Raksin wrote a song, “Slowly” (with lyrics by Kermit Goell), to be sung by Alice Faye.
Otto liked the song, but thought it wasn’t right for the character Alice was playing. Instead, he wanted to use my tune for the opening [in which the antihero rides into town on a bus], but I said it was wrong there too. “Don’t you like your own tune?” he asked me. “Of course I do, but it’s too sentimental for an opening where a guy on a bus is about to be thrown off because he has no money.” It would have made the picture start out in the wrong way. “It should open with a sense of urgency,” I told him. I said the song was right for Linda’s character. I was right, and he knew I was right. I respected him in turn: Otto was a smart son of a gun.20
Heard on the jukebox in the diner where Stella works, “Slowly” becomes the character’s theme song, its melancholy refrain carried by a wailing trombone whenever Stella appears.
After his discomfort with the palace intrigue in A Royal Scandal, Preminger returns to form in Fallen Angel. His command of noir’s visual idiom is apparent in the arresting title sequence. Headlights from a bus pierce the infinite darkness of the open road as titles designed in the form of highway signs come into view. Throughout, the settings ripple with apprehension and instability, the imminence of mischance. The walls of the seaside diner where Stella works are crisscrossed with striped shadows cast by venetian blinds. Stella lives in an apartment at the top of a rickety staircase which, shot on the diagonal, becomes an augury of her dark fate. A rundown hotel room with a relentless blinking neon sign outside the windows reeks of the protagonist’s ill fortune. To underline his antihero’s entrapment, Preminger with his ace cinematographer Joseph La Shelle frames the character in low-angle ceiling shots in which space seems to be closing in on him.
As in Laura and many other noir thrillers, the narrative is riddled with suggestions of pathology. The spinster, June, plays the organ in a joyless-looking church, a crucible for sexual repression, and shares a house with her older, unmarried sister Clara (the frostbitten Anne Revere), who has an incestuous attachment to June that the film can only hint at. In June’s capitulation to Eric, an “homme fatale,” there is more than a hint of masochism. “Walk all over me,” she seems to say to the man who leaves her on their wedding night. A detective (played by Charles Bickford) who hangs out in the diner and has it bad for Stella is a sadist who administers a brutal beating (offscreen) to a man he pretends to suspect of having killed Stella. (In a last-act twist, the crazed-with-jealousy detective is identified as the murderer.)
Dana Andrews’s masked style strikes all the right notes for his ill-starred loner thrust into a noir whirlpool. Linda Darnell is equally fragrant as the small-town siren. When she makes her entrance at the café door, after having been missing for three days (shades of Laura), her allure is palpable. Fixing her stocking, and with a flower in her hair, she’s a fallen angel all right—a sweet girl with a tough veneer who seems forever destined to choose the wrong guy. Preminger failed only with Alice Faye, whose ineradicable common touch clashes with the well-born spinster she is playing. Her matte performance ended her starring career; many years later she was to appear again in small roles in which she is equally inexpressive.
For all its visual and stylistic victories, Fallen Angel did not match the achievement of Laura— an accusation Preminger was to face for the rest of his career. The problem, as it was often to be for the director, was narrative structure, getting the story right. “There are three stories in this one screenplay, but none of them is brought into sharp focus,” observed Otis Guernsey Jr. in the New York Herald Tribune on November 8, 1945. The finale, with the detective revealed as the murderer, feels like a last-minute rewrite. And the happy ending, with June reunited with Eric, also seems manufactured. It’s no wonder that Preminger could never remember how the film ended. “I was dressing for dinner one night and Fallen Angel was on television,” he recalled. “I watched it and I got quite involved; then we had to go out and I never saw the ending. I still cannot recall the ending.”21
Post-Laura, Preminger was becoming indoctrinated into the factory lineup. First he was a substitute for Lubitsch, a thankless task because he was being set up against a director with a far longer track record and vastly higher critical standing than his own. Then, with Fallen Angel, he slipped into the trap of trying to make a movie in the mold of his big hit. Neither project advanced his reputation in or out of the studio, and Preminger was in danger of becoming a company functionary marching in step with front-office orders.
His next project, a musical with an original score by Jerome Kern, at least offered the change of pace that Otto always relished. But the project held little intrinsic interest for him. “I took it because it was available; it was something Zanuck asked me to do, and at the time I was in no position to turn him down. And I didn’t want to: Zanuck ran the show, as I had learned.”22 “Today [1971] I would not be capable of spending three or four months on Centennial Summer— neither the story nor the characters would interest me. At that time it probably served some purpose in my life and in my career.”23 In fact, it is easy to see why the material “at that time” appealed to him. “Preminger’s thinking is strictly American,” a September 5, 1945, Fox press release announced. “He is Hollywood’s outstanding exception to the general rule that foreign-born directors prefer to make films with foreign settings.” The release then quoted Preminger: “For me, Europe is the past, America is the future. As Carl Sandburg once wrote, ‘The past is a bucket of ashes.’ Never having gone back to Europe I would hardly have a new viewpoint
about things European. But as a new American intensely interested in every facet of American life I might just possibly have something new to offer to stories with American settings.”
Centennial Summer, set in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876 and presenting an idealized view of an all-American working-class family, is one of those stories. Ordinary problems confront the Rogers clan. Mr. Rogers’s job on the railroad is imperiled. Two sisters become rivals for the same dream-boat. Family routine is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Mrs. Rogers’s elegant, gallivanting sister, who has had an amorous career among European royalty and who brings with her the handsome nephew of her late husband, a French duke. The homespun Rogers household is contrasted favorably with the representatives of European worldliness. Glazed with nostalgia for an American Arcadia, the slight narrative with its evocation of a vibrant young nation reflects the spirit of a country newly victorious in the world war.
Zanuck was itching to put the project on the studio slate because he was hoping to duplicate the success of the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis— for a while he even thought of calling his film See You in Philadelphia. Fox had already released one Americana musical, State Fair (1945), featuring an original score by Rodgers and Hammerstein; and rural dramas, perhaps a reflection of Zanuck’s own country-boy origins, had been a staple of the studio since its founding. His enlistment of Preminger for the project made sense on two counts. Zanuck was well aware of Otto’s patriotic fervor, and he knew he could count on the director completing the film quickly so that it could be released while the upbeat postwar mood was still ripe. Because of the elaborate production values, the film had a longer than usual shooting schedule (a full two months, from September 5 to November 9, 1945), but as Zanuck expected, Otto kept costs down. The final budget was a little over $2,200,000, as against an initial projection of two million dollars— almost any other director on the lot would have ended up spending far more of the studio’s money.
At first Otto welcomed the chance to work with Jerome Kern, the Broadway composer whose score (with Oscar Hammerstein) for Show Boat in 1927 had altered the course of the American musical theater. But Kern, volatile and impatient, was not an easy collaborator. And in a fundamental way their artistic temperaments were not compatible: Kern’s sentimentality collided with the aura of reserve that was an innate part of Preminger’s style. During production Kern was more ill-te
mpered than usual because he was working with a lyricist, Leo Robin, who was slow-moving. Kern was eager to return to New York to supervise the upcoming Broadway revival of Show
Boat, for which he and Oscar Hammerstein had written a new song, as well as to begin working with Hammerstein on a musical about Annie Oakley. Finally fed up with Robin, and refusing to wait any longer for him to finish the lyrics on a few numbers, Kern returned to New York in mid-October before the score had been completed. Before decamping he offered Preminger (appalled by Kern’s lack of professionalism) two songs he had written with other lyricists. (“All Through the Day,” with words by Oscar Hammerstein, and “Cinderella Sue,” with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, are performed in the film as interpolated specialty numbers.) In early November Kern collapsed while walking in the theater district and on November 11, 1945, he died. Show Boat opened, as scheduled, on January 25, 1946; the Annie Oakley musical, Annie Get Your Gun, opened on Broadway on May 16,1946, with a score written with remarkable speed by Irving Berlin.
Zanuck opened Centennial Summer in July to tepid reviews and box office. Preminger got much of the blame. “Obviously the script was weak, but Preminger did little to snap it up,” Bosley Crowther observed in the New York Times on July 18, 1946. Ideally, the warm-hearted story and Kern’s robust, all-American songs need a cozy style not in Otto’s line. Centennial Summer doesn’t invite the audience in, as the equally fragile Meet Me in St. Louis does; and the rich sense of family and home that illuminates Vincente Minnelli’s direction of the MGM classic is missing.
Though Centennial Summer, Preminger’s first film in color (he was working with cinematographer Ernest Palmer), is hardly the equal of Meet Me in St. Louis, it is sturdier than its obscure reputation suggests. Preminger’s characteristic stateliness gilds the story with an appropriately ceremonial touch, and throughout, there are graceful set pieces—a smooth tracking shot around the outside of the Rogers house; craning, pirouetting camera movement in a ball scene. Preminger’s direction of the musical sequences is sensitive. Since the characters are not performers, he is careful to bind the songs to the story rather than to isolate them in a separate realm—music doesn’t interrupt the action but grows out of it, and to reduce the “taint” of performance Preminger often interrupts songs before they are over. Clustering around a piano, the family sings a ditty called “The Railroad Song,” which Preminger stages naturalistically as a spontaneous activity: this is something an American family of the period might do.
Only one song, “Cinderella Sue,” is entirely unmotivated—and it’s the best moment in the film, an inspired interruption. Into an Irish bar where two of the characters go for a drink, a black singer (Avon Long, who played Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess) and a group of black children enter suddenly and begin to sing the song. The camera moves in for a close-up as Long
Parade for the world premiere of Centennial Summer in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia. Preminger emerges from a cab at the premiere of Centennial Summer.
strums a banjo and one of the kids plays a harmonica; then during a dance break the camera retreats to a discreet distance. At the end of the number the kids pick up coins the white spectators toss at them, and then, as quickly as they entered, the performers exit. From a contemporary viewpoint the number—black performers performing “blackness” for the amusement of a white audience—certainly violates political correctness. But “Cinderella Sue” is showstopping in the best sense. To watch Avon Long’s strutting turn is to catch a glimpse of his Sportin’ Life. And in its irresistible melody and rhythm the number has echoes of the great Negro songs Kern composed for Show Boat. Anticipating his landmark all-black musicals of the 1950s, Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess, Preminger films the interlude with evident respect and delight.
By now Preminger had become one of a small cadre of directors Zanuck knew he could trust absolutely. And Preminger, on his side, had developed great respect for DFZ. “I think he is basically one of the fairest men I have ever met,” he said. “He inspires a certain loyalty and following. He has a group of people, and I’m one of them, who would do anything for him. When we had an argument, there was nothing malicious about it. In spite of, or because of, everything, I have a warm feeling for him.”24 By 1946 Preminger also had one of the plushest contracts on the lot: $7,500 a week, a princely sum at the time.
As his position at Fox solidified, however, complications bedeviled Otto’s private life. He and Marion had been estranged for years, and in the sense that Marion had never quite received his full attention, the couple had been estranged from the beginning of their marriage. In Hollywood social circles their open marriage had long been an open secret. Otto was surprised, however, when in May 1946 Marion asked for a divorce. On a trip to Mexico she had met a fabulously wealthy (married) Swedish financier named Alex Wennergren who, as reported in an article in the Los Angeles Times on May 27, 1946, had been “blacklisted by the Allies during the war.” Agreeing to Marion’s petition for a speedy divorce, Otto consented to go to the Mexican consul in Los Angeles to sign papers. “Two days later I received a letter from Marion full of affectionate Hungarian farewells,” he recalled. “She would never forget our happy years together but she knew that I did not love her anymore and there was a man who loved her very much. She didn’t want anything from me except a few personal belongings that would be picked up in a few days by her fiancé’s private plane.”25 The plane never arrived, but Marion did. Mrs. Wennergren, apparently, was not willing to grant a divorce—more than that, she was madly jealous of her rival and began to stalk Marion. One afternoon in a post office in Mexico, Marion claimed that Mrs. Wennergren attempted to shoot her.
If Marion was a poor actress onstage, there was no question of her skill as the flamboyant leading lady of her own life. Whether or not the attempted shooting took place, or whether, as Otto speculated, it was “just a figment of Marion’s Hungarian imagination,”26 she lived her life with panache. A bit sheepishly but essentially unbowed, Marion returned to 333 Bel-Air Road in June 1946 to resume her appearances as Otto’s wife and to lunch regularly at all the industry favorites, including the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Romanoff’s, Chasen’s, and the Brown Derby. Marion persevered, despite the fact that the charade of being Mrs. Otto Preminger had worn thin—Otto was enjoying his escapades as a freewheeling man-about-town and had begun dating Natalie Draper, a niece of Marion Davies and one of the extras on the Fox lot. Marion Preminger was on borrowed time and no doubt she knew it.
Long before Marion asked for a divorce, Otto often went on his own to parties at Zanuck’s Santa Monica beach house or for weekends in the desert at Ric-su-dar, Zanuck’s Palm Springs estate named for his three children, Richard, Susan, and Darrilyn. However, one weekend invitation, in June 1946, a few weeks after Marion’s request for a divorce, was a ruse. Zanuck, as always keeping daily watch on every production at the studio and aghast at the rushes on Forever Amber, based on Kathleen Winsor’s infernally popular novel, had decided to remove the director, John Stahl. To protect his investment—Zanuck had already spent over two million on the production, by far the most expensive undertaking in the studio’s history—Zanuck turned to the reliable Preminger to bail him out. When Otto arrived, solo, at Ric-su-dar on Friday afternoon, Zanuck informed him that he was to leave after breakfast the next morning, drive directly to the studio to view all the footage that Stahl had shot during the six weeks the film had been in production, and on Monday offer a candid assessment of what he saw. “Monday, you will tell me what you want to do,” Zanuck said.
“I’ll tell you now what I want to do,” Preminger shot back. “I want not to do Forever Amber. I read the book when it was sent round by the story department and I thought it was terrible.” He told Zanuck he was adapting Daisy Kenyon, another best seller aimed at a female audience, and did not want to interrupt the good progress he was making with his scriptwriter, David Hertz.
“You’re a member of the team,” Zanuck said ste
rnly. “You must do it. I won’t blame you if it doesn’t turn out well.”27
Otto told Zanuck that if he agreed to work on “this trashy story” there would certainly be a reprise of the kind of argument they had had on Kidnapped and that Zanuck would end up firing him.
“You must help me,” the czar persisted. Then he assured Otto, who knew it to be a subterfuge, that as director he would be allowed to do whatever he wanted with the material.
“It was very difficult,” Preminger later recalled. “You wanted to get along with him when he talked like this.”28 In the end, as he had perhaps realized all along, Otto knew he had “no choice.”29 Daisy Kenyon, a heroine he believed in, would have to wait until he had rescued the lusty Amber, a heroine he despised.
Peggy Cummins (as Amber) and Peter Whitney in scrapped footage of Forever Amber, directed by John Stahl, replaced by Preminger. The actors were replaced by Linda Darnell and John Russell.
Preminger drove back to Los Angeles Saturday morning, looked over Stahl’s footage, and on Monday rendered his judgment. To proceed, he must have a completely new script, and the leading lady, Peggy Cummins, a young British blonde Zanuck had signed up and whom Preminger found “amateurish beyond belief,” would have to be replaced. Otto said he would need at least two months to prepare a script, and in the meantime production would have to be halted. In all his demands Preminger omitted a request for a producing credit—he was only too relieved that William Perlberg would have that burden. Zanuck agreed to the provisos, adding that as the script was being prepared they would “think about [Cummins’s] replacement.”30 Only later did Preminger discover that Zanuck had already hired Fox contract player Linda Darnell.
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