A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 40
First, he rescues Cuddles, a syndicate moll, and convinces her to rat on Smith for another murder she saw him commit. Then Tolly gets a job inside the syndicate, cutting a deal with Driscoll, now the crusading crime commissioner, to frame Gunther as a traitor. Gunther gets killed by one of the syndicate's own assassins in a rigged car explosion. Then, Tolly ingratiates himself to the boss of all the syndicate bosses, Connors. Connors has Gela eliminated because Tolly sets him up, too.
Meanwhile, Cuddles falls for Tolly, who at first belittles her for wanting a family, then finally decides she should be the mother of his children. Tolly's decision to go straight doesn't mean he'll cooperate any further with the crime commissioner. He refuses to bring down Connors, the big boss. Tolly's only motive has been personal revenge against his father's murderers. But when Connors puts a contract on Cuddles, Tolly hunts him down in his swimming pool headquarters and brutally kills him. Wounded in the melee by a syndicate henchman, Tolly stumbles through the streets, crumbling in the same dark alley where he saw his own father die. My final shot closes in tight on Tolly's clenched fist, dying proof of a life filled with hate and frustration.
Tolly is hostile, rebellious, and self-centered, altogether not very likable. Motivated by self-interest and survival, Tolly is very much in the same mold as Skip McCoy in Pickup. When I write a character like that, I never think about whether the public will find him likable. Some people will. Others will shake their heads in disapproval. All I try to do is be truthful. I'd met plenty of these crooks on my beat as a crime reporter back in New York. That was exactly the way they were. A petty criminal in Manhattan, a wino in Clichy, a prostitute in Frisco, a guy on the needle in London, they exist and they have a story. It's not a nice story, either. They are, like Milton wrote, "swallow'd up and lost in the wide womb of uncreated night.
I'm not dealing here with beneficent kings, ravishing princesses, or charming princes who are born with castles, jewels, and juicy legacies. Ever since my characters were born, their lives have been harsh and unfair. They're going to have to learn how to fight to survive. They are anarchists, turned against a system that they feel has betrayed them. That's why they end up taking the law into their own hands. Tolly goes one step farther, exploiting the hateful system to get his enemies eliminated.
My lead's anarchistic attitude owes a debt to Jean Genet, the midtwentieth-century French novelist and dramatist whose writings were deeply rebellious against society and its conventions. Genet's books and plays are full of society's outcasts, confronted by omnipresent crime, sex, and death. His plays are laced with cruelty. For Genet, moral concepts are absurd. I'd read a helluva lot of Genet's stuff and felt a kinship with his harsh universe.
I also loved Jean-Paul Sartre's biography of this controversial man, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952). Genet was the illegitimate child of a prostitute, and was caught stealing at the age of ten. By early adolescence, he was serving a series of sentences for theft and homosexual prostitution that spanned nearly thirty years. In 1947, following his tenth conviction for theft, Genet was sentenced to life imprisonment. While in prison, he had started writing and getting published. His growing literary reputation induced a group of leading French authors to petition a pardon for him. The president of France granted it in 1948.
See, in my yarns, I never judge my characters. The pope preaches peace. The gangster preaches death. Their ways and means, their sermons, make sense to them. But a writer doesn't favor any character. He observes. He recounts. He depicts. It's the audience's job to react. My head mobster coldly explains to Tolly how the mob always stays one step ahead of law enforcement.
I got information from the Department of Justice about the profits that were generated by organized-crime activities, and it was astonishing how successful they were. The studio made me take out those figures. They were afraid everyone wouldgo out and try to join the rackets.
For the finale of Underworld, U.S.A., Tally (Cliff. Robertson) extracts his ultimate revenge on the underworld big boss, Connors (Robert Emhardt).
CONNORS (smiling)
There'll always be people like Driscoll. There'll always be people like us. But as long as we don't have any records on paper, as long as we run National Projects with legitimate business operations and pay our taxes on legitimate income and donate to charities and run church bazaars, we'll win the war. We always have.
It's up to the audience to judge this guy, not the writer. One spectator thinks, "Hell, what a smart bastard!" Another thinks, "My God, he's like all clever leaders!" Still another thinks, "What a horrible man, a coldblooded killer!"
The killers and mobsters I ran across when I was working as a reporter wanted just one thing: to survive. Capital punishment for those criminals is all about revenge, a powerful emotion in all of us, very human, very tough to transcend. Still, I think we have to avoid succumbing to revenge. Capital punishment has never dissuaded anybody from murder. I'm against it, only because it's so inhumane. It makes us, indirectly, into killers, too.
Hell, I understand the good arguments for capital punishment, since the murderers and rapists aren't humane either. They are released from prison and sometimes commit similar crimes. Our first reaction to a vicious crime is to say, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. What about all the innocent people who've been executed in retribution for a crime they were falsely accused of? The greatness of the American system is that the Fifth Amendment provides protection against the human compulsion for quick revenge, with "due process of law."
In Underworld, U.S.A., I wanted to show how gangsters are no longer thugs but respectable, tax-paying executives. Hardworking government people are trying to eradicate crime by lawful means in the movie. My crime commissioner gives a talk to his staff of young lawyers, laying out the difficult terrain ahead.
DRISCOLL
Organized crime is much more intellectual than it was years ago and much more difficult to prosecute so we lawyers have been appointed to find a way to prosecute it.... Our job's to cut red tape and come up with a lethal and legal battle plan for prosecuting the syndicates.
To get the dark, austere look I needed for the picture, I hired Hal Mohr as my cameraman. Hal had shot about eighty movies in his long career as cameraman, going all the way back to the twenties, including The Jazz Singer (1927), Shanghai Lady (1929), Captain Blood (1935), and The Wild One (1954). I asked my friend Harry Sukman to compose the soundtrack. Once again Harry came up with just the right mix of tension, melodrama, and violence.
Casting the actor to play Tolly was my most important choice. I had a number of up-and-coming stars read for the part. Cliff Robertson stood out. Cliff and I hit it off right away because he'd been a reporter before turning to acting. He'd never had a starring role, but he convinced me he could be Tolly. Downplaying his handsome leading-man looks, Cliff gave Tolly a smooth exterior, piloted inside by a dark and tortured soul. Cliff went on to have a helluva career. He played a wide range of roles, even portraying John E Kennedy in PT zop (1963), and he won an Oscar for his performance in Charly (1968). But I'd venture to say Cliff never had another part that was quite as haunting as my Tolly.
Of all the many reviews and analyses of Underworld, U.S.A., that have appeared over the years, one remains with me. It got back to me through the Hollywood grapevine, a remark from a real gangster apparently made to his colleagues about Tolly's all-consuming obsession to avenge his father's death.
"If only my son," said the mob boss, "would have that kind of affection for me!"
The Smell
of Truth
38
n the spring of 1961, I found myself in the Philippines, doing a war movie about the 5307th Composite Unit, instead of in Europe doing one about my own First Division. We'd climbed up to a high point overlooking a gorgeous landscape next to the ocean. The location for one of our battle scenes was down below in the countryside outside Manila. I thought about a line from a poem by Rimbaud, the French poet with whom I'd always been fascinat
ed: "The sky above my head, so calm, so blue." Japan's invasion of the Philippines in 1941 had been terrible. When MacArthur and Nimitz retook the island in 1944, all hell rained down again on the Filipinos. Underneath that grand, placid sky, mankind continually devastated the planet with malevolent wars.
Milton Sperling, a producer at Warner Brothers, had asked me if I'd write and direct a movie based on Charlton Ogburn's book The Marauders. The book was about a famous campaign in the Pacific theater, the true story of a three-thousand-man infantry unit under the command of Brigadier General Frank Dow Merrill that fought behind Japanese lines in Burma in 1944. The only World War II yarn I really wanted to direct was about the Big Red One. I was turned off by the idea of using someone else's book to show combat life that I hadn't actually lived through. Jack Warner called me in to discuss the project.
"Sam," Warner said, "what's the military expression for a rehearsal, when you prepare your outfit for a big battle?"
"Dry run," I said.
"Dry run," repeated Warner.
There were other studio executives in the room. They nodded and repeated "dry run." It reminded me of a military debriefing, with Warner as the four-star general and the studio execs as his battalion commanders. Warner gave me a complicitous look to make me understand that my Big Red One project could still happen at his studio. Maybe by doing this picture I'd be getting myself in position to make The Big Red One.
Warner promised I could write a script in my own style for Merrill's Marauders and make my own casting choices. It was the opportunity I'd been looking for to finally work with Gary Cooper, who was perfect for my lead. Coop thought he might be too old for the part when we discussed the picture. I told him that when I was writing the script, I saw only him as my Merrill. The real-life general was a tough father figure with a commanding presence and an iron will. He'd advance with his troops until he dropped. Then he'd get up and still keep going. As demanding as he was on himself, Merrill showed great empathy for his soldiers. Embodied by Cooper, the character would be a tribute to my own commander, Terry Allen, who was always there for his men.
The structure of the script had to be different from anything I'd written before. There was little dialogue. I tried combining lots of quick shots to capture the raging storm of combat. Here's an example:
ENEMY
as white smoke pops, making it impossible for them to know where the hell the Marauders are.
KOLOWICZ
waves cease fire. His riflemen hold their fire, giving:
DOSKIS AND MEN
the chance to advance closer to the enemy and lob in more frag grenades.
ENEMY
grenaded. Black smoke bursts in midst of blinding white smoke.
STOCK AND TAGGY
firing as they advance from the flank.
HANK AND MEN
leapfrogging Dopskis' group with more smoke grenades hurled at:
ENEMY
White smoke pops in midst of black smoke.
KOLOWICZ AND RIFLEMEN firing as they advance.
STOCK AND TAGGY
angling toward enemy, firing as they advance. They are now joining up with others. PRIVATE O'BRIEN is hit. He falls.
STOCK
Medic! Medic! O'Brien!
The studio hired Colonel Samuel Wilson as a technical adviser on the project. Wilson and I struck up a warm friendship. He'd fought alongside the real General Merrill in Burma and survived their historic victory at Myitkyina. Wilson and I spent many evenings together drinking vodka and talking about the infantry in the Pacific and European theaters. Hell, foot soldiers always had it tough. Twenty percent of all soldiers were in the infantry, yet they suffered 75 percent of the casualties. Wilson described the nightmare of fighting in those jungles without any air force or artillery backup. My movie had to convey the nerve-racking, gut-wrenching madness of the Burma battles.
While we were in preproduction, Gary Cooper got sick. We learned it was cancer and that he didn't have too long. I had a tough time getting Gary out of my mind for the lead in Merrill's Marauders. As Coop's health declined, I knew he wouldn't be able to do it. In my search for a replacement, I found Jeff Chandler.
Born Ira Gossell, in Brooklyn, Jeff was an officer in World War II. After his discharge from the service, he worked in radio before signing with Universal. His premature gray hair and dark features got him cast as Cochise in Broken Arrow (1950), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. They continued to assign Jeff roles in Westerns and period pictures. I thought he could do better. He proved it with his heartfelt performance as Merrill in my movie.
There we were in the middle of the Pacific shooting Merrill's Marauders. We'd flown our cast and crew over to Manila and set up our general headquarters at Clark Air Base. Their enlisted men would serve as our extras. Before long, the officers insisted on being in the movie, too. I always would appreciate their hospitality.
Between takes, Jeff used to throw a football around with other actors and some of the air force officers. Chandler was a good athlete, good enough to be offered a job in professional football when he was younger. However, he had a bad back, having injured it on a movie set years before, and he had suffered from it ever since. Our seven-week shoot was strenuous, but Chandler never complained about his back, or anything else. He was a real trooper. During one of the scenes we shot in a hot, humid jungle, however, Jeff fainted. An army helicopter flew him back to Clark. He was fine after a day off and finished the film without any further health problems. However, when he returned to California after shooting with us in the Philippines, Chandler decided to have surgery on his back. Inexplicably, he died in the hospital, apparently from blood poisoning. His death, at age forty-two, was deemed malpractice and resulted in a large lawsuit and settlement for his children. I was sick when I heard the news, just sick.
In my movie, Merrill has a heart condition, like the real general. Just as dangerous is his emotional condition, the inner overload that can sometimes kill you faster than a bullet. It sounds crazy, but a lot of soldiers die in battles of heart failure, without a scratch. I wanted this war movie to be truthful about it. The regimental surgeon, Doc, is the only one who knows about the general's coronary problem.
Clowning around with Jeff' Chandler and some of the crew on Merrill's Marauders. I thought the picture was going to be the start oJ'a new phase of Jeff's career. Instead, it was his last movie.
DOC
... You're kidding yourself, General. You've got no decision to make. These men are at the end of their rope. And so are you.
MERRILL
When you're at the end of your rope, all you have to do is make one foot move after the other. Just take the next step. That's all there is to it.
Just before the final push against the enemy, Merrill has a heart attack, falls to his knees, and pitches facedown on the ground. His surrogate son, Stock, rallies the soldiers to move on. My original ending had the Americans successfully attacking their objective, the enemy's air strip, as Merrill looks up at the watchful gaze of Doc:
DOC
Those are our planes, Frank. Your men are taking the strip.
MERRILL
Who led them?
DOC
Stock.
(Merrill smiles)
I don't know how they did it. They fought when they had typhus. They fought when they had malaria. They fought when they were starving. They fought when they were wounded. They fought on their knees. What kind of men are these? What are they? Who are they?
(Merrill tries to say something but he can't. Doc lowers his head to Merrill 's lips to hear.)
MERRILL (whispering)
They're Infantry.
To my surprise and anger, the studio decided to cut my final scene in the editing room. Right after Merrill's collapse, they spliced in footage of a victory parade of soldiers marching down Fifth Avenue. Jack Warner and his executives wanted an overt patriotic ending, and they decided to end the picture with that propaganda-like crap and a po
mpous narrator bragging about the American victory at Myitkyina. I went toe to toe against the studio on that one, but I lost.
We had another big clash about a violent scene I'd shot in the Philippines in a concrete maze-immense supports for fuel tanks-a confusing battleground where soldiers can and do fire at their own comrades in the panic of the combat. I did this whole sequence in one single take, panning the camera across the battle, instead of cutting to close-ups to show who was shooting whom. They told me it looked too artistic. For Chrissakes, I'd been in the infantry, I knew combat was chaos and pandemonium, I knew Americans sometimes shot Americans in the heat of a battle. They hired a second-unit director to reshoot the scene. The reshoots looked ridiculously theatrical. Only one brief sequence of the second-unit stuff ended up in the final cut of the movie. And anyway, what's so wrong with looking "artistic," goddamnit?
One of the scenes I'm most proud of in Merrills Marauders is when Sergeant Kolowicz, played by Claude Akins, stumbles upon a village and is served a bowl of rice by an old woman. There's not one word of dialogue. The haggard, unshaven soldier is stunned by the tenderness of the old woman and the curious children who watch him eat the rice. Kolowicz breaks down into tears. Every time I see that poignant scene, I start crying as well.
The movie is an honest tribute to Merrill and his soldiers, sans phony patriotism. Exhausted or wounded, they try to stay alive as they accomplish the mission at hand. For cryin' out loud, the work of GIs at war is nerve-racking and frustrating, not glorious!
When George Patton's son came to see me later about doing a film about his father, he told me he loved Merrill's Marauders, but that, in Pentagonese, "it had no recruitment flavor." That's why he wanted me to direct Patton.
"I know you disliked my father," he said good-humoredly, "but at least you'll make a hard-hitting movie!"
One of the wonderful memories from our stay in the Philippines was meeting the leading member of the country's Liberal Party, Benigno Aquino, and his wife, Corazon. He asked me to call him "Ninoy," his nickname. When President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, Ninoy was imprisoned. Later, he was allowed to move his family to the U.S., where he underwent heart surgery and then served as a research fellow at Harvard. In 1983 he flew back to Manila to work in the legislative election and was assassinated as he deplaned. Corazon Aquino went on to run against Marcos and get elected. Long live peace, ethics, and the will of the people! To hell with dictators!