair between Frenchy Burgoyne and Maily. Wise later felt that if he had The Sand Pebbles to do over again he would have eliminated the Frenchy–Maily love affair altogether. But why is it that a former editor of Wise’s ability did not recognize that the film’s length would be the one flaw in an otherwise impressive accomplishment? In most productions it is the producer who, working with the editor and the director, makes the hard decisions about how much and when to trim. Wise was, of course, both director and producer, which can be a difficult combination of business head and creative artist. In the case of The Sand Pebbles, the choice was complicated by the fact that even the sequences that in retrospect seem a little too long are splendidly executed. The battle on the river, for example, is a rare combination of visual poetry and exciting action, at the core of which are the fluid physical movements (he insisted on doing his own stunts) and superbly rendered emotional reactions of Steve McQueen. Regrettably, the film is not the sum of its admirable parts. Wise, inexplicably, found it difficult, if not impossible, to make the cuts that needed to be made. The need to make a political statement—the analogy to the Vietnam War that was being fought at the time—obscured his creative judgment. The reviewers were divided. The most negative review was given by Judith Crist, who called The Sand Pebbles “three hours of tedium interspersed with a blood-spattered, schmaltz-spangled compendium of screenplay clichés about American servicemen involved in Oriental politics, revolutions and amours.” She also took serious issue with Robert Anderson’s script, calling it “some of the most stultifying dialogue ever allotted actors.” In notable instances, the script’s shortfall was fortunately overcome for Crist by the performances of Attenborough, Crenna, and especially McQueen, whom she found “superb” and “remarkably sensitive.”19 Judging from Arthur Knight’s critique in the Saturday Review, it’s hard to believe that he and Judith Crist saw the same picture. Knight praises The Sand Pebbles as another success from a director “who seems to be able to do any-

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thing . . . whatever the genre.” In stark contrast to Crist, Knight credits Anderson’s script with being “brilliantly succinct” and, in his direction, Wise is “nobly abetted” by a script “that keeps hurtling forward for more than three hours with scarcely a let-up in pace.”20 Bosley Crowther of the New York Times found it “brooding and turbulent,” and ultimately “a beautifully mounted film,” albeit a “curiously turgid and uneven attempt to generate a war romance and a finally forceful and depressing blast at getting into trouble over our heads.”21 Other reviews, not surprisingly, took issue with the film’s length, and Variety, finding it “excellent,” “a sensitive personal drama,” and a “handsome production,” nonetheless found it “overlong by at least 25 minutes.”22 The Sand Pebbles had been widely promoted, but a large publicity campaign was not enough to make it the success that Wise had wanted it to be. It received eight nominations but no Academy Awards. The Sand Pebbles was an arduous project, shot under difficult conditions on location in Taiwan. With its completion, Wise looked forward to a cherished project, one that would enable him to return to the musical, his area of greatest commercial success. The public’s continuing love affair with Julie Andrews and her personal triumph in The Sound of Music made her the box-office star of the 1960s, and Wise and his associate producer, Saul Chaplin, decided early on to do another Julie Andrews musical. It was in the late summer of 1964, with Sound of Music still in the postproduction stages, that Julie Andrews verbally agreed to play Gertrude Lawrence in a musical biography for which a script had not yet been written. At the time, it seemed like a reprise of a winning combination and therefore a sure box-office winner. Ultimately it became a small disaster for all concerned, most particularly for Julie Andrews. Wise and Chaplin attempted to showcase her with as much musical glitter and sparkle as they could feasibly put together in one picture. There were seventeen musical numbers, sixteen of them, either whole or in part, performed by Andrews. She had ninety-six complete costume changes and wore jewelry, on loan from Cartier of New York, valued at more than $3 million. Boris Leven designed 185 sets, all of which Wise supervised and scrutinized carefully for exact period accuracy. To complete the sets and further guard against anachronisms, some 6,800 hand prop items of the kind used between 1905 and 1940 were either custom made or foraged from antique collections. Star! also had the largest cast Wise had worked with since Helen of Troy. There were 18 stars and principal players, supported by 144 small speaking roles and an additional 178 small bit roles. In the background there were almost 10,000 extras, a figure that included those used on location work in Cape Cod, France, England, and New York.23 For some single sequences, there were as many as 600 extras. Judging from some of the really fine musical numbers

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like the early “Piccadilly,” a delightful extravagance set in a pre–World War I music hall featuring Julie Andrews at her best, it seemed an accomplished fact that Wise and Chaplin had another hit on their hands. But several months after its world premiere in London, it was all too clear that the exact opposite was the case. After several months of disappointing box-office returns and giving it the benefit of the doubt, Twentieth Century Fox faced facts and pulled Star! out of release. It had cost $14 million and had played fewer than 1,000 engagements before being withdrawn. In the editing rooms at Fox, Wise and editor William Reynolds began their salvage operations. When they finished, they had trimmed 35 minutes from its original 165-minute running time. Fox’s research department began testing to see what kind of an audience the new ad campaign should aim for, and a new title was also in the works. The first choice for a while was Gertie Was a Lady, but clearer heads prevailed and the final decision went to Those Were the Happy Times. Fox rereleased it in October 1969, but once again, it simply rolled over and died. Why? Clearly it was a case of miscasting. It simply wasn’t the role for Julie Andrews. Mary Poppins (1964) had brought her an Academy Award and The Sound of Music was her resounding popular success, but a large part of her appeal in each was a kind of virginal purity, an appeal that eventually made the word refreshing a cliché when used as an adjective to describe her. When Star! opened in the summer of 1968, it offered the public a new Julie Andrews and demonstrated that her versatility was indeed limited. In personality, Gertrude Lawrence was no Mary Poppins and she was certainly not a Maria von Trapp. She wasn’t even Eliza Doolittle, the My Fair Lady role that brought Andrews her first great Broadway success and led both critics and public (many of whom believed it grossly unfair that she was not considered a big enough star for the film role) to believe that she was not only highly talented but also extremely versatile. Regrettably, she was not equal to the challenge. The real Gertrude Lawrence was tough but sophisticated, a temperamental and egocentric theater professional of enormous talent, and she knew it. Her colleague and lifelong friend Sir Noel Coward described her affectionately as “maddening.” Julie Andrews tries hard and is technically fine, but her attempts to bring off Lawrence’s verve and panache fall short. More significantly, her former image and her new role clash head-on. For the first time her fans heard her being brash and insulting, delivering lines sprinkled with “damn,” “cripes!” and “you bastard!” There were several cheesecake shots, even a burlesque bump-andgrind sequence in one of the musical numbers; Julie as Gertie drank frequently and even played a drunk scene; she smoked throughout the picture and at one point puffed on a cigar. It was all very disillusioning for those who came to see

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once again the incomparable heroine of The Sound of Music, the foremost ingénue of motion pictures. In this sense, Star! was the victim of the fallacy of heightened expectation. For the most part, the audience that went to see Julie Andrews knew little of Gertrude Lawrence and were clearly anticipating an enhancement of Maria von Trapp—more of the same, only better. They were woefully disappointed. For the remainder of his life, Wise remained mystified about the failure of Star! Certainly he had made films that had not paid off at the box office, but Star! he maintained, “was my biggest disappointment. . . . People often ask me why it didn’t work for them. It’s hard to find the answers.”24

NOTES 1. Sergio Leeman, Robert Wise on His Films (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1995), 167. 2. Robert Wise, interview with author, August 15, 1981. 3. Wise, interview. 4. Linwood G. Dunn, “Effects and Titles for West Side Story,” American Cinematographer, December 1961, 756. 5. Wise, interview. 6. Wise, interview. 7. Wise, interview. 8. “Tube,” Variety, August 21, 1963. Reprinted in Filmfacts 6, no. 32 (September 12, 1963): 182. 9. “Tube,” Variety. 10. Bosley Crowther, New York Times, August 19, 1963. Reprinted in Filmfacts 6, no. 32 (September 19, 1963): 182. 11. Wise, interview. 12. Screen Source: Top Grossing Movies, www.amug.org/~scrnsrc (accessed December 16, 2006). 13. Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, March 20, 1965, 26–27. 14. Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (New York: Bantam, 1969), 214. 15. “Moody Critic Aside, Sound of Music Out-Blowing Top ‘Wind,’” Variety, January 1, 1966. 16. Ted McCord, “How I Photographed The Sound of Music,” American Cinematographer, April 1965, 223–25. 17. “Wise Hits ‘High-handed’ 20th Staffer Who Slashed Nazi Footage from ‘Music,’” Variety, June 2, 1966, 4. 18. “The Sand Pebbles,” Time, January 6, 1967. Reprinted in Filmfacts 9, no. 24 (January 15, 1967): 331. 19. Judith Crist, “The Sand Pebbles,” New York World Journal Tribune, December 21, 1966. Reprinted in Filmfacts 9, no. 24 (January 15, 1967): 331.

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20. Arthur Knight, “SR Goes to the Movies,” Saturday Review, December 24, 1966, 62. 21. Bosley Crowther, “The Sand Pebbles,” New York Times, December 21, 1966. Reprinted in Filmfacts 9, no. 24 (January 15, 1967): 330. 22. ‘Murf,’ “The Sand Pebbles,” Variety, December 21, 1966. Reprinted in Filmfacts 9, no. 24 (January 15, 1967): 331–32. 23. Mike Kaplan, Star! Production Notes (Robert Wise Productions file: 3 [undated]). 24. Wise, interview.

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he last film that Robert Wise directed in the 1960s was the ominous Star! which seemed to augur the beginning of a series of films that would either misjudge public appeal or be woefully misunderstood by reviewers. Of the five films he would direct in the 1970s, only The Andromeda Strain (1971) would be regarded as a modest success. Of the others, Two People (1973), a love story dealing with disillusionment and alienation during the Vietnam War, came at a time when the public was pretty much saturated with media attitudes regarding the folly of intervention and its destructive effect on domestic morale. The Hindenburg (1975) was generally looked upon as an effort at a big-budget prestige film that boasted painstaking historical accuracy, but was largely an attempt to cash in on the then-current box-office appeal of disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), Airport (1975), and, most certainly, Mark Robson’s Earthquake (1974), a box-office hit that was produced by the Filmmakers’ Group, a production company jointly owned by Robson and Wise. Two years after the release of The Hindenburg came Audrey Rose (1977), a story of reincarnation in the body of a twelve-year-old girl. Inevitably, it was seen as a successor to William Friedkin’s highly successful The Exorcist (1973) and John Boorman’s barely tolerable Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), released early in the year. Because it was seen as a pale, rather weak effort to capitalize on the movie public’s current appetite for little girls inhabited by forces from beyond, Audrey Rose was condemned out of hand. Exorcist buffs were unimpressed, since it lacked the spewing of green vomit and 360-degree head turns. Reviewers found it an overlong and insipid effort to cash in on Friedkin’s success. Wise’s final picture of the decade, Star Trek:The Motion Picture (1979) was a project that he undertook with considerable misgivings. 139

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Early in The Andromeda Strain, Robert Wise’s first film of the ’70s and the thirty-fourth of his career as a director, Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill) takes issue with his colleague Dr. Mark Hall (James Olson) because he has not read thoroughly the emergency material relating to Project Wildfire. “I don’t go in for science fiction,” is Hall’s terse response. “Neither do I,” replies Stone. Nor, indeed, does Robert Wise, who steadfastly maintained in all subsequent interviews and commentary that The Andromeda Strain was not science fiction but more accurately “science fact.”1 Although not literally true, The Andromeda Strain, in Robert Wise’s view, is closer to fact than it is to fiction. In this context, he clearly found the term fiction more negative than descriptive. In the novel on which the film is based, author Michael Crichton treats his story as a documentary, a recounting of actual events. To support the aura of fact, he fabricates a bibliography of scientific documents, many authored by characters in the novel. He also acknowledges the aid and support of a number of fictitious high-ranking government and military officials. This speculative, quasidocumentary approach greatly appealed to Wise, and the story of a contaminated satellite returning to Earth could not have been more timely. The moon rocks, collected from the United States’ first and decidedly limited exploration following the lunar landing, arrived on Earth in July 1969. Significantly, the first scientific speculation about soil samples and the question of extraterrestrial contamination came to public notice as early as the summer of 1966. The question was indeed frightening: what if the moon rocks contained a strange microorganism with a lethal power beyond anything the science of Earth could counteract? There is even room for insidious overtones: what if the Pentagon was actively pursuing the discovery and development of such an organism, with the intention of obtaining the ultimate weapon? Such speculation seems farfetched until we consider the thinking and the final actions taken by the military in the matter of World War II’s Manhattan Project. It is in that light that Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding, from the starting point of Michael Crichton’s novel, conducted their extrapolation of current headlines. The Andromeda Strain opens with a team of army technicians who have tracked a small space probe satellite to its landing near the small town of Piedmont, New Mexico. As they enter the town, they radio back to their headquarters that there is no sign of life. In fact, many of the town’s inhabitants appear to be lying dead in the streets. Suddenly, the radio goes dead and nothing further is heard from the tracking team. Reconnaissance aircraft is called in to survey the area, but the plane, after radioing a similar report, mysteriously crashes in the desert. The crash prompts the government to declare a national emergency and order a Wildfire alert, which activates Project Wildfire, a program specially designed to deal with emergencies arising out of contact with extraterrestrial mi-

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croorganisms. Called into action are Dr. Jeremy Stone, a biologist; Dr. Ruth Leavitt (Kate Reid), a microbiologist; Dr. Charles Dutton (David Wayne), a pathologist; and Dr. Mark Hall, a surgeon and, apparently, an expert on blood chemistry. Stone and Hall are brought by helicopter to Piedmont. As a safeguard against contamination and infection, they wear protective space suits. They soon find their satellite but they also find that the entire population of the town is dead, all having died suddenly and painlessly in the middle of their daily activities. As Hall and Stone move from building to building, Wise switches to a subjective point of view, splitting and even quartering the screen to show us the victims, frequently in ironic and symbolic juxtapositions: an old man in a World War I army uniform, for example, grouped with a young, bare-breasted girl wearing a peace medallion. The entire town is dead, with the exception of two: a sixty-nine-year-old sterno drinker who suffers from ulcers and a six-month-old baby who cries incessantly. They become the primary mystery for Project Wildfire to solve: why have they survived when everyone else has died? Hall also makes another discovery: the mysterious epidemic changes the blood of its victims from liquid form to dry crystals. Stone and Hall transport the satellite and the two survivors to a specially designed multilevel underground laboratory that the government has built for Project Wildfire in the vicinity of Flatrock, Nevada. After an exhaustive series of tests and decontamination procedures, they discover that the microorganism, now named “Andromeda,” is crystalline in structure and can only exist and do damage within a very narrow range of pH. If the growth medium is too acidic, as it was in the system of the sixty-nine-year-old sterno drinker who popped aspirin for his ulcer pains, the organism did not multiply. Nor did it multiply if the system had too little acid, as it did in the case of the baby, whose crying released carbon dioxide and the carbonic acid that it formed. The old man had too much acid, the baby too little; thus they survived, since Andromeda could enter the lungs and crystallize the blood only if the system had a normal acid balance. But their troubles are far from over. Although by this time Andromeda in its fickle way has mutated to a noninfectious form, it has now developed an appetite for plastic and it’s rapidly crystallizing—that is, dissolving—all of the polychron gaskets that surround and seal the doorways on the various levels of the laboratory. To prevent uncontrollable, widespread infection should any microorganism get out of hand, the Wildfire lab is equipped with an atomic selfdestruct device that detonates five minutes after the sensors determine that the microorganisms have spread beyond the containment areas. They also discover that Andromeda thrives on energy, and an atomic blast will cause it to mutate and multiply in staggering proportions. The only one who can stop it is Hall,

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who has been chosen to carry the deactivation key as the result of a psychological profile called the “odd man hypothesis.” After the five-minute countdown has started, the key must be inserted and turned in one of the wall unit deactivation stations located on each of the five levels. But as the contamination reaches each successive level, its corridors are automatically sealed off. Hall and Stone find themselves trapped on a lower level. Finally, Hall climbs up through the central core of the laboratory, staying ahead of the gas and intermittent laser guns designed to prevent the escape of infected laboratory animals. Punch drunk and wobbly from the combination of being gassed and zapped by lasers, Hall makes it to the upper level, where he lurches, stumbles, and crawls to the substation and finally deactivates the atomic device—with eight seconds to spare. Underlying all of this tension and suspense that naturally comes with a race against time to prevent total annihilation, The Andromeda Strain offers cogent commentary on the uneasy relationship that connects modern man to the machines he has created and on which he becomes, as the years pass, increasingly dependent. Jeremy Stone, for example, seems the consummate modern scientist; in a world of mechanisms and computers, he is a machine-like man— cool and optimally efficient at all times. His colleagues react with human emotion to stress situations: Leavitt, a closet epileptic, becomes tired and irritable; Dutton, breathing hard to keep Andromeda at bay in his sealed-off contaminated lab area, is genuinely and humanly afraid: “I’m scared—Oh Lord, I’m scared!” Hall, who ultimately finds the solution, becomes nervous and has difficulty functioning; when he wants to use the computer to check his hypothesis, he is unable to punch the correct keys; the cool and dispassionate Stone— seemingly a man of stone—does it for him. It is in the contrast between Stone and Hall that screenwriter Nelson Gidding has made the essential distinction in the picture. The machine-like Stone has the hands of an ultramodern scientist—calmly efficient and accurate as they punch computer keys and operate mechanisms. As such he operates at a distance from humanity. When, for example, he operates the mechanical hands that manipulate the satellite while the team watches from its sealed protective booth, the trained hand technician compliments him on his proficiency in using the device. “I never,” says the technician, “saw anyone use the hands better.” In direct contrast, Hall has the hands of a surgeon, a man who touches the vital parts of the human organism to correct its deficiencies and prolong life. At Wildfire he becomes both geriatrician and pediatrician, studying and worrying about his two patients. Hall always refers to them as patients; Stone always alludes to them as subjects. A further example of Stone’s machine-like nature becomes apparent when the group discovers that the topography diagrams that predict the de-

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gree of Andromeda dispersal in the event of nuclear detonation are actually military biological warfare maps. Leavitt and Dutton quickly arrive at the conclusion that the Wildfire lab was built not to counter the effects of biological organisms from outer space but to develop such organisms for use in what the Pentagon calls CBW—Chemical Biological Warfare. In anger and dismay, Leavitt and Dutton accuse Stone of knowing all the time, of acting in complicity with the military. But Stone sidesteps the emotional side of the issue and, like a computer correcting a projectile that has suddenly gone off course, brings the group back to the scientific procedure needed to achieve their objective: finding the Andromeda antidote. Like many tales of science fiction, The Andromeda Strain is a story of man gradually being preempted by the mechanism he created to serve him. But when the mechanism becomes unpredictable or even treacherous, he inevitably falls back on human instinct, conscience, and intelligence, using only human resources to overcome and neutralize the threat. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the film that totally changed the film industry’s approach to science fiction, offers an excellent example. The first part of the film presents the lyric beauty of an advanced cybernetic age. Man has created machines and a mastermind computer that has made his life almost totally carefree and reduced him to something like a fetal stage, his feeding and physical environment carefully controlled by the HAL 9000 computer. When, however, the computer makes a leap of its own and decides to destroy the crew and take over the spacecraft, it is David Bowman, the film’s human protagonist, who manages to use his ingenuity to reenter the ship from which the computer has exiled him. Once inside, he climbs, hand over hand, into the computer’s brain center and disconnects it. The significant point here is that he disconnects the treacherous HAL 9000 not by pushing buttons on a console, but by hand, with a space-age screwdriver. By doing so, he falls back on the primordial resources that started the march of technology in the first place: human ingenuity and the opposable thumb. Using the same basic equipment, Mark Hall deactivates the nuclear selfdestruct device in the Wildfire laboratory, climbing hand over hand as the defense mechanisms attempt to prevent him from leaving the sealed-off areas of the laboratory. The circumstances that make his perilous climb necessary are equally ironic. The device was developed as the final precaution to protect the world from an extraterrestrial epidemic. But shortly before it is activated, they discover that the now noninfectious and harmless Andromeda Strain would thrive on nuclear energy, and would mutate and multiply in undreamed-of proportions, very likely returning to its original deadly state—or worse. The protective atomic device would provide for Andromeda the most fertile of growth media. It cannot be countered by computers or mechanisms, which leaves, as the only recourse, human ingenuity and action.

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In preparing the script for The Andromeda Strain, Nelson Gidding faced a number of obstacles, and the most formidable of these was the problem of technological density. Esoteric terms relating to microbiology, pathology, epidemiology, hematology, and half a dozen other “ologies” abound in Crichton’s novel, and while a reader can reread a difficult passage, the film viewer has no such advantage, beyond staying for another entire screening. If, however, the explanations are too basic, pitched too obviously to the lowest common denominator, the screen scientists lose their credibility. And if the technical jargon is too abstruse, the audience gradually but surely loses interest altogether. Although there were reviewers who found the film difficult to follow, it’s quite clear that on balance, Gidding does a fine job of walking the thin line between simplicity and oversimplification. He skillfully avoids the incomprehensible exchange of technical dialogue, but his concessions for clarity are never at the cost of scientific authenticity. Another problem that Wise and Gidding faced was how to convey to audiences the genuine deadliness of the Strain. An actor could, of course, simulate the effects of the disease, convulsing and collapsing quite convincingly. But audiences are inured to movie death scenes, and take a kind of subconscious solace from the fact that no matter how brutal or tragic they may be, it’s all make-believe. The problem of demonstrating indisputably the lethal nature of the strain is solved in the scene in The Andromeda Strain in which a small rhesus monkey is let out of its glass cage and exposed to Andromeda. Suddenly, it quivers, goes into convulsions, and “dies” right before our eyes. Almost everyone has seen the exploits of trained animals, but clearly this was no act. Animal lovers throughout the country were incensed at the callousness of filmmakers who would destroy an animal solely for cinematic effect, and wondered why the SPCA hadn’t been more vigilant. It is indeed the single most shocking scene in the picture. Within a minute after its screen death, however, the monkey was once again very much alive. To achieve the necessary effect, Wise shoots the monkey in close-up. While we are watching, the monkey’s air in his enclosed area is changed to pure carbon dioxide, causing him to pass out—that is, to die from the effects of Andromeda. Wise says “Cut!” the camera is stopped, and a team of veterinarians flush the monkey with oxygen, immediately restoring him to consciousness. The scene was shot with great care and, as the veterinarians assured Wise, the monkey was in neither pain nor danger.2 Gidding was also responsible for another innovation: in Crichton’s novel, the team was made up of four male scientists; but Gidding hit upon the idea of making one of the team members a woman. He no sooner introduced the idea, however, than Wise vetoed it. In Wise’s view, it would be introducing sex appeal solely for its own sake, and would undermine the film’s credibility.

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It summoned up the vision of Raquel Welch in the submarine that went coursing through a human bloodstream in Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage (1966). But Gidding was proposing a woman markedly different from the usual run of Hollywood glamour types. His distaff scientist would be middle-aged, and a deal less than physically attractive. She would, of course, be highly intelligent and an acknowledged expert in her field, but she would also be very down to earth, and possessed of a salty tongue and an acid wit. Wise found the idea as Gidding outlined it more and more intriguing. They discussed it further and, finally, Peter Leavitt in Crichton’s novel became Ruth Leavitt in the film.3 Although Wise was quick to deny that the creation of Ruth Leavitt was a concession to prevalent feminist ideology, she is a remarkable characterization in that the scientist so clearly takes precedence over the woman. In this sense, The Andromeda Strain is one of the few films with a woman in a featured role in which sexual distinctions are totally irrelevant to the action. She is also the most colorful character of the four, and her dry humor and lack of reverence for government bureaucracy seems like humanity’s defense against the sterile and stolid atmosphere of the Wildfire lab. Gidding, who works small, almost imperceptible bits of humor into all of his scripts, gives her one of the best lines in the film. Since the lab must always be as sterile as is humanly and scientifically possible, cigarettes, liquor, and food of any kind are prohibited. As the four scientists sit around a table for breakfast in the otherwise empty cafeteria, we see that breakfast consists of a nutrient pill and a small cup of supplement liquid. The repast completed, Ruth settles back into her chair and looks impassively at her companions. “I’d really like a cigarette now,” she says flatly, “it’s after meals that you really miss ’em.” But the combination of Gidding’s well-balanced script, Wise’s direction, and Boris Leven’s impressive production design could not offset the film’s mixed reviews. Critic Pauline Kael, for example, was admittedly confused; the picture lacked—among other things—humor. A clever, incisive, occasionally brilliant critic, Kael has her moments when she entirely misses the point. “Isn’t science fiction,” she asks, “meant to have some fun to it—some imaginative playfulness? The fanatical realism of all that decontamination suggests nothing more than an obsession with cleanliness.”4 Charles Champlin, however, writing in the Los Angeles Times, was considerably impressed with The Andromeda Strain, and aware of the film’s central issue: The Andromeda Strain follows Crichton’s book in neither deriding nor glorifying the men of science, but viewing them . . . with a wary and worried neutrality, admiring their skills but looking with alarm at their capacity for both advertent and inadvertent folly.5

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On balance, The Andromeda Strain was a box-office success—the first and last that Robert Wise would have in the 1970s. His next three pictures, Two People, The Hindenburg, and Audrey Rose, came under heavy critical attack. In February 1972, Wise began shooting Two People, a topical love story with the Vietnam War as the villain in the background. The picture stars Peter Fonda, Lindsay Wagner, and Estelle Parsons, and was shot on location in Marrakech, Paris, and New York. In Two People, Wise worked for characters who would be thoughtful and introspective, and overshot the mark; the result was a story that was slow and turgid. Fonda plays the role of Evan Bonner, a deserter whose long exodus from Vietnam terminates in Morocco, where, tired and disillusioned, he finally ends his three-year exile and makes a deal with a government agent to return to the United States. En route he meets Deirdre McCluskey, a top fashion model whose career has brought her everything but love and emotional security. They prove to be curiously compatible. Her life, despite the superficial glamour, is shallow and unsatisfying, and his life has become equally pointless. But he is not, as he makes clear, a conscientious objector sustained by consistent conviction; he is simply a human being who realizes that he cannot go to war. In the tradition of movie romance, they meet on a train going from Marrakech to Casablanca and fall in love. Their itinerary provides for an idyllic night in Paris, after which they return to the United States, where he faces a prison term as an army deserter. At the conclusion, their future together remains uncertain. In addition to the slow pace of its direction, the timing of Two People was off in other ways. To make the most of its topical theme, it should have been made at least two years earlier. The war in Vietnam had effectively ended in the late summer of 1972, and the antiwar slant of the script raised rather shopworn moral issues at a time when people were tired of the controversy and wanted to put the whole thing behind them. There is also nothing very new about screenwriter Richard De Roy’s approach to the issue of the disease of war infecting one man’s psyche. Bonner’s earnest desire, confessed to Deirdre, to return to Vietnam some day and find and explain himself to the family of the Vietnamese soldier he killed is old-hat melodrama, borrowed from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 antiwar classic Broken Lullaby. There is also little or no plot in Two People. Everything depends upon the chemistry of the two principals, but the “chemical reaction” remains imminent and never quite materializes, their moment of Parisian bliss notwithstanding. Both Fonda and Wagner do a creditable job as young people attempting to anesthetize themselves against the pain of the times, with Fonda particularly good at portraying the inner stress of his situation. Lack of a plot, slow pacing, and a message about a war that the American public had tired of hearing about doomed the picture. Only the cine-

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matography of Henri Decaë was universally praised, but that was hardly enough to make a significant difference. The leading critics generally trounced it, and Two People was withdrawn from distribution shortly after it was released. Wise’s next film was The Hindenburg, an undertaking with obvious appeal to his taste for documentary. It was based on a historic incident that occurred on May 6, 1937, when the German dirigible Hindenburg, having just completed a transatlantic flight, suddenly burst into flames while attempting to land in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirty-six people lost their lives, and the cause of the explosion was never satisfactorily determined. At the time of the incident, the Hindenburg was the ultimate in luxurious air passenger service and a formidable weapon in Adolf Hitler’s propaganda arsenal. As a film project, the Hindenburg story seemed to have guaranteed audience appeal, since disaster films were very much in in the early 1970s. Airport (1970) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972) had started the trend, and The Towering Inferno (1974) made it clear that tragedy on a grand scale was big box office. Even Wise’s good friend and partner, Mark Robson, had directed for Filmmaker’s Group, their production company, the highly successful Earthquake (1974). Wise, however, pointedly denied that The Hindenburg was pandering to the public appetite for disaster, citing what he felt was a clear distinction. The ’70s rash of disaster films all began with a fictional catastrophe, and the suspense and general appeal of the plot lay in the actions of the characters to escape and/or overcome that disaster. Wise’s disaster, the total immolation of the airship following a hydrogen explosion, comes at the conclusion of the picture and punctuates, rather than determines, the development of character and plot. Primarily, The Hindenburg is a conspiracy story, a tale of alleged sabotage that actual investigation and subsequent historical research have never been able to rule out. Despite his disclaimer, it seems clear that Wise was banking on the combination of timely disaster appeal and the almost guaranteed intrigue that comes when a conspiracy story is attached to a historical event that ended in tragedy. The conspiracy part of the plot involves George C. Scott as Franz Ritter, a Luftwaffe colonel of high principle, William Atherton as Boerth, an idealistic anti-Nazi crewman, Anne Bancroft as a German countess whose estates have been confiscated by the Nazis, and Roy Thinnes as Vogel, a stereotypically ruthless Gestapo agent. Ritter has been reluctantly assigned—by no less than Joseph Goebbels himself—to investigate an alleged sabotage rumor that the Hindenburg will be blown up before it completes its upcoming voyage to New York. Although a latent anti-Nazi, Ritter is still a man with a sense of duty. Apparently the Hindenburg, a vital part of Nazi international propaganda, is too important a political asset to be trusted to one man, so Vogel is sent along to shadow Ritter. The widowed countess would like to be the love interest, but

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Ritter is a married man who also has too much respect for her husband’s memory (he was an old flying buddy) to respond to her overtures. With the romantic sidetracking of the countess, the plot complication—such as it is—centers on the triangle of Ritter, Boerth, and Vogel. Ritter dutifully and doggedly pursues the unknown saboteur whom the audience knows is Boerth, and Boerth pursues his synchronized sabotage plan. Vogel undertakes a double pursuit: a true Gestapo man, he is clearly out to get them both. Although George C. Scott is an actor of sufficient power to hold his own in any picture, he is hard pressed to do so here. The sleuthing-after-a-saboteur idea is at best thin and predictable, and it is further undermined by a large and distracting, rather than supporting, cast that collectively offers a set of performances that are less than first rate. Burgess Meredith and Rene Auberjonois, for example, cast as a pair of comic relief card sharps, fall embarrassingly flat. Robert Clary, playing Joe Spah, one of the actual survivors of the Hindenburg crash, is, according to the on-screen reaction of his fellow passengers, a very funny guy, but to the theater audience he most emphatically isn’t. The real stars of Hindenburg are the special effects and the overall production design. Wise and production designer Edward Carfagno spent more than eighteen months on detailed research, combing government archives, both in the United States and in Germany, for whatever filmed or printed records might be useful in their search for authenticity. In the finished product, Wise’s usual painstaking fidelity to historical detail is impressively evident; the interior and exterior re-creation of the Hindenburg may just be the most memorable thing about the picture, especially the visually graceful scenes of the Hindenburg on its final voyage high above the Atlantic. Scenes of the airship in flight, particularly the final shot of the Hindenburg floating softly through billowing clouds, are technically among the best of their kind ever filmed. This final shot, with the dramatic contrast of the voiceover of the actual radio broadcast of the Hindenburg’s final moments, has a lyrical grace and beauty reminiscent of the unforgettable opening scenes of Leni Riefenstahl’s classic The Triumph of the Will (1935). Also impressive is Wise’s treatment of the fiery disaster itself. Rather than simply run the actual newsreel footage of the Hindenburg collapsing in flames, Wise incorporates the actual footage, some thirty-four seconds all told, into an extended sequence of the dirigible’s fiery collapse that runs for almost ten minutes. What is impressive here is the skill with which fact and fiction are all but seamlessly stitched together, the enlarged black-and-white footage underscoring the death and rescue scenes with a sense of stark reality. Still, Wise’s direction, Carfagno’s production design, and the superb special effects work by Albert Whitlock and Glenn Robinson could not turn Hindenburg into a hit. In a film with a running time of 125 minutes, technical quality can’t be expected to carry the entire picture.

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Wise followed Hindenburg with Audrey Rose (1977), a story of supernatural suspense that marked a return to the kind of work he had done under the tutelage of Val Lewton more than thirty years earlier. Audrey Rose is a striking contrast to Two People and The Hindenburg in that the dramatic development of the plot is done with a much more evident sense of conviction, and the entire film seems directed with a much surer hand. Audrey Rose tells the story of a little girl named Ivy, the daughter of Bill and Janice Templeton (John Beck and Marsha Mason). The Templetons are a normal, happy family until one day a man named Elliot Hoover (Anthony Hopkins) comes into their lives. Hoover presents the Templetons with the preposterous story that Ivy is actually the reincarnation of his daughter, Audrey Rose, who died tragically in a burning automobile at the exact moment that Ivy was being born. The Templetons quite understandably give him a cool reception, despite the fact that he seems to be the only one who is able to calm Ivy when she is in the throes of one of her recurring nightmares. Hoover gently persists in his quest to be close to Ivy, hopeful that he might somehow free Audrey Rose’s troubled soul from the body of Ivy Templeton, where it apparently resides in tandem with Ivy’s own soul. But Ivy and Audrey Rose are, as it were, a set of psychic Siamese twins, and their separation, if it is to be accomplished, will be a complex and delicate procedure. Hoover’s gentleness and sincerity gradually win over Janice Templeton, although husband Bill remains adamantly opposed to Hoover’s nonsense. The marital rift over Ivy’s future eventually becomes a matter for the courts to decide, and the judge in the case grants permission for Ivy to be put under exploratory hypnosis. Elliot Hoover strongly opposes the decision, but to no avail. As judge, jury, Bill Templeton, and Hoover watch through the one-way mirror of the observation room, Ivy is hypnotized and gradually taken back from the present to the immediate postnatal stage. At that point the soul of Audrey Rose asserts itself, and the child, now beyond the hypnotist’s control, relives the final terrifying moments of Audrey Rose trapped in the burning automobile. Before anyone can intervene, Ivy Templeton dies, pounding on the glass of the observation room window, just as Audrey Rose had pounded on the window of the burning automobile, trying frantically to escape. Timing was once again a problem, and at the time Audrey Rose was released, many reviewers dismissed it as another attempt to capitalize on the highly successful sensationalism of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and Richard Donner’s very similar The Omen (1976). Undeniably, Wise and producer Frank De Felitta were aware of the marketability of films featuring children possessed by supernatural forces, but they intended to do more than simply capitalize on a popular trend. What most of the reviewers failed to see was that Audrey Rose is a far more substantial work than it is generally given credit for being. One of the few critics who recognized the quality of the film was

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William K. Everson, who reviewed it in the June–July 1977 issue of Films in Review: It must be terribly discouraging for a director like Robert Wise to turn out a film as meticulously crafted as Audrey Rose, and then have it dismissed en masse by critics as an Exorcist rip-off—precisely what it isn’t. . . . It would have been all too easy for Wise (as a former editor as well as a skilled director) to have loaded Audrey Rose, a reincarnation story, with the kinds of shocks and sensationalism that now seem part and parcel of the genre. Courageously, he left that approach to Michael Winner and The Sentinel. Commercially it may have been a mistake, but aesthetically, most certainly not.6 Certainly Wise’s sense of precision and seamless craftsmanship are evident in Audrey Rose, but it is also clear that Wise is more comfortable with this story than he had been with the plots of his two previous pictures, Two People and The Hindenburg. There is in the interaction of his central characters a lack of stiffness; it has a dramatic flexibility that had not been evident in his work in recent years. For Everson, the quality of Wise’s work in Audrey Rose owes much to the return to artistic roots, to the early days with Val Lewton at RKO: Audrey Rose is exactly like a Lewton film done in color and with a budget allowing for even greater subtleties. Even the casting seems to be in the Lewton mould, with Anthony Hopkins especially effective in the tradition of those non-dynamic, “face-in-the-crowd” protagonists of the Lewton films.7

Unlike the best of the Val Lewton films, Audrey Rose is not in the strict sense a horror film. The horror, such as it is, is sublimated and highly suggestive. What is truly captivating in this film are the performances turned in by the leading characters. As Everson suggests, Hopkins is nothing short of superb, in a splendidly moving performance as a father whose love follows his child into the world beyond. Marsha Mason, as the mother who must suspend logic and rational belief, is a bit too weepy at times, but is nevertheless compelling. Many of those subtleties that Everson indirectly attributes to Lewton originate with Wise, and Wise seemed more inclined to experiment in Audrey Rose than he was in many of his more recent pictures. There are interesting touches of symbolic suggestion, such as the scene in which Ivy, in the throes of nightmare, presses her burning hands on the glass of the aquarium, as the brightly colored fish dart back and forth, offering visual parallel to the flashback scenes showing Audrey Rose pressing her hands on the window of the burning automobile as the flames flickered around her. There is also the dra-

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matic conclusion in which Elliot Hoover smashes the glass of the observation room; in the midst of the confusion and excitement, the camera slowly moves in to close up on a large fragment of the shattered glass, which appears smoked and darkened. It is of course the mirrored glass of the observation window, which offers plausible and literal explanation for its darkness, but the close-up is clearly intended to suggest, by its smoked and darkened color, the glass in the burning car in which Audrey Rose perished. In a genuine change of pace, Wise’s final scene is an abrupt switch to the subjective camera, a technique that he last used in the early fifties for the opening scene of Executive Suite. Janice Templeton, who has been unable to prevent Ivy’s hypnosis because of her husband’s legal maneuverings, has arrived at the hospital too late to be admitted to the observation room. She must therefore watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television in an anteroom. Like Audrey Rose at the window of the burning automobile and Ivy Templeton at the window of the hospital observation room, Janice Templeton is also separated from those she loves by windows, transparent barriers that nonetheless provide effective separation. While Ivy dies, all the barriers fall before the mother of the dead child. Janice’s viewpoint becomes that of the camera, which glides slowly forward as guards, doctors, lawyers, and jurists all step aside, saddened and dumbfounded. Janice, of course, was the only one who gave credence to Elliot Hoover’s theories, theories (De Felitta’s script suggests) defeated by reactionary intolerance and prejudice. The use of the subjective camera here clearly implies that we, the film audience, are in total sympathy with the supposedly more liberal and broadminded views of Janice Templeton and Elliot Hoover. This final, subjective camera tracking shot gives us the opportunity to see Janice and Elliot’s adversaries shorn of their arrogance and self-assurance. But there weren’t enough—neither in the ranks of the audience nor the critics—who bought De Felitta’s view on the transmigration of souls, apparently preferring the more graphic antics of satanism in The Exorcist and its derivatives. Ultimately, the picture is rescued from De Felitta’s somewhat murky theosophy and parapsychology and given what substance and integrity it has by Robert Wise’s direction. Perhaps the final word on Audrey Rose should be given to William K. Everson, the critic who saw something in it that almost all of his colleagues missed: Ignore the critics who term [Audrey Rose] “dull” and the theological purists who call it “inaccurate” (!): it’s all too infrequently these days that one gets the opportunity to see a film made with such taste and pride in craftsmanship. If comparisons with similar-genre films have to be made, then it is to The Exorcist as Dreyer’s Jeanne D’Arc is to the Ingrid Bergman Joan of Arc.8

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Robert Wise’s final film of the 1970s was Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). For most of us the term Star Trek describes a media icon, an original television series that not only attracted loyal fans, but went on to develop an unprecedented cult following. The original concept and series were created and developed by Gene Roddenberry, a former pilot for Pan-American Airways and Los Angeles policeman who later turned, with conspicuous success, to writing for television. The Star Trek series made its debut on NBC on September 15, 1966, and was dropped by the network some three years and seventy-nine episodes later, in the late spring of 1969. Shortly thereafter, it went into international syndication. Its fans, however, refused to let it die. With a unified enthusiasm that developed into a phenomenon of pop culture, thousands of Trekkies across the country conducted letter-writing campaigns and began to gather periodically at Star Trek conventions to share trivia and memorabilia concerning the exploits of Captain James Kirk and the ethnically diverse crew of the United Federation of Planets’ starship Enterprise. When Roddenberry brought the property to Paramount in 1976, they knew it had potential value, but they were never quite sure what they wanted to do with it. At first, the studio planned to resurrect it as a television series, but this idea was displaced by a subsequent plan to do it as a television movie. This would enable Paramount to test the rating waters, and also to have a property that could later be distributed abroad for theatrical release. When for a variety of reasons this idea stalled, renewed attention was given to the possibility of a series. The impetus for a major motion picture came when George Lucas, in the summer of 1977, had such extraordinary success at the box office with Star Wars. The success of Star Wars demonstrated to Paramount that beyond the omnipresent and persistent clamor of the Trekkies—the devoted fans of the television series—there was an audience across the nation with a strong appetite for science fiction and space fantasy. Entering the competition, Paramount upped the project to major motion picture status with a budget of $15 million. The plans called for Roddenberry, who stayed close to his brainchild and was responsible (with Harold Livingston) for much of the script and for the assembling of the original Star Trek cast, to produce the picture. But Paramount was reluctant to give Roddenberry—whose production background was limited to television—total production control. In particular, the front office wanted a director with the guaranteed knowhow to handle a big-budget production. It was the executive office at Paramount that turned to Robert Wise, who not only had produced and directed costly and successful productions like West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and The Sand Pebbles, but also was highly respected for the quality of his work in science fiction films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain.9

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Wise signed to direct Star Trek:The Motion Picture with something less than unbounded enthusiasm. At the time that he was approached by Paramount, he had no project of his own that particularly interested him, and to be called into competition with the biggest box-office blockbuster of recent times was hard to resist. But after developing his own properties for more than twenty years, Wise was unable to find much excitement in a project in which the story, sets, and cast were fixed in place and beyond change. Whatever originality and creativity he might lend to the project was greatly constricted and obviously subsumed by his role as director, which in this instance seemed to call primarily upon his technical experience. He signed on as director, but also as what amounted to an uncredited associate producer who would direct the picture with full final-cut rights. Paramount was counting on him to protect the onset portion of their investment and, in effect, he answered to the Paramount front office, rather than to Roddenberry.10 There were major problems for Wise in the directing of Star Trek:The Motion Picture, problems that were concentrated in two areas: script and special effects. Wise had been assured that the script was an original story, an entirely new approach that would mark a refreshing departure from the established Star Trek formula. He therefore saw no reason to familiarize himself with any of the episodes from the television series. It wasn’t until he was well into the production that he became aware that the current script had borrowed heavily from script ideas used in the series, most notably “The Changeling” and “The Doomsday Machine,” both of which had aired during Star Trek’s first television season in 1967. Adding to this annoyance was the fact that when shooting began on August 9, 1978, Livingston and Roddenberry had not yet completed the script. The first act went smoothly before the cameras, but the months that followed brought about a flurry of blue pages, the trade term for script rewrites and deletions. The script was continually being written—and rewritten. It ultimately reached the point where Roddenberry, Livingston, Wise, and cast members like William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were sharing in an idea free-for-all aimed at bringing the script to completion. Finally, the finished product that appeared on theater screens had the following plot line: It’s the twenty-third century, and the planet Earth—along with the entire galaxy—is threatened by a huge, powerfully destructive energy force which is heading directly for Earth and destroying everything in its path. In the opening scene we see it dispatch a party of space cruisers manned by Klingons, the archenemies of the United Federation of Planets. At Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco, Admiral James Kirk (William Shatner) steps down from his present assignment to assume command of his old starship, the Enterprise, now being fully refitted for space duty. [Apparently only the Enterprise and the old

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Chapter 11 crew are really up for this new challenge.] In deciding to take over, Kirk demotes the Enterprise’s present captain, Will Decker (Stephen Collins), to second officer, thereby creating tension between the two.

With Kirk’s entry onto the bridge, there is a moment of warm reunion as the former captain rejoins his old crew. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) is once again communications officer, Chekov (Walter Koenig) is in charge of security, Sulu (George Takei) is at the helm, and Scotty (James Doohan) is keeping things up to par in the engine room. There are new crew members who add an exotic touch, notably navigation officer Ilia (Persis Khambatta) who comes from the planet Delta, where the women are all beautiful—and bald. The standard Star Trek crew is now reassembled, with one notable exception. Science Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) has returned to Vulcan, his home planet, where he has attempted to purge himself, once and for all, of the human influence and contact, which he has always found vexing and illogical. But because there is some deep desire for human contact and feeling still within him, the Vulcan initiation rites fail. Spock finally rejoins the Enterprise, albeit sulky and uncommunicative, as if unused to human contact. Even Dr. “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley) has been drafted from his quiet life as a country doctor. Together again, Kirk and his band of celestial knights sally forth into space to confront the unknown cosmic dragon that awaits them. Their first meeting with the alien energy force is a head-on encounter, but ultimately the Enterprise manages to sidestep annihilation and sets up a form of communication with its adversary. Gradually the Enterprise is drawn inside a vast cloud cover that surrounds the force. Once inside, the Enterprise is visited by a “probe,” an electrical force field that abducts Ilia. She later returns, but she is Ilia in appearance only; in reality she is now a robot, a nonhuman replicant that has come back for further information. Through this second Ilia, Kirk and crew learn that their opponent is known as “V’ger.” It is searching for someone or something known only as “the Creator,” and it wants to know why its questions, which have for years been beamed at Earth, have never been answered. As Decker works on the Ilia robot in an attempt to rekindle some emotional spark of its old human element, Spock indulges in his now-familiar (to Trekkies) mind-meld in order to discover the true nature of V’ger. What they all ultimately discover is that V’ger is the metamorphosis of what was once Voyager VI, an unmanned space probe launched from Earth some three hundred years earlier. V’ger’s three hundred years’ worth of information seems to have made a transition from facts to knowledge, and with knowledge come the eternal questions. Thus V’ger’s need to fulfill its mission, to return to its creator, its source as it were, takes on the character of ontological argument. It is

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Spock’s view that V’ger, for all its sophistication, is a child, and its pressing need to know has become a destructive tantrum in space. Clearly no one on Earth could respond to V’ger’s signal, since no one could recognize it. The scientists who created and launched Voyager VI had been dead for three hundred years. V’ger’s knowledge is finally released when Kirk contacts Earth and gets the necessary codes from the Voyager VI archives. V’ger, according to Roddenberry’s highly speculative metaphysics, has now evolved as far as a machine, devoid of the human element, can go. The next step in this higher stage of evolution comes in the pyrotechnic finale. Decker willingly serves as a surrogate creator, the human element who willingly becomes one with the Ilia probe, the extension of V’ger. In a consummation that McCoy observes as the birth of some new and higher life form, Decker and Ilia are fused together, becoming, at the very last, a symbolic fountain of joyful light. A problem that proved to be even more vexing than the slow development of the final shooting script was the enormous difficulty that surrounded Star Trek’s special effects. Paramount had given the contract to Robert Abel Associates, whose most solid claim to credentials at that time was a widely admired set of television commercials for Levi-Strauss sportswear. Abel clearly gave Star Trek everything he had, but he was out of his depth in attempting to come up with the kind of sophisticated visuals that would be needed to challenge pictures like Star Wars. Wise and everyone connected with the production knew that without very “special” special effects, Star Trek would be a second-class entry in the competition of contemporary science fiction. Months went by in which time scheduled for principal photography was delayed as Abel shot thousands of feet of film with his special sixty-five-millimeter cameras. When Wise and Roddenberry asked to see some test footage, some sample of the kind of work Abel was doing, they were woefully disappointed with what they saw. Abel’s work proved to be far below the standard they had envisioned. Finally Paramount had to buy out Abel’s contract, which, along with all the delays and the need to do extensive reshooting sent the original $15-million budget spiraling upward.11 To replace Abel, Wise and Paramount were able to line up Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra, who had done special effects for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:A Space Odyssey and George Lucas’s Star Wars. The late signing of Trumbull and Dykstra, along with Trumbull’s associates Richard and Matthew Yuricich, now gave Star Trek:The Motion Picture the people who were widely considered the best special effects people in the business. But by this time it was an uphill struggle. The long delays and reverses in scheduled shooting time put everyone in a race with the clock that was hardly conducive to creative visual work. Paramount had contracted with some eight hundred theaters across the

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United States to have the picture ready for screening by December 7, 1979. To default on this opening date would mean that the exhibitors who had booked the film would start suing to get back the $50 million in advance guarantees. Even with the editing and dubbing rooms working almost around the clock on weekends, Star Trek: The Motion Picture barely made its release date. Wise himself saw the completed film for the first time on November 29, six days before its December 6 premiere in Washington, D.C. But Wise had more reservations about this picture than any he had worked on in the previous twenty years. Chief among his concerns was the inability to have a sneak preview. With very few exceptions, it had been Wise’s habitual practice to have a preview theater performance of a finished film, frequently outside of California, in order to gauge audience reaction and to see the film from their perspective. Such previews more often than not gave Wise a different view of the film, enabling him to see where and how additional editing could improve the picture. Had time permitted, Wise wanted to rework the scene in which Kirk, traveling in a small transport pod, flies around the Enterprise in its refitting space dock. Wise would have made the whole thing shorter by as much as a minute and a half. The scene in which Spock leaves the Enterprise and flies into the heart (or mind) of V’ger is another he would have liked to rework extensively, probably cutting it by a minute or more. In the final analysis, Star Trek:The Motion Picture went far beyond its initial budget, another point that considerably troubled Wise. By late 1980, the cost was somewhere between $42 and $45 million. Fortunately for Paramount, Star Trek:The Motion Picture did not lose money. When it opened, it set a boxoffice record, grossing more than $11 million in its first three days. Rental profits for the film remained high for more than a decade after.12 A sequel, Star Trek:The Wrath of Khan (1982), directed by Nicholas Meyer, also helped create renewed interest in Wise’s film. But Wise’s fortunes with the reviewers generally remained unchanged. What was expected in Star Trek:The Motion Picture was the rapid-fire, fast-paced action sequences of Star Wars, a veritable screen action light show. Only the more intellectually inclined Trekkies seemed to find much in Star Trek:The Motion Picture, burdened as it was with Roddenberry’s nebulous philosophy. Trumbull and Dykstra, of course, had made what Wise termed a Herculean effort to put the picture into competition, but the special effects that constituted their rescue effort were hardly state-of-the-art. Still, not all criticism of Wise’s work was negative. In the February 1980 issue of the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin, Philip Strick sympathizes with Wise for being in the position of having to create dramatic action out of a script in which the person and image of the leading characters must remain intact, both out of deference to the Trekkie following and for potential sequels. Under such circumstances, says Strick,

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Wise had to tell his story amid an array of distractions and preconceptions which, ironically, only the translator of smash-hit stage musicals to the screen is likely to be able to transcend. That he does so is the reason why Star Trek: The Motion Picture can rank immediately with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (Russian, 1972) as one of the screen’s finest science-fiction achievements.13

NOTES 1. Robert Wise, interview with author, July 15, 1981. 2. Wise, interview. 3. Wise, interview. 4. Pauline Kael, Deeper into Movies (New York: Warner Books, 1980), 349. 5. Charles Champlin, “The Andromeda Strain,” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1971. Reprinted in Filmfacts 14, no. 5 (1971): 105 6. William K. Everson, “Audrey Rose,” Films in Review, June–July 1977, 374. 7. Everson, “Audrey Rose,” 374. 8. Everson, “Audrey Rose,” 374. 9. Wise, interview, August 13, 1981. 10. Wise, interview, August 13, 1981. 11. Wise, interview, August 13, 1981. 12. Wise, interview, August 13, 1981. 13. Philip Strick, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” BFI Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1980, 29–30.

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The completion of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was welcomed by Robert

Wise, who vowed never again to be involved in complex, large-scale projects that were not of his own devising and totally within his own control. For the next ten years he continued to plan and look for new projects for his production company. The only credited directing he did immediately following Star Trek:The Motion Picture was a small promotional film for the film industry’s retirement home, the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital. The film was entitled The Heart of Hollywood (1980).1 In the early 1980s he served on the board of trustees for the American Film Institute, and as chair of the Special Projects Committee of the Directors Guild of America. He also served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1985 to 1987. The only active directing he did for theatrical release during this period was Wisdom (1986). There is some controversy regarding the role he played. The director’s credit was given to Emilio Estevez, the film’s star, who also wrote the screenplay. Robert Wise was credited as the executive producer. Wise strongly maintained, however, in interviews that he essentially directed the film, as a tutorial for Estevez’s initial attempt at directing; but at least one other film scholar claims that Wise emphatically denied directing any significant portion of the film.2 There were other abortive projects on which he spent considerable time in the early 1980s. Two years of extensive planning went into an interracial love story, with the working title Our Destiny. The film was to be set in Shanghai in the years following World War II. Wise wanted to shoot on location, but continuing difficulties over script changes emanating from the Chinese government resulted in the scrapping of the project after two years of work. Wise also had plans to do a biopic on Jazz singer Anita O’Day and another on 158

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Mae West, the latter to star Bette Midler, neither of which materialized. There were high expectations for plans to bring the stage version of the Michael Cacoyannis film Zorba the Greek (1964) to the screen as Zorba, the Musical. Ernest Lehman was slated to do the script. Wise’s friend and collaborator Saul Chaplin, who was his associate producer on West Side Story and The Sound of Music and the producer of the ill-fated Star! would oversee scoring and orchestration, as well as produce. Michael Kidd would do the choreography. Anthony Quinn would reprise the title role from the 1964 film with which he was so closely identified, and John Travolta would play the role that had been played by Alan Bates. It was a potentially powerful collaboration, but after ten months in preproduction, the project fell victim to budget problems that could not be resolved.3 Still open for another directing project, Robert Wise proved yet again to be unduly susceptible to the lure of the musical. Director Taylor Hackford had formed a production company, New Visions, and Wise agreed to direct Rooftops (1989). This was the last film Robert Wise made for theatrical release and, unfortunately, it is a rather weak and misguided effort. Wise had become the captive of his past, lacking the fresh vision that is essential to bring something new to a film that is dealing—at least ostensibly—with crack houses, homeless people, and the other modern trappings of urban poverty. Rooftops suggests that all of these can somehow be overlooked, or at least reduced to secondary consideration, as Wise invites the audience to concentrate instead on the highly imaginative musical passions of a contrived urban subculture. One expects at any moment that the Sharks and the Jets will suddenly appear, hoofing across the rotting roofs of Manhattan tenements, but there was no such salvation for this film. Clearly Rooftops is an attempt to re-create the ambiance of West Side Story, with its undertone of cultural relevance successfully combined with exciting dance numbers and great music. But Wise hadn’t had much luck with original screen musicals, as attested most clearly by Star!—his attempt to capitalize on the success and popular appeal of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. The members of the audience for Rooftops, however, were a generation coming of age in the ’80s, used to television pop music videos. A sound track offering the Eurythmics and Grace Jones was neither new nor captivating. As for the romanticizing of inner-city poverty, it’s difficult for an intelligent audience to accept crack dealers, homeless teenagers, and omnipresent urban blight as a backdrop for singing, dancing, and young love. Pervasive social crisis proves a constant contradiction to this ongoing celebration of life on the streets. It is indeed regrettable that the director who made films that dealt intelligently with such significant issues as world peace and the Cold War (The Day the Earth Stood Still), the peril of organized crime (Captive City), the question of capital punishment (I Want to Live!), and the destructive

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power of racism (Odds against Tomorrow, West Side Story) had in the twilight of a distinguished career created a film so socially superficial and shortsighted. The critics were kind, and manifested this kindness largely by simply ignoring the film out of deference and respect for Wise and his better work, or by offering the neutral, innocuous review. Characteristic of the latter is Richard Bernstein’s analysis in the New York Times on March 18, 1989, in which he terms Rooftops “a rose-tinted look at the inner city.” Bernstein effectively sums up the perplexity of those who had come to expect more from a Robert Wise film: “There ought to be a message deeper than the one contained here, which is that the good kids in the ghetto would find happiness and fulfillment jiving to the beat if only the crack dealers would leave them in peace.”4 No message here, not even a relevant statement about what we see on the screen, only a failed bid for commercial success. Following Rooftops, Wise essentially retired from active filmmaking and found himself spending more time before the camera than behind it. Although he continued to read scripts and was still alert for an interesting project, he was frequently an interviewee appearing in a number of film documentaries on Hollywood luminaries whom he had either known or with whom he had worked. The subjects of these documentaries included Val Lewton, Cecil B. DeMille, George Stevens, Luis Buñuel, Bela Lugosi, William Wellman, and Darryl F. Zanuck. Robert Wise’s return to directing after his ten-year hiatus from the director’s chair was a much smaller venture, a television movie made for Hallmark Entertainment in conjunction with the Showtime cable channel’s production company, Showtime Original Pictures for All Ages. A Storm in Summer (2000) was written by Rod Serling and originally produced for television in 1970, with Peter Ustinov in the starring role. In the version directed by Wise, Peter Falk plays Abel Shaddick, an elderly Jewish man who runs a small delicatessen in upstate New York. The project appealed to Wise for two reasons. First, it gave him the opportunity to return once more to the director’s chair, in a moderate project that was manageable for a man of eighty-six. Second, the issues of incipient prejudice and bigotry at the heart of Serling’s original teleplay appealed to his liberal sensibilities. A Storm in Summer is not, however, a film that presented such issues with the punch of Odds against Tomorrow or the subtle and sardonic commentary of West Side Story. It’s a high-school-level lesson on the evils of bigotry in America, tempered to a family audience and intended to be gently thought provoking rather than hard-hitting. The film is set in the turbulent days of civil rights protests and the Vietnam War. It is a hot summer, suggestive of the mood and temper of a tumultuous period. Abe Shaddick lost his only son, Benjy, in World War II. Almost a quarter of a century has passed since that traumatic event. Abe continues to

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talk to Benjy’s photograph, prominently displayed on the wall of his delicatessen, and he can still recite, word for word, the telegram he received informing him of his son’s death. Abe is a man stoically resigned to the role in which he has been cast by fate, passively indifferent to everything around him. Unsatisfied customers mean nothing to him, and he can only shake his head in sardonic dismay at his irresponsible nephew, Stanley (Andrew McCarthy), a young man who lives intermittently with his uncle between failed get-richquick schemes. But Abe Shaddick’s life begins to change when Stanley, while slightly drunk at a country club party, attempts to impress Gloria Ross (Nastassja Kinski), an attractive and wealthy young charity worker, by agreeing to sponsor a child from the inner city of New York for a fresh-air vacation in the rural upstate area. When Miss Ross comes to the delicatessen to finalize the details, she meets the acerbic Abe Shaddick, who of course has no idea of the commitment his nephew has made. With his usual sense of responsibility, Stanley has taken a bus to Atlantic City intent upon another of his dubious prospects, and abandons his charge to the tender mercies of his uncle. Abe vehemently rejects any such sponsorship, and there are attempts to stop the process by telephoning the boy’s grandmother and guardian (Ruby Dee). They are too late. The boy is on his way. The meeting between Herman Washington (Aaron Meeks), the young African American boy from Harlem, and the elderly Jewish storekeeper is a face-off of two initially alien personalities. For Abe, the ten-year-old Herman is an annoyance, an undeserved burden inflicted upon his Job-like existence. Herman’s feelings are similar. He is a proud and independent spirit, guided by the influence and code of inner-city life learned from Bill, an older brother currently serving in Vietnam. Brother Bill is the closest thing to a father in Herman’s life, and he idolizes him. That Abe and Herman will find common ground as targets of discrimination and prejudice in American society is a foregone conclusion. Brother Bill’s philosophy, as Herman makes clear to Abe, is that he “doesn’t care if Mr. Charley likes him, or whether Mr. Charley hates him . . . he just wants Mr. Charley to get his foot off him.” The idea clearly resonates with Abe, who responds thoughtfully: “I’ve tasted more hate in my life than I have wine.” They are, Abe gradually realizes, mutual victims of bigotry: alien presences in a contemporary American society of which they are, nonetheless, an integral part. With common ground established, the odd couple bonds quickly. Gloria Ross, the young, naïve, and idealistic social worker, arranges for Abe and Herman to be her guests at the local country club for a day of fun and a welcome respite from the oppressive summer heat. Herman has a delightful time swimming in the club pool, much to the dismay of Mrs. Parker (Gillian Barber) who makes it quietly clear to Gloria that she resents this intrusion of

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undesirables. Mrs. Parker, of course, receives her comeuppance, and the event only serves to strengthen the bond between Abe and Herman, a bond further strengthened when the two are accosted on the streets by two biker bigots and subjected to predictable bullying and racial slurs. Abe subsequently takes young Herman to the movies, and also takes him fishing, a new experience for the boy, and one long promised by brother Bill. It is a poignant moment for Abe Shaddick, since it is an experience once enjoyed many years before with his son, Benjy. The idyllic period is rudely interrupted by the inevitable phone call to Gloria Ross from Herman’s grandmother, informing her that Bill has been killed in combat. Herman’s pain becomes anger and resentment, and initially ruptures the friendship. The bond is restored, however, when Abe recites the telegram he received many years before, a telegram, he tells Herman, that is undoubtedly the same general wording of the telegram received by Herman’s grandmother. Herman initially sheds no tears, but Abe has a cathartic breakdown, and cries, he says, “for the both of us . . . I cry because young men die, and old men just go on,” presumably to live in pain. At this moment, when the boy and the old man are together to share and assuage their mutual grief, the younger finding solace and the older finding closure, the summer heat gives way to thunder, followed by a symbolic healing rain. Herman goes back to the city, but it is with the implied promise that he will come again (Abe will reserve his room for him), and life, after prolonged grieving, begins to take on meaning for Abe Shaddick. Even a phone call from his ne’er-do-well nephew, asking to return, is received with charity and understanding. A Storm in Summer is a story about suffering that comes with personal loss and how we learn to help ourselves by helping others. The Serling script was undoubtedly more perceptive and insightful when it first appeared in the 1970 production, but with the passage of time it has become innocuous and somewhat trite. At its best, A Storm in Summer is heartwarming, and thereby fulfills the family viewing intentions and expectations of the Hallmark and Showtime Original Pictures for All Ages production companies. A Storm in Summer was the fortieth and final film directed by Robert Wise. In a career that lasted more than half a century, he earned and received the respect and esteem of everyone with whom he worked in the American and international motion picture industry. They knew him to be one of their best. Actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, production designers, and myriad other technical talents involved in the creation of motion pictures were universally proud of the work they did under his direction and were never hesitant to say so. He was primarily a director and a producer, but in his long career Robert Wise served the film industry behind the scenes in a number of important po-

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sitions and received many awards in recognition of his service. From 1971 to 1975, he was the president of the Directors Guild of America (DGA). He was the producer of the 43rd Annual Academy Awards telecast ceremony, and from 1976 through the mid-1990s, he was the chairman of the Special Projects Committee for the Directors’ Guild. From 1985 to 1987, he was president of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1988 the DGA awarded him the D. W. Griffith Award for a lifetime of achievement and outstanding service to the industry. It was, however, the making of motion pictures that was most important to him, and his work as a director and producer was duly recognized. Early in his career, The Set-Up won the grand prize at the Cannes film festival, a juried award presented by the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI). He was subsequently nominated four times by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences for the Best Director award, and although he did not win for I Want to Live! or The Sand Pebbles, he did win for West Side Story (shared with Jerome Robbins) and again for The Sound of Music. He also won the DGA award twice, once for West Side Story and again for The Sound of Music, and was nominated by the DGA four times previously, for Executive Suite, Somebody Up There Likes Me, I Want to Live! and The Sand Pebbles, respectively. Both West Side Story and The Sound of Music won the Oscar for best picture, which meant an additional two Academy Awards for Wise as producer. The Producers’ Guild of America awarded him the David O. Selznick award and, in 1966, the Academy recognized Wise’s lifetime achievement with the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. He also received four Golden Globe nominations for Best Director, and was awarded two: one as Best Director for I Want to Live! and one as producer for Odds against Tomorrow, designated the Best Film Promoting International Understanding. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) also nominated three of Robert Wise’s films, The Set-Up, Executive Suite, and West Side Story, as Best Film. Although the industry was appreciative, the critics were often a different story. Some, like Pauline Kael, Judith Crist, and British film historian David Thomson, were especially (and inexplicably) hard and rather narrow in their assessment of Robert Wise. Kael and Crist seemed motivated by some personal animus that lacked anything that might be termed objective criticism to explain it. Wise came to be recognized as a rather pedestrian director, hardworking but lacking both artistic quality and distinctive style. The critic primarily responsible for this view of Wise was Andrew Sarris. The assessment of the work of a film director (or any artist, for that matter) begins with a list, generally a brief one, of the definitive work that will illustrate that director’s place in cultural history. One of the preeminent creators of such lists of film directors and their accomplishments (or lack thereof ) was

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Andrew Sarris. In 1968, Sarris’s book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, was published, and it offered brief assessments of American directors from 1929 through 1968. The book had a profound influence on students, scholars, other critics, and on anyone with more than a passing interest in American film. By turns, the book is highly subjective, candid, occasionally harsh, but always intelligent and still indispensable. Sarris groups directors from that forty-year period into eleven categories, beginning with the most influential and important, whom he places in the “Pantheon” (Welles, Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, and ten others). In one of the other, presumably lesser, categories, entitled “Strained Seriousness,” Sarris places Robert Wise. It is a category, incidentally, that Wise shares with other notables such as Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, and fifteen others. Few if any of the directors in Sarris’s compilation escape with flaws uncited. Sarris was responsible for the apotheosis of many a director being at least temporarily reconsidered and reassessed. In Sarris’s view, Robert Wise was a director who lacked an identifiable style. His signature, Sarris complained, was “indistinct to the point of invisibility.” Robert Wise was a “technician without a strong personality,” whose greatest asset was a certain “conscientious craftsmanship.”5 In determining the place that Wise’s completed canon will occupy in the history of American film, there is no better starting place than an examination of the validity of Sarris’s statements. Is a signature a clearly definitive style unique to a particular director, essential to a determination of that director’s artistic quality? Is the absence of a distinctive, identifying signature necessarily a flaw? The poet John Keats credited Shakespeare with “negative capability,” the unique ability to present ideas in an objective manner, rather than as definitive statements of the human condition refined and made distinctive by the subjective interpretation of the author. Terms such as aesthetic distance define in similar fashion the same characteristic. Robert Wise would not have used the term aesthetic distance, but I firmly believe he practiced it unwittingly. There is often a thin line between true art and conscientious craftsmanship. Certainly the latter is essential to the execution of the former, and in true art the two are inseparable. Like Alfred Hitchcock, a Pantheon director of the highest order, Robert Wise approached a film project with a sense of what the audience would see. Hitchcock maintained that he saw every shot in his imagination before any of them were actually filmed and that he had actually seen the movie, as if he were a member of the future audience, before it was made. Robert Wise would have made no such claim. I suspect that what he would have said if asked to compare himself to Hitchcock in that very specific regard is that he would bring to any individual shot what he felt and believed was instinctively and technically right, what would reveal on the screen the essential idea or image in the script that he felt

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would appeal to an intelligent audience. In the process of bringing a script to the screen, he had a truly admirable work ethic, and he concerned himself deeply with every facet of every production. His memos on his many projects in the Robert Wise Collection at the University of Southern California— mostly written to screenwriters, but also to cinematographers, production designers, composers, and others—would rival the well-known collection of similar interproduction correspondence by the celebrated David O. Selznick. From the extensive attention to detail, both men produced memorable, highly artistic contributions to the art of the American cinema. The films that will inform future criticism of Robert Wise’s career are The Set-Up (1949), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Executive Suite (1954), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), I Want to Live! (1958), Odds against Tomorrow (1959), West Side Story (1961), The Haunting (1963), and The Andromeda Strain (1971). The conscientious craftsmanship that enabled him to create these and others was largely founded in the respect he had for the film audience. Motion picture audience demographics have changed considerably since the days of Robert Wise’s greatest screen successes. Given his personal code of values, I’m not sure he could be a major director today. I suspect he would be drawn to the challenge of independent films, rather than larger productions. If he learned anything from his earliest days with Val Lewton, it was not to pander to the tastes of the lowest common denominator of a film audience, but to recognize that an audience was out there that would be receptive to an intelligent screen presentation. Sometimes, however, the realities of the business made this impossible. Even late in his career, there were times when personal concessions had to be made in order to fulfill the responsibility accepted for a particular project. There were, for example, growing pressures to compromise standards when he directed Star Trek:The Motion Picture, a film that was circumscribed by a readymade audience of Trekkies, whose only interest was to see more of the television series cult figures working familiar territory, albeit wonderfully transferred to the big screen. Even the story line of the script for that production was based on an old television episode. The hype and hyperbole of the Roddenberry associates notwithstanding,6 Robert Wise came to regret his involvement with that project, and was happy to see it over and done with.7 Star Trek:The Motion Picture may have turned into an unfortunate misstep but throughout his career, Robert Wise gave the target audiences for whom he made motion pictures credit for intelligence, perception, and sensitivity. Undoubtedly audience demographics have changed, and today’s audience will continue to change, not necessarily for the better. But to the last, Wise endeavored to make films that he felt an intelligent audience would want to see and from which they would benefit. Quite clearly, not every film was successful; along the

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way, he had a profound flop or two. But there were also profound successes, films of the highest quality created with intelligence, sensitivity, and a very “conscientious craftsmanship.”

NOTES 1. Frank Thompson, Robert Wise: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), 17. 2. Thompson, Robert Wise, 17. 3. Sergio Leeman, Robert Wise on His Films (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1995), 107. 4. Richard Bernstein, “Battling Crack Dealers on Rooftops of New York,” New York Times, March 18, 1989. 5. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968), 203. 6. Susan Sackett and Gene Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (New York: Wallaby, 1980), 76–82. 7. Robert Wise, interview with author, August 13, 1981.

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Appendix: An Interview with Robert Wise

On September 14, 2005, Robert Wise died at the age of ninety-one, bringing to a conclusion a career of sixty-one years in the motion picture industry. On the occasion of my visit to the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the summer of 1978, we sat together in his office in Building E on the Paramount lot, and he granted me an extended interview. From those tapes, and from additional interviews conducted in later years by letter, telephone, and at one meeting for lunch in Washington, D.C., when he was in town for a trustees meeting at the American Film Institute, I have excerpted the following questions and answers. Over the years, Wise had given many interviews, often answering the same questions with considerable patience. Many subsequent interviews have extracted additional information, and have added considerably to our understanding of his extensive contribution; others have reworked familiar territory. In some aspects the interview is a little dated, but the working values hold true. I believe these questions and answers give some special insight into the man and his work. R. K.: Do you have an objective in making films beyond merely entertaining audiences? Something that might be called a “philosophy” that guides your work? WISE: I don’t know that I would necessarily put it that way, but yes, I do have certain guiding principles about my work, although I don’t know that they’re all that unique. I consider film a universal language. Those of us in the motion picture business know our films are shown all around the world, we know we see films from many other countries, and in my view there is no single art or means of expression that is so universally understood and has such impact around the world as film, as motion pictures. I believe it is one

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of the most effective ways in which peoples of the world can get to know and understand each other better, to illustrate the very, very many things that people around the world have in common. This is a very important aspect of filmmaking for me. It is not, however, a final determinant in the material I select to make for my films—not all carry great weight as far as a “one world concept” is concerned—but I certainly value very highly that aspect of any story subject that happens to contain this element. R. K.: Over the years, you’ve directed films in almost every genre: fight pictures, war, musicals,Westerns, even a DeMille-type spectacle. Do you have a favorite genre? WISE: I don’t look for stories in any particular area. I want a good spanking yarn that I think I can make into a damned good movie. The only things that I do put some limitations on are don’ts rather than dos. I’m not interested in making Westerns, and I haven’t made one since Tribute to a Bad Man back in 1956. That was my last, my very last! I never bother to read Western scripts. Also, I’m not interested at all in spectacle films, that is, spectacles of the ancient era, Biblical era—I did one, Helen of Troy, largely, I think, because I wanted the challenge. It was an interesting experience, but I found it was a kind of film, a genre of film, that I didn’t care for. R. K.: Let me ask you a general question about the theory of making movies. In putting together a given film, is there, in your judgment, such a thing as an “indispensable element,” something that must be there for the film to work? Would it be the director? The star? Script? Production designer? Any combination of these and other elements? WISE: Obviously, all of those that you’ve mentioned are important, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the one specific component involved in the creation of a film that is the most important is the story. I feel that is the major decision any of us make—selecting the story. We never escape the strengths of that original story or its weaknesses. I might work better than the next director or I might cast it better or I might get a better screenplay or I might do a worse job than another director, but however we approach it, we never escape the strong influence of that original decision, the story we choose to make. I don’t mean to make it sound like all the other aspects of filmmaking are not terribly important and cannot add tremendously to that choice of the original story. All the aspects that we know, the script, the writer, the actors, the production designer, the editor, all of the technicians, they’re all terribly important—but none of us, none of those people, the stars as well as the others, can escape the rightness or the wrongness of that original decision of what story to make into a motion picture.

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R. K.: In your long career, you’ve worked with many of the great stars in Hollywood, several more than once. Do you have any particular favorite or favorites? WISE: Sure, I have some favorites, just as I have a few people I would not have been eager to work with a second time. There are very few in that latter group, however. As you know, I had a difficult time with Spencer Tracy when we did Tribute to a Bad Man, but Spencer was going through a bad patch at the time. His health wasn’t good, and he had other problems. Also, it just wasn’t the right project for him. That being said, I would be among the many who recognize what an enormous talent he was, and what a great contribution he made to our industry. Generally speaking, I’d rather not name any names in either group. I had very few problems,, and the work I did with many performers over the years will have to speak for itself. R. K.: In the first picture you directed [Curse of the Cat People], you had to work with a juvenile actress, something I would think would be unduly challenging for a fledgling director. Did it present special problems? WISE: Not really. There’s always a parent or an assistant director who supervises child actors, and children have always been pretty much at ease with me. I had a good group to work with on The Sound of Music. Children have different levels of energy, and if there are delays on the set, they sometimes get tired, and a little bored. That’s understandable. Some are a little better at what it takes than others. I remember in particular the pleasure of working with Billy Gray on The Day the Earth Stood Still. Very professional, always knew his lines, always ready and responsive. After all these years, he stands out in my memory as a juvenile with whom I had a very good working experience. R. K.: Since you put such emphasis on the story, do you have a favorite source of material? Do you find yourself looking to novels, short stories, original screenplays? As a man often described as the preeminent translator of stage musicals into film, I would assume that the theater would be your primary source. WISE: Certainly the theater can let you know quicker whether or not something works in visual terms, but as far as story sources are concerned, I’m wide open. I look to whatever source I can for the stories on which to base a film. That’s the big problem, it always has been and continues to be the big challenge for all of us who direct and produce films, the matter of finding exciting, original, cinematic material. I look at material from all sources—original screenplays, screen treatments, books, plays, short stories, any avenue in any genre of writing that might offer potential for an exciting cinematic screenplay. When I finally find something

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that hits me, that tells me that this will work, I try to get the proper screenplay and make the film. R. K.: What do you mean by “the proper screenplay”? What steps are involved in doing that? WISE: I’m not a screenwriter myself. I always have my screenplays done by professional screenwriters. I have one rather strong feeling about this. I prefer generally not to have the man who has written the original material—that is, of course, unless it’s an original screenplay—but let’s say that if I purchase a novel, not to have the original author do the screenplay. I usually prefer to have another writer do the screen adaptation. R. K.: Don’t you run the risk of losing something by this? Wouldn’t the original author be able to reinforce what you originally found so appealing? WISE: Possibly. But I really feel that more often than not, the original author will be so close to his material, will be so involved in it, he will not be able to see where it needs to be pulled together, what needs to be eliminated, all the cutting and excising and pulling together, and rewriting and changing that might be necessary to make a first-rate screenplay out of his material. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, of course, and there have been very good examples of original authors and playwrights doing the screenplays on their own material, but I generally prefer to have a man fresh to the material to do the screenplay. R. K.: Once you’ve gotten your writer assigned to work on developing a screenplay, do you direct each step of the way? How closely do you work with a writer at this stage? WISE: Generally, I have long, in-depth story sessions with the screenwriter before he starts to work, letting him know all the thoughts I have on the transference of the story to screenplay and getting the ideas that he has at this early juncture. We kick ideas and approaches around in these story sessions and then I let him go ahead and do his treatment if he likes, or go directly into screenplay, if he prefers. I let him write himself out and give me everything that he can think of or wants to put into his first draft. From there on, I work with him in cutting down and polishing, and with the rewrites in, finally getting the material into shooting-script shape. R. K.: It seems to me that other directors have done as much, and have felt themselves entitled to screenplay credits; in working so closely, aren’t you really a “writer” of the screenplay as well?

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WISE: Not really. I have ideas, but I let the writer translate them for me. Depending on the film, I may have ideas for delivery of certain sequences, particularly in a visual sense. Often I will write these up in my own form and turn them over to the writer to put into script form in his script. Case in point: the whole opening of West Side Story, the helicopter shots coming in over New York and gradually working over Manhattan to the West Side and into the playground, an opening that has been very favorably received from the time it first came on the screen, was my idea. In order to simplify the matter of explaining the idea to Ernie Lehman, the screenwriter, I simply sat down one day and wrote up the opening sequence and gave it to Ernie, who then worked it over and put it into proper terms for the script. I’ve done this in several instances. They usually are visual and action sequences, not sequences that involve dialogue from the characters. R. K.: You’re said to be a director who leaves “nothing to chance.” Do you set your scripts up so that you can follow them without variation? Have you ever found yourself mentally writing or rewriting on the set? Freely improvising? WISE: The first part of your question makes me sound rather inflexible, but I certainly do like to have all the action and business worked out before I start shooting. I like to have all the indications that occur to the writer put into at least the early drafts, indications of business and actions for the characters. Sometimes I will trim some of this down so it’s not excessive in the shooting script, but I like a good, full script. Then, as do most directors, I allow myself room to improvise beyond that, beyond what is down on the written page. Then, when the actors are on their feet, if the action as described doesn’t work well and we see chances to improve it, we improvise from what we start with in the script. But I am a director who very much likes to prepare fully every aspect of films as much as possible. R. K.: To what degree does that desire for extensive preparation apply to actors? Do you attempt to shape an actor’s approach to a role beforehand? Or do you let an actor improvise, and shape the role for you? Just how much freedom are you willing to give an actor? WISE: At the risk of sounding like I’m hedging, I’d have to say that I employ a combination of both. Before an actor has had too much of a chance to form his own opinion—let’s say, he’s read the script, he has formed his own image of the character and some of his thoughts about the script, but before he really starts to learn the role and learn the lines—I want to have a good, long discussion with him about the script, about the story, about the aims of the story, and, particularly, about his character and how I see it. I like to see

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whether we’re in accord or whether he has things to suggest that would improve what I feel or whether I can put to the actor aspects of the character that he hadn’t thought of. Before we start shooting, I like to be sure that, with all the characters, the actor and I are basically in accord with our feelings about the character, what he stands for and where he is going. Once that is established, and we start rehearsals and shooting, I like to give the actor his head, let him experiment and bring out all the things that he feels in the scene in relation to the character. This is the area of improvising on the basis of a solid understanding between us before we start shooting, about what the character is. R. K.: With your fiftieth anniversary in the motion picture business upon us, have you given any thought to retirement? WISE: Not really, I feel good, I’m in good health, I’ve got lots of ideas. I continue to read scripts and novels, and search for story material. As long as I feel this way, I’ll continue making motion pictures. (Following this interview, Robert Wise went on to make two final films: Rooftops in 1989 and, for television, A Storm in Summer in 2000.)

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Agee, James. Agee on Film. Boston: Beacon, 1964. Beck, Roger. “Police, Prosecutors Blast Film on Barbara Graham.” Los Angeles Mirror News, November 28, 1958. Bernstein, Richard. “Battling Crack Dealers on Rooftops of New York.” New York Times, March 18, 1989. Brosnan, John. Movie Magic:The Story of Special Effects in the Cinema. New York: New American Library, 1976. Champlin, Charles. “The Andromeda Strain.” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1971. Reprinted in Filmfacts 14, no. 5, 1971, 105. Crist, Judith. “The Sand Pebbles.” New York World Journal Tribune, December 21, 1966. Reprinted in Filmfacts 9, no. 24, January 15, 1967, 331. Crowther, Bosley. “Some Game!” New York Times, November 24, 1945. ———. “Court in Session.” New York Times, November 16, 1946. ———. “The Screen in Review.” New York Times, May 1, 1947. ———. “The Screen in Review.” New York Times, March 28, 1958. ———. “The Screen in Review.” New York Times, November 19, 1958. Reprinted in Filmfacts 1, no. 45, December 10, 1958, 210. ———. “The Screen in Review.” New York Times, August 19, 1963. Reprinted in Filmfacts 6, no. 32, September 12, 1963, 182–83. Dunn, Linwood G. “Effects and Titles for West Side Story.” American Cinematographer, December 1961, 737–38. Everson, William K. “Audrey Rose.” Films in Review, June–July 1977, 374. Eyles, Allen. “The Other Brando: The Surprising World of Paul Newman.” Films and Filming, January 1965. Farber, Manny. “Low Company.” New Republic, April 25, 1949, 29–31. Guernsey, Otis. “On the Screen.” New York Herald Tribune, October 2, 1950. Haver, Ron. “RKO Years.” American Film, December–January 1978, 28–34. Houseman, John. Front and Center. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Kael, Pauline. Deeper into Movies. New York: Warner Books, 1980.

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———. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. New York: Bantam, 1969. Kaplan, Mike. Publicity Notes for Star!—Robert Wise Productions. 1968. Kauffman, Stanley. “The Sound of Music.” New Republic, March 20, 1965, 26–27. Knight, Arthur. “Movies Are Wider Than Ever.” Saturday Review, May 16, 1953, 32–33. ———. “SR Goes to the Movies.” November 29, 1958. Reprinted in Filmfacts, December 10, 1958, 210. Leeman, Sergio. Robert Wise on His Films. Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1995. Maas, Peter. “As Rocky—Newman Scores a K.O.” Collier’s, July 20, 1956, 46–49. McCord, Ted. “How I Photographed The Sound of Music.” American Cinematographer, April 1965, 223–25. Nogueira, Rui. “Robert Wise at RKO.” Focus on Film, Winter 1972, 43–50. ———. “Robert Wise at Fox.” Focus on Film, Spring 1973, 47–50. ———. “Robert Wise.” Focus on Film, Autumn 1973, 49–55. ———. “Robert Wise to Date.” Focus on Film, Autumn 1974, 52–59. Sackett, Susan, and Gene Roddenberry. The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. New York: Wallaby, 1980. Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968. New York: Dutton, 1968. Siegel, Joel. The Reality of Terror. New York: Viking, 1973. Stark, Samuel. “Robert Wise: Began as a Cutter and Has Retained a Cutter’s Cunning.” Films in Review 14, no. 1, 1963, 5–22. Strick, Philip. “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” BFI Monthly Bulletin, February 1980, 29–30. Telotte, Jay. Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Thompson, Frank. Robert Wise: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995. Welsh, James M. “Knockout in Paradise City: An Appraisal of The Set-Up.” American Classic Screen, July–August 1978.

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AS DIRECTOR The Curse of the Cat People (RKO, 1944) Producer: Val Lewton Codirector: Gunther von Fritsch (Replaced by Wise) Assistant Director: Harry D’Arcy Screenplay: DeWitt Bodeen Director of Photography: Nicholas Musuraca Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Walter E. Keller Set Decorators: Darrell Silvera, William Stevens Music: Roy Webb Musical Director: C. Bakaleinikoff Editor: J. R. Whittredge Cast: Simone Simon (Irena), Kent Smith (Oliver Reed), Jane Randolph (Alice Reed), Ann Carter (Amy Reed), Elizabeth Russell (Barbara), Julia Dean (Julia Farren), Eve March (Miss Callahan), Sir Lancelot (Edward), Erford Gage (Captain of Guard), Joel Davis (Donald), Juanita Alvarez (Lois), Charley Bates (Jack), Gloria Donovan, Ginny Wren, and Linda Ann Bieber (Little Girls), Sarah Selby (Miss Plumett), Mel Sternlight (State Trooper). Running Time: 70 minutes Premiere: May 31, 1944, Rivoli Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Turner Home Entertainment/Val Lewton Horror Collection (set)

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Mademoiselle Fifi (RKO, 1944) Producer: Val Lewton Assistant Director: Sam Ruman Screenplay: Josef Mischel and Peter Ruric Literary Source: “Mademoiselle Fifi” and “Boule de Suif ” by Guy de Maupassant Director of Photography: Harry Wild, A.S.C. Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Walter E. Keller Set Decorators: Darrell Silvera and Al Fields Costumes: Edward Stevenson Music: Werner Heymann Musical Director: C. Bakaleinikoff Sound: James G. Stewart Editor: J. R. Whittredge Cast: John Emery (Jean Cornudet), Simone Simon (Elizabeth Rousset), Kurt Kreuger (Lt. von Eyrick), Alan Napier (Count de Breville), Jason Robards (Wine Merchant), Norma Varden (Wine Merchant’s wife), Romaine Callender (Manufacturer), Fay Helm (Manufacturer’s wife), Edmund Glover (a young priest), Charles Waldron (Curé of Cleresville), Mayo Newhall (M. Follenvie), Lillian Bronson (Mme. Follenvie), Alan Ward (Coach Driver), Daun Kennedy (The Maid), William von Wymetal (The Major), Max Willenz (The Captain). Running Time: 69 minutes Premiere: June 29, 1944, Academy Theater, Pasadena, California Awards: None DVD: Editions Montparnasse, Manga Films The Body Snatcher (RKO, 1945) Producer: Val Lewton Assistant Director: Harry Scott Screenplay: Philip MacDonald and Carlos Keith (Val Lewton) Literary Source: “The Body Snatcher” by Robert Louis Stevenson Director of Photography: Robert de Grasse Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller Set Decorators: Darrell Silvera and John Sturtevant Music: Roy Webb Musical Director: C. Bakaleinikoff Editor: J. R. Whittredge Cast: Boris Karloff (Gray), Bela Lugosi (Joseph), Henry Daniell (MacFarlane), Edith Atwater (Meg), Russell Wade (Fettes), Rita Corday (Mrs. Marsh), Sharyn Moffett (Georgina), Donna Lee (Street Singer), Mary Gordon (Mrs. McBride).

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Running Time: 77 minutes Premiere: May 6, 1945, Rialto Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Turner Home Entertainment/Val Lewton Horror Collection (set) A Game of Death (RKO, 1945) Producer: Herman Schlom Assistant Director: Doran Cox Screenplay: Norman Houston Director of Photography: J. Roy Hunt Literary Source: “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell Set Decorators: Darrell Silvera and James Altweis Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino and Lucius Croxton Music: Paul Sawtell Musical Director: C. Bakaleinikoff Sound: Philip Mitchell and James G. Stewart Editor: J. R. Whittredge Cast: John Loder (Rainsford), Audrey Long (Ellen), Edgar Barrier (Krieger), Russell Wade (Robert), Russell Hicks (Whitney), Jason Robards (Captain), Gene Stutenroth (Pleshke), Noble Johnson (Carib), Robert Clarke (Helmsman). Running Time: 70 minutes Premiere: November 23, 1945, Rialto Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Not available Criminal Court (RKO, 1946) Producer: Martin Rooney Screenplay: Lawrence Kimble Director of Photography: Frank Redman, A.S.C. Special Effects Photography: Russell A. Cully, A.S.C. Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino and Lucius Croxton Set Decorators: Darrell Silvera and Michael Orenbach Music: Paul Sawtell Musical Director: C. Bakaleinikoff Sound: Francis M. Sarver and Roy Granville Editor: Robert Swink Cast: Tom Conway (Steve Barnes), Martha O’Driscoll (Georgia Gale), June Clayworth (Joan Mason), Robert Armstrong (Vic Wright), Addison Richards

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(D. A. Gordon), Pat Gleason (Joe West), Steve Brodie (Frankie), Robert Warwick (Marquette). Running Time: 60 minutes Premiere: November 15, 1946, Rialto Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Not available Born to Kill (RKO, 1947) Producer: Herman Schlom Screenplay: Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay Literary Source: Deadlier Than the Male by James Gunn Director of Photography: Robert de Grasse, A.S.C. Special Effects Photography: Russell A. Cully, A.S.C. Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller Set Decorators: Darrell Silvera and John Sturtevant Gowns: Edward Stevenson Music: Paul Sawtell Musical Director: C. Bakaleinikoff Sound: Robert H. Guhl and Roy Granville Editor: Les Millbrook Cast: Lawrence Tierney (Sam Wilde), Claire Trevor (Helen Brent), Walter Slezak (Albert Arnett), Philip Terry (Fred Grover), Audrey Long (Georgia Staples), Elisha Cook Jr. (Marty Waterman), Isabel Jewell (Laury Palmer), Esther Howard (Mrs. Kraft), Tony Barrett (Danny), Ellen Corby (maid). Running Time: 92 minutes Premiere: April 30, 1947, Palace Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Warner Home Video/Film Noir classic collection Mystery in Mexico (RKO, 1948) Producer: Sid Rogell Assistant Director: Jaime Contreras Screenplay: Lawrence Kimble Director of Photography: Jack Draper Art Director: Gunter Gerszo Gowns: Renié Music: Paul Sawtell Musical Director: C. Bakaleinikoff Sound: José B. Carles and Fred L. Granville

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Editor: Samuel E. Beetley Cast: William Lundigan (Steve Hastings), Jacqueline White (Victoria Ames), Ricardo Cortez (Norcross), Tony Barrett (Carlos), Jacqueline Dalya (Dolores Fernandez), Walter Reed (Glenn Ames), José Torvay (Swigart). Running Time: 66 minutes Premiere: February 15, 1948, Rialto Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Not available Blood on the Moon (RKO, 1948) Producer: Theron Warth Assistant Director: Maxwell O. Henry Screenplay: Lillie Hayward Literary Source: Gunman’s Chance by Luke Short Director of Photography: Nicholas Musuraca Art Directors: Albert D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller Set Decorators: Darrell Silvera and James Altwies Costumes: Edward Stevenson Music: Roy Webb Musical Director: C. Bakaleinikoff Sound: John L. Cass and Terry Kellum Editor: Samuel E. Beetley Cast: Robert Mitchum (Jim Garry), Barbara Bel Geddes (Amy Lupton), Robert Preston (Tate Riling), Walter Brennan (Kris Barden), Phyllis Thaxter (Carol Lupton), Frank Faylen (Jake Pindalest), Tom Tully (John Lupton), Charles McGraw (Milo Sweet), Tom Tyler (Frank Reardon), Bud Osborne (Cap Willis). Running Time: 87 minutes Premiere: November 10, 1948, Globe Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Not available VHS: Warner Home Video The Set-Up (RKO, 1949) Producer: Richard Goldstone Assistant Director: Edward Kelly Screenplay: Art Cohn Literary Source: Poem by Joseph Moncure March Director of Photography: Milton Krasner, A.S.C.

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Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino and Jack Okey Musical Director: C. Bakaleinikoff Fight Sequences: John Indrisano Set Decorators: Darrell Silvera and James Altwies Makeup Supervision: Gordon Bau Sound: Phil Brigandi and Clem Portman Editor: Roland Gross Cast: Robert Ryan (Stoker Thompson), Audrey Totter (Julie Thompson), George Tobias (Tiny), Alan Baxter (Little Boy), Wallace Ford (Gus), Percy Helton (Red), Hal Fieberling (Tiger Nelson), James Edwards (Luther Hawkins), Darryl Hickman (Stanley), Kenny O’Morrison (Moore), David Clarke (Gunboat Johnson), Philip Pine (Souza), Edwin Max (Danny). Running Time: 72 minutes Premiere: March 29, 1949, Criterion Theater, New York Awards: Cannes Film Festival 1949 (Wins: Best Cinematography: Milton Krasner; FIPRESCI Prize: Robert Wise) BAFTA 1950 (Nomination: Best Film) DVD: Turner Home Entertainment (Also available on VHS) Two Flags West (Twentieth Century Fox, 1950) Producer: Casey Robinson Screenplay: Casey Robinson Director of Photography: Leon Shamroy Art Directors: Lyle Wheeler and Chester Gore Set Decorators: Thomas Little and Fred J. Rode Costumes: Edward Stevenson Music: Hugo Friedhofer Musical Director: Alfred Newman Sound: Alfred Bruzlin and Harry M. Leonard Special Photographic Effects: Fred Sersen Editor: Louis Loeffler Cast: Joseph Cotten (Clay Tucker), Linda Darnell (Elena Kenniston), Jeff Chandler (Major Kenniston), Cornel Wilde (Capt. Mark Bradford), Dale Robertson (Lem), Jay C. Flippen (Sgt. Duffy), Noah Beery (Cy Davis), Harry von Zell (Ephraim Strong), John Sands (Lieut. Reynolds), Arthur Hunnicutt (Sgt. Pickens). Running Time: 92 minutes Premiere: October 9, 1950, Rivoli Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Not available

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Three Secrets (Warner Bros., 1950) Producer: Milton Sperling Assistant Director: Russell Saunders Screenplay: Martin Rackin and Gina Kaus Director of Photography: Sid Hickox, A.S.C. Special Effects Photography: William McGann and Edwin DuPar Art Director: Charles H. Clarke Set Decorator: Fred M. MacLean Music: David Buttolph Orchestration: Maurice de Packh Sound: Charles Lang Editor: Thomas Reilly Cast: Eleanor Parker (Susan Chase), Patricia Neal (Phyllis Horn), Ruth Roman (Ann Lawrence), Frank Lovejoy (Bob Duffy), Leif Erickson (Bill Chase), Ted de Corsia (Del Prince), Edmon Ryan (Hardin), Larry Keating (Mark Harrison), Katherine Warren (Mrs. Connors), Arthur Franz (Paul Radin), Duncan Richardson (Johnny). Running Time: 98 minutes Premiere: October 1, 1950, Strand Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Not available VHS: Republic Pictures House on Telegraph Hill (Twentieth Century Fox, 1951) Producer: Robert Bassler Screenplay: Elick Moll and Frank Partos Literary Source: Novel The Frightened Child by Dana Lyon Director of Photography: Lucien Ballard Art Director: Lyle Wheeler Set Decorators: Thomas Little and Paul S. Fox Costumes: Renié and Charles Le Maire Musical Director: Alfred Newman Orchestration: Edward Powell and Maurice de Packh Sound: George Leverett and Harry M. Leonard Editor: Nick DiMaggio Cast: Richard Basehart (Alan), Valentina Cortesa (Victoria/Karen), William Lundigan (Marc Bennett), Fay Baker (Margaret), Gordon Gebert (Chris). Running Time: 100 minutes Premiere: Unknown

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Awards: Academy Awards 1952 (Nomination: Best Art Direction/Set Direction, B&W) DVD: Twentieth Century Fox The Day the Earth Stood Still (Twentieth Century Fox, 1951) Producer: Julian Blaustein Screenplay: Edmund H. North Director of Photography: Leo Tover Special Photographic Effects: Fred Sersen Art Directors: Lyle Wheeler and Addison Hehr Set Decorators: Thomas Little and Claude Carpenter Costumes: Travilla Klaatu’s Costume: Perkins Bailey Music: Bernard Herrmann Sound: Arthur L. Kirbach and Harry M. Leonard Film Editor: William Reynolds, A.C.E. Cast: Michael Rennie (Klaatu/Carpenter), Patricia Neal (Helen Benson), Hugh Marlowe (Tom Stevens), Sam Jaffe (Prof. Barnhardt), Billy Gray (Bobby Benson), Lock Martin (Gort). Running Time: 92 minutes Premiere: Unknown Awards: Golden Globes (Win: Best Film Promoting International Understanding; Nomination: Best Score, Bernard Herrmann) DVD: Twentieth Century Fox (Also available on VHS) The Captive City (Aspen Productions, 1952) Producer: Theron Warth Assistant Director: Ivan Volkman Screenplay: Karl Kamb and Alvin M. Josephy Jr. Director of Photography: Lee Garmes, A.S.C. Special Photographic Effects: William Reinhold Production Design: Maurice Zuberano Music: Jerome Moross Musical Director: Emil Newman Sound: Tom Carmon and James G. Stewart Editor: Robert Swink, A.C.E. Cast: John Forsythe (Jim Austin), Joan Camden (Marge Austin), Harold J. Kennedy (Don Carey), Marjorie Crossland (Mrs. Sirak), Victor Sutherland (Murray Sirak), Ray Teal (Chief Gillette), Martin Milner (Phil Harding),

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Geraldine Hall (Mrs. Nelson), Hal K. Dawson (Clyde Nelson), Ian Wolfe (Rev. Nash), Gladys Hurlbut (Linda Purcy), Jess Kirkpatrick (Anderson). Running Time: 90 minutes Premiere: Unknown Awards: None DVD: Not available Something for the Birds (Twentieth Century Fox, 1952) Producer: Samuel G. Engel Assistant Director: Henry Weinberger Screenplay: I. A. L. Diamond and Boris Ingster Director of Photography: Joseph LaShelle Art Directors: Lyle Wheeler and George Patrick Set Decorators: Thomas Little and Bruce MacDonald Costumes: Eloise Jensson Music: Sol Kaplan Musical Director: Lionel Newman Sound: Arthur L. Kirbach and Harry M. Leonard Editor: Hugh S. Fowler Cast: Victor Mature (Steve Bennett), Patricia Neal (Ann Richards), Edmund Gwenn (Johnny Adams), Larry Keating (Roy Patterson), Gladys Hurlbut (Mrs. Rice), Christian Rub (Johnny’s colleague). Running Time: 81 minutes Premiere: Unknown Awards: None DVD: Not available Destination Gobi (Twentieth Century Fox, 1953) Producer: Stanley Rubin Assistant Director: J. Richard Mayberry Director of Photography: Charles G. Clarke Special Photographic Effects: Ray Kellogg Art Directors: Lyle Wheeler and Lewis Creber Set Decorator: Al Orenbach Music: Sol Kaplan Musical Director: Alfred Newman Sound: Arthur L. Kirbach and Harry M. Leonard Editor: Robert Fritch

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Cast: Richard Widmark (Sam McHale), Murvyn Vye (Kengtu), Don Taylor (Jenkins), Earl Holliman (Svenson), Martin Milner (Elwood Halsey), Ross Bagdasarian (Sabatello), Darryl Hickman (Tony). Running Time: 89 minutes Premiere: Unknown Awards: None DVD: Not available The Desert Rats (Twentieth Century Fox, 1953) Producer: Robert L. Jacks Assistant Director: J. Richard Maybery Screenplay: Richard Murphy Director of Photography: Lucien Ballard Art Directors: Lyle Wheeler and Addison Hehr Set Decorator: Fred J. Rode Music: Leigh Harline Musical Director: Alfred Newman Sound: Alfred Bruzlin and Roger Heman Editor: Barbara McLean Cast: Richard Burton (Capt. MacRoberts), Robert Newton (Bartlett), Robert Douglas (General), Torin Thatcher (Barney), Chips Rafferty (Smith), James Mason (Rommel). Running Time: 88 minutes Premiere: May 8, 1953, Mayfair Theater, New York Awards: Academy Awards 1954 (Nomination: Best Writing, Story and Screenplay, Richard Murphy) DVD: Twentieth Century Fox (Also available on VHS) So Big (Warner Bros., 1953) Producer: Henry Blanke Assistant Director: Russ Saunders Screenplay: John Twist Literary Source: Novel So Big by Edna Ferber Director of Photography: Ellsworth Fredericks Art Director: John Beckman Set Decorator: George James Hopkins Music: Max Steiner Orchestrations: Murray Cutter Sound: Oliver S. Garretson

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Editor: Thomas Reilly Cast: Jane Wyman (Selina), Sterling Hayden (Pervis DeJong), Richard Beymer (young Roelf ), Ruth Swanson (Maartje Pool), Roland Winters (Klaas Pool), Tommy Rettig (Dirk, 8 years), Steve Forrest (Dirk, 25 years), Nancy Olson (Dallas O’Mara), Martha Hyer (Paula Hempel). Running Time: 101 minutes Premiere: November 3, 1953, Hollywood Paramount Theater, Los Angeles Awards: None DVD: Not available Executive Suite (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1954) Producer: John Houseman Associate Producer: Jud Kinberg Assistant Director: George Rhein Screenplay: Ernest Lehman Literary Source: Novel Executive Suite by Cameron Hawley Director of Photography: George Folsey, A.S.C. Special Photographic Effects: A. Arnold Gillespie and Warren Newcombe Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons and Edward Carfagno Set Decorators: Edwin B. Willis and Emile Kuri Costumes: Helen Rose Recording Supervisor: Douglas Shearer Editor: Ralph E. Winters, A.C.E. Cast: William Holden (McDonald Walling), June Allyson (Mary Walling), Barbara Stanwyck (Julia Tredway), Fredric March (Loren Shaw), Walter Pidgeon (Fred Alderson), Shelley Winters (Eva Bardeman), Paul Douglas (Walt Dudley), Louis Calhern (George Caswell), Dean Jagger (Jesse Grimm), Nina Foch (Erica Martin). Running Time: 104 minutes Premiere: April 15, 1954, Egyptian Theater, Hollywood Awards: Academy Awards 1955 (Nominations: Best Supporting Actress, Nina Foch; Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, B&W; Best Cinematography, B&W; Best Costume Design, B&W) BAFTA 1955 (Nominations: Best Film; Best Foreign Actor, Fredric March) Directors Guild of America 1955 (Nomination: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, Robert Wise) Writers Guild of America 1955 (Nomination: Best Written American Drama, Ernest Lehman) National Board of Review 1954 (Win: Best Supporting Actress, Nina Foch) Venice Film Festival 1954 (Win: Special Jury Prize; Nomination: Golden Lion, Robert Wise)

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DVD: Not available VHS: MGM/Warner Helen of Troy (Warner Bros., 1955) Producer: Jack L. Warner Associate Producers: Maurizio Lodi-Fe and Giuseppe De Blasio Screenplay: John Twist and Hugh Gray Director of Photography: Harry Stradling Art Director: Edward Carrere Music: Max Steiner Cast: Rossana Podesta (Helen), Jacques Sernas (Paris), Sir Cedric Hardwicke (Priam), Stanley Baker (Achilles), Robert Douglas (Agamemnon), Nora Swinburne (Hecuba), Torin Thatcher (Ulysses), Harry Andrews (Hector), Brigitte Bardot (Andraste), Eduardo Ciannelli (Andros), Marc Lawrence (Diomedes). Running Time: 114 minutes Premiere: January 26, 1956, Fox Wilshire, Beverly Hills, California Awards: None DVD: Warner Home Video (Also available on VHS) Tribute to a Bad Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956) Producer: Sam Zimbalist Assistant Director: Arvid Griffen Screenplay: Michael Blankfort Director of Photography: Robert Surtees Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons and Paul Groesse Set Decorators: Edwin B. Willis and Fred MacLean Music: Miklos Rozsa Sound: Wesley C. Miller Editor: Ralph E. Winters Cast: James Cagney (Jeremy Rodock), Dan Dubbins (Steve Millar), Stephen McNally (McNulty), Irene Pappas (Jocasta), Vic Morrow (Lars Peterson), James Griffith (Barjak), Jeanette Nolan (Mrs. Peterson), Lee Van Cleef (Fat Jones), Royal Dano (Abe), Onslow Stevens (Hearn), James Bell (L. A. Peterson). Running Time: 95 minutes Premiere: March 18, 1956, Village Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: Not available VHS: MGM/Warner

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Somebody Up There Likes Me (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956) Producer: Charles Schnee Associate Producer: James E. Newcom Assistant Director: Robert Saunders Screenplay: Ernest Lehman Literary Source: Autobiography Somebody Up There Likes Me by Rocky Graziano and Rowland Barber Director of Photography: Joseph Ruttenberg Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons and Malcolm Brown Set Decorators: Edwin B. Willis and Keogh Gleason Music: Bronislau Kaper Technical Adviser: Johnny Indrisano Sound: Wesley C. Miller Editor: Albert Akst Cast: Paul Newman (Rocky Graziano), Pier Angeli (Norma), Everett Sloane (Irving Cohn), Eileen Heckart (Ida Barbella), Harold J. Stone (Nick Barbella), Sal Mineo (Romolo), Steve McQueen (Fidel), Robert Loggia (Frankie Peppo). Running Time: 114 minutes Premiere: August 9, 1956, State Theater, Los Angeles Awards: Academy Awards 1957 (Win: Best Art Direction/Set Decoration, B&W; Best Cinematography, B&W; Nomination: Best Film Editing) Directors Guild of America 1957 (Nomination: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, Robert Wise) Writers Guild of America 1957 (Nomination: Best Written American Drama, Ernest Lehman) DVD: Warner Home Video (Also available on VHS) This Could Be the Night (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1957) Producer: Joseph Pasternak Assistant Director: Ridgeway Callow Screenplay: Isobel Lennart Literary Source: Stories by Cornelia Baird Gross Director of Photography: Russell Harlan Art Directors: William A. Horning and Paul Groesse Set Decorators: Edwin B. Willis and Robert R. Benton Recording Supervisor: Wesley C. Miller Editor: George Boemler Cast: Jean Simmons (Anne Leeds), Anthony Franciosa (Tony Armotti), Paul Douglas (Rocco), Julie Wilson (Ivy), Neile Adams (Patsy St. Clair), Joan

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Blondell (Crystal), J. Carroll Naish (Leon), Rafael Campos (Hussein), Zasu Pitts (Mrs. Shea), Murvyn Vye (Waxie London). Running Time: 104 minutes Premiere: May 15, 1957, Pantages Theater, Hollywood Awards: Golden Globes 1958 (Nomination: Best Motion Picture Actress Musical/Comedy, Jean Simmons) DVD: Not available VHS: MGM/Warner Until They Sail (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1957) Producer: Charles Schnee Associate Producer: James E. Newcom Assistant Director: Ridgeway Callow Screenplay: Robert Anderson Director of Photography: Joseph Ruttenberg Art Directors: William A. Horning and Paul Groesse Set Decorators: Edwin B. Willis and Henry Grace Music: David Raksin Recording Supervisor: Wesley C. Miller Editor: Harold F. Kress Cast: Jean Simmons (Barbara), Joan Fontaine (Anne), Paul Newman (Jack Harding), Piper Laurie (Delia), Charles Drake (Richard Bates), Sandra Dee (Evelyn). Running Time: 94 minutes Premiere: September 24, 1957, Pantages Theater, Hollywood Awards: none DVD: Not available VHS: MGM/Warner Run Silent, Run Deep (Hecht, Hill, Lancaster, United Artists, 1958) Producer: Harold Hecht Associate Producer: William Schorr Assistant Director: Emmett Emerson Screenplay: John Gay Literary Source: Novel Run Silent, Run Deep by Edward L. Beach Director of Photography: Russell Harlan, A.S.C. Art Director: Edward Carrere Set Decorator: Ross Dowd Music: Franz Waxman

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Sound: Fred Lau Editor: George Boemler, A.C.E. Cast: Clark Gable (Comdr. P. G. Richardson), Burt Lancaster (Lieut. Jim Bledsoe), Jack Warden (Mueller), Brad Dexter (Cartwright), Don Rickles (Ruby), Nick Cravat (Russo), Joe Maross (Kohler). Running Time: 93 minutes Premiere: March 27, 1958, Victoria Theater, New York Awards: None DVD: MGM (Also available on VHS) I Want to Live! (Figaro Productions/United Artists, 1958) Producer: Walter Wanger Assistant Director: George Vieira Screenplay: Nelson Gidding and Don Mankiewicz Literary Source: Newspaper articles by Ed Montgomery and the letters of Barbara Graham Cinematographer: Lionel Lindon Art Director: Edward Haworth Set Director: Victor Gangelin Music: John Mandel Sound: Fred Lau Editor: William Hornbeck Cast: Susan Hayward (Barbara Graham), Simon Oakland (Ed Montgomery), Theodore Bikel (Carl Palmberg), Wesley Lau (Henry Graham), Philip Coolidge (Emmett Perkins), Lou Krugman (Jack Santo), James Philbrook (Bruce King), Joe DeSantis (Al Matthews), John Marley (Father Devers). Running Time: 120 minutes Premiere: November 26, 1958, Fox Beverly Theater, Beverly Hills Awards: Academy Awards 1959 (Win: Best Actress, Susan Hayward; Nominations: Best Director, Robert Wise; Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, Nelson Gidding and Don Mankiewicz; Best Cinematography, B&W; Best Editing; Best Sound) Golden Globes 1959 (Win: Best Motion Picture Actress, Susan Hayward; Nominations: Best Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture Director, Robert Wise) BAFTA 1960 (Nomination: Best Foreign Actress, Susan Hayward) Directors Guild of America 1959 (Nomination: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, Robert Wise) Writers Guild of America 1959 (Nomination: Best Written American Drama, Nelson Gidding and Don Mankiewicz)

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New York Film Critics Circle Award 1958 (Win: Best Actress, Susan Hayward) DVD: MGM (Also available on VHS) Odds against Tomorrow (Harbel Productions/United Artists, 1959) Producer: Robert Wise Associate Producer: Phil Stein Assistant Director: Charles Maguire Screenplay: Abraham Polonsky (screen credit to John O. Killens) and Nelson Gidding Literary Source: Novel Odds against Tomorrow by William P. McGivern Director of Photography: Joseph Brun Settings: Leo Kerz Set Decorator: Fred Ballmeyer Costumes: Anna Hill Johnstone Music: John Lewis Sound: Edward Johnstone and Richard Voriseck Editor: Dede Allen Cast: Harry Belafonte (Johnny Ingram), Robert Ryan (Earl Slater), Ed Begley (Burke), Shelley Winters (Lorry), Gloria Grahame (Helen), Kim Hamilton (Ruth), Mae Barnes (Annie), Wayne Rogers (Soldier), Zohra Lampert (Soldier’s girl), Cicely Tyson (Barmaid). Running Time: 95 minutes Premiere: September 25, 1959, Fox Wilshire, Beverly Hills Awards: Golden Globes 1960 (Nomination: Best Film Promoting International Understanding) DVD: MGM (also available on VHS) West Side Story (Mirisch Brothers/United Artists, 1961) Producer: Robert Wise Associate Producer: Saul Chaplin Codirector: Jerome Robbins Assistant Director: Robert E. Relyea Screenplay: Ernest Lehman Literary Source: Play West Side Story by Arthur Laurents (which drew inspiration from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) Director of Photography: Daniel L. Fapp, A.S.C. Special Photographic Effects: Linwood Dunn, A.S.C. Production Design: Boris Leven

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Set Decorator: Victor Gangelin Production Artist: Maurice Zuberano Costumes: Irene Sharaff Music: Leonard Bernstein Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim Musical Conductor: Johnny Green Choreography: Jerome Robbins Sound: Murray Spivack, Fred Lau, and Vinton Vernon Film Editor: Thomas Stanford Cast: Natalie Wood (Maria), Richard Beymer (Tony), Russ Tamblyn (Riff ), Rita Moreno (Anita), George Chakiris (Bernardo), Simon Oakland (Lieut. Schrank), Ned Glass (Doc). Running Time: 155 minutes Premiere: October 18, 1961, Rivoli Theater, New York Awards: Academy Awards 1962 (Wins: Best Picture; Best Director, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins; Best Supporting Actor, George Chakiris; Best Supporting Actress, Rita Moreno; Best Cinematography, Color; Best Editing; Best Art Direction/Set Director, Color; Best Costume Design, Color; Best Scoring of a Musical Picture; Best Sound; Nominations: Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, Ernest Lehman) BAFTA 1963 (Nomination: Best Film) Golden Globes 1962 (Wins: Best Motion Picture Musical; Best Supporting Actor, George Chakiris; Best Supporting Actress, Rita Moreno; Nomination: Best Motion Picture Director, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins) Directors Guild of America 1962 (Win: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins) Writers Guild of America 1962 (Win: Best Written American Musical, Ernest Lehman) New York Film Critics Circle Award 1961 (Win: Best Film) DVD: MGM (Also available on VHS) Two for the Seesaw (Mirisch/Seven Arts/United Artists, 1962) Producer: Walter Mirisch Assistant Director: Jerome Siegel Screenplay: Isobel Lennart Literary Source: Play Two for the Seesaw by William Gibson Director of Photography: Ted McCord Production Design: Boris Leven Music: Andre Previn Miss MacLaine’s Costumes: Orry-Kelly

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Editor: Stuart Gilmore Cast: Shirley MacLaine (Gittel Mosca), Robert Mitchum (Jerry Ryan), Edmon Ryan (Taubman), Elizabeth Fraser (Sophie), Billy Gray (Mr. Jacoby) Running Time: 119 minutes Premiere: Unknown Awards: Academy Awards 1963 (Nominations: Best Cinematography, B&W; Best Song) DVD: Not available VHS: MGM The Haunting (Argyle/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1963) Producer/Director: Robert Wise Associate Producer: Denis Johnson Assistant Director: David Tomblin Screenplay: Nelson Gidding Literary Source: Novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson Director of Photography: Davis Boulton Art Director: Elliot Scott Set Decorator: John Jarvis Special Effects: Tom Howard Miss Bloom’s Clothes: Mary Quant Music: Humphrey Searle Sound: A. W. Watkins and Gerry Turner Editor: Ernest Walter Cast: Julie Harris (Eleanor), Claire Bloom (Theodora), Richard Johnson (Dr. Markway), Russ Tamblyn (Luke Sanderson), Lois Maxwell (Grace), Rosalie Crutchley (Mrs. Dudley), Fay Compton (Mrs. Sanderson). Running Time: 112 minutes Premiere: September 18, 1963, New York City Awards: Golden Globes 1964 (Nomination: Best Motion Picture Director, Robert Wise) DVD: Warner Home Video (Also available on VHS) The Sound of Music (Robert Wise Productions, Twentieth Century Fox, 1965) Producer: Robert Wise Associate Producer: Saul Chaplin Assistant Director: Ridgeway Callow Screenplay: Ernest Lehman Literary Source: Musical Play The Sound of Music, book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse; Autobiography, The Trapp Family Singers, by Maria von Trapp

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Director of Photography: Ted McCord Production Design: Boris Leven Set Decorators: Walter M. Scott and Ruby Levitt Costumes: Dorothy Jeakins Music: Richard Rodgers Choreography: Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood Sound: Murray Spivack and Bernard Freericks Film Editor: William Reynolds Music Editor: Robert Mayer Second Unit Director: Maurice Zuberano Cast: Julie Andrews (Maria), Christopher Plummer (Capt. von Trapp), Eleanor Parker (Baroness), Richard Haydn (Max), Peggy Wood (Mother Abbess), Charmian Carr (Liesl), Heather Menzies (Louisa), Nicholas Hammond (Friedrich), Duane Chase (Kurt), Angela Cartwright (Brigitta), Debbie Turner (Marta), Kym Karath (Gretl), Daniel Truhitte (Rolfe), Norma Varden (Frau Schmidt), Marni Nixon (Sister Sophia). Running Time: 176 minutes Premiere: March 2, 1965, Rivoli Theater, New York Awards: Academy Awards 1966 (Wins: Best Picture; Best Director, Robert Wise; Best Editing; Best Scoring of Musical Adaptation and Treatment; Best Sound; Nominations: Best Actress, Julie Andrews; Best Supporting Actress, Peggy Wood; Best Cinematography, Color; Best Art Direction/Set Decoration, Color; Best Costume Design, Color) Golden Globes 1966 (Wins: Best Motion Picture/Musical or Comedy; Best Motion Picture/Musical or Comedy Actress, Julie Andrews; Nominations: Best Motion Picture Director, Robert Wise; Best Supporting Actress, Peggy Wood) BAFTA 1966 (Nomination: Best British Actress, Julie Andrews) Directors Guild of America 1966 (Win: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, Robert Wise) Writers Guild of America 1966 (Win: Best Written American Musical, Ernest Lehman) DVD: Twentieth Century Fox (Also available on VHS) The Sand Pebbles (Argyle-Solar/Twentieth Century Fox, 1966) Producer: Robert Wise Associate Producer and Second Unit Director: Charles Maguire Assistant Director: Ridgeway Callow Screenplay: Robert Anderson Literary Source: Novel The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna Director of Photography: Joseph McDonald

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Second Unit Photography: Richard Johnson Special Photographic Effects: L. B. Abbott and Emil Kosa Jr. Production Design: Boris Leven Production Associate: Maurice Zuberano Set Decorators: Walter M. Scott, John Sturtevant, and William Kiernan Costumes: Renié Music: Jerry Goldsmith Orchestrations: Arthur Morton and David Tamkin Sound: James P. Corcoran, Bernard Freericks, and Murray Spivack Editor: William Reynolds Cast: Steve McQueen (Jake Holman), Candice Bergen (Shirley Eckert), Richard Attenborough (Frenchy), Richard Crenna (Captain Collins), Marayat Andriane (Maily), Mako (Po-han), Larry Gates (Mr. Jameson), Charles Robinson (Ensign Bordelles), Simon Oakland (Stawski), Ford Rainey (Harris), Joe Turkel (Bronson), Gavin MacLeod (Crosley), Richard Loo (Major Chin). Running Time: 191 minutes Premiere: December 26, 1966, Fox Wilshire, Los Angeles Awards: Academy Awards 1967 (Nominations: Best Picture; Best Actor, Steve McQueen; Best Supporting Actor, Mako; Best Cinematography, Color; Best Editing; Best Art Direction/Set Decoration, Color; Best Original Music Score; Best Sound) Golden Globes 1967 (Win: Best Supporting Actor, Richard Attenborough; Nominations: Best Motion Picture Drama; Best Motion Picture Director, Robert Wise; Best Motion Picture Actor, Drama, Steve McQueen; Best Supporting Actor, Mako; Best Screenplay, Robert Anderson; Best Original Score) Directors Guild of America 1967 (Nomination: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, Robert Wise) Writers Guild of America 1967 (Nomination: Best Written American Drama, Robert Anderson) DVD: Twentieth Century Fox (Also available on VHS) Star! (Twentieth Century Fox, 1968) Retitled: Those Were the Happy Times in 1969 Producer: Saul Chaplin Assistant Director: Ridgeway Callow Screenplay: William Fairchild Director of Photography: Ernest Laszlo, A.S.C. Set Decorators: Walter Scott and Howard Bristol Costumes: Donald Brooks Musical Director: Lennie Hayton

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Sound: Murray Spivack, Douglas O. Williams, and Bernard Freericks Choreography: Michael Kidd Editor: William Reynolds, A.C.E. Cast: Julie Andrews (Gertrude Lawrence), Richard Crenna (Richard Aldrich), Michael Craig (Sir Anthony Spencer), Daniel Massey (Noel Coward), Robert Reed (Charles Fraser), John Collin (Jack Roper), Bruce Forsyth (Arthur Lawrence), Beryl Reid (Rose). Running Time: 174 minutes Premiere: July 18, 1968, Dominion Theater, London Awards: Academy Awards 1969 (Nominations: Best Supporting Actor, Daniel Massey; Best Cinematography; Best Art Direction/Set Decoration; Best Costume Design; Best Score of a Musical Picture; Best Song; Best Sound) Golden Globes 1969 (Win: Best Supporting Actor, Daniel Massey; Nominations: Best Motion Picture Actress Musical/Comedy, Julie Andrews; Best Original Song) Writers Guild of America 1969 (Nomination: Best Written American Musical, William Fairchild) DVD: Twentieth Century Fox (Also available on VHS) The Andromeda Strain (Robert Wise Productions/University, 1971) Producer: Robert Wise Assistant Director: Ridgeway Callow Screenplay: Nelson Gidding Literary Source: Novel The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton Director of Photography: Richard H. Kline Special Photographic Effects: Doulgas Trumbull and James Shourt Production Design: Boris Leven Art Director: William Tuntke Set Decorator: Ruby Levitt Costumes: Helen Colvig Music: Gil Melle Sound: Waldon O. Watson, James Alexander, and Ronald Pierce Editors: Stuart Gilmore and John W. Holmes Cast: Arthur Hill (Dr. Jeremy Stone), David Wayne (Dr. Charles Dutton), James Olson (Dr. Mark Hall), Kate Reid (Dr. Ruth Leavitt), Paula Kelly (Karen Anson), George Mitchell (Jackson), Ramon Bieri (Major Manchek). Running Time: 137 minutes Premiere: Unknown Awards: Academy Awards 1972 (Nominations: Best Editing; Best Art Direction/ Set Decoration)

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Golden Globes 1972 (Nomination: Best Original Score, Gil Melle) DVD: Universal (Also available on VHS) Two People (Filmmakers Group—Robert Wise Productions/Universal, 1973) Producer: Robert Wise Production Managers: Ridgeway Callow and Enrico Isacco Assistant Directors: Denis Amar and Larbi Bennani Screenplay: Richard De Roy Director of Photography: Henri Decaë Art Director: Harold Michelson Set Decorator: Eric Simon Music: David Shire Sound: Antoine Petitjean, Waldon O. Watson, and Ronald Pierce Editor: William Reynolds Cast: Peter Fonda (Evan Bonner), Lindsay Wagner (Deirdre McCluskey), Estelle Parsons (Barbara Newman), Alan Fudge (Fitzgerald), Philippe March (Gilles), Frances Sternhagen (Mrs. McCluskey), Brian Lima (Marcus McCluskey), Geoffrey Horne (Ron Kesselman). Running Time: 100 minutes Premiere: Unknown Awards: None DVD: Not available The Hindenburg (Universal, 1975) Producer: Robert Wise (uncredited) Assistant Director: Howard Kazanjian Screenplay: Nelson Gidding Literary Source: Novel The Hindenburg by Michael Mooney Director of Photography: Robert Surtees Special Photography: Clifford Stine Special Visual Effects: Albert Whitlock Production Design: Edward Carfagno Set Decorator: Frank McKelvey Music: David Shive Sound: Leonard Peterson Editor: Donn Cambern Cast: George C. Scott (Col. Ritter), Anne Ancroft (Countess), William Atherton (Boerth), Roy Thinnes (Vogel), Gig Young (Douglas), Burgess Meredith (Pajetta), Charles Durning (Capt. Pruss), Richard Dysart (Lehmann),

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Robert Clary (Joe Spahn), Rene Auberjonois (Napier), Stephen Elliott (Capt. Fellows). Running Time: 125 minutes Premiere: December 2, 1975, Chinese Theater, Los Angeles Awards: Academy Awards 1976 (Special Awards: Best Visual Effects, Albert Whitlock and Glen Robinson, Best Sound Effects, Peter Berkos; Nominations: Best Cinematography; Best Art Direction/Set Decoration; Best Sound) DVD: Universal (Also available on VHS) Audrey Rose (United Artists, 1977) Procedures: Joe Wizan and Frank De Felitta Screenplay: Frank De Felitta (from his novel) Literary Source: Novel Audrey Rose by Frank De Felitta Cinematographer: Victor J. Kemper Production Design: Harry Horner Set Decorator: Jerry Wunderlich Special Effects: Henry Millar Jr. Music: Michael Small Sound: Tom Overton, William McCaughey, Aaron Rochin, and Michael Kohut Editor: Carl Kress Cast: Marsha Mason (Janice Templeton), Anthony Hopkins (Elliot Hoover), John Beck (Bill Templeton), Susan Swift (Ivy Templeton), Norman Lloyd (Dr. Lipscomb), John Hillerman (Scott Velie), Pat Corley (Dr. Webster). Running Time: 113 minutes Premiere: Unknown Awards: None DVD: MGM (Also available on VHS) Star Trek:The Motion Picture (Paramount, 1979) Producer: Gene Roddenberry Associate Producer: Jon Povill Assistant Directors: Danny McCauley and Doug Wise Screenplay: Harold Livingston Cinematographer: Richard H. Kline Special Effects Director: Douglas Trumbull Special Effects Supervisor: John Dykstra Additional Special Effects: Richard Yuricich and Matthew Yuricich Production Design: Harold Michelson Set Decorator: Linda DeScenna

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Costumes: Robert Fletcher Music: Jerry Goldsmith Editor: Todd Ramsay Cast: William Shatner (Captain Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock), DeForest Kelley (McCoy), Stephen Collins (Will Decker), Persis Khambatta (Ilia), James Doohan (Scotty), George Takei (Sulu), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), Walter Koenig (Chekov), Majel Barrett (Christine Chapel), Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand). Running Time: 132 minutes Premiere: December 6, 1979, Washington, D.C. Awards: Academy Awards 1980 (Nominations: Best Art Direction/Set Decoration; Best Original Score, Jerry Goldsmith; Best Visual Effects) Golden Globes 1980 (Nomination: Best Original Score, Jerry Goldsmith) DVD: Paramount (Also available on VHS) Rooftops (New Visions Pictures, 1989) Producer: Howard W. Koch Jr. Screenplay: Terence Brennan Original Story: Allen Goldstein and Tony Mark Cinematographer: Theo Van de Sande Production Design: Jeannine C. Oppewall Music: David A. Stewart and Michael Kamen Editor: William Reynolds Cast: Jason Gedrick (“T”), Troy Beyer (Elana), Eddie Velez (Lobo), Tisha Campbell (Amber), Alexis Cruz (Squeak), Allen Payne (Kadim), Steve Love (Jackie-Sky), Rafael Baez (Raphael). Running Time: 95 minutes Premiere (East Coast): March 16, 1989, New York DVD: Platinum Disc (Also available on VHS) A Storm in Summer (Showtime, 2000) Producer: Renée Valente Screenplay: Rod Serling Cinematographer: Bert Dunk Production Design: Andrew Deskin Music: Cynthia Millar Editor: Jack Hofstra Cast: Peter Falk (Abel Shaddick), Andrew McCarthy (Stanley Banner), Nastassja Kinski (Gloria Ross), Ruby Dee (Grandmother), Aaron Meeks (Her-

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man D. Washington), Gillian Barber (Mrs. Parker), Lillian Carlson (Mrs. Gold), Ingrid Torrance (Harriet). Running Time: 95 minutes Premiere (Cable Television): February 6, 2000, Showtime Awards: Emmy Daytime Awards 2001 (Win: Outstanding Children’s Special; Nominations: Outstanding Performer in a Children’s Special, Peter Falk; Outstanding Writing in a Children’s Special, Rod Serling) DVD: Platinum Disc (Also available on VHS)

AS PRODUCER Return to Paradise (1953), directed by Mark Robson The Sergeant (1968), directed by John Flynn [Executive Producer] The Baby Maker (1970), directed by James Bridges [Executive Producer] Wisdom (1986), directed by Emilio Estevez [Executive Producer] At Night the Sun Shines (1992), directed by Guillermo Real [Supervising Producer]

AS EDITOR Bachelor Mother (1939), directed by Garson Kanin 5th Avenue Girl (1939), directed by Gregory La Cava The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), directed by William Dieterle My Favorite Wife (1940), directed by Garson Kanin Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), directed by Dorothy Arzner Citizen Kane* (1941), directed by Orson Welles The Devil and Daniel Webster, aka All That Money Can Buy (1941), directed by William Dieterle The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), directed by Orson Welles Seven Days’ Leave (1942), directed by Tim Whelan Bombardier (1943), directed by Richard Wallace The Fallen Sparrow (1943), directed by Richard Wallace The Iron Major (1943), directed by Ray Enright *Academy Award nomination: Best Editing

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Abel, Robert, 155 Adams, Neile, 91 Agee, James, 14, 21–22 Alice Adams, 2 Allyson, June, 83, 86 Anderson, Robert, 134 Andrews, Julie, 112, 127, 129, 131, 135–36 The Andromeda Strain, 63, 139, 140–46, 152, 165 Angeli, Pier, 90 Armstrong, Robert, 31 Aspen Productions, 62, 75, 91 Atherton, William, 147 Attenborough, Richard, 132, 134 Auberjonois, Rene, 148 Audrey Rose, 139, 146, 149–51 Bakaleinikoff, Constantin, 16 Ballard, Lucien, 66, 81 Bancroft, Anne, 118, 147 Barber, Gillian, 161 Barber, Rowland, 90 Bardot, Brigitte, 87 Barrett, Tony, 33, 37 Basehart, Richard, 65 Bates, Alan, 159 Bates, Harry, 69 Baxter, Alan, 44–45

Baylor, Hal. See Hal Fieberling Beck, Roger, 104 Begley, Ed, 107 Bel Geddes, Barbara, 39 Belafonte, Harry, 106–7 Bennett, Joan, 99 Bennett, Richard, 6, 7 Bergen, Candice, 132 Berman, Pandro S., 2 Beymer, Richard, 115 Bikel, Theodore, 104 Blondell, Joan, 47 Bloom, Claire, 120 Bodeen, DeWitt, 11, 16 The Body Snatcher, 22–28, 41, 63, 64, 94, 120, 122 Bolton, Muriel, 36 Boorman, John, 139 Born to Kill, 32–35, 64 Box, John, 131 Breen, Joseph, 20; moral objections to Mademoiselle Fifi, 20; Production Code Administration of America, 32; Breen Office, 48 Brennan, Walter, 39–40 Brooks, Richard, 116 Brosnan, John, 73 Brown, Helen, 45 Brun, Joseph, 109

201

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Buñuel, Luis, 160 Burton, Richard, 81 Butler, John, 45 Cacoyannis, Michael, 159 Cagney, James, 88–89 Calhern, Louis, 83, 85–86 Callahan, Mushy, 51 Camden, Joan, 77 Cameron, James, 131 Campos, Rafael, 91 The Captive City, 75–78, 159 Carfagno, Edward, 148 Carroll, Barbara, 100 Carter, Ann, 13 Chakiris, George, 116, 118 Champlin, Charles, 145 Chandler, Jeff, 63 Chaplin, Saul, 118, 135, 159 Chekhov, Michael, 13 Christie, Julie, 131 Clarke, David, 45 Clary, Robert, 148 Cohn, Art, 43, 52, 55 Collins, Stephen, 154 Conway, Tom, 31 Cook, Elisha, Jr., 32, 34 Cooper, Meriam C., 2 Corcoran, James P., 131 Cortesa, Valentina, 64, 66 Cortez, Ricardo, 37 Cotton, Joseph, 6, 63 Coward, Sir Noel, 136 Crenna, Richard, 132 Crichton, Michael, 140, 144–45 Criminal Court, 31–32 Crist, Judith, 134–35, 163 Crowther, Bosley, vii, 30, 35, 93, 103–4, 125–26, 135 Crutchley, Rosalie, 124 Cukor, George, 66 The Curse of the Cat People, 11–17, 66, 96, 122, 169 Curtis, Tony, 109

Daniell, Henry, 22–23, 26, 62 Darnell, Linda, 63 Davis, Elmer, 72 Dawson, Hal, 77 The Day the Earth Stood Still, 69–75, 78, 152, 159, 165, 169 Dean, James, 89 Dean, Julia, 13 DeCaë, Henri, 147 Dee, Ruby, 161 Dee, Sandra, 92 DeMille, Cecil B., 160 Dempsey, Jack, 51 DeRoy, Richard, 146 The Desert Rats, 80, 92, 96 Destination Gobi, 80, 96 Diamond, I. A. L., 79 Dieterle, William, 5–6 Directors Guild of America (DGA), 163 Dmytryk, Edward, 46, 88 Doohan, James, 154 Douglas, Kirk, 54–55 Douglas, Paul, 83–84, 86, 91 Drake, Charles, 92 Dubbins, Don, 88–89 Dunn, Linwood, 117 D. W. Griffith Award, 163 Dykstra, John, 155–56 Edwards, James, 45, 48 Enright, Ray, 9 Erickson, Leif, 58 Estevez, Emilio, 158 Eurythmics, 159 Executive Suite, 63, 82–86, 98, 113, 163, 165 Falk, Peter, 160 Fapp, Daniel, 118 Farber, Manny, 45 Farmer, Art, 100 Faylen, Frank, 39 Fellows, Bob, 9, 12 Ferber, Edna, 81

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Index Fieberling, Hal, 49 The Filmmakers’ Group, 139, 147 Fleck, Freddie, 8 Fleischer, Richard, 145 Foch, Nina, 83, 86 Fonda, Peter, 146 Fontaine, Joan, 92 Ford, John, vii, 62, 164 Ford, Wallace, 46 Foreman, Carl, 51–52 Forsythe, John, 76 Foster, Norman, 6 Franciosa, Anthony, 91 Francis, Robert, 88 Friedkin, William, 139 Fritsch, Gunther von, 11–12, 13, 96 Gable, Clark, 88, 92, 94–95 A Game of Death, 30, 64 Gangelin, Victor, 118 Garfield, John, 48 Garmes, Lee, 78 Gates, Larry, 133 Gay, John, 94–95 The Gay Divorcee, 3 Gerstad, Harry, 55 Gibson, William, 118 Gidding, Nelson, 99, 100, 103–5, 107–9, 120, 125–26, 140, 142, 144 Goldstone, Richard, 43, 47–48, 51, 54–55 Goldwyn Studios, 115, 117 Gordon, Bill, 13, 16, 32 Goulding, Edmund, 47 Graham, Barbara, 99–100 Gray, Billy, 70, 74, 169 Graziano, Rocky, 51, 89–91, 113, 116 Green, Eve, 32 Green, Johnny, 118 Greer, Dabbs, 103 Groman, Arthur, 51, 54 Gross, Jack L., 21–22, 43 Gwenn, Edmund, 79

203

Hall, Alexander, 72 Hall, Pierson M., 51, 54 Hamilton, Billy, 3 Harbel Productions, 106 Harris, Julie, 120 Hathaway, Henry, 80, 96 The Haunting, viii, 112, 120–27, 165 Hawks, Howard, 164 Hawley, Cameron, 90 Haworth, Ted, 102 Hayden, Sterling, 82, 106 Hayward, Lillie, 38 Hayward, Susan, 62, 99, 102 Hearst, William Randolph, 4 Heatter, Gabriel, 72 Hecht Hill Lancaster Productions, 91–92, 95 Heckart, Eileen, 89 Helen of Troy, 86, 96, 131, 135, 168 Hickman, Darryl, 45 Hill, Arthur, 140 The Hindenburg, 63, 139, 146, 147–49 Hitchcock, Alfred, vii, 66–67, 164 Holden, William, 83–84, 86 House on Telegraph Hill, 64–68, 81 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 106 Houseman, John, 82, 98 Howard, Esther, 33 Hughes, Howard, 42, 48–50, 55 Hynes, Fred, 118, 131 I Want to Live, viii, 62, 96, 99–106, 113, 121, 159, 163, 165 The Informer, 3 Jackson, Shirley, 120, 125 Jaffe, Sam, 70, 74 Jagger, Dean, 83–84, 86 Jewell, Isabel, 33 Johnson, Forrest, 102 Johnson, Nunnally, 120 Johnson, Richard, 120 Jolly, Pete, 100

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Jones, Grace, 159 Josephy, Alvin, Jr., 76 Jurgens, Curt, 93–94 Kael, Pauline, vii, 127–28, 130, 145, 163 Kaltenborn, H. V., 72 Kamb, Karl, 76 Karloff, Boris, 22–23, 26, 62 Kauffmann, Stanley, 127–28, 130 Keats, John, 164 Kefauver Senate Committee on Organized Crime, 75–76 Kelley, DeForest, 154 Kennedy, Arthur, 55 Kennedy, Joseph P., 1 Khambatta, Persis, 154 Kidd, Michael, 159 Killens, John Oliver, 106 Kimble, Lawrence, 36 Kinski, Nastassja, 161 Knight, Arthur, viii, 81, 104, 134–35 Koenig, Walter, 154 Koerner, Charles, 7–8, 11, 16, 21, 39 Korda, Zoltan, 19 Kostal, Irwin, 118, 131 Kramer, Stanley, 49, 50–51, 109 Kreuger, Kurt, 19 Kubrick, Stanley, 143, 164 Lancaster, Burt, 91, 94–95 Lang, Jennings, 99 Lang, Walter, 113 LaMotta, Jake, 51 Lardner, Ring, 52 Lau, Wesley, 101 Laurie, Piper, 92 Lawrence, Gertrude, 135–36 Leavy, H. Miller, 104 Lee, Canada, 48 Legion of Decency (Catholic Church), 20 Lehman, Ernest, 82, 90, 113–14, 116–18, 128, 131, 159, 171 Leonard, Archie, 45 Leven, Boris, 117–18, 131, 135, 145

Levitt, Ruby, 131 Lewis, John, 110 Lewton, Val, 9, 10–12, 15, 18–19, 28, 38, 55, 62, 75, 82, 112, 120, 123, 160, 165; literary values, 20–24 Livingston, Harold, 152–53 Loder, John, 30 Loggia, Robert, 90 Long, Audrey, 33 Lovejoy, Frank, 58–61 Lubitsch, Ernst, 146 Lucas, George, 152, 155 Lugosi, Bela, 22, 160 Lumet, Sidney, 164 Lundberg, Dan, 104 Lundigan, William, 36, 65–66 Macaulay, Richard, 32 MacDonald, Phil, 22 MacLaine, Shirley, 118 Mademoiselle Fifi, 17–22 Mako, 132 Mandell, Johnny, 100 Mankiewicz, Herman, 4 Mankiewicz, Don, 99–100, 105 Manne, Shelly, 100 March, Fredric, 83–84, 86 March, Joseph Moncure, 43, 52 Marlowe, Hugh, 71–74 Marsh, Terence, 131 Martin, Dwight, 45 Martin, Lock, 73 Martin, Quinn, 13, 32 Mature, Victor, 79–80 Maupassant, Guy de, 17–18, 20 Mayo, Archie, 72 McCarthy, Andrew, 161 McCord, Ted, 128–29 McGivern, William, 106–7, 109 McGraw, Charles, 40 McKenna, William, 130 McQueen, Steve, 90, 132, 134 Meeks, Aaron, 161 Menzies, William Cameron, 69 Meredith, Burgess, 148

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Index Meyer, Nicholas, 156 Midler, Bette, 159 Milner, Martin, 77 Mineo, Sal, 90 Minnelli, Vincente, 82–83 Mirisch Corporation, 112–13, 117 Mitchell, Red, 100 Mitchum, Robert, 39, 41, 93–94, 118 Moguy, Leonide, 9 Moll, Elick, 66 Monahan, Mrs. Mabel, 99 Montgomery, Ed, 104, 106 Moore, Colleen, 81 Moreno, Rita, 118 Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, 163 Mulligan, Gerry, 100 Murphy, Richard, 80 Musuraca, Nick, 17, 40 Mystery in Mexico, 35–37 Naish, J. Carroll, 91 Neal, Patricia, 57–61, 70, 73–74, 79–80 Neumann, Kurt, 69 Newman, Paul, 89–92 Nichols, Nichelle, 154 Nimoy, Leonard, 153–54 North, Edmund, 69 O’Day, Anita, 158 Odds against Tomorrow, 63, 106–10, 113, 117, 160, 163, 165 Odlum, Floyd, 2, 42–43 O’Driscoll, Martha, 31 O’Hara, Brian, 45 Olson, James, 140 Ophuls, Max, 46 Palmberg, Carl, 104–5 Pappas, Irene, 89 Parker, Eleanor, 57–59 Parsons, Estelle, 146 Partos, Frank, 66 Pasternak, Joe, 98

205

Pearson, Drew, 72 Perkins, Emmett, 99 Pichel, Irving, 69 Pidgeon, Walter, 83–84, 86 Pine, Philip, 45 Podesta, Rosanna, 87 Poitier, Sidney, 109 Polonsky, Abraham, 106 Porter, Cole, 60 Powell, Dick, 93 Preminger, Otto, 106 Preston, Robert, 39 Raftery, Edward, 50–51, 54 Rains, Claude, 72 Ramin, Sid, 118 Randolph, Jane, 11, 14, 123 Rathvon, N. Peter, 7, 42–43 Ray, Nicholas, 82–83 Reid, Kate, 141 Rennie, Michael, 70, 74 Reynolds, William, 128, 131, 136 Richards, Addison, 31 Riefenstahl, Leni, 148 Riesman, David, 17 RKO, 1–3, 42, 51, 54–55 Robbins, Jerome, 113–14, 116, 163 Robinson, Glenn, 148 Robson, Mark, 5, 7–8, 10–12, 49–51, 54, 62, 75, 139, 147 Rockefeller, Nelson, 6 Roddenberry, Gene, 152–53, 155–56, 165 Rodgers and Hammerstein, 13 Rogell, Sid, 12, 19, 35, 37–38, 43 Roman, Ruth, 57–59 Rooftops, 159, 172 Rossen, Robert, 106 Rosolino, Frank, 100 Run Silent, Run Deep, 63, 80, 92–95, 98, 165 Russell, Elizabeth, 11, 16 Ruttenberg, Joseph, 89 Ryan, Robert, 44–45, 48–49, 51, 83, 91, 107

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Index

The Sand Pebbles, viii, 62, 112, 130, 131–35, 152, 163 Santo, Jack, 99 Sarnoff, David, 1 Sarris, Andrew, vii, 163–64 Schaefer, George, 3, 7 Schary, Dore, 38–39, 43, 48, 88 Schlom, Herman, 32 Schnee, Charles, 89, 92 Schoedsack, Ernest, 2 Scott, George C., 147 Scott, Walter, 131 Selznick, David O., 2, 10, 165 Serling, Rod, 160, 162 Sernas, Jacques, 87 The Set-Up, vii–viii, 41–55, 78, 80, 82, 91, 119, 121, 163, 165 Shakespeare, William, 115–16; West Side Story, 118 Shank, Bud, 100 Sharaff, Irene, 118 Shatner, William, 153 Short, Luke, 38 Siegel, Joel, 16 Simmons, Jean, 91–92 Simon, Simone, 11, 14, 21, 23 Simoni, Dario, 131 Siodmak, Robert, 17 Slezak, Walter, 32, 34 Sloane, Everett, 90 Smith, Kent, 11, 14 So Big, 81–82, 92, 96 Somebody Up There Likes Me, 86, 89–91, 96, 98, 113, 116, 163, 165 Something for the Birds, 79–80, 96 The Sound of Music, viii, 112, 127–31, 152, 159, 163, 169 Stanford, Thomas, 118 Stanwyck, Barbara, 81, 83, 85–86 Star! 112, 135–37, 139, 159 Star Trek:The Motion Picture, 139, 152–58, 165, 167 Stein, Phil, 106 Stevens, George, 2, 160 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 22, 24

Stewart, James, 38 Stewart, Paul 54 Stone, Harold J., 89 A Storm in Summer, 160–63, 172 Strick, Philip, 156–57 Stroheim, Erich von, 19 Sturges, John, 88 Surtees, Robert, 88 Takei, George, 154 Tamblyn, Russ, 116, 120 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 157 Thaxter, Phyllis, 41 Thinnes, Roy, 147 This Could Be the Night, 91, 113 Thomson, David, 163 Three Secrets, 57–62, 72, 81, 122 Tierney, Lawrence, 32, 34 Tobias, George, 44 Toland, Gregg, 4 Top Hat, 3 Totter, Audrey, 44–45, 47–48, 91 Tourneur, Jacques, 12, 14, 16, 38, 39, 123 Tracy, Spencer, 87–88, 169 Travolta, John, 159 Trevor, Claire, 32, 34 Tribute to a Bad Man, 86–87, 89, 95–96, 168–69 A Trip through Fijiland, 2 Trumbull, Douglas, 155–56 Two Flags West, 62–64, 94 Two for the Seesaw, 112, 118–20, 127 Two People, 139, 146–47 Tyler, Tom, 40 Ulmer, Edgar G., 69 Until They Sail, 81, 91–92, 96 Ustinov, Peter, 160 Vadim, Roger, 87 Wade, Russell, 23 Wagner, Lindsay, 146 Walker, Vern, 8

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Index Wallace, Richard, 8 Walsh, Raoul, 39, 108 Wanger, Walter, 99–100, 105–6 Warner, Jack, 87 Warrick, Ruth, 4 Warth, Theron, 38, 62, 75, 98 Wayne, David, 141 Welch, Raquel, 145 Welles, Orson, vii, 3–9, 12, 82, 84, 95–96, 164 Wellman, William, 160 West, Mae, 159 West Side Story, viii, 112–18, 127, 152, 159–60, 163, 165, 171 Whalen, Tim, 8 Wheeler, Lyle, 67 White, Jacqueline, 36 Whitlock, Albert, 148

Whittredge, J. R., 17 Widmark, Richard, 80 Wilkinson, Jimmy 2 Winters, Shelley, 83, 85, 107 Wise, David, 1 Wood, Natalie, 115 Wood, T. K., 2 Woodward, Joanne, 120 Wyler, William, 129 Wyman, Jane, 82 Youngman, Gordon, 49–51 Yuricich, Matthew, 155 Yuricich, Richard, 155 Zagon, Samuel, 50 Zanuck, Darryl F., 160 Zinnemann, Fred, 43

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About the Author

Richard Keenan is professor of English and chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. He has served as both associate and contributing editor for Literature/Film Quarterly. In addition to writing about film, he has written articles on such diverse subjects as detective fiction, romantic and Victorian literature, realism in American fiction, and life and thought in colonial America.

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