Demanding the right to choose his own writer, Otto turned to Ring Lardner Jr., who, uncredited, had written some of Waldo Lydecker’s dialogue in Laura. Although like everyone else Lardner thought the novel was “junk,” he accepted because he liked working with Preminger. “Otto was extremely bright and curious about almost everything,” he recalled. “He was also very good company, and when we worked together, we tended to spend as much time talking about the world in general as we did about the movie at hand.”31 Philip Dunne, who had written the first draft, was relieved, thinking he was now free of “the whole sorry mess. It was an amateur book that somehow caught on. It was a dollar catcher. It was supposed to be raunchy, and of course here were the censors looking at us: ‘Don’t you dare make a move.’ I wanted to make a spoof of it. But Zanuck said, ‘No. It’s a best seller. Let’s go with it.’ ”32 Curbing his desire to transform Winsor’s ribald story into a comedy, Dunne had turned in “a dreary, dutifully sanitized script.”33 Zanuck, however, wanted Dunne to remain on the project. As Lardner recalled, “I was now supposed to collaborate with Phil on a rewrite—a touchy situation, or rather, it would have been if he had been any less of an exemplar of graciousness and professionalism. As it was, the three of us, Otto, Phil, and I, established a strong bond based, in part, on a fervent common desire to be working on almost any property other than the one Zanuck had foisted on us.”34
Zanuck was risking a king’s ransom because he believed the novel’s popularity ensured a large audience. At 972 pages, Winsor’s chronicle of the fortunes of a poor country lass who sleeps her way into the court of Charles II in Restoration England is a monumental bodice ripper. Vixen, whore, royal consort, and sometime actress, Amber for all her erotic cunning fails to secure the affection of the one man she really loves, Bruce Carlton, a fortune hunter who in the end goes off to the new colony of Virginia with another woman by his side. Winsor draws on mountainous research to evoke a tapestry of the period: teeming with a Brueghelesque density of detail, her accounts of a historical plague and fire, of the decadent court of Charles II, and of the brothels and theaters where Amber works at various points in her career, provide bravura literary set pieces. Winsor, to be sure, is occasionally naughty, her passages about her heroine’s amorous exploits calculated to titillate her mostly female 1940s readers. But at the same time that she had her
Preminger, a photo of FDR, one of his heroes, on his office wall, with the script of Forever Amber, a film he was to direct under protest.
eye squarely on the box office, Winsor was also a real writer, and Preminger and his team should have been able to see that there was a terrific movie to be sculpted out of her saga.
Only after turning in his revised script did Preminger learn that Zanuck had already cast Linda Darnell. Otto had nothing against the actress (he never knew how much she had already grown to dislike him), and quite rightly thought she had done good work for him on Fallen Angel and Centennial Summer. But Winsor’s heroine was blonde and he couldn’t see the raven-haired Darnell in the role. He wanted a real blonde, Lana Turner, who was under contract to MGM. Zanuck protested. He was convinced that whoever played Amber would become a big star, and as he told Otto, he did not intend to give that kind of break to another studio’s “property.” Even after Zanuck decreed that Amber would be played by Linda Darnell, Otto, thinking he had an advantage—he had agreed to direct only as a favor to the boss—and confident of his rising place in the studio hierarchy, continued to promote Turner. He invited Zanuck and Turner to a lavish dinner at 333, and to prepare her for the meeting Otto coached Lana about how she should play up to the mogul. “She did her best,” he recalled. “She flirted shamelessly with Zanuck, at one point even sitting on his legs.”35 But Zanuck remained adamant, and Preminger, checking his audacity at this point, backed off, realizing he had no choice other than to proceed with an actress he could not envision in the role.
For her part, Linda Darnell stifled her anxiety about working with Preminger once again because she knew Amber was a star-making role. “I thought I was the luckiest girl in Hollywood,” she said at the time.36 Indeed, right after Zanuck announced that Darnell would play the coveted part she was given a major star buildup. Six weeks before filming was scheduled to resume in mid-October, Darnell was subjected to a routine as rigorous as that of an athlete in training for a championship event. She was placed on a severe diet. She began intensive daily studies with a vocal coach, British actress Constance Collier, in order to transform her Texas twang into a simulation of mid-Atlantic “movie speech.” In successive stages her brunette hair was dyed blond and twisted into a variety of shapes in preparation for the thirty-four different hairstyles Amber would have. She had to endure hundreds of costume fittings. And as a rising “star of tomorrow” she was required to give interviews in which, coached by the studio public relations department, she was expected to underline the similarities between her own humble background and Amber’s. None too flatteringly, in building a bad-girl image for Darnell, press releases reminded fans that Darnell was estranged from her husband, cameraman Peverall Marley and like many other Hollywood brunettes had had an affair with Howard Hughes. In forging a link between the actress and her role, the studio was suggesting that a slut had been chosen to play a slut. Insecure and not remotely divalike, Darnell submitted without a whisper of discontent to her preproduction regimen.
However, her costar Cornel Wilde, cast as the unattainable Bruce Carl-ton, wanted to bail. Wilde had already suffered through the aborted Peggy Cummins version, had rancorous memories of working with Preminger on Centennial Summer, and shared the writers’ conviction that the material was rubbish. But Wilde was a big star at the time, the kind of heartthrob the role demanded, and both Zanuck and Preminger wanted him to remain. When Wilde’s agents negotiated a sizable salary increase, the actor stayed on, grudgingly.
With no one except Linda Darnell excited about the project, Otto began filming on October 24. Darnell, whose days began at 4:30 a.m. with hair and costume fittings and often continued until eight at night, was under enormous pressure, and Preminger did nothing to bolster her confidence. Suffering her director’s almost daily explosions, Darnell, as she confided to her sister, became “convinced that Preminger was holding her back in the
Showing a bemused Cornel Wilde how to make love to Linda Darnell in Forever Amber. The actress feared and loathed Preminger’s autocratic methods.
part. Linda was not one to dislike many people … but Preminger she couldn’t tolerate. He was a good director, but a mean SOB. She hated him.”37 (During the filming of A Letter to Three Wives in 1949, when he needed a look of disgust from Darnell, director Joseph Mankiewicz placed as a prop a portrait of Preminger in a Nazi uniform.38) Exhausted, and demoralized by her director’s outbursts, Darnell midway through the seventeen-week ordeal collapsed and under doctor’s orders remained away from the set for ten days.
Other mishaps followed. To create a semblance of English fog that Otto wanted for an early-morning duel scene, a spray called Nujol was used. “It was a laxative,” Cornel Wilde recalled, “and half the cast and crew got diarrhea breathing and swallowing it.”39 The most harrowing incident occurred during the shooting of the Great Fire. After meticulous preparation—no traffic was allowed within a mile of the Fox lot—the sequence was shot at 3 a.m., with a battalion of fire trucks at the ready if something were to go wrong. Something did. The star was burned. “Linda Darnell just escaped death, because during the Great Fire a roof caved in,” recalled the film’s cinematographer Leon Shamroy. “I pulled the camera back and just got her off the set in time. She was terrified of fire, almost as though she had a premonition.”40 (Darnell was to die in a fire in 1965.)
The only member of the production who enjoyed working on the film was the composer, David Raksin, who hadn’t read the novel but felt the screenplay was
terrifically good for such a piece of trash. Phil Dunne and Ring were first-rate writers. As soon as I read their work I k
new I wanted the score to have a symphonic sweep. I worked on it steadily for about six weeks. The picture has a helluva lot of music, and needs it. It has more themes than you would believe. I already knew a lot about the music of the period, but you can’t be too accurate to the period: it won’t work. Your aim is to simulate the music of the time. Otto didn’t touch a note of my score, because he recognized he had something extraordinary. Very few scores are like that. Zanuck sent down a note to Alfred Newman, who was to conduct, saying the score was magnificent in every respect.41
(Raksin earned an Academy Award nomination for his score.)
Filming dragged on until March 11, 1947. “It was the longest shooting schedule I ever had,” Preminger grumbled. “Zanuck was determined that this would be the biggest and most expensive and most successful film in history”42 After principal photography was completed, however, another round of problems ensued. Zanuck had bought the book because its scandalous reputation promised big box-office returns. Yet he and Preminger realized that the story of a promiscuous heroine who has a child out of wedlock and who seems, until she receives her comeuppance at the end, to be rewarded for her turpitude, would need to be toned down. As Preminger recalled, “We were very careful to stay well within the rules of the industry’s own censoring body,” known as the Hays Office, named for Will Hays, a former U.S. postmaster who was the first head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association.43
The Hays Office did indeed pass the film, but the more austere (and at the time more powerful) Catholic Legion of Decency condemned it. In an effort to avert the financial disaster that a C rating from the Legion then represented, Spyros Skouras, the high-strung president of Twentieth Century-Fox, summoned Preminger and three priests from the Legion to a meeting in his New York office. Determined to protect the company’s $5 million investment, a near record at the time, Skouras proceeded to behave in a way that Otto would long remember. When the youngest priest, the chief spokesman for the Legion, began by chastising him for having dared to film Winsor’s banned book in the first place, Skouras with increasing agitation started twisting his yellow worry beads. After he saw that pleading with the irate priest to rescind the C rating had no effect, Skouras got down on his knees and began to cry, quietly at first but then with mounting fervor until his body was wracked with heaving sobs. At the high point of his aria, Skouras began to pound the floor furiously. Otto, no slouch in putting on a show to get what he wanted, was nonplussed. At that point the young priest, perhaps a little frightened by Skouras’s display, suggested that the Legion’s objection might be withdrawn if Fox changed the title. Skouras shrieked, as if in mortal pain: the title was the selling point of the film, and could not possibly be changed, he assured the priest in a voice shaking with indignation. Skouras promised the Catholic delegation, however, that the studio would make any changes they might request. “Just show [Mr. Preminger] what you want cut and he’ll cut it,” he announced.44 And proving once again that he could be a good citizen, Otto sat patiently with the priests in the Fox screening room in New York, listening to their concerns scene by scene. Perhaps because he had no faith in the project, he readily agreed to make strategic cuts in all the kissing scenes, and promised to schedule retakes to reduce the amount of the star’s cleavage in certain shots. After viewing Preminger’s sanitized version, with all the nips and tucks in place, the Legion bestowed its approval on the film. Preminger was to remember the “pathetic scene” in Skouras’s office a few years later, when he would have his own run-ins with the Legion of Decency and the Production Code Administration office. And with Skouras’s behavior as a negative model, he would refuse to capitulate.
On October 10, 1947, Forever Amber opened to big business, with Zanuck and Skouras making a quick and handsome profit on their expensive investment. The film even garnered some decent reviews. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times saluted Preminger’s “lush theatricalism” and noted that “although the film does not picture the details of Amber’s amours with such boldness as did Miss Winsor, it doesn’t spare the innuendoes, chum!”
In an interview with the New York Times ten years after the film’s release, Preminger recalled that Forever Amber was “by far the most expensive picture I ever made and it was also the worst.”45 He couldn’t have been more wrong. Closer to the mark was David Raksin’s assessment: “Otto sure did a hell of a good job with it.”46 Even more than Laura, the unfairly maligned Forever Amber confirms Preminger as a maestro of mise-en-scène. Working closely with Leon Shamroy (Preminger called him “a brilliant cameraman and a marvelous friend”),47 he assembled a procession of images that have the rhetorical power of master paintings. The Puritan dwelling where Amber was raised, shot with looming shadows and figures in silhouette lit ominously from below, is quickly established as a place of stultifying repression, the joyless rooms seeming almost to incite Amber’s amorous career. After examining herself in a mirror—Amber is always a self-conscious “performer”—she enters a packed, smoke-filled tavern where she waits on tables, mixing with a crowd of rollicking peasants in a mise-en-scène that oozes a primal vitality. Amber’s early career as a London cut-purse takes place in settings—dark, narrow lanes, dank rooms with threateningly low ceilings—roiling with underworld menace. Three scenes set in the theater where Amber is to become a successful actress are suffused with Preminger’s love of the stage. In the first, the heroine is mesmerized at
Preminger’s love of the stage is displayed in the theater scenes in Forever Amber. Amber (Linda Darnell), far right.
a performance of Romeo and Juliet. In the other scenes she is herself onstage, having become a leading player in the company of Sir Richard Killigrew. The richly detailed theater setting with its horseshoe-shaped auditorium filled with obstreperous patrons milling in the pit among women selling apples (and what else?) as the gentry primp and ogle each other in the boxes would surely satisfy the most exacting historian. A duel between Bruce Carlton and a jealous captain, shot in elegant horizontal compositions, takes place in a pearly, Corot-like early morning light. The decrepit house where Amber saves Bruce from the plague radiates an aura of disease and decay. Preminger and Shamroy shoot the scenes of the Great Fire in a chiaroscuro that has the virtuosity of a Georges de la Tour painting. And for the elaborate processions and dances at the worldly court of Charles II, they use a vibrant palette.
Preminger’s Old World formality is exactly what the material needs— Zanuck was astute in assigning him to be the rescue man—and not for a moment does Otto reveal his distaste for the story. Maintaining narrative momentum for over two hours and twenty minutes, his direction achieves genuine epic sweep. Shaping his star’s performance, however, he was less successful. Perhaps because he didn’t believe she could offer more, he presents Linda Darnell as an object to be looked at: a mannequin on display in period costumes and hairdos. As Amber she is no more than a virtual actress, a Restoration figurine with a small and inescapably contemporary-sounding voice. Under Preminger’s careful (perhaps too careful) direction, Darnell is never less than adequate. But the director gives her no chance to make a stab at the potentially bravura acting moments, as for instance when Amber saves Bruce from the plague, which a spirited, intuitive performer could have brought to roaring life. Preminger even subdues Darnell’s trademark sultriness. Her Amber is coquettish, but unlike Winsor’s heroine she is never allowed to be sexually threatening or to be consumed by lust.
Throughout the five-month shoot on Forever Amber Otto maintained a bruising schedule. Putting in ten-hour days on the troubled production, he also worked regularly with writers on scripts for two upcoming projects, Daisy Kenyon and The Dark Wood; read or at least scanned dozens of novels circulated by the Fox story department; and saw every film and play that opened in Los Angeles. He boasted that he took no vacations, claiming that once he completed a film he would “go to bed for three days” before launching into his next project. Because Amber, a film he did not want to make, took so long, Pr
eminger hardly took his customary three days before plunging into preproduction on a film he very much wanted to make.
FIVE
On the Job (2)
After being cooped up with Amber, Preminger was relieved to be working on Daisy Kenyon, an ambivalent character of the kind he was always drawn to. Based on a best-selling 1945 novel by Elizabeth Janeway the undertaking also offered him the chance to prove himself in a new genre, the regulation woman’s film of the 1940s. Daisy is a successful magazine illustrator facing a romantic conflict: Will she choose a prominent, married lawyer or an unmarried neurotic veteran? (At the time a sympathetic heroine would, of course, end up with the single veteran rather than the married lawyer, but against the odds Preminger sustains suspense by refusing to play favorites. His impartial response to the characters keeps the viewer guessing.)
For different reasons, the film’s star, Joan Crawford, was as enthusiastic as Otto about making Daisy Kenyon. At forty-three, Crawford was old by the standards of Hollywood, and in fact too mature to play Janeway’s troubled heroine. Yet as Ruth Warrick, cast as the lawyer’s wife, recalled, “She begged on her knees to get the role. She had recently won an Academy Award for Mildred Pierce, in which she played her first mother part, and now she wanted to prove to the industry that she still could be convincing in a younger role. She was determined to fight the Hollywood ‘rule’ that a woman had claim to real beauty only for as long as the seven-year contract the studios then offered. To achieve this, she’d have done anything Preminger asked her to.”1
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