The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  At which point, Stewart went off to war (he was underweight and had to cheat his way in). He flew bomber missions over Germany and rose to the rank of colonel, with decorations. But at the end of the war, he had a crisis, if not a breakdown, because of the stress. He came back a little heavier, with gray in his hair and more sadness in his eyes.

  He was not sure what to do. “Frank [Capra] really saved my career,” he would say. “I don’t know whether I would have made it after the war if it hadn’t been for Frank. It wasn’t just a case of picking up where you’d left off, because it’s not that kind of a business. It was over four and a half years that I’d been completely away from anything that had to do with the movies. Then one day [he] called me and said he had an idea for a movie.”

  That idea was George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, a man presented with an ultimate gamble: to live or die, to keep Bedford Falls intact or let it turn into Pottersville. At the time, the public wasn’t bowled over, but history knows better. George Bailey is at the heart of the Jimmy Stewart legend, as a savings-and-loan manager dedicated to his hometown and identified with Christmas. It is an enchanting myth, even if Pottersvilles have won the bet in so many ruined places in America.

  In truth, Stewart was more of a businessman. But when he came back from the U.S. Army Air Forces he found himself without an agent. His old handler, Leland Hayward (who had been married to Margaret Sullavan—it was a small world; she had married Henry Fonda, too), was going into theatrical production. Hayward’s future was Mister Roberts (1955) and South Pacific (1958), on Broadway. So Stewart moved over to another stable.

  Louis, or Lew, Wasserman was born in Cleveland in 1913, the son of a bookbinder from Russia. At the age of twelve he got a job selling candy in movie theaters and he was on the edge of the city’s Mayfield Road gang as a wistful onlooker. As he grew up he became an agent in the local music business, joining Jules Stein, who had founded the Music Corporation of America (MCA). It was in 1940, seeking to grow, that Stein sent Wasserman to Hollywood, where he had no clients as yet. Things developed, and Wasserman is the most important show business arranger this book has yet touched. The MCA client list grew, because Wasserman had seen that the role of agents was changing.

  Agents were fringe figures once, kept around to agree with their clients and to process paperwork. Those tasks abide, but Myron Selznick had altered the nature of the job. He was an older brother to David Selznick, and a son to Lewis J. Selznick, a big shot in the early picture business until he went broke. Myron longed to make good on his dad’s name and he was a tough businessman. As sound arrived, Myron saw a way to take some of the talents (actors, writers, and directors) and demand higher salaries as their contracts came up for renewal. He loved to insult and exploit the studios. But a contract generally lasted seven years, with set increases, so the agent didn’t have a lot to do. Myron was a savage alcoholic and he died in 1944 at the age of forty-five. Leland Hayward inherited some of his clients and a lot of his methodology, including the realization that if actors became corporations and reported profits instead of income, their tax bill could be greatly reduced.

  Wasserman was the heir to this scheme. He also saw that in postwar Hollywood, with studios looking to cut back on contracts, a few top stars had exceptional bargaining power. So he talked Stewart into not renewing at M-G-M, and he encouraged the actor to go independent. Stewart was smart enough to understand that prospect, though not every performer could have overcome the insecurity of being out on his own. The actor said he was doing it all for Frank Capra (and It’s a Wonderful Life had a problematic budget, ending up over $2.3 million), but he did it for $200,000, more than Capra’s salary.

  Wasserman got him $300,000 for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). And then Universal approached Stewart and asked if he would do two films for them: Harvey and Winchester ’73. Harvey was a play by Mary Chase that opened on Broadway in November 1944 about an eccentric, Elwood Dowd, who has as his best friend a life-size white rabbit (named Harvey) that nobody else can see. It was a gentle version of the doppelgänger theme. Frank Fay introduced the role of Dowd, but then Stewart took over and had considerable personal success. Talking to a rabbit, he could be as ruminative as he liked.

  Winchester ’73 was a Western, about a prized Winchester repeater rifle that changes hands several times, as if it were the ball in a game of roulette. For a time, Fritz Lang had worked on a script for it, but that had been dropped. The studio still liked the idea. Wasserman asked for $200,000 for each film, which was not out of line with Stewart’s current value. But Universal was alarmed. By then the trend in audience decline was emerging. They liked Stewart. They thought Harvey was a natural, and Winchester ’73 appealed because it was about a gun. But they didn’t like the fee.

  In consultation with Stewart, Wasserman proposed that Stewart do the two pictures for nothing up front, but he would be in for 50 percent of the profits, granted that “profits” was a variable blessing that meant what was left over after the studio had applied the film’s costs, an overhead, a distribution fee, and anything else they could think of. There are still people waiting for “profits” from movies the world regards as hits. But Stewart told Wasserman to take the gamble.

  Stewart could have looked like a chump, a man talking to imaginary creatures. The studio believed they couldn’t lose. Harvey the play had run for 1,775 performances and is still revived onstage. But maybe everyone interested had seen it already. The film did not do well, which doesn’t mean Stewart fans don’t treasure it. Winchester ’73 was another story. Anthony Mann directed it in black and white, with a script from Borden Chase that saw Stewart winning the rifle in a shooting contest (presided over by Wyatt Earp), then losing it. The rifle passes through many hands: his evil stepbrother (Stephen McNally), an Indian chief (Rock Hudson), a sly trader (John McIntire), a coward (Charles Drake), and a raffish gunman (Dan Duryea). It is a brisk adventure Western, and Stewart has that hard edge that would distinguish him in the 1950s in a string of other Westerns made with Mann: Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954), The Man from Laramie (1955).

  Winchester ’73 took in over $2 million, and when the profits were dealt out, Stewart had $600,000. The first lesson was that star actors might be profit-earning businesses, or even their own production companies. Profit participation was not unknown before 1950, but it was rare, and when it happened it was often kept quiet. On most of our classic movies, the actors lived for years and decades without a residual dollar from their success. On Gone With the Wind, Clark Gable got $4,500 a week with a bonus of $16,666, and Vivien Leigh was paid $20,000. But there was nothing for them after that in the decades of Wind’s revenue.

  Another lesson was that the Western was viable as it had not been before. There had been B picture Westerns and star figures such as Tom Mix and William S. Hart. John Ford had made Westerns, Stagecoach (1939) and his cavalry pictures, and, in the late 1940s, Duel in the Sun and Red River had done well at the box office. But the Western of the cold war era was a stern moral genre, about honor and justice and duty. It seemed capable of producing important pictures that turned on American resolve. There was a martial undertone, and guns were potent. Think of the scene where Shane teaches the boy Joey what a gun is, and of his final use of that gun to protect the farming community.

  The Western was more violent now: the scene in the salt flats in The Man from Laramie in which Stewart is shot in the hand as undue punishment is still shocking. Righteous violence was a force in such films, and there were several that celebrated weapons: Colt .45 (1950, with Randolph Scott), Springfield Rifle (1952, with Gary Cooper), Carbine Williams (1952, Stewart again), Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns and Run of the Arrow (both 1957). These Westerns have an unequivocal sense of enemy, white or red, and that racial tension leads to Ford’s The Searchers, where John Wayne sets out on a mission to find and eliminate the niece who has been taken away and “married” by a Comanche chief.

  Meanwhile,
Lew Wasserman sat in his office, wearing the black suit and tie that became the uniform for his growing staff, and doing more and more deals. One observer reported that MCA thrived because of Lew’s drive and because “they were great tax people…They would show a star how to save more of what he earned than anybody else in the world could.” That was how the agency broke down the reluctance among many actors to do television in the 1950s—a superiority that lingers even if it leaves a few big-screen loyalists looking very isolated.

  One of the clients at MCA was an actor who had made some routine Westerns without much success. He was hard up; he had an ex-wife and two kids and a new wife. He needed a job. He was not important enough to command Wasserman’s attention. But he had his own subagent, Arthur Park, who managed to get him $125,000 a year (a big lift) to host a TV anthology series. The advertisers took him on because he seemed “a good upright kind of person,” and the stories to be told were subsidiary to the company image: General Electric Theater—it was a title worthy of Marshall McLuhan as a description of television itself and our role as “consumers.” The actor was Ronald Reagan, though he was shifting over from actor to personality. The profit participation would come later, in 1966, when Reagan got another part, as governor of California.

  No one thought From Here to Eternity could be made. James Jones’s novel had appeared in 1951 and been a best seller (five hundred thousand copies in hardback in the United States). That prompted thoughts of a film, but Jones then had “ruined” the plans with a timid treatment intimidated by censorship. In his version, the officer’s wife (the Deborah Kerr role eventually) was made his sister, the officer was a decent guy, and there was no real criticism of the army (The only person who criticized the U.S. Army at that time was Senator Joseph McCarthy, and it ruined him.)

  Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, had paid $85,000 for the film rights, and he was worried. “The New York office was laughing at him. “It was the typical gesture of a gambler,” said Fred Zinnemann. Then a screenwriter named Daniel Taradash said he believed he could lick it. He deleted the bad language, he simplified the book, and went for the core of what Jones had been scared to try. It wasn’t easy or quick. As Taradash said, “Cohn always liked to talk primarily to the writers, and his whole method was to irritate you, ask the same thing over and over until he drove you to the wall. When he saw you were about to attack him physically, he said, all right, go ahead, do it, because he knew you really believed in it. But that can drive you crazy after six months.”

  Taradash and the assigned director, Fred Zinnemann, were following a path Frank Capra had charted with Cohn. But the film became a model of what the old system could do when inspired by the thought that times were changing. Hollywood was crazy about doing anything that had never been done before; it’s a restlessness it learned from audiences. From Here to Eternity was an 800-page novel done in 118 minutes for the screen. The bad language was cleared away. The sex was almost eliminated—though the film would be famous for a love scene between Kerr and Burt Lancaster sprawled in the surf on an Oahu beach that was a model of sexual suggestion (and “splendor”) before censorship cracked apart. (It was good for tourism, too.) The film was cleverly and luckily cast: Lancaster was an emerging figure in the early 1950s; Deborah Kerr took over when the first choice, Joan Crawford, got fussy and afraid over how she would look—Kerr had the charm of a “nice” girl turning dark; that sweetheart Donna Reed (the loving wife in It’s a Wonderful Life) was cast as the coded whore; Frank Sinatra got the vivid role of Private Maggio, not thanks to underworld pressures but because first choice Eli Wallach was committed to a Broadway play (Camino Real, by Tennessee Williams); and the central character, Prewitt—a rough, rural, rather dumb kid in the book—was made adorable through the beautiful and valiant figure of Montgomery Clift. Cohn had wanted to use his star-in-development Aldo Ray—better casting for the novel, but a potential downer for the movie. Clift was an “elevated” actor; he made Prew accessible to millions who would have hated to join the army.

  So here was a film opening only weeks after armistice in the Korean War, critical of army codes, with two failed love stories and the death of two heroes, leaving Pearl Harbor in tatters and without a hint of revenge, and it was an immense success. On a budget of $1.65 million, it earned U.S. rentals of over $12.0 million. And Taradash had an unprecedented deal of 2.5 percent profit participation—“I believe they went with it because they thought it would never happen.” The film was nominated for thirteen Oscars and it won eight (it tied Gone With the Wind). Even James Jones thought it “immensely fine.”

  Manny Farber was grudging but alert about the film in The Nation. He admitted it was a “fourteen-carat entertainment,” and he thought Sinatra was the discovery as an actor, just as Donna Reed excelled unexpectedly when the camera “uses a hard light on her somewhat bitter features.” The trouble for Farber was “that it is too entertaining for a film in which the love affairs flounder, one sweet guy is beaten to death, and a man of high principles is mistaken for a saboteur and killed on a golf course.” He had a point: even the downer elements are given a high gloss. At the conclusion, when Kerr and Reed meet on the ship sailing home from Hawaii, it is with a note of being older and wiser, not quite destroyed. We fear they may go home to be “better women.”

  Farber felt the persona of Marlon Brando lurking behind the film. Clift was four years older than Brando, but they were both from Omaha, Nebraska. They were handsome, very talented, and they owed some allegiance to the director Elia Kazan and the influence of the Actors Studio that Kazan had helped found in 1947 (with Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis). They shared something else, not just as new faces, but in carrying themselves with a wary unease that was new to the screen. In some cases they could have swapped parts: Brando might have been Prewitt; Clift could have done Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954)—but Clift could not have handled Stanley in Streetcar (1951), just as Brando would have overwhelmed Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun (1951).

  Acting was on the public mind in the early 1950s. It was close to being a subject in itself, and that can’t be just because professional actors in America were going through their stylistic revolution, the Method. It had to do with the way the public was becoming more interested in acting as a variant on ordinary behavior.

  Both Clift and Brando had a romantic yearning, but Clift liked to think well of himself, whereas Brando was ready for any depth of darkness or confusion. There was something else: Clift was gay or bisexual (though the public had no knowledge of that—it was part of movie romance that gayness was as alien as TV), and Brando was not. Clift seemed like a man who wanted to be a movie star. But Brando resisted that hopefulness. Clift never holds back from the alchemy of the film that is making Prewitt saintly and emblematic; Brando yearns to keep Terry Malloy rough or stupid, despite Kazan’s unstoppable urge to identify with his own hero, and Brando’s innate grasp on elegance. Of course, it is rash to rule out self-love in any actor. That’s the shine that gets people noticed and chosen. But cast your mind forward, to Last Tango in Paris (1972), and you can feel the drive of self-disgust in Brando and the likelihood that this exceptional guy might one day despair of doing the thing he was made for.

  Still, On the Waterfront is a landmark for Brando and his director. Elia Kazan (or Kazanjoglou) was born in Constantinople in 1909. He was brought to New York when he was four, and he would remain a self-conscious outsider and a determined American. He was bright enough to go to Williams College, where as a poor kid he regarded rich WASP girls with hostility and lust. Homely in his looks, he was an attractive demon and an immense womanizer who could also conjure up fraternal relationships with male actors. He is one of the most interesting men who ever made movies, and probably more intriguing than his pictures.

  He was an actor and a general assistant with the Group Theatre in the 1930s, and for a year and a bit he was a Communist in the way many creative young people were, though he resented the Party for its secrecy and b
ureaucratic controls. Kazan believed in himself as being uncontrollable. By the 1940s he was directing onstage: he cast Clift in The Skin of Our Teeth (1943) and helped discover Brando for a small but eye-catching role in Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café. Then, in the late 1940s, he directed the two great plays of the era, A Streetcar Named Desire (with Brando and Jessica Tandy) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (with Lee J. Cobb).

  It was out of this period that the Actors Studio emerged, affected by the writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky and the experience of the Group Theatre, but rooted in a belief that American acting deserved to come into its own. There was a notion that this country’s acting had been unduly influenced by English approaches—so that it was too smooth, eloquent, and effete. This is a travesty of the range of English acting, but it was borne out in the way many people had acted in movies in the 1930s. The cultural shock of war, the arousing films of neorealism—all those things required acting that felt more real, that was based in a way of finding the character in the actor’s own experience or sense memory (sometimes with the help of psychoanalysis). That “real behavior” was not meant to be eloquent or polished; it was rough, awkward, and inarticulate, but it was “honest”—or so the claim was made. Though this began as a theatrical revolution, it had the most impact at the movies—nearly all the Method actors ended up in Hollywood, for the close-up agonizing encouraged by the Method was begging for the camera.