A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 39
CHARLIE
You mean you want to marry her?
JOE
You wouldn't have said it that way if I were white!
CHARLIE
What the hell are you talking about?
JOE
Look at you! It's all over your face!
CHARLIE
Have you gone crazy?
JOE
What burns you is that you lost her to me!
CHARLIE
Is that what you think?
JOE
It's not what I think! It's what I know. It makes you sick to your stomach! Look at your face!
Joe's wrong-as wrong as Othello in his unjustified accusations of Desdemona. Charlie confronts him honestly. Joe is blind to the truth. He's going away.
CHARLIE
Will it do any good if I talk?
JOE
Nope.
CHARLIE
Even if you went off half-cocked?
JOE
I'm not scouting for an apology.
CHARLIE
Apologize for what? I apologize when I'm wrong-not when you put words in my mouth!
JOE
You're wasting your time.
CHARLIE
Joe, you threw me off guard when you told me about Chris. Maybe there was a look on my face. A look of hate-normal, healthy, jealous hate! Look at me, Joe! You know me better than anybody else. I'm even carrying a pint of your blood inside me, remember?
JOE
Never missed it.
CHARLIE
Glad it's not a piece of your brain muscle! When are you turning your badge in?
JOE
Soon as the chief gets to his office.
CHARLIE
The case isn't closed yet.
JOE
Mine is.
They run down Sugar's murderer, a gal named Roma, who confesses with her dying breath that she was mistaken, and that she killed because she was jealous of her boyfriend without having proof he was cheating. Suddenly Joe understands his own misplaced aggression and poor judgment.
"Love is like a battlefield. Somebody has to get a bloody nose," con cludes Mac, my cigar-smoking female muralist on Skid Row. The part was played by the lovely Anna Lee, costumed to conceal her beauty and femininity.
Hell, history is full of little misunderstandings and imaginary demons, little bumps in the road that overturn the entire apple cart of human relationships. A bloody nose on Cleopatra could alter the course of history.
James Shigeta got the role of Joe. Shigeta had been a singer in Honolulu before getting a role in the smash Broadway musical The Flower Drum Song. Glenn Corbett got the part of Charlie, the white cop. For Christine, the woman they both fall in love with, I picked Victoria Shaw, an Australian actress I'd seen in George Sidney's film The Eddy Duchin Story (1956), in which Victoria played alongside Tyrone Power and Kim Novak. When I walked out of that formulaic movie, I thought more about Victoria's character, a sweet girl who takes care of children, than about the sexy one that Kim Novak played. I wanted a normal-looking yet classy actress to play the role of the white artist who falls for the Nisei. Victoria Shaw was poised and steady at all times, with Romy Schneider-like beauty. She was a far cry from the flaming-hot blondes who were so popular back then.
With James Shigeta and Victoria Shaw, my lovers in The Crimson Kimono, breaking worn-out Hollywood racial stereotypes that a white woman and a JapaneseAmerican couldn't get together
My opening shot was from a helicopter flying over Los Angeles at night. We had trouble getting permission to fly as low as I wanted, but we pulled it off. Another rough scene to shoot was when the stripper flees the burlesque house and gets shot on a downtown street. I had problems finding a stunt woman who'd actually run around the street half naked in heavy traffic. We finally found a large blond lady to do it. The passing cars weren't aware that we were using the street as a movie set. While we were shooting, the real cops showed up. Somebody had reported a woman running around in her underwear. They also reported a corpse, which is what she became at the end of the scene. By then, we had the scene in the can. When I looked at the rushes with Sam Briskin, we realized that nobodynot even a passing sailor or a homeless drunk-was paying any attention to the big, scantily clad gal running along that downtown street. Nobody gave a damn. "What the hell's wrong with this country?" asked Briskin.
To recreate the kendo sword fight and make all the action scenes look realistic, I hired a martial arts expert, George Okamura, to oversee the stunts. Okamura was a heavyset man who appears with Joe and Charlie in a fight scene in a pool hall. Okamura insisted that my actors actually hit him in that scene. They were reluctant, but when the cameras rolled, they really banged away. Okamura was right. The fight looked genuine. Hell, it was.
I wanted to get the kendo scene right because that sword fight sends an emotional message about Joe that's essential to my yarn. When Joe blows his stack and tries to beat up Charlie during the exhibition, he transgresses the protocol of a discipline whose basic rules have been developed over the last two thousand years of Japanese culture. He strikes out at his best friend and at the basic mores of his people. A person that far overboard is in terrible pain. Joe goes off the deep end and may never regain his balance. I wanted to show that the violence was directed as much at himself as at his buddy.
Upsetting the apple cart is fair game if you're striving to develop a character or underscore an emotion. In Run of the Arrow and Forty Guns, I'd broken plenty of rules to make characters more credible. And I'd do it again, as long as it gave my stories a fresh twist and allowed my characters to stay true to themselves.
We finished The Crimson Kimono on schedule and under budget. When Columbia released the movie, I was disappointed by the way they marketed it. They went against my express wishes and slanted the campaign with banner catch phrases such as "L.A. BY NIGHT" and "WHY DOES SHE CHOOSE A JAPANESE LOVER?" To me, the Los Angeles setting was of minor importance. My story could have taken place in Tallahassee in broad daylight. I was trying to develop original characters in an unusual story line. That's why I'd cast the picture with unknowns. Stars would have been less credible. I complained bitterly about how they'd cheapened the movie. I was told that, now that the film was finished, I should leave the marketing to them. The film was released as just another Hollywood "B" exploitation picture.
It didn't have to be that way. I still have two i96o reviews-printed side by side in the same issue of an English newspaper-of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and of The Crimson Kimono. The headline over both articles said "Los Angeles, Mon Amour." By sheer coincidence, both movies had been released about the same time. Both stories dealt with white women falling in love with Japanese men. Both reviews were extremely favorable, delving into similarities and contrasts between the two works. The writer treated both films with respect and intelligence, understanding all the themes I was hitting upon. He said very nice things about my film because he got it. When you are the sole author of the story as well as the director, you only have yourself to blame if your movie is misunderstood. On the other hand, when your film breaks through and speaks to people, maybe just one person next door or across an ocean, you feel deeply satisfied.
I didn't give a damn if The Crimson Kimono looked like one of my "minor" works. I was proud of the picture. Was I completely satisfied with it? Not really. One story, one script, one book, one film never really gives me complete satisfaction. Nor should it. All creative people must learn how to deal with the imperfect and the incomplete. There is no end in art. Every accomplishment is the dawn of the next challenge. The kismet of artists is to accept partial fulfillment. As I look back now, I know that I've only achieved a small slice of what I wanted to do. Not one of my films is all I'd hoped it would be. Still, the smile on my face is just as broad and grateful.
37~
Breathing Revenge
M y mother died in the spring of 1959, at the age of eighty-five. All my life, Rebecca Fuller
had been my greatest supporter. There's nothing to say when a man loses his mother. It's just a terrible emptiness. My marriage to Martha wasn't going well, and my mother's death sealed its fate. I wanted to move out of the big Hearst mansion with the servants to return to living more simply, to work on my stories in peace and pull myself back together. I decided to leave Martha the house and everything in it except for my Royal typewriter and the Mark Twain table that I'd bought from Twain's daughter, Clara.
Martha filed divorce papers against me for "mental cruelty." I okayed the whole thing. What difference what they called it? The relationship was finished. My lawyer said that I was completely nuts to leave her the house. He threatened to never talk to me again unless I asked for a fifty-fifty split. Nevertheless, I insisted on Martha keeping everything. I knew I could start again and wanted to make sure she was taken care of. I had no heart for a messy divorce settlement.
Through me, Martha met her next husband, Ray Harvey. Ray had been a highly decorated army officer during the war. He'd relocated to Hollywood and was then working for the studios as a "technical adviser." As a guarantee of authenticity, I'd hired Ray on Fixed Bayonets and Verboten! He'd been over to our house on many occasions. The three of us used to have good times together.
In the summer of 1959, I was finally on the brink of a multimilliondollar deal with Warner Brothers to write, direct, and produce The Big Red One. The picture would follow a gritty sergeant and his squad of dogfaces during the First Division's campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, and Europe. I'd amassed a thousand pages of action and dialogue and storyboarded most of the film in my head.
Jack Warner loved my yarn and lined up John Wayne to play the part of the sergeant. I wasn't crazy about the idea of Wayne doing the role, but I put my reservations aside for the time being. Warner coughed up the dough for a scouting trip for me to revisit all of the Big Red One's important battlefields. I decided to take Martha with me. It was our farewell voyage together. I also took Ray Harvey along with us. While I shot photos of locations, Ray drew up plans for the production's technical details, as he was going to be our liaison with the U.S. Army on the film.
It was during that trip to Europe and North Africa that Martha and Ray started to have serious feelings for each other. I wasn't going to stand in their way. When we came home, I moved into a modest place down in Hollywood, allowing Martha and Ray to take up life together. We all remained friends, which seemed bizarre to outsiders. People thought of me as an incorrigible eccentric for having changed lifestyles so drastically. I didn't give a damn what anybody thought, for I was too busy with preparations for the most important movie I'd ever make.
Richard Brooks and Dalton Trumbo advised me against doing The Big Red One with John Wayne. Their contention was that Wayne would succeed in shrinking my story from a dark struggle for survival and sanity into a patriotic adventure movie. I thought a lot about it and decided they were right. I couldn't risk having to compromise on that movie. When I told Jack Warner that I wanted someone else besides Wayne, the deal fizzled.
My mother's death, the divorce, and the suspension of The Big Red One all weighed heavily upon me. I became a solitary figure, not even socializing with my cherished writer friends or musician buddies. All I wanted was to be left alone so that I could absorb all the pain in my own way. Thankfully, there wasn't much time to mope, because I was working on dozens of ideas for movies. With the business being as crazy as it was, my next project came from Columbia, the studio that I'd had words with about the release of The Crimson Kimono. Despite my problems with them, they offered me another film with producer Ray Stark.
Ray wanted me to write and direct a movie based on a magazine article that he'd bought the rights to. The article, written by Boston newspaperman Joseph Dineen, talked about gangsters operating not only in Chicago and New York but also in other cities across the country, like Boston. Boston even had its equivalent of mob boss Al Capone. Stark loved the title of the aricle, "Underworld, U.S.A." And so did I.
The first gangster movie I ever saw was Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), with Clive Brook and George G. Bancroft. Ben Hecht won an Academy Award for that screenplay. The film defined the genre by its story and lighting, long before the elements became cliches. I wanted to go beyond classical gangster movies like Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) to talk about alienation and corruption, inspired more by Greek drama. I was also influenced by an excellent book entitled Here Is to Crime, by Riley Cooper, a newspaperman whose extensive research proved that crime in the United States really did pay. My take on Underworld, U.S.A., was to focus on a criminal who's a loner, a man whose entire motive for breathing is revenge. A loner cannot, by definition, be a "gangster." He or she never feels comfortable being a member of any group.
My relations with the studio boys started off on the wrong foot, right from the moment I let them read my first scene, a hell-raising opening that began with a close-up of a beautiful young woman's back, the camera rising on a crane to reveal more and more attractive women, scantily clad and positioned to form a map of the United States. Then one of the women begins a stirring speech about the new "Union of Prostitutes" that she explains is necessary for the advancement of their careers. Cab fares and laundry bills would be tax-deductible. Pimps would be outlawed. Prostitution is a job like any other, she says, and they want official recognition. Prostitution would always be part of the national economy, so why not unionize, set their own minimum wages, and get social security and retirement benefits, just like any other worker, male or female. As the woman concludes her glorious speech, the fat title comes up across the screen: UNDERWORLD, U.S.A.
The camera follows the rabble-rousing prostitute into a changing room. While she's getting dressed, the muzzle of a gun slips into her mouth and fires, exploding her head. The movie's titles and credits continue to roll. The other prostitutes run for their lives. One of them hooks up with my loner lead, implicating people very high on the social ladder in prostitution, rackets, and drug pushing.
Sam Briskin and other Columbia executives found my opening scene downright shocking. Hell, I was showing how crime had become part of the very fabric of our nation. How else could I present it if not in a shocking, almost lewd way? I'd done the research to prove that no region of our country was untouched. For cryin' out loud, crime was shocking! There I was face-to-face with Hollywood tastemakers, America's puritanical attitude from the fifties still deeply embedded in their brains. Briskin told me that my whole opening sequence had to go. It was too carnal, too brutal, to fly. Why not replace it with a voice-over narrative? I snapped back at him that if I couldn't show my ideas visually, why not make a radio show instead of a movie?
"Sam, your prostitute scene is too much," said Briskin.
"Okay," I said, not disturbed at all about refocusing my yarn. "Let's concentrate on my loner. The seed of a lifelong vendetta has been planted in his head long before, like Dumas and The Count of Monte Cristo. Maybe when he was just a kid."
"Yeah," said Briskin, "the public loves revenge."
"How about this: a little sonofabitch raised in the world of crime sees his father being murdered by gangsters. His father's only legacy to the kid is an obsession to take revenge on the murderers. The boy grows up and gets into crime, too. He concocts a scheme to use the United States government's own people to eliminate the men he wants dead."
"How's that?" asked Briskin, looking worried again.
"You know, federal prosecutors."
"You can't touch them, Sammy."
"Why not? I've already been in contact with the Department of Justice. Their people provided me with information. I've also spoken to Charles Anslinger."1
Briskin said it wasn't believable for my main character to be dealing directly with federal officials. I told him that it happens all the time. The idea was to show a criminal mind at work. My loner is slow at certain things that so-called "normal" people do rapidly, but he's ten miles ahead of the game for everything that
concerns his obsession with vengeance. Cold-bloodedly, he will use everyone he can, even the girl who's in love with him. Why not the Feds, too? If the audience understood that kind of obsession, they'd understand my lead character and the climate of my film.
"Do you have to mention the word `commission'?"
"Okay," I said. "I'll call them the `federal crime committee.' There's eight to ten highly intelligent lawyers working in an office, accumulating evidence on all sorts of criminal activities. But they're not as devious as my lead. When it comes to outsmarting people to get what he wants, he's as smart as Machiavelli's prince. He has only one thing in mind: getting even with the bastards who killed his father."
After a couple more rewrites, Briskin gave us the green light. The aspect of my yarn that finally convinced him was the idea of a son avenging the death of his father. In my final draft, we meet Tolly Devlin as a boy in the first scene of Underworld, U.S.A. He's already a street thief. Tolly and his surrogate mother, Sandy, see a man being beaten to death in a dark alley. It's Tolly's father, a small-time crook. Although he can finger one of the killers, a gangster named Farrar, the boy refuses to cooperate with the district attorney, Driscoll. Just a kid, Tolly already knows he wants to seek vengeance on his own terms.
Twenty years of crime later, Tolly, now played by Cliff Robertson, catches up with Farrar on his deathbed in a prison infirmary. Tolly tricks the dying old man into naming the other three killers, taunting him with forgiveness. The three killers, Smith, Gunther, and Gela, are part of a huge crime syndicate. Methodically, Tolly goes after them, one by one.