A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 37
My next films would delve deeper into the problems of misguided youth. In Forty Guns (1957), the heavy is the heroine's punk brother, a rotten, trigger-happy teenager. In Verboten! (1959), a violent gang corrupts an impressionable adolescent. In Underworld, U.S.A. (1960), a boy nourished on hate avenges his father's murder.
Each society has its own way of taming young people so they won't destroy themselves and can mature into useful citizens. By focusing on bad boys, I wanted to thank my mentors for helping me stay on the high road. I was lucky. At critical moments in my life, role models like Arthur Brisbane, Gene Fowler, Terry Allen, George Taylor, Herbert Brenon, and John Ford took me under their wings and kept me from derailing, showing me how to be a mensch.
Economic conditions in my youth had a lot to do with my attitude today. I feel sorry for today's affluent kids who don't have to strive for anything. When I was growing up, my family had very modest resources. My mother needed my financial help. There was no hardworking daddy or rich uncle to keep food on our table. I couldn't afford to be a rebel. There's nothing like work to make teenage bums into responsible adults.
In Forty Guns, the juvenile delinquent theme is a subplot intended to enhance the dominant nature of my lead, Jessica Drummond. The first time we see Jessica, she's dressed in black, riding her white stallion across Cochise County followed by forty men on forty horses. It's the 188os, and this powerful gal owns those guys just like she owns most everything else in two-bit Tombstone, Arizona. Her one weak spot is for her punk brother, Brock, who shoots up the town just for fun. Brock gets arrested by a stranger, Griff Bonnell, who's on his way to California with his two brothers, Wes and Chico. Thanks to his big sister's influence, the good-fornothing Brock is released from jail.
Griff is a retired gunman, having forsworn his previous life as a marshal, a "legal killer." He and Jessica are drawn to one another, their passion finally exploding during a violent storm. Sheriff Ned Logan, who's not only on Jessica's payroll but also in her bed at night, is afraid Griff will expose the town's corruption. Jessica has no more use for Logan. She writes him a check and gets rid of him. Men do that all the time to women, but when Jessica does it, Logan's male pride is so wounded that he hangs himself.
Stanwyck had what I wanted for the part of Jessica Drummond in Forty Guns. Besides, she was ready to do whatever you needed, even if it meant falling off her horse and being dragged along the ground.
Griff's brother Wes, marrying a local gal, is murdered by Brock at his own wedding. That bullet changes everyone's destiny. It pushes Griff over the edge. He hasn't touched a gun in a decade. He's reconditioned himself to shun the destructive power of guns. He taught Wes never to use a gun except for self-defense. Now he must exact justice for Wes's killing.
See, one goddamned bullet has always been decisive, from Sarajevo to Dallas. There are no more alibis with a bullet. Conventions, treaties, all good efforts, all bullshit! Phony! What really determines the beginning and the end of every conflict since the invention of gunpowder is the trajectory of one bullet.
Griff arrests Brock for his brother's murder and throws him back in jail, causing an angry rift with Jessica. When Jessica goes to visit her brother, Brock grabs her and uses her as a human shield to make a break for it. The final confrontation in Forty Guns has Brock taunting Griff, holding Jessica as protection, screaming, "Let's see you shoot her!" Brock knows Griff loves his sister and surely won't shoot a woman. He's wrong. Griff plugs Jessica in the leg and, as she slides to the ground, empties his pistol into the bastard brother. Brock sinks to his knees, screaming, "I'm killed, Mr. Bonnell, I'm killed!" Griff strides past Jessica, muttering to a bystander, "Get a doctor. She'll live."
Griff doesn't kill Brock out of vengeance. He's eliminating a cancer that's terrorizing the community. But he's disgusted with himself. By resorting to guns, Griff sees the last ten years vanish in a flash, as he becomes the killer he'd renounced.
My original script had Griff killing both Jessica and her brother, stepping over their corpses in a daze, throwing his gun down-this time for good-and walking up the dusty street without a pause. Nothing and no one exists for Griff anymore.
The End.
That version ran into trouble at the studio. Zanuck loved it, but his marketing people said they couldn't sell a Western where the hero kills the heroine. I told them that that was my story. The moment my hero picks up a gun again, he's honest, he knows he's going to kill. And he hates the killer in himself.
Fox's marketing people insisted that movie bookers and theater owners would never play a film like that. I was in a strange creative dead end. For Chrissakes, my gunman had to think about box-office receipts before he decided to pull the trigger! Zanuck asked me to come up with something different, so I changed the ending to suit the studio people. Griff only wounds Jessica, making sure that her life isn't in danger. We tacked on a closing scene with Griff riding a wagon out of town. Now fully recovered, no longer wearing black leather but a frilly white dress, Jessica runs after him.
I wanted Forty Guns to be a different kind of Western, as good as the trail-blazing movies that had inspired me: King Victor's Duel in the Sun (1946), Anthony Mann's The Furies (1950), and Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954)
My story hinged on America's pervasive fascination with guns. Hell if I know why people think guns are sexy. I cooked up a helluva lot of sexual metaphors playing with the idea. A couple flirts as assorted weapons in a gun-shop window shadow their faces. Wes looks at his future bride down the barrel of a rifle. A woman is "built like a 40-40." Jessica describes a man as "everything with two feet and a gun." When Griff starts flirting with Jessica, the sexual tension goes through the roof. Facing Griff across the dining table, Jessica asks him if she can feel his gun. He replies, "Uhuh, it might go off in your face." Hell, the movie's stuffed with phalluses!
Guns in movies are fantasy objects. In real life, there are just too many guns and too many violent people who have access to them. The argument that our Constitution gives everyone the right to carry guns is stupid. It was written in 1789, when we were afraid that the British might return and we'd have to fight again for our independence. The situation is crazy today, and something clear-cut must be done to keep the tools of violence away from destructive people, especially youngsters. We must teach our children tolerance and forgiveness, not how to resort to guns. If films like Forty Guns serve any greater purpose at all-and who the hell can say if they do!-it's to show how inhumane and fruitless violence is.
A wonderful cast came together, with Barbara Stanwyck playing Jessica, Barry Sullivan as Griff, Dean Jagger as Sheriff Logan, John Ericson as Brock, and Gene Barry as Wes. Not long before we were to begin production of Forty Guns, I was working late at my office when Marilyn Monroe dropped in to say hello. She was wearing one of her big woolen sweaters and carrying a fat Dostoyevsky novel. She'd heard that Stanwyck was playing my heroine. Monroe asked me why I didn't let her read for the role. I told her that it would have been a comedy if she did the picture.
"But why?" asked Marilyn.
GriJf (Barry Sullivan) pays a call on Jessica (Barbara Stanwyck) at dinnertime with her guns. "Fox's great set designer, Lyle Wheeler, retooled Tara, the famous plantation from Gone with the Wind, to become the Drummonds' extraordinary ranch house.
I summarized my story, cutting to the chase. My forty guns were forty pricks. My powerful heroine had her way in the sack with all forty, then cast them aside for the forty-first "gun," Griff. Monroe's wholesomeness wouldn't have been believable, her innocence out of place, and, finally, just funny. Marilyn listened and nodded thoughtfully. There was nothing phony about her. I told her I'd love to work with her and promised I'd keep looking for a part for her.
Monroe was a wonderful person. I'd always hold her in esteem because she was gracious enough to accept a blind date with my brother Ving. In the early fifties, Ving came out to the West Coast for a visit and asked me to fix him up for a night on the town. Marilyn happily agreed
to my request. When Marilyn Monroe showed up, Ving's mouth dropped open. Marilyn and Ving had a good time, dining and dancing at some swank place. My brother treated her with respect. She spent a pleasant evening with a normal guy without once talking about show business. She told me she was happy when she could be just a normal gal.
We had a very short shooting schedule on Forty Guns, so there wasn't much time for retakes. My cameraman, Joe Biroc, moved quickly from one setup to the next. We made most of the picture on Fox's back lot in the studio's Western town, a set that had already served as backdrop for hundreds of frontier movies. To convey the power and dominion of the Drummond clan in Tombstone, I wanted to shoot a scene from one end of Main Street to the other in one take. It was complicated, because the camera had to move all the way up the entire length of the set. We'd tried using the big Chapman crane, but the road was too rough, and the camera bounced all over the place.
So I had about fifty men come in and lay track all the way down the street-over a thousand feet of it-to have a smooth run for our dolly. We rehearsed a little, then we shot the scene, actors coming and going, greeting each other, the camera constantly moving up the street following a man on his way to the post office to send a telegram. At the corner, he walks past forty men sitting on forty horses, waiting for their boss. Jessica shows up, jumps up on her white stallion, and rides off, her forty horsemen galloping away behind her.
In this early scene from Forty Guns, we dollied the camera up the entire length of Foxs frontier street on specially laid tracks. It was the longest dolly shot in the history of the studio.
We got it in one take. I wanted the whole thing to look unstaged, dust and all. Joe Biroc had never shot a scene like that one, and he joked that he never wanted to do anything like it again. When those forty-one horses flew by him and the camera, only a couple of feet from his head, he said he was too scared to bat an eyelash.
For the long outdoor shots, we went up into one of those arid California valleys with unbroken vistas. Stanwyck insisted on doing all her own horseback scenes out there, even the stunt shots. The most dangerous one was when Jessica has to fall off her saddle in a violent dust storm and be dragged along the ground by her horse, one foot in the stirrup.
When Gene Fowler Jr., my editor on the picture, heard that Stanwyck was going to do the falling-off-the-horse scene, he confronted me in the cutting room.
"You're out of your mind, Sammy!" he said.
"Why?"
"What if something happens? The horse could step on her face. The picture isn't nearly finished. You've still got a lot of days to go with her. She's a big star."
"Well, nothing's going to happen. Barbara said she wanted to do it, and that's that," I said, ending the discussion.
Not only did Stanwyck do the stunt, she did it over and over. Because of technical problems, we had to reshoot the damned scene three times. You couldn't believe the dust storm we concocted. It was ferocious. We brought in an extra wind machine and threw in bags of stuff called Fuller's Earth, a brand of cement. I liked the wild effect it created. But the crap didn't feel too good in your mouth and your eyes, especially when they whipped it up to about eighty miles an hour. Barbara was a little bruised at the end of that day, but she never murmured a word of complaint. What a trooper!
They showed Forty Guns at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland a few years ago as part of a tribute. There were two thousand spectators in the Piazza Grande. On the big screen, you could see the tiny veins in the necks of those galloping horses. That's how close Joe Biroc's camera was in that dolly shot. To see the film projected on that size screen was really exciting. For the festivalgoers, they subtitled the picture in French and Italian. Whatever language they spoke, everybody understood Jessica's passionate, forceful character. Several women came running up to me afterward and said Forty Guns was "the most feminist movie" they'd ever seen.
I think the poet Petrarch claimed that a woman had to have some masculine qualities to seduce a man. Griff falls for Jessica because she's one powerful lady. Forty Guns is not only about strength. It's about modesty, too. Jessica rides in on a horse followed by forty men, but, at the end, she's on foot, running after the guy she loves. Her power is just as great, but it's been altered by love, forgiveness, and humility. Griff killed her brother, wounding her in the process, but she forgives him.
"You have to be big to forgive," says Griff.
Of all the articles and reviews that have been written over the years about Forty Guns, the one I most appreciated was a French writer's fascination with the way my gunman walks toward his adversary. I was intent on getting that right, that rhythmical, stalking gait as he relentlessly closes in on his victim. The Indians perfected that stride. It required patience and timing. You can see Griff using his entire body to do "the walk."
For the showdown, I had Joe Biroc set up his camera behind Griff as his remaining brother, Chico, carefully moves into place at a window to cover him. When Griff captures the eye of his adversary, he's out of danger. The guy's as good as dead because he's in a death trap. See, real gunmen in the Old West never walked down the middle of some dusty frontier street like you see in the movies. They moved in stealthily, like a mongoose closes in on a cobra. They always-always!-had an accomplice hidden somewhere behind a window or a door aiming at the victim's back. It was usually that guy who did the killing. Professional gunmen wanted to live a long life and put their victims away quick. That way they could collect the bounties-their paychecks-at the end of every month. Go out west and look at the tombstones of marshals, sheriffs, and other paid killers, as I have. Compare the dates after "b." and "d." Those guys died late in life, probably asleep in their beds, not in a heroic gunfight with a badman.
With Forty Guns, I'd really hit my stride. I considered it one of my best efforts so far. Sure, there were some compromises-like the ending-but it came pretty close to my original vision. At the time, very few people were given the opportunity to write, produce, and direct their own movies. In France in the sixties, they'd call it cinema d'auteur. Maybe after the New Wave boys had blazed a trail, filmmakers expected independence. But in America in the fifties, it was very tough to maintain that kind of autonomy unless you financed your own pictures. It would get even tougher in the decades to come. One of my inspirations was Joseph Mankiewicz, the great writer-producer-director. Joe encouraged me to never stop fighting for my personal vision in Hollywood. He'd fought some hard battles himself in the forty years he'd been in the business. Joe was suspicious of any project that needed five screenwriters. He would puff on his pipe, shake his head and say, "Sam, too many cooks spoil the brew."
Stanwyck was a helluva gal.
For my next picture, I felt like a chef making a hardy soup-blending together postwar Germany, Beethoven, Wagner, unrepentant Nazis, and the Nuremberg war trials into a forceful yarn I'd call Verboten.! German for "forbidden."
35 i
I Used My Own
Voice
L ong before I went to war against Germany, I was fascinated with German culture. As a young man, I was deeply moved by Goethe's Faust. I still have a cherished edition of Heinrich Heine's Germany, A Winter's Tale. When I listened to Beethoven, I got a million images in my head, a million ideas for stories. Other composers didn't have that cosmic effect on me. It was like one mountain calling to another, one ocean inviting another to join it. Beethoven made the blood rush through my veins. In his sweeping symphonies, I heard echoes of real people I'd known and voices of imaginary characters.
Beethoven was even in my dreams. At night, he showed up to reassure me, as if we were of one family. He came to me in nightmares, too, with harsh words. Shaking his big mane of hair, he'd say, "Go and write your stories, Fuller, but please, please, don't touch my music." I remembered lying in the desert in Tunisia during the war dreaming I could hear Beethoven. Then Axis Sally started singing "Lili Marleen" on Nazi loudspeakers. "Lili Marleen" was a gorgeous song, but it was used as propaganda, promoting fascis
t lies and doom. Beethoven wrote life-giving music, opening doors, not locking them.
In the late thirties, I wanted to do a movie based on the life of Herman Ullstein, the German press magnate who'd opposed Hitler and was destroyed by the Nazis. I talked to the actor Albert Basserman about playing Ullstein. War seemed imminent, and no studio was in the mood to make a movie about a German who was anti-Hitler. For Hollywood, every German was a Nazi.
Thanks to my war experiences, I'd learned firsthand that every German was not a Nazi. Still, the studios shied away from any picture dealing with contemporary Germany. Americans had been overwhelmed with images of the Holocaust, proof of Hitler's monstrous Final Solution. The public couldn't empathize with German civilians who'd been caught up in the Nazi madness. If they didn't wear swastikas, went popular opinion, then they all looked the other way during Hitler's reign.
I showed William Dozier at RKO my script for Verboten set in postWar Germany. Dozier thought it was a good story, honest but risky. If I could shoot the picture fast on a tight budget, he'd green-light it. Bill was worried about my scene at the Nuremberg trials where I have my characters in the back of the courtroom watching the proceedings.
"How are you going to make it look authentic?" asked Dozier.
"I'm going to use war footage and actual film taken at the trials," I told him.
"How can you get that material, Sam?"
"The war stuff, from military friends in Washington. The Nuremberg stuff, from Ray Kellogg, my special-effects man. Ray was a cameraman at Nuremberg. He gave me twenty reels of 16-mm, black-and-white footage he shot at the proceedings."
I have few regrets about my life, but one of them concerns the Nuremberg trials. Behind each Nazi prisoner at Nuremberg was a guard. Those guards were soldiers from my outfit, the Big Red One. The military was screening candidates for that assignment when I went off to Paris to visit my brother Ray. I'd already promised him that I'd meet him in Paris, and there was no way in hell I'd let him down. But what a missed opportunity. I could've watched the Nuremberg trials in person.