"Holy shit, Darryl!" I said. "Korea? I did that already. I don't want to think about Korea again."
"Yes, you do," said Zanuck. "Look, Sammy, the only guy who can make another movie as good as Steel Helmet is you. The other studios will turn out cheap imitations with no style. Your ego won't allow you to copy yourself."
I thought fast. Why talk myself out of directing a picture? I was married now and had a helluva lot more expenses.
"Okay," I said, "but I want to shoot the entire picture on one goddamned hill covered in snow."
Zanuck picked up his phone and called in the studio's set designers. The department head was Lyle Wheeler, who'd won, among many other awards, an Oscar, for Gone with the Wind. I sketched out the set I had in mind: an icy hill, a snow-banked trail, a cave on the side of a cliff.
"No problem," said Wheeler.
My ultimate concern about the new picture was that we were just making an overhaul of The Steel Helmet.
"Look, Sammy," said Zanuck, trying to reassure me, "we made a movie at Fox with Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara called The Immortal Sergeant in '42. John Stahl directed it, based on a John Brophy novel. Did you see it?"
"Yeah."
"Like it?"
"Yeah."
"Well, we own the rights. So we'll just say that your movie is based on Brophy's book."
"My story will be an original," I insisted. "Almost nothing will be lifted from that goddamned book."
"Who cares?" said Zanuck. "Only a few people in the industry will even notice, and they'll think we've been reworking the story over here. The point is that before anyone can copy Steel Helmet, you'll have another picture under your belt."
What dawned on me was the realization that I was now a small player in a very big game. Studios were in fierce competition with each other. In addition to his savviness about stories, Zanuck was a tough businessman. The studio bosses reminded me of newspaper publishers constantly trying to scoop one another.
I set to work writing a script for Darryl called Fixed Bayonets. It was about a small squad of soldiers sent to stall an enemy advance while their division pulls back from a snowy mountain region in North Korea. Of course, my yarn included stuff I'd lived through on the front lines, such as the risk of frostbite in freezing weather, an officer's misgivings about having to order his men into danger, and a soldier's fear about pulling the trigger.
"You take care of her," says one of my characters, looking at his Mi, "and she'll take care of you." I'd heard my sergeant say that again and again.
I threw in a crack about the controversy surrounding the Korean conflict.
"They told me this was going to be a police action," a soldier says to his buddy.
"So why didn't they send the cops?" the GI shoots back.
Somebody at Fox wanted to take out that exchange, afraid of possible repercussions from the McCarthy clowns. Zanuck came to my defense. My script would remain exactly as I wrote it. Darryl always stood up for the writer, because he'd been one himself.
People continued trying to pigeonhole me as a lefty or a righty, and my work as being liberal or conservative, projecting their own notions on me. I wouldn't let them affect my deeply held belief system. Peace and ethics were my beacons. I wanted to transcend the narrow political terms and emblems that imprison a creative person. McCarthyism had spawned a horrible climate of fear and suspicion. The blacklists, coercion, witch hunts, accusations, and self-imposed censorship were inadmissible in our democracy. It was execrable how artists felt compelled to label themselves as "left" or "right." I was deeply hurt by what was happening in America so soon after putting my life on the line to fight the fascists in Europe. All the venom and general hysteria at home seemed like just more fascism.
One of the most reactionary columnists of the period was George Sokolsky. I'd met Sokolsky several times, and we'd talked politics. Those were heated discussions, because I always tried to poke holes in his idiotic ideas about what was politically correct or incorrect. He'd listen to me because he considered me a war hero and above suspicion of being a lefty. I told Sokolsky to his face that he was full of bullshit.
Once at a brunch at Richard Brooks's house, I ran into Edward G. Robinson. I loved Robinson as an actor and had always wanted to work with him. He'd recently been crucified in one of Sokolsky's columns as having flirted with communism, a charge that at the time was tantamount to saying the actor had strangled his mother. Robinson confessed to us that he thought his career was over. For cryin' out loud, one of our greatest actors was being put out of action by a gossip-mongering newspaperman! I phoned around until I found Sokolsky. He was in some meeting at the Ambassador Hotel. He took my call. I didn't go into what I thought of his shitty journalistic standards, publishing destructive hearsay without ever having talked with Robinson himself. I told the sonofabitch that he had to meet Robinson, write a new column, and apologize for the false charges. Sokolsky hesitated. I threatened that I was going to get some of my Big Red One pals together from the war and pay the bastard a visit to discuss politics. I told him to stay on the line and got Robinson to pick up the phone. Right then and there, Sokolsky and Robinson made an appointment for a face-to-face interview. Subsequently, an apology appeared.
Another time, 1 was at a well-known Hollywood hangout having a drink with Dalton Trumbo. A reactionary sonofabitch named MacColly stood near us. He'd asked me, after my reception for Stevenson, if he could use my house for some kind of right-wing political meeting. I refused. MacColly started insulting Dalton at the bar, goading him into a fight. Despite my war experience, I don't consider myself a violent person. But don't push me, goddamnit! This creep MacColly really got me angry. Like in a saloon scene from a Wayne Western, I picked up a whiskey bottle from the bar and waved it in front of the sonofabitch's face. Maybe the little coward's aggression toward Trumbo was meant for me. I told MacColly that I was going to shove the bottle down his throat if he didn't shut up. He shut up.
The fact remained that many intellectuals like my friend Trumbo were attracted to communism. I couldn't understand why. Hell, communism was nothing new. Our very own Pilgrims who'd arrived on the Mayflower in 162o agreed on a "communistic" compact, that the same amount of farmland would be given to all members of the community. They were soon embroiled in disputes. Selfishness and greed pushed them to want more terrain. Filching it from their neighbors was the next natural step. Fighting broke out. Marxist theories were similarly utopian.
Stalin's working model was totally abusive, though few realized it yet. I found out about what was going on in Russia thanks to an old newspaper pal, Walter Duranty, who'd been a correspondent in Moscow for twentyfive years. Walter had sent me his fascinating 1937 book called One Life, One Kopeck, describing in detail a harsh system gone haywire, the widespread repression of the people, the churches that had been transformed into prisons, the lands that were confiscated by the government, the forced labor, the killings. The title of Duranty's book was a rough translation of a Russian proverb that literally meant life isn't worth a shit.
What good was a movement that espoused great ideals while abusing the human rights of its own people? Hitler and Mussolini had tried to pull off that trick. Now Stalin and his regime were taking the same murderous approach. I lived to see the day when everyone finally recognized the terrible truth about Stalin.
Hollywood was a microcosm where the turbulence of those times surfaced frequently. I vividly remember the now-famous meeting of the Director's Guild of America when Cecil B. DeMille was trying to unseat Joe Mankiewicz as president. In those years, the president of the DGA was an important spokesman for all filmmakers in Hollywood. The vote was a clarion call to take a stand in that tense period of reprisal and repression. Two Hollywood goliaths faced off for the post. DeMille was one of the pillars of the industry, having made movies for over forty years, ever since The Squaw Man, in 1914, one of the first films ever shot in Hollywood. Mankiewicz was an eminence grise, having written and directed a score of
intelligent pictures since the late twenties, among them the formidable All About Eve (1950).
The DGA election was a rambunctious gathering of independentthinking people. Directors got up and made fiery speeches in favor of Mankiewicz, considered a lefty, and DeMille, as conservative as they came. Insults and barbed quips were yelled across the room. Then, John Ford rose to his feet like a towering volcano about to erupt. Everybody shut up. All eyes turned toward the big man with the black eye patch.
"My name is Jack Ford, and I make Westerns," he began. "We owe Cecil a lot."
It was a fact, said Ford, that DeMille had been the one who'd first made the public aware of the importance of the director in moviemaking. Before Cecil, people only talked about pictures in terms of their stars. A wave of panic washed across the "liberal" directors who backed Mankiewicz for the president's job. What was Ford up to? How could he support DeMille? Jack was standing only a few feet away from Cecil, determined to speak his mind face-to-face.
"But I don't like Cecil's politics," Ford concluded. "So I'm voting for Joe. The rest of you can do what the hell you want."
Rouben Mamoulian, director of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, gave one of the many moving speeches that day. "You were all born in the United States," he said. "But I chose to live in this country. This country didn't choose me. Now that I live and work here, I want Joe Mankiewicz to be president of our guild."
For ethical reasons, not political ones, I voted for Mankiewicz and against DeMille that day. DeMille called himself a patriot, then insisted that all directors sign a moronic loyalty oath. What bullshit! It was contrary to our country's foundations. DeMille was an elitist. For Chrissakes, there is nothing elitist about our very own Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Production of Fixed Bayonets got under way in the summer of 1951. We shot the movie in twenty days, twice as much time as I'd ever had on a movie set. For my lead, Corporal Denno, an officer who panics in the heat of battle and loses control, I cast Richard Basehart. He wasn't a big star, but just who I wanted. He'd go on to play opposite Guilietta Masina in Fellini's masterpiece La Strada (1954). Basehart's character was unheard of in war movies, but I knew officers goofed up because I'd seen it firsthand. Corporal Denno is ambivalent about why he's even in the army. I had a GI asking Corporal Denno about his reasons for being a soldier. "That's something I've been trying to figure out for a long, long time," he replies.
Even though he wouldn't tamper with my script, Zanuck thought lines like that one would get me into hot water with the Pentagon again. I firmly believed that the only way to honor GIs at war was by showing the truth. There's nothing romantic about the infantry. If you survive, you'll be proud of having been a foot soldier until the day you die. As it turned out, the army would request permission to show Fixed Bayonets to soldiers in their own training schools.
The popular misconception was that professional soldiers signed up for idealistic motives. The truth was that most men joined the army because they needed a roof over their heads or they craved a medal to impress the girls they wanted to marry or they had no career designs other than letting Uncle Sam decide for them. The military has always been a catchall. In Stendhal's The Red and the Black (1830), there were only two honorable choices for young men of that era, the black-the priesthood-or the red-the military.
Since Gene Evans had brought me luck with The Steel Helmet, I wrote the part of Sergeant Rock for him in Fixed Bayonets and made sure that he was paid well for it. Gene's best scene was the one with bullets ricocheting all around a cave where his squad is hunkered down. When a soldier fires at you in the field, you know more or less where the bullet is going. But if the enemy shoots at you in a cave, no one knows where the bullet is going to end up. What you think is a well-protected
On Lyle Wbeeler'sgreatset for Fixed Bayonets, my dogfaces get their marching orders. One of those boys was a young actor named James Dean, in his first movie role. My heartgoes out to any infcentyman in any army in the world. Wars are started by politicians, orchestrated by generals, but fouglit by soldiers on the ground.
position becomes a death trap. I wanted the movie's cave to feel like an agonizing prison, dangerous inside and out. Its usefulness against the enemy and the cold is short lived. The soldiers must move on. By doing so, they risk death.
One of the truths about human existence is the struggle to be free of boundaries, real or emotional. Almost all my movies touch on that idea in one way or another. We emerge from a mother's womb and end up in a box at death. In my later movies, there'd be social prisons to escape from, like O'Meara's defeated Confederacy, in Run of the Arrow (1957), or Kelly's big-city prostitution, in The Naked Kiss (1964). In White Dog (1982), a dog tries to escape from the prison of its conditioning. I like turning the tables, too. In Shock Corridor (1963), Johnny Barrett volunteers to be locked up in an insane asylum to crack a murder, then can't ever escape.
To convey the isolation in Fixed Bayonets, a soldier yells out, "Who goes there?," and all he hears is his own voice echoing over and over. The actor we cast for that part was a young, sensitive kid in his first movie, James Dean. Dean had just come out to Hollywood to find work after having studied at the Actor's Studio. I liked his face and gave him a crack. I hoped it would bring him luck.
The primary motive for all action in Fixed Bayonets, as in all my war movies, is survival, not heroism. I wanted to underscore the futility of battle and the tragic human waste. In one scene, I have the sergeant goad a soldier into firing his M1 by saying: "Shoot, for Chrissakes! I'm not asking you to kill eight. But at least one or two." A bullet cost five cents in those days. Every dogface had eight bullets in his rifle's magazine. The sergeant is just doing his job, asking to get something for the army's investment, which means a nickel a life, eight lives for forty cents. I was goading audiences to understand war's senseless cheapening of human life.
There were two big openings for my first studio film. One was in New York, at the Rivoli, and one was in Hollywood, at Grauman's Chinese. Charles Einfield, head of worldwide publicity at Fox back then, sent me to New York for the East Coast premiere, part of some military benefit. When I got off the plane, I had one of the happiest surprises of my entire life. A dozen reporters I'd worked with in the old days on Park Row showed up at the airport to greet me. I was overwhelmed by their warm welcome. After the screening of Fixed Bayonets, we had a raucous dinner at Toots Shot's place, like in the old days, with an abundance of steaks and vodka. I don't know how I got back to my hotel that night.
Fixed Bayonets did solid box office for Fox. Zanuck was proud of the movie. He told me that the studio was investing the film's profits in a new invention by Frenchman Henri Chretien, the "anamorphic" lens, key to the new process of CinemaScope. Darryl wanted me to shoot my next movie in the new format.
I had other ideas for my next project. I longed to make Park Row, finally shooting a movie about the men and women who worked on that wonderful street. All my love and respect for newspapers would go into it. The real hero would be our nation's freedom of the press. I was willing to take a big gamble for my love song to American journalism. And to get Park Row produced, I'd have to.
The New York opening of Fixed Bayonets had a marching band and a helluva lot of army brass, plus a large contingent of my pals from the old days as a reporter. I had a great time that night.
27
A Little
Black-and-White
Picture
One day, Zanuck joined me in a screening room at Fox to watch rushes from Fixed Bayonets. I was carrying my 9-mm Luger, a war souvenir, which I fired to cue actors and crew. When the lights came up, Darryl questioned me about the ricochet scene in Fixed Bayonets. Did bullets really bounce around a cave like that, shrieking like a banshee? I looked around the screening
room's cement walls, then pulled my Luger out of its holster.
"A hundred cigars says it's exactly that way."
"You're on," said Zanuck, looking at the pistol. "It's loaded?"
I took some real bullets out of a leather pouch on my belt and replaced the blanks in the Luger's clip.
"Now it is," I said as I handed the Luger to Darryl.
"All right," he said, chuckling. "Let's see."
He fired a couple of rounds with the Luger. The bullets went zinging around the cement walls. Bang! Bing! Bang! The echo was deafening. The shots continued to resound for a long moment. We both started laughing uncontrollably. Lucky neither of us was hit!
It was a perfect moment to bring up Park Row again with Darryl. My script for the movie was done, written with the hope that Fox would finance the project. I'd never stopped thinking or talking about the famous street in lower Manhattan between the Bowery and Brooklyn Bridge where American journalism was born. Zanuck shared my enthusiasm for the story but wanted major changes, beginning with the title.
"We made a film here with Tyrone Power in 1938 called In Old Chicago," he explained to me. "Very successful. Sam, forget your title. Nobody's ever heard of Park Row. We'll call the picture In Old New York."
"Impossible," I said. "It's got to be Park Row, goddamnit!"
"What actor do you want to play your editor?"
"Gene Evans."
"Evans? What? For the lead? Never."
"He promised me he'd lose thirty pounds."
"Look, Sam, your script is terrific," said Zanuck, shaking his head as he puffed on his nicotine-free cigar. "But your hero is in love with a linotype machine. The audience won't get it. We need stars. We need color. We need CinemaScope. Here's what we do. We cast Greg Peck as your crusading editor. Then we get Susan Hayward as the love interest. Or maybe Ava Gardner. Dan Dailey can play the guy who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge. Mitzi Gaynor can be the barmaid. We write some songs and make it as a musical!"
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 29