As an ideologue Preminger may be a once-over-lightly generalist, but as the firmly in-command master of ceremonies of a particular kind of spacious and stately film spectacle, he is without an equal. On the cusp of being passé in 1963, Preminger’s brand of showmanship can now be fully savored as nostalgia. Judged on its own, albeit shallow terms, this quirky, straight-faced, visually majestic, reserved-seat epic is one of the triumphs of Otto Preminger’s career.
FIFTEEN
Location/Location
After launching The Cardinal in its road-show engagements, Otto was sitting pretty. In February the film received six Academy Award nominations, including a Best Director nod to Preminger. In March he signed a lucrative three-picture deal with Paramount, his terms a solid 15 percent plus participation in the profits. In addition, two films remained on his agreement with Columbia, and he had a commitment with United Artists for two distribution deals. With solid ties to three major studios, Preminger enjoyed a virtually unrivaled vote of confidence from industry financiers and distributors. He was an independent producer who had managed to insulate himself against the convulsions of the poststudio era. And despite his preeminence and the royalist trappings of his bearing and his office, anyone could make an appointment to see him or could reach him by phone. His voice rising and falling in rivulets of alternating frolic and ferocity, Otto not only answered all his calls, he just as readily made them. Many are those with visions of Hollywood glory who can attest to the memorable occasion when they answered their phones to hear a friendly, booming voice announcing, “This is Otto Preminger calling.”
Throughout the spring Preminger worked with Wendell Mayes trying to extract a scenario from In Harm’s Way, a long, episodic novel by James Bassett, a syndicated columnist for the New York Times who had been Nixon’s campaign manager for the 1956 and 1960 elections and during World War II had been a press aide to Admiral William F. Halsey. Once again, as in Exodus, Preminger chose a story that unfolds against a seething historical canvas—In Harm’s Way is set in Hawaii in 1941 just before and immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And once again, as in The Cardinal, he was interested in exploring the inner workings of a monolithic institution, in this instance the United States Navy.
“Nobody but Otto would have dealt with the Navy as he did,” claimed Mayes, who accompanied Preminger to a meeting at the Pentagon with eight Navy admirals. As Mayes observed, the filmmaker presented himself not as a supplicant needing favors but as a potentate accustomed to issuing demands.
Otto said he needed a destroyer and he needed a cruiser, and he wanted them out at sea. But the Admirals we met with wouldn’t cooperate until we agreed to make changes in the script. [Given Preminger’s firm policy of keeping his scripts under wraps, it’s unlikely any of the admirals had actually read or seen a script; their concerns were probably based on material in the novel.] Because they were worried about recruiting, they didn’t want certain things told to the public, for example that the officers of the Navy are human beings with human failings. They definitely didn’t want the leading man to have an affair without being married. Otto, of course, was prepared for this. He said he would not make a single change, and he added, “If you won’t give me what I want, I am prepared to hire the Brazilian Navy. They will give me a cruiser that was built in the United States, a destroyer built in the United States, and I won’t need you. And all they are asking is $500,000.” Well, there was dead silence around the table. “Mr. Preminger, let us think about this,” the Admiral in charge said. The next day he called to say, “Mr. Preminger, we will give you what you want.” Now Otto was not bluffing; he really was going to hire the Brazilian Navy1
Because Preminger, of course, wanted to shoot on location, in the actual places where the events had taken place, he and Lyle Wheeler, his veteran production designer, along with the trusted Eva Monley made several trips to Hawaii in advance of his June 24 starting date. Over three months in advance of shooting, Eva Monley set up a command post in a new wing of the Ilikai Hotel in Honolulu that included a production office, an art department, a costume department, and makeup facilities. On Otto’s orders she booked everyone who would be working on the film into the best rooms in the hotel. Monley also lined up two real Navy ships, the USS St. Pauland the USS Philip, and commandeered three Matson Line ships as well as a fleet of air freighters that would bring personnel, supplies, and equipment to the location.
Although there were to be only two brief battle scenes—the attack that begins the film, and at the end a battle between American and Japanese ships at Leyte Gulf, the first major sea clash of World War II—both required extensive preparation. In setting up the shots for the Japanese attack, Preminger had to guarantee that he would not disrupt Navy routine or cost taxpayers any money, and following shooting he would have to return all Navy facilities to their former state as quickly as possible. As Preminger quipped, “The Japanese had it easier because, unlike me, they didn’t care about American taxpayers.”2 Preparations for the Leyte Gulf encounter required over two months of research and a special effects crew to build ships. This was not to be a battle fought by actual ships, but rather a fiberglass flotilla scaled three-quarter inch to the foot. Preminger insisted nonetheless that all external details, down to the last rivet, were to be authentic. When completed, the fleet was trucked 2,500 miles to a shallow bay on the Gulf of Mexico where a crew of forty spent one month and one million dollars to film a battle that was to take only five minutes of the film’s 165-minute running time.
As Mayes was finishing the script and Monley was preparing Honolulu for the arrival of the crew, “Admiral Preminger,” as the filmmaker was called by naval officers who recognized the logistical problems of getting Hawaii camera-ready rounded up his cast. “The script wasn’t finished, but I got all my first choices by simply showing them the book and on my say-so,” he boasted.3 The three leads—John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Patricia Neal— were newcomers to the Preminger fold, but among the large supporting cast were such veterans as Burgess Meredith, Franchot Tone, Henry Fonda, and Jill Haworth. Preminger offered a part to Dana Andrews, who had been struggling with alcoholism for years and unable to work. “Otto, who hated scenery chewers, always appreciated Dana’s underplaying, and in the Fox days had also liked him very much personally,” Hope recalled. “He had only a short part for Dana, but was delighted that he accepted, and when Dana showed up in Hawaii looking fit and healthy Otto was so pleased.” Amazingly, Preminger also hired Tom Tryon for a major supporting role. “Otto had Tom under contract,” as Hope pointed out, “and if Tom had refused the role he would have been in breach of contract. No matter what he might have felt, Tom behaved beautifully.
“Everyone, including Otto, liked Tom, and everyone was rooting for him,” Hope said. “Tom and I were very friendly and I tried hard to put him at his ease. But he was nervous on the set and had trouble getting his lines out. Tom had a certain formality, and also a certain weakness. When you got any kind of emotion on his face it was because he was about ready to cry”4 “Tom went out of his way to avoid any contact off the set with Preminger,” Jill Haworth remembered. “But a problem developed. After Tom had been in Hawaii for nearly two months he had a great tan; then when he wasn’t needed, he went away for a few weeks—he certainly wasn’t going to be around Preminger any longer than he had to be. But when he returned he no longer had his tan and was white as a sheet. Preminger, a stickler for continuity, was upset but he did not explode.”5
Tryon was spared, but Paula Prentiss, cast as his wife, was not. “Paula was a wonderful actress, light and airy, and she had a lot of pizzazz,” Tryon commented. “When we were shooting in San Francisco, in what was our characters’ apartment, Otto started in on her and I thought, ‘Oh, Jesus, Otto, don’t.’ It was only the second or third day of shooting and he was zinging it to her for no reason. Paula took it as long as she could and then she blew. And I mean she blew and Otto sidled over to me, as if for protection.”6 A seco
nd eruption occurred during a scene in which Prentiss is told that her character’s husband is missing in action. Added pressure was on the actress because Preminger wanted to shoot the scene in one take rather than cut to a close-up reaction shot. “Paula got so flustered she couldn’t remember her lines,” Hope said. “At one point, she yelled ‘Cut!’ which is not the actor’s choice. An actor should never say that to any director, least of all Otto! Paula also had a propensity to ad-lib—also not a good idea when Otto is your director. Many, many takes were required and Paula, who was very conscientious and eager to get the scene right, would stamp her foot. She didn’t realize until after the scene was over that she’d broken her ankle.”7 Unable to walk, she was taken to a hospital. Rumors circulated on the set that an enraged Preminger had kicked the actress, but Preminger’s attacks were never physical.
“Paula and Tom would huddle together yakking about how terrible Otto was,” co-star Patrick O’Neal recalled. “It got to be a big bore. I told them, ‘If your life means anything to you, you’ll stand up to him once and find out he’s a human being.’ Everybody who says they hate Otto Preminger hate him because they won’t fight back. There are two groups of actors. One needs to be browbeaten—and Preminger can smell them a mile off. He knows if you’re frightened and he can’t cope with it. The other group—I’m one—fight back and Otto respects me for it.”8
Preminger had no problems at all with his two leads, John Wayne and Patricia Neal. Because Wayne was ideally cast as an officer who disobeys orders during the Pearl Harbor attack and must fight his way back to a position of authority, there was no need to get in his way. “John Wayne and Otto agreed not to discuss politics,” Hope pointed out. “They had completely opposite views, and as Otto said, they were both too old to change and wouldn’t succeed in converting each other, so why bother? They played chess instead, and they were both good: very competitive.”9
With Neal as with Wayne, Otto was strictly hands off.
Look, I was right for the part of the nurse [an earth mother cut from solid rock] and Otto didn’t have to tell me much. I had had instructions from a real nurse and besides, I have good instincts. For actors, Otto was not the best. But he did one thing for us that really helped: there were no sets, everything was real, and that made a difference in how the actors felt.
His screaming bothered me, but I didn’t dare say anything: I was only an actress, after all. But he never screamed at me, because after winning the Oscar for Hud in 1963 I had become a star, and Otto was always great to stars. He was also the most generous producer I ever worked for, and he was divine to my family and me. I was pregnant at the time we went to Honolulu, and he put up Roald [Dahl, Neal’s husband] and me and our three children and two nurses at a fabulous hotel. We were beautifully cared for, and all at Otto’s expense. He would call regularly to find out if everything was all right.
(Preminger’s kindness toward Neal, whom he had dated briefly in Hollywood in the early 1950s, continued after the film was completed. In March 1965, after the actress suffered a series of massive strokes, Preminger wanted to start a fund that would support her for the rest of her life. “Thank God I didn’t need the fund, but I remember his concern. I appreciated it then, and I appreciate it now.”)10
As in his other location shoots, Preminger believed it was part of his job to charm the locals. He persuaded a Honolulu paper to assign a journalist to write a daily feature on the making of the film, and during the eleven weeks of shooting Hawaiians were regaled with anecdotes of the production. “We went to lots of parties,” Eva Monley said, “and Otto hosted lots of galas.” And, as Variety reported on August 26, 1964, “Hawaii filming got international publicity via Preminger’s timeworn but ever-effective technique of flying in selected journalists and columnists from Europe as well as the U.S. mainland to watch various phases of shooting.”
Preminger completed principal photography on September 3, eleven days ahead of schedule and well under his original budget of $5.5 million. A few weeks before the film’s premiere on April 6, 1965, he held press conferences and hosted luncheons and dinners for American and foreign journalists. This time, nobody was up in arms; no group had been offended. “The only thing I was asked to delete was the word ‘screw,’ and I told them I thought it preferable to another word that the navy officer would probably use. They let it remain,” Preminger reported.11 To his surprise, Japanese exhibitors voiced no objections, and he signed contracts for In Harm’s Way to open in Japan in August.
The film received mixed reviews. “Strikingly dramatic,” enthused Kate Cameron in the New York Daily News. “The kind of movie that probably hasn’t been made since Pearl Harbor,” Judith Crist, guns blazing as always in Otto’s direction, wrote in the New York Herald Tribune. In the New York Post, Archer Winsten cited two performances for “absolute economy of means coupled with beautiful projection of feeling, those of Paula Prentiss and Tom Tryon as the young couple who survive a great deal of suspense.”
For the film’s out-of-competition screening as the opening event of the Cannes Film Festival on May 12, Preminger orchestrated a hootenanny He gathered one hundred critics in London and booked them on a chartered plane to Nice, where he had them taken on a private bus with a specially installed bar to the Carlton Hotel. At the hotel, both before and after the screening he served them caviar and champagne of the finest quality. For the after-screening soirée he flew in Diahann Carroll from Los Angeles to entertain the troops. The cost of this Otto special was $25,000, a staggering sum at the time. “You can’t force a critic to like a film, but you can try to create the conditions that might make him well disposed,” wrote Leonard Moseley of the London Daily Express, one of Preminger’s hundred guests. Despite (or perhaps because of?) Preminger’s hospitality, for the most part the reviews, and later the European box office, were lukewarm.
“It is not really a war picture,” Preminger claimed in his press conferences at Cannes. And in the same sense that The Cardinal is not a religious film and Advise and Consent is not a political film, the statement is accurate. Measured by battle scenes, which after all are the set pieces by which the genre defines itself, the film comes up short. The inciting incident, the attack on Pearl Harbor, is more or less presented in one long, packed master shot, and viewers expecting a traditional action scene must wait over two hours. But there, too, war film fans are likely to be disappointed, as the climactic naval battle is shot in a perfunctory way and by today’s standards the special effects are crude.
In In Harms Way, Preminger presents the attack on Pearl Harbor in one long, roving, deep-focus shot.
Hardly unexpectedly, battle scenes hold little interest for Preminger. More surprising, however, is his apparent indifference to the political and historical significance of Pearl Harbor. The film offers so little context or point of view about the attack or about World War II that the story could be taking place in almost any war. The Japanese are an absent presence, glimpsed only once, in long shot, to the accompaniment of “Oriental” music. Of the European theater of the war or of the Nazis there is no mention at all. Preminger’s focus is on military process: how the Navy conducts its business, enforces its rules, punishes offenders, and rewards heroes. As a result, the real catalyst in the film is not the attack on Pearl Harbor but the response to the attack of Captain Rockwell Torrey (John Wayne), the sturdily named hero. Because the captain (the “Rock”) disregards orders by leading what turns out to be an unsuccessful sea attack against the invaders, he is demoted to a desk job. In this melodrama of male redemption, in which Preminger’s concern is with how Torrey regains his place within the
Patricia Neal as the earth-mother nurse tending to the wounded hero (John Wayne) in the last shot of In Harms Way.
naval hierarchy, the “enemy” isn’t the Japanese so much as it is Torrey’s adversaries in the military who try to block his comeback.
Like Stephen Fermoyle in The Cardinal, Rockwell Torrey learns how to curb a streak of defiance in order t
o be able to function within the system; and like the priest, by the end rock-solid Torrey becomes an ideal company man. A sincere (if far from hip) tribute to the Navy and to military preparedness, In Harm’s Way is the work of a filmmaker who first to last was an American patriot. “War does not necessarily make animals out of men,” Preminger claimed in a pre-opening interview. “They can also make great friends and by having to defend themselves become gallant and courageous and inventive. When attacked you do not become hysterical and give up. The film tells how a handful of Americans reacted to attack without the necessary weapons but with courage and decisive action. People don’t become bad in war, they become stronger, more resourceful, braver. I don’t say that in the picture, I try to show it.”12
As in The Cardinal, scenes of arrival and departure display the director’s Viennese attraction to the trappings of protocol. But throughout there are curious dry spots, scenes of groups of men in anonymous rooms examining maps and discussing military strategy. Clearly, battleships and Quonset huts don’t have the same allure for Preminger as the marmoreal Senate in Advise and Consent or the palatial rooms in which the officers of the Catholic church conduct their affairs in The Cardinal. His occasionally flaccid direction is contrasted by Saul Bass’s dynamic end titles set against crashing waves, which, along with Jerry Goldsmith’s stirring exit music, prefigure the battles the American armed forces will have to wage before victory over the Axis enemy can be claimed.
The least commanding work of Preminger’s epic phase, In Harm’s Way is also the warmest. The director presents the relationships between John Wayne and Patricia Neal, and between Wayne and Brandon de Wilde as his estranged son (was Otto thinking again of his own “estranged” son, Erik?), without his customary detachment. Significantly, he ends with a close-up rather than his usual long shot—of the nurse giving Torrey who has been wounded in action, a benevolent, protective smile. In Harm’s Way “reads” like an engrossing, plot-heavy work of popular fiction, a lending library favorite.
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