Despite the circumstances, Jean Seberg never cracked on the set. “Otto had cast her because of a strength he had seen in her, and during the filming he could not break her,” Lionel Larner said.23 Rita Moriarty agreed. “The steel that got her the part prevented her from crying. She was a tough cookie, and I must say I was impressed by Jean’s self-control. That was what Otto had liked about her at first, and I believe it’s that quality that through it all held his respect for her. Otto admired those who would not fall apart when he yelled. Jean was firm, stoic, and she would not let him get her down.”24 Away from the set, though, Jean’s stalwart façade crumbled, according to production photographer Bob Willoughby, who befriended her. “Often at the end of the day’s shooting, she would be sobbing hysterically. Jean would be broken.”25
His outbursts unsettled everyone except Otto, who recovered from his tirades in a matter of seconds, ready to carry on as if nothing had happened. He may have had hourly tantrums, but as the shooting progressed he was not displeased. His master cinematographer, Georges Périnal, and Roger Furse, his equally accomplished set designer, were giving him what he had asked for. His classically trained company was performing in a style adjusted to films rather than the stage. And he saw in the rushes plentiful evidence of Jean’s naturalness and strength—the qualities for which he had hired her. “The dailies looked excellent,” he recalled.26
Preminger’s intemperance with Jean did not mean he disliked her; quite the contrary. As much as everyone else, he cared for her personally, and he never ceased feeling responsible for her. He gave her lavish presents, and many times after hours at the Dorchester he reverted to a calm, fatherly demeanor. On one drive back to the hotel from Shepperton, about midway through shooting, he informed her that he was going to cast her in the leading role in his next film, Bonjour Tristesse, an adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s recent best-selling novel about la dolce vita on the French Riviera. Jean’s “gratitude was immense,” as David Richards reported.27
Near the end of shooting, Jean was involved in a near catastrophe that epitomized how she felt about working with Preminger. “I’m burning!” Jean screamed as smoke and flames from two of seven gas cylinders enveloped her during the filming of the Maid being burned at the stake. Lining up the shot on a crane high overhead, Preminger was horrified as crew members quickly released Jean from her chains while studio firemen poured water onto the flames. Singed but unhurt, Jean offered to redo the shot but Otto sent her back to the Dorchester in a limousine and arranged for a doctor and nurse to be on hand. Jean never remounted the pyre. Although Preminger was accused, preposterously, of having arranged the mishap as a publicity gimmick, after it had occurred he certainly didn’t block newspapers and magazines from reporting the incident. A journalist and photographer from Life had been on the set, and Otto was pleased when the event was given a big spread in the magazine. “We got it all on film. The camera took 400 extra feet. The crowd reaction was fantastic. I’ll probably use some of it,” Preminger boasted, seemingly unaware of how callous he sounded.28
Jean’s last day at Shepperton was March 15. Soon after, weary yet relieved, Jean returned to Marshalltown, which had never looked smaller or more provincial to her. She knew at once she could never again live at “home” and realized as well that the kind of conventional lives her high school friends were pursuing would never be available to her. Is it possible that during her monthlong stay in Marshalltown it occurred to Jean (and to her family as well) that having been chosen by Otto Preminger might not have been the luckiest moment of her life?
In mid-April Otto called her to New York for publicity. At the beginning of May he brought her to Paris, where, on May 12, as the crowning touch to the drumroll of publicity that had enveloped the project first to last, Preminger presented the world premiere of his film at the Paris Opéra.
The unrivaled splendor of the Palais Garnier and the assemblage of celebrities from show business, politics, fashion, and international business who paid a thousand dollars a seat to benefit the Polio Foundation transformed the premiere of Saint Joan into an event that surpassed any Hollywood opening. Appearing on the arm of her director, Jean was radiant in an aqua Givenchy evening dress that Preminger had presented to her as a gift. Although test screenings of the film in New York in April had evoked tepid reactions and tonight she would be facing the judgment of an international
tribunal, for the furiously clicking cameras Jean projected the poise of an acclaimed star. On this gala occasion she looked far less like Saint Joan than like a cosmopolitan young woman who embodied a new style, Gallic chic garnished with an all-American twist.
The applause at the end of the screening was lukewarm. But at the reception at Maxim’s later in the evening, Preminger, with a resplendent smile, personally greeted every single guest and behaved as if the premiere had been a triumph. The French critics, by and large, dismissed the film as a betrayal of a national heroine, and business on the Champs-Élysées was lackluster. Although he realized that the film would be likely to receive the same cool reception when it opened in America at the end of June, he proceeded to promote it with flair. He booked Jean on a grueling twenty-seven-day tour that included press conferences, photo sessions, radio and television interviews, and appearances at special promotions. The star of Saint Joan appeared frequently at downtown department stores and greeted the public on the steps of numerous city halls. Just before the American premiere, however, Preminger whisked Jean to London for the opening at the Odeon Leicester Square. The British reaction was also dispiriting, with critics complaining that Preminger and Graham Greene had not been sufficiently reverential toward Shaw.
From London Otto sent Jean to recuperate on the French Riviera and to begin to prepare for Bonjour Tristesse. When Saint Joan had its American premiere at the Orpheum Theater in her hometown on June 24, Jean was in Nice studying French, swimming, lingering over coffee in outdoor cafés, and acquiring a French boyfriend. Distracted by the easy life, and with the burdens of her instant celebrity lifted, Jean was all but immunized against the American reviews, which ranged from barely respectful to scorching. “Too often Jean Seberg looks as though she’d be more comfortable on a soda fountain stool,” Paul Beckley huffed in the New York Herald Tribune on June 27. “Skimpy,” “sketchy,” “not well-articulated,” and “a series of dissertations on an important theme” were typical complaints, though many reviews acknowledged that both the director and his star took command during the climactic trial sequence. Business was dismal, and after its first-run engagements—Preminger himself booked the film on a then-thriving art-house circuit; in Los Angeles, he opened Saint Joan at the Four Star, the upscale venue where The Moon Is Blue had premiered—the film never received a wide general release. A year after it opened, the worldwide grosses were less than $400,000, making Saint Joan Preminger’s first financial failure as an independent filmmaker. “What good are successes if you can’t have a failure once in a while?” he quipped, affecting a cavalier indifference he could not truly have felt.29 Preminger’s attempt to promote Saint Joan with the kind of showmanship befitting a Hollywood blockbuster seems, in retrospect, strangely but also endearingly naive, the most touching merger of idealism and commerce in the filmmaker’s career. How could he ever have imagined that his reasonably faithful adaptation of a dense, talky Shavian masterwork could ever have achieved popular acceptance?
Both at the time and ever after, Preminger defended Jean. “I think this girl has great talent, great poise,” he said in an interview in the New York Times on January 12, 1958, “and it would be unfair to blame her for the picture. Maybe it was just as much my fault. Maybe it was an error to try to make a movie out of Shaw.” “I made the mistake of taking a young, inexperienced girl and wanted her to be Saint Joan, which, of course, she wasn’t,” he told Jean’s biographer. “I didn’t help her to understand and act the part. Indeed, I deliberately prevented her, because I was determined that she should be completely unspoiled. I think the in
stinct was right, but now I would work with her for perhaps two years until she understood the part right through. Well, that was a big mistake, and I have nobody to blame but myself”30 In his autobiography, Preminger offered his final assessment: “Many people blamed Jean Seberg and her inexperience [for the failure of the film]. That is unfair. I alone am to blame.”31
Some of Preminger’s comments about Saint Joan after the fact revealed it wasn’t only Jean Seberg who had been overmatched by George Bernard Shaw. “I misunderstood something fundamental about Shaw’s play” Preminger said. “It is not a dramatization of the legend of Joan of Arc which is filled with emotion and religious passion. It is a deep but cool intellectual examination of the role religion plays in the history of man.”32 Saint Joan, to be sure, is a play of ideas, but it is not, as Preminger claimed, a “cool intellectual” exercise stripped of emotion. To the contrary, if it is interpreted properly—that is, according to the playwright’s intentions—turbulent emotions are released through the characters’ engagement with ideas. As Preminger didn’t fully grasp, the playwright’s great characters are great talkers for whom the play of language—discourse, debate, ratiocination—is deeply emotional, and sometimes, as it is with Joan, tinged with eroticism.
Although Preminger and Seberg were not equal to Shaw, their film does not deserve its outcast reputation. Even if the most zealous revisionist critic could not possibly rehabilitate the film as an overlooked masterpiece, it is far from being a disgrace. Enriched by Georges Périnal’s ravishing yet realistic black-and-white cinematography; Mischa Spoliansky’s distinguished score, a contemporary interpretation of medieval motifs with a plangent central theme; and Saul Bass’s elegant title sequence, in which ringing bells are transformed into a truncated torso of Joan wielding a sword, Preminger’s condensed, Reader’s Digest version of Shaw’s play is a flawed, courageous American art film of its era.
Yes, Jean Seberg lacks the technical and emotional resources to embody, in all its theatrical majesty, the variegated character Shaw conceived. Hers is an unfinished performance, a sampling. In many fundamental ways, however, she gave her director exactly the Maid he had in mind: a vulnerable figure thwarted by manipulative representatives of church and state whom she cannot understand; a religious naïf whose girlishness is graced with a budding sensuality. The qualities in Shaw’s conception that Preminger himself did not seem fully to believe in—Joan’s genius as a military leader and as a public orator, the assertiveness that enabled an illiterate teenager to alter the destiny of France—are the ones either missing or deficiently represented.
Under Preminger’s guidance, Seberg gives a performance carefully crafted for the camera rather than the proscenium. Rather than a mannish stage diva galloping through the part on her high horse trilling lines with technical bravura, Jean is a deeply feminine young woman who approaches Shaw in a fresh, unaffected way. Her Maid of Orléans, as Shaw intended, is decidedly not unsexed. When she smiles at the sympathetic Brother Martin or teases the childlike Dauphin, she is distinctly fetching—a charming warrior-saint. With lingering traces of her Midwestern roots, Jean speaks in a light, splintery voice which takes on a lyrical lilt in all the soft moments, as for instance when Joan talks of her saints who tell her what to do, or when she recalls her country home. But her voice and body language do not project the “born boss” Shaw describes in his preface. When in the early scenes she must make demands of a gruff soldier or convince the court of the truth of her voices, she lacks the authority that a genuine born boss like her director would be able to summon as if by divine right.
Preminger presents Jean cautiously. “Here is the chosen one; what do you think?” he seems to be saying to the audience as he photographs Jean primarily in neutral long takes, not for a moment trying to protect her or to amplify her work with editing, lighting, or camera movement. He presents Jean’s big scene at the end of the trial, for instance, in a single uninterrupted take. He does provide a lovely entrance for his discovery, however. In the opening scene Joan appears first in shadow, standing by the sleeping Dauphin like a spectral figure emerging from his dream. After a beat, she steps into the light.
Finally, the ordeal of Jean Seberg is an indelible part of her performance. In the conclusion of the trial sequence, in which Joan is plunged into uncertainty, first recanting and then ultimately denying her recantation, Jean, no doubt drawing on her own terror and giving everything she has to give, performs with enormous commitment, her body and voice trembling. The moment is thrilling and it is possible, after all, to see why Preminger cast Jean Seberg, and what he saw in her.
As a producer, Preminger came on like a carnival barker, bristling with bluster and braggadocio, but as a director of Shaw he proceeds in his usual subdued way. He is a scrupulous, perhaps even intimidated, Shavian caretaker who honors the word more than the image. But he is of course showman enough to provide periodic visual grace notes—brief respites from the wordplay. He offers a striking opening image of the Dauphin’s castle reflected in a lake, painterly pastoral shots of Joan on her journey to see the Dauphin, and occasional high-angle shots of Joan cowering in her cell. With Reinhardt-like authority he stages the one fully articulated action sequence in the film, the burning at the stake, shot on the largest sound stage in Europe with a cast of 1,500 screaming, pummeling witnesses seized by an almost sexual frenzy at the prospect of Joan’s imminent death. His handling of the coronation and of the siege of Orléans, however, is curiously perfunctory. He shoots the coronation less for pageantry than for physical comedy, with the Dauphin struggling with his massive robes. And a long shot of Joan leading the siege of Orléans is an elaborate visual appetizer for a battle sequence that does not take place.
Sometimes, Preminger is self-effacing to a fault. In the play there is a rousing moment at the end of scene two, when Joan has been charged with leading the army against the English invaders. “Suddenly flashing out her sword as she divines that her moment has come,” as Shaw writes, Joan cries out in triumph, “Who is for God and his maid? Who is for Orléans with me?” The character’s ecstasy demands a response from the medium, a bit of cinematic bravura—a burst of triumphal music, perhaps, a heroic camera movement, or a dramatic shift in lighting. Refusing to permit the film to do any “acting” of its own, Preminger keeps the camera at a neutral distance from Joan. His static shot of the Maid as she tentatively raises her sword and Seberg’s shaky whispering of lines that ought to ring with the weight of destiny defuse Shaw’s theatrical thunder.
In the trial scenes, however, Preminger’s conservatism yields many dividends. He ordered a week of rehearsals for the sequence, which he then shot over an intense two-week period. Fifty actors appear in the scenes, all without makeup and many wearing bald wigs. Quite unlike Carl Dreyer’s montage editing in The Trial of Joan of Arc, which separates Joan in isolating one-shots, Preminger in dispassionate, eye-level compositions often keeps the Maid and her prosecutors within the same spatial frame. Avoiding disfiguring low angles and providing only a few close-ups of Joan, he presents the trial objectively in a series of deep-focus long shots. The visual balance underscores the equality of both sides in the Shavian debate (“there are no villains in the piece,” as Shaw warned in his preface) and puts the emphasis in the right place—on Shaw’s dialogue.
Saint Joan, the most honorable failure in Preminger’s career, lost money and damaged the prestige he had accumulated as an independent filmmaker with three hits in a row. Would he and Jean Seberg bring each other better fortune on their next venture?
When midway through Saint Joan Preminger informed Jean that she was to star in Bonjour Tristesse, the project had already had a complicated history. In 1954, before publication and with no awareness of the success her little story was to achieve, Sagan had sold the rights to a French producer, Ray Ventura, for ten thousand dollars. A year later, early in 1955, when the book was selling briskly in twelve countries, had appeared on the New York Times best-seller lists for an astonishing t
hirty-eight weeks, and had sold over 1,300,000 copies in paperback, Preminger bought the rights from Ventura for a sum ten times what Ventura had paid the author. Otto’s initial plan was to extract a double dividend from his catch—before turning it into a film, he would first present Bonjour Tristesse as a play On August 5, 1955, he signed S. N. Behrman (whose favorite subject was the manners of the out-of-sight rich) to adapt the novel into both a play and a screenplay. Preminger announced that he would produce and direct Bonjour Tristesse on Broadway during the 1955–56 season and then shoot Behrman’s screenplay on location in the summer of 1956. No further word about the play ever appeared, but in the late winter and early spring of 1956, as he was preparing his search for Saint Joan, Preminger worked with Behrman on a screenplay. On April 6, the two sailed to France on the Liberté. From April 23 to May 10 Preminger served on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival and then joined Behrman in Antibes to continue to work on the script that he expected to shoot in July and August. As it happened, Otto didn’t shoot Bonjour Tristesse until the summer of 1957, and the screenplay was not by Behrman but another man of the theater, Arthur Laurents, the author of two successful plays and several screenplays, including Rope (directed by Alfred Hitchcock) and Anastasia.
Preminger was drawn to Sagan’s story of Cécile, an amoral young woman with an incestuous attachment to her father who indirectly causes the death of a rival for her father’s love. He admired Sagan’s casual attitude toward the rituals of the sweet life on the Riviera as well as her seductive evocations of landscape and weather. Arthur Laurents, however, did not share Preminger’s enthusiasm. “When I read Sagan’s book in French, I thought it was a hot fudge sundae that might well become a best seller, but I also thought it was a trick, and indeed it turned out to be her fifteen minutes,” Laurents recalled. “When I met her, I thought she was cultivating an attitude. She was pretending to be jaded, which she was too young to be. She was of the moment—it was chic to be depraved at that moment—and at the time she was taken seriously. A lesbian who lived a very fast life, she was quite unattractive, and that always helps to be taken seriously”33
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