Tensions did not ease once the company began working in the studio. “At that point I was on the set every day, and I saw Otto bully Marilyn and some of the crafts people, some of the lower ones,” Rubin said.
I never saw him scream at Natasha, but in speaking to Marilyn he would be just below yelling—in front of everybody. It was a frontal assault. I saw her in tears near the end of shooting. When we were scheduled to do close-ups on the raft on the tank stage and she knew she was going to be drenched, with water pouring all over her, she wouldn’t come out of her dressing room. Otto was enraged. He started screaming at his full lung power and he pounded the back of his chair, demanding Marilyn’s immediate appearance on the set. I talked Marilyn down—she may have been frightened. When she came out Otto was seething, and he continued to hurl insults, berating her for being selfish and unprofessional. He wouldn’t let up; everyone could see that he despised her, and it seemed to be personal as well as professional. Marilyn and I got on nicely because we had a common enemy: Otto Preminger.
Location shooting in Canada for River of No Return, Preminger’s first film in CinemaScope.
Rubin’s examination of the dailies confirmed his original belief that Preminger had been the wrong choice. “An aura that would have been natural for a Raoul Walsh, who was steeped in Western lore, wasn’t there,” Rubin concluded. “A feeling, a tone I was looking for, and that was in the script, wasn’t there. Otto and I had a bad fight about a scene with Monroe and Mitchum in the woods. Otto said it would work fine; I felt an element had been lost. In the first and final analysis, Otto and I were not meant for each other—our personalities were not attuned. Otto was bigger than life, and I am life-sized.” 69
Despite the embattled atmosphere Preminger finished on schedule, on September 29, and within Rubin’s original budget. Once shooting was completed, Otto began to edit with Lou Loeffler, whom he trusted, but before the end of postproduction he left for Europe; working alongside Loeffler, Rubin finished the film. “We made some changes and a few retakes were shot by Preminger’s friend, Jean Negulesco,” Rubin said.70 As Otto recalled, “After River of No Return I decided not to work ever again as a studio employee. I paid Fox $150,000 to cancel my half-year contract.”71
Otto’s leaving before the final cut was completed was a declaration of independence, but during filming he had been engaged by the project. The story of a father, just released from prison, who learns to love a son he has not known no doubt caused Otto to reflect on his own unknown son Erik, now nine and being raised by his mother. The scenes between father and son tentatively reaching out to each other are the strongest in the film, beautifully played by Robert Mitchum and Tommy Rettig.
Preminger discovered that shooting in CinemaScope supported his usual preferences for long shots and minimum intercutting. “It is actually more difficult to compose in this size,” he said. “Few painters have chosen these proportions, and somehow it embraces more, we see more widely, and it fits into long takes better. On the wide screen, abrupt cuts disturb audiences.”72 On a first outing in the wide-screen format in which he was to become a master, Preminger and his cinematographer Joseph La Shelle revel in panoramic vistas: high-angle shots of the raft floating on the river between canyons of massive rock; low-angle shots of Indians massed threateningly on the tops of high cliffs. The opening scene, which Preminger and La Shelle design as a fluid tracking shot that follows Mitchum as he rides through a tent community buzzing with activity, reveals the increased possibilities in CinemaScope for long takes and deep focus.
There is no way, however, that as a director of a western Otto Preminger could ever be mistaken for John Ford. A fight scene, in which two roughnecks suddenly appear, without a horse, in the middle of the wilderness and begin to attack the hero, is perfunctorily staged and edited. An Indian attack is only marginally more convincing. (The film’s reactionary, reflexive treatment of faceless Indians on the warpath is standard for the era. Their individuality erased, their grievances never addressed, their cameo appearances cued by dissonant chords on the sound track, the Indians function as pure motiveless malignity, a threat to the white man’s hegemony.) Problematic, too, is the occasionally faulty match between studio and location shots. A scene in a cave smells of studio artifice, and repeated process shots of the characters on the raft fall well below the technical standards of the time.
Tommy Rettig (eleven years old) helped Marilyn Monroe, who detested Preminger and her role as a chorus girl, through the ordeal of filming River of No Return.
Otto stumbled with Monroe. The actress herself frequently claimed that River of No Return was her worst film. It isn’t, but it’s easy enough to see why she was unhappy. Aside from her dislike of the director, the role of a saloon singer longing for love and respectability reinforced stereotypes she was already determined to resist. And in a story of masculine rituals, her whore with a heart of gold is not only a cliché, she is also largely irrelevant. In most of her scenes with Tommy Rettig, in which she speaks in her natural voice, and in her musical numbers, Monroe is captivating in ways that only a born movie star can be. But in the far more numerous scenes with adult males, she delivers her lines in the style demanded by Natasha. Otto’s failure to knock the affectation out of his misguided star is a notable lapse in his careerlong assault on overacting.
For years after River of No Return was released, Preminger spoke bitterly about Monroe. “If I was offered a million dollars tax free I wouldn’t make another picture with her,” he stated in a March 3, 1957, interview with Art Buchwald. “It’s okay for a star to be late one time, and two, but when she’s late fifty-four or fifty-six times it’s too much. It’s beneath the dignity of any director or any other star.” “If Miss Monroe should ask me to do another picture—and I think she won’t—I will not do it because life is too short,” he announced in an interview in the New York Post on August 22, 1958. Yet over time, as the memory of his bruising encounters with Monroe and her sorceress began to recede, Preminger struck a more gallant tone. And after Monroe acquired the kind of mythic standing he could never have anticipated when locked in battle with her in the summer of 1953, he began to express praise for her abilities and compassion for her torment. “She tried very hard, and when people try hard, you can’t be mad at them,” he reflected in a January 28, 1980, interview in the New York Daily News.
SEVEN
Lightning Strikes Twice
Otto’s haste to be done with Monroe and Fox was due to his eagerness to launch into his second independent production, an opera with an all-black cast. He was counting on the likely fact, as he had with The Moon Is Blue, that no major studio would take the risk of making Carmen Jones, an adaptation by Oscar Hammerstein II of Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera Carmen that had been an unexpected hit on Broadway in 1943. Otto was convinced he could transform Bizet’s perennially popular opera, with its ravishing melodies, sex-driven characters, and compelling story, into a realistic film that had every chance of stirring up controversy. It was not an easy sell, however.
From the moment Oscar Hammerstein had heard Bizet’s opera in concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934, he had seen its potential as a musical play—a show for Broadway rather than the opera house. In his adaptation, set in North Carolina and Chicago during World War II, Bizet’s fiery heroine becomes Carmen Jones, a worker in a parachute factory who seduces and abandons Joe, a soldier, before moving on to her next conquest, a prizefighter, Husky Miller. Joe, driven mad by Carmen’s desertion, strangles her. Hammerstein eliminated recitative, noting that the composer and his collaborators “originally wrote Carmen with spoken dialogue scenes between the arias. The work was not converted to ‘grand opera’ until after Bizet’s death [with music written by Ernest Guiraud].”1 Nonetheless, Hammer-stein had difficulty finding investors. Billy Rose, a scrappy impresario with deep pockets, decided to take a chance on the show, which he presented on Broadway on December 2, 1943, to a warm reception. Carmen Jones had a substantial run of 502 performance
s followed by an eighteen-month national tour.
When he had seen it, Preminger was impressed more by the idea of the show than what Hammerstein had done with it. Inaccurately, he dismissed the Broadway Carmen Jones as a series of “skits loosely based on the opera” and recalled that the score had been “simplified and changed so that the performers who had no operatic training could sing it.”2 In fact, Carmen Jones adheres closely to the opera’s structure and was sung operatically In his film, Preminger was intending to disregard “Hammerstein’s revue” as well as the opera’s libretto by Meilhac and Halévy and to return to the original source, the 1845 novel by Prosper Mérimée. To write the script he hired Harry Kleiner, his former student at Yale, instructing him to open up the material beyond the limited settings of both the opera and Hammerstein’s adaptation. (In the “revue,” Hammerstein sets Act I in a parachute factory and improbably squeezes Act II onto the terrace of a black country club.) “I had decided to make a dramatic film with music rather than a conventional film musical,” Preminger said, and to maintain movie realism he intended to shoot as much of the film as he could on location.3
After his success with The Moon Is Blue, Preminger was counting on the support of Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin at United Artists. But at a lunch at “21,” the two men, having examined the financial history of all-black films and concluding that the project was not economically viable, declined. “Sorry, Otto, but this is too rich for our blood,” they said.4 Surprised by their reaction, Preminger quickly offered the project elsewhere. Again the response was negative.
As he continued to search for backers, Otto did something he had never done before and would never attempt again. In October 1953, he directed an opera for the New York City Opera, the American premiere of a work by Gottfried von Einem based on The Trial, by Franz Kafka. For Preminger the material was a radical departure: Kafka’s novel, a nightmarish allegory of a man accused of a nameless crime, is not concerned with the realistic kind of trial and the real-world legal issues that were Preminger’s usual bailiwick. But Otto welcomed the challenge of directing an opera for the stage as a way of preparing for Carmen Jones. “Mr. Preminger, being a believer in the work of the New York City Opera, is charging a considerate fee, but it would nevertheless be higher than any previous fee paid to a stage director by the City Opera,” an article in the New York Times on September 21, 1953, noted. On the whole, Otto’s production received stronger reviews than the opera itself.
Olin Downes in his New York Times review on October 23 praised “a carefully prepared and extremely capable performance” but expressed disappointment in the opera. “Its musical substance is of the slightest… . Could any librettist, any composer, have turned this work of Kafka into a compelling music drama? One might, the Alban Berg of Wozzeck. But he has gone, and it is doubtful if the future will produce another like him.”
Despite many turndowns, Otto continued to believe in Carmen Jones. Salvation came finally from a perhaps not unexpected source: Darryl Zanuck, who had heard of Preminger’s difficulties placing the project and asked to see the script. After reading it, he promptly offered financing. Fox would be providing the funds, but Preminger would operate as an entirely independent filmmaker.
Zanuck believed Carmen Jones had blockbuster potential. But Joseph Moscowitz, the head of Fox’s business affairs in New York, did not, and for weeks he avoided meeting with Preminger. When Zanuck finally forced him to complete the deal, Moscowitz refused to offer more than a meager $750,000. After finally signing a contract in December 1953, Preminger began what was to be a prolonged preproduction process. He started to scout possible locations, always one of his favorite activities. He hired his crew. Veteran Sam Leavitt would shoot the film. The musical director would be Herschel Burke Gilbert, who had composed the score for The Moon Is Blue. Herbert Ross would choreograph. All the while Otto continued to huddle with Harry Kleiner on refining the script, making sure drama rather than music remained the focus.
And then, on April 19,1954, six weeks before he was scheduled to begin shooting, Preminger had another run-in with Joe Breen, who in his final months at the head of the Production Code Administration office seemed determined to even the score over Otto’s victory with The Moon Is Blue. After he read the script, Breen was livid. His objections to The Moon Is Blue had been entirely in what the characters said, in their mental attitude toward sex, whereas his complaints about Carmen Jones were visual as well as verbal. Carmen lives by her erotic skills, titillating her men with seductive body language and verbal come-ons—there was no question that as written, the character was intended to be sexually provocative in ways that violated contemporary Hollywood standards. Breen to his horror fully grasped that Otto, capitalizing on the racist stereotype of blacks as sexually superior to pale Anglo-Saxons, was intending to produce one hell of a hot-blooded movie. Breen cited the script’s “over-emphasis on lustfulness,” lodging particular complaints against Carmen sliding down Joe’s body after he has lifted her up; Carmen adjusting her stockings as Joe watches; and Joe waking up in Carmen’s bed. “We cannot see our way clear to approve detailed scenes of passion, in bedrooms, between unmarried couples,” Breen fulminated. Breen overall was outraged by the film’s apparent neutrality, “the lack of any voice of morality properly condemning Carmen’s complete lack of morals.”5
Because he had made his point in the fight over The Moon Is Blue; because he was relieved at last to have found backing; and because, unlike the comedy, which had needed a fracas to put it over, Carmen Jones had far more than some sexy images to entice mid-1950s moviegoers, Preminger agreed to make some minor adjustments. But he drew the line at Breen’s objection to a lyric, “Stand up and fight like hell,” sung by the prizefighter Husky Miller. Here he would not budge. Neither would Breen. A flurry of memos flew back and forth between Fox and the Production Code Administration office. Preminger applied to the board of the Motion Picture Association of America and won his case. But at the same time he agreed to shoot two versions of two scenes Breen had found offensive—in both cases, Preminger’s original versions survived.
Otto was unfazed about violating sexual taboos, but in 1954, at a time when blacks had virtually been written out of mainstream American films, he was sensitive to issues of racial representation. Aware of the value of providing employment to performers who had been overlooked, he was at the same time alert to the possibility that the all-black world of the film could reinforce prejudice. He was concerned, too, that black characters speaking in dialect and impelled by atavistic sexual urges could be potentially offensive to some black viewers. “ Carmen Jones was really a fantasy, as Porgy and Bess was,” Preminger said. “The all-black world shown in these films doesn’t exist, at least not in the United States. We used the musical-fantasy quality to convey something of the needs and aspirations of colored people.”6
At Zanuck’s urging, Preminger sent the script to Walter White, president of the NAACP. White’s response, recorded in a memo from Preminger to Zanuck, was reassuring. “While White indicated that he principally is opposed to an all-Negro show as such, because their fight is for integration as opposed to segregation in any form, he likes this particular script very much and has no objection to any part of it.”7
Preminger assembled his cast quickly. For Joe, the male lead, he signed Harry Belafonte, a good-looking folk singer who had recently popularized calypso and in 1953 had made his film debut in Bright Road and won a Tony Award for John Murray’s Almanac. In the supporting role of Frankie, Carmen’s good-time, smart-talking friend, he hired Pearl Bailey, who had appeared in two minor films but had become popular as a band singer and on Broadway in 1945 in St. Louis Woman. As the prizefighter Preminger chose Joe Adams, a strapping Los Angeles disc jockey.
For Diahann Carroll, then a nineteen-year-old singer from New York, auditioning for Preminger was a terrifying experience. “I had never before encountered power on such a grand scale,” she recalled. “Otto Preminger was seated behind the
longest desk I had ever seen … his office was the size of a hotel ballroom.”8 Preminger, catching her off guard, asked her to read for the title role. On the spot she was to prepare a scene in which Joe (read by James Edwards, who only a few years earlier had seemed about to become the first black leading man in American films) paints Carmen’s toenails. Stunned by Preminger’s order for her to remove her shoes and stockings, she could barely focus on rehearsing with Edwards, “one of the most seductive men I have ever met.” When Preminger returned, she stumbled through the scene.
Nothing in my young life had prepared me for this kind of heavy sexuality, and I couldn’t begin to handle it, even on the level of “let’s pretend.” Sensing my discomfort, Preminger asked, blaring at me with his full force (but with a glint in his eyes), “Who ever told you you were sexy?” “No one! No one! I swear!” I answered quickly, looking him straight in the eye, somehow recognizing that both of us knew this was outrageous, and that a friendship had just begun. And then Otto Preminger, the bully extraordinaire, threw back his head and roared with laughter.9
Diahann Carroll didn’t get the part. But Preminger, who always appreciated people who could make him laugh, found a small role in the film for his new friend (she was to play Frankie’s sidekick Myrt), and he was to cast her in two future films as well.
Brock Peters, who, unlike the other performers Preminger had cast so far, was operatically trained, remembered “a surprisingly easy interview. I knew Preminger’s reputation, we all did. But when I saw him, in New York, he couldn’t have been more polite and gracious. He did not ask me to sing, but I could feel he was looking me over very closely. His blue eyes looked at me intently; I had the feeling those eyes could see right through you. My first impression was that here was a man who was all-knowing, and from that came the terrific power that he radiated.” At the end of the meeting Preminger cast Peters in the unsympathetic role of Sergeant Brown, a troublemaker attracted to Carmen and resentful of Joe. Peters was thrilled. “Film to a black performer back then seemed a long way away—the very thought of Hollywood was so remote, and so unattainable for black youngsters. We all felt we needed some kind of magic to make it happen.”10
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