Nonetheless, Dodsworth won only one Oscar (for art decoration) and did tepid box-office business. Goldwyn claimed, “I lost my shirt. I'm not saying it wasn't a fine picture. It was a great picture, but nobody wanted to see it. In droves.” Then he complained that the film had failed because “It didn't have attractive people in it.”32 Believing that audiences did not want to see a film about middle-aged people, he thought for years about remaking it with Clark Gable. Conversely, Goldwyn would also declare that Dodsworth was “one of the biggest hits I ever had. It made a fortune.”33
In the early 1970s, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art rediscovered Dodsworth, naming it one of the fifty great American films selected for a retrospective. It is now recognized as an important work, certainly one of the key films of the 1930s.
5
A Concoction
Come and Get It (1936)
While Wyler was shooting Dodsworth, Howard Hawks was filming Come and Get It for Goldwyn one sound stage away. Meanwhile, the studio head himself was recovering from intestinal surgery in New York. Upon his return to Hollywood, and against doctor's orders, Goldwyn demanded to see the footage of both films. He was upset by all the excess footage Wyler had shot for Dodsworth but delighted by the quality of the film. Hawks's work, however, nearly sent him back to the hospital. He wrote to Edna Ferber, author of the novel on which the film was based, “After I saw what [Hawks] had filmed, I suffered a relapse for a full two weeks, it upset me so.”1 Hawks recollected, “He saw what I had shot, and it was a shock to him. He bought a story, and he didn't get it.”2
Goldwyn became further enraged when he confronted Hawks and learned the director's ideas about the film's central focus. According to Hawks, “He told me a director shouldn't write, and I wasn't very polite with my answer.”3 Goldwyn was devoted to the prominent writers he courted and adamant that the integrity of their work be respected. He was appalled by what Hawks was doing to Ferber's novel: turning it into a Hawksian buddy movie about two guys and a girl. What was supposed to be the story of a lame girl who tries to entertain a group of loggers with her songs but gets hooted at was being changed into the story of a “lusty wench.”4 When Hawks announced that he was quitting, Goldwyn replied that was fine, because Hawks was fired.
Faced with the task of restoring a prestige property he felt was ruined, Goldwyn needed to find a director he could trust to rework and complete the project. He decided on Wyler, who was then putting the finishing touches on Dodsworth. Having been ordered back to bed, Goldwyn summoned Wyler to his home—it was Wyler's first invitation to the producer's residence. But when Goldwyn announced that he greatly admired Dodsworth and wanted Wyler to finish Come and Get It, the director protested, stating that he was still editing Dodsworth. Goldwyn told him that that project could wait, and besides, Wyler was not a film editor. Wyler countered, “I can't just walk into another picture like that. It's Howard Hawks's picture.” Goldwyn told him that Hawks had been fired, at which point Wyler simply refused the assignment.5 Wyler remembered, “He carried on like a madman about me having to do this, that I was legally obligated to do it and that he'd ruin my career if I refused. He got so furious that Frances Goldwyn took a flyswatter and beat it over his legs on the bed and I ran out of the room.”6 Later, Wyler had his lawyer review his contract and learned that Goldwyn was right—there was nothing he could do but accept the job or be suspended. Also suspecting that “if he was getting somebody else to finish the Hawks picture, he'd get somebody else to finish mine,”7 Wyler started working on Come and Get It in August 1936.
Wyler inherited the film with Hawks's actors already in place. Goldwyn had wanted Spencer Tracy for the role of Barney Glasgow, but Louis B. Mayer refused to loan him out, so the part went to Edward Arnold. Walter Brennan, slight and thin, was cast as Swan Bostrom, Barney's best friend, even though Ferber described the character as the “strongest man in the North woods.” Joel McCrea, fresh from These Three, was cast as Barney's son, Richard, and Mady Christians got the role of Lotta's aunt Karie. For the crucial double role of Lotta, Goldwyn wanted Miriam Hopkins, but Hawks had convinced him that she was not suitable. Shortly thereafter, and with considerable publicity, Goldwyn announced that Virginia Bruce had been given the coveted role. Hawks, however, had other ideas. While viewing rushes from a Bing Crosby vehicle, Rhythm on the Range, he had noticed Frances Farmer, a young actress whose blonde hair, blue eyes, and sturdy physique made her perfect to play a girl from the Wisconsin woods. After having her read for him—ostensibly for a smaller part—Hawks offered her the lead and then proceeded to spend countless hours nurturing his new protégée. Because of this casting decision, the character of Lotta Morgan shifted from a lame, reserved girl into a lusty, sexy barroom singer. The emotionally fragile Farmer would have a difficult time adjusting to Wyler, who was both more demanding than Hawks on the set and annoyed at having to be there in the first place. She described acting for Wyler as “the nearest thing to slavery,” while Wyler quipped, “The nicest thing I can say about Frances Farmer is that she is unbearable.”8
The extent of Wyler's contribution to the finished film is a matter of some controversy. According to Jan Herman, Wyler himself claimed credit for around 50 percent.9 Daniel Mandell, a frequent Wyler collaborator (although he did not edit this film), contends that Wyler did “more than half.”10 In his biography of Goldwyn, Arthur Marx writes that Wyler “reshot the last half…at an additional cost of $900,000.”11 Hawks's biographer, Todd McCarthy, states that Wyler was responsible for only the film's last half hour, which is supported by Scott Berg; however, McCarthy asserts that Wyler worked on the film for about a month (August 19–September 19), while Berg claims he did so for only two weeks.12 At another point, McCarthy states that Hawks shot for “forty-two of the seventy days Come and Get It was in production.”13 The Goldwyn files support McCarthy's dates, as well as his contention that Hawks worked on the film longer than Wyler did, but they do not necessarily prove that the completed film was more Hawks's work than Wyler's. In a telegram to Wyler dated October 29, 1936—more than a month after shooting was completed—Eddie Curtiss, the film's editor, indicates that the final product contained more of Wyler's footage than Hawks's. He apportions the total footage of 8,945 feet as follows: 4,506 to Hawks, which includes 473 by Richard Rosson; 4,205 to Wyler; and 234 for titles.14 Rosson directed the second-unit footage, filmed primarily in Idaho, which included shots of falling trees, tree trunks sliding down flumes, logging camps, dynamiting ice, and lumber being sent downriver. Wyler considered these scenes among the best in the completed film. Once Rosson's footage and the titles are subtracted from the total, Curtiss's numbers indicate that Hawks directed 4,033 feet of completed film and Wyler 4,205, thus supporting the conclusion that Wyler was responsible for about half the film.
As completed, Come and Get It is thematically closer to Wyler's work than to Hawks's. It echoes the subjects and themes Wyler explored during the previous decade—notably, the strained relations between husband and wife (Counsellor-at-Law, Dodsworth), triangular relationships (These Three, Dodsworth, Counsellor-at-Law), the folly of attempting to recapture one's youth, and the emotional cost of sacrificing love for ambition. In his essay on Hawks, Andrew Sarris concludes that “the pathos of the unattained woman sacrificed upon the altar of excessive ambition…seems to be more Wyler's speed, but the brawling sequences on the road to power do have a distinctly Hawksian flavor.”15
The film's content is an integral part of the controversy over directorial credit as well. After the film was completed, Goldwyn wrote a letter of apology and explanation to Edna Ferber, blaming his illness for preventing him from overseeing the project more closely and emphasizing that he wanted to do justice to her book. He goes on, “I found that Hawks had filmed a completely different story from what you had written…. I decided to try to get as much of your story onto the screen as I possibly could, under the conditions. I threw away most of what Hawks had photographed, put William Wyler onto the picture
and spent a good two months rephotographing it, trying to get what I thought would come as near to your book as possible.”16
In a reply written four days later, Ferber expresses her admiration and gratitude to Goldwyn for the “courage, sagacity, and power of decision which you showed in throwing out the finished Hawks picture and undertaking the gigantic task of what amounted to a new picture. Few producers would have done this.”17 Both parties seem guilty of overstatement, since Wyler did not spend two months on the film, nor did Goldwyn make what amounted to a “new picture.”
Just three days earlier, however, before receiving Goldwyn's letter of apology, Ferber had been singing a different tune. In a telegram dated October 28, she makes it clear that her novel's central subject is “the destruction of forests and rivers by the wholesale robber barons of the day…for now we know that the droughts and floods and dust storms of our time are the result of the Barney Glasgows of fifty years ago.”18 This is certainly a prescient observation, and although the novel occasionally preaches these ideas, it places far more emphasis on the multigenerational saga of a powerful family—in fact, Ferber seems to find much to admire in Barney Glasgow. The ecological argument remains peripheral to the film, which focuses more closely on the themes of lost love and fathers and sons.
Ferber's novel covers four generations of the Glasgow family. When it opens in 1907, Barney Glasgow is already one of the wealthiest men in Wisconsin and one of the preeminent business tycoons in the country. Theodore Roosevelt may be trying to break the trusts, but Barney is not concerned, for he is a man of limitless confidence in himself, his methods, and his success: “Gover'ment my foot! I'm the gover'ment when it comes to my own business…. I'll cut my timber and fix my rates and ship my logs as I see fit. Always have. Always will.”19 The novel then goes back in time to the early days of lumbering and papermaking in Wisconsin, when Barney was a boy and worked as a lumberjack in the camps where his mother was a cook. Astute and ambitious, young Barney catches the eye of his boss, Jed Hewitt, and after making some successful deals and investments, he marries Hewitt's daughter, Emma. Ferber then traces the history of the family from 1907 through the expansion of the war years, the economic boom of the 1920s, the stock market crash and subsequent Depression, and into the present (the book was published in 1935), at which point the family has lost much of its power and wealth.
Despite Ferber's claims to Goldwyn, the novel is not primarily a conservationist's exposé of the destruction of the land by robber barons. True, she does deplore the ravaging of the land and Glasgow's insensitivity toward the natural resources he is exploiting, but Ferber is not an effective muckraker. A passage early in the novel describing the residents of Butte des Morts, Barney's hometown, is representative of her efforts: “They never dreamed of resenting these houses or the millions they represented; or the raping of the forests, the harnessing of the rivers, the manipulation of the railroads, the razing of the hills. Over the lovely little town hung the acrid smell of acids, pricking the nostrils, and the fumes of sulphur and ammonia in the great digesters were the incense offered up on the funeral pyres of the vanquished trees. This miasma Butte des Morts inhaled with rapture.”20
Late in the novel, Tom Melendys, a lumberjack's son who has become a college professor, writes a book entitled The Rape of American Forests; he then becomes a surrogate father to Barney's grandchildren and raises their political consciousness. However, these developments seem to materialize out of nowhere in the narrative, and the character of Tom remains more a concept than a believable creation. By the time he appears, after Barney's death, the novel has already run out of steam, and Ferber seems unable to create any new characters to command the reader's interest. The last third of the novel reads rather like a forced historical overview, as Ferber seems more interested in surveying the first thirty years of the new century than in creating convincing characters and situations.
Like many writers who center their tales on business tycoons, Ferber evidently admires her protagonist. Despite their sins, captains of industry like Barney Glasgow, with their pioneering, creative spirits, make more compelling characters than their more sensitive offspring. Like Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris, Ferber understands that entrepreneurial energy and ruthlessness are captivating:
They conducted their business over black cigars, whisky and bawdy stories…. They saw what they wanted and grabbed it, as all their lives they had done. Their enemies walked the plank. Most of them, in early life had labored with their hands. They were at ease with the workmen of their own generation and even the younger ones; friendly, hearty in their talk with them…. Bernie [Barney's son], on the other hand, regarded them as though they were something you had to placate, not because you liked them but because it was politic and economic to keep them contented and good-natured, like performing animals in a cage.21
Despite her reservations about Barney, one senses that Ferber prefers him to his son. (Although he alludes to different circumstances, Sinclair Lewis foresaw a similar diminution in the generation of automotive tycoons that replaced Dodsworth, with its attention to the bottom line and its disregard for the product's integrity.) Ferber's fascination with and grudging admiration for the patriarch of her fictional dynasty are apparent in the vibrancy of her narrative as well. Once Barney dies, she seems to lose interest in his descendants, undercutting the reader's involvement in the rest of the story.
Come and Get It follows the standard American business novel formula by focusing on the catastrophe of success. Barney, despite his money and power, is unhappy in a marriage that was motivated by ambition rather than love. He becomes acutely aware of the emptiness of that bargain when, in his fifties, he meets Lotta, the granddaughter of his best friend, Swan Bostrom. As a young lumberjack, Barney had known her grandmother, a saloon singer. (The film suggests that he harbored some feelings for her, which he sacrificed to marry the boss's daughter instead. Ferber does not dwell on this theme of romantic loss in her novel, but she does parallel Barney's story with that of his daughter Evie, who gives up the man she loves—a laborer in her father's factory—to marry someone from her own social circle.) Barney now attempts to compensate for his unhappiness by bestowing on Swan, his daughter Karie, and her daughter Lotta all the advantages they desire. Lotta is a young woman who instinctively knows her own worth and is aware of her extraordinary beauty, and she allows Barney to shower her with gifts, rationalizing that he is doing so out of regard for her grandfather. In fact, she has set her sights on Barney's son, Bernie, the heir to his father's business. Barney is so besotted with Lotta that he does not recognize her true ambition, and he plans to divorce his wife and marry her himself: “I've got my life to live and i'm going to take a few million dollars right in my old pants pocket and live it by God, with the most beautiful woman in the world.”22
Events come to a head at the Glasgows’ annual lawn party, where Barney catches Bernie and Lotta in an embrace. The two men fight, and Lotta tries to break them up. When Bernie shouts, “Lotta and I are going to get married,” Barney counters, “[She] belongs to me.” Lotta protests, saying, “I wouldn't have him touch me. Why would I! I wouldn't have anything to do with an old man like him.”23 This scornful rejection deflates Barney, who tells them both to get out of his house and announces to his wife that he is going to disinherit their son. Before he can carry out his threat, however, Barney, Emma, and their daughter Evie are all killed in a boating accident. Bernie ends up inheriting the family fortune and marries Lotta.
The film remains faithful to the spirit of the novel by focusing on Barney's unrequited love for Lotta—though she is now Bostrom's daughter rather than his granddaughter. The screenwriters are more effective than Ferber in establishing Barney's attraction to Lotta's mother (grandmother in the novel), also named Lotta (Morgan); in the novel, their meeting is brief and is quickly followed by her marriage to Swan and her violent death. The film also portrays in some detail the courtship of the younger Lotta by Ric
hard (the novel's Bernie), which Ferber does not narrate at all. And the screenwriters further extend the romantic contours of the plot by having Evie abandon Orvie, her fiancé, and declare her intention to marry Tony Schwerke, a laborer in her father's plant who is also in partnership with Richard in the manufacture of a new product—the paper cup.
The film concludes with the confrontation between Richard and Barney over Lotta, but the ending is handled differently than in the novel. As Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur would do three years later in Wuthering Heights, the screenwriters conclude the film version of Ferber's novel by simply dispensing with the stories of Barney's descendants and even with his own death—none of the screenplays in either the Goldwyn or the Wyler collection goes beyond Barney's own story. (The first-draft screenplay ended with the dedication of a park in Barney's honor and the unveiling of a bust of him, but this conceit was quickly dropped.) Apparently, utilizing the coda to Ferber's novel was never an option for any of the screenwriters.
The first part of the film seems to belong to Hawks, whom Robin Wood credits for “the splendidly shot and cut documentary on lumberjacking, the camaraderie which Barney Glasgow loses when he gains financial success and social position, [and] above all, the saloon fight in which Barney, Swan and Lotta vanquish opposition by hurling tin trays.”24 Wood is wrong about the lumberjacking sequence (Hawks assigned Rosson to film those scenes) but right about the rest. The film opens with the lumberjacks gathering around the dinner table after a long day. Barney makes a speech, complaining that the men are not cutting enough lumber and will have to increase their productivity. He then gets into a fistfight with two of the men. This is a typical Hawksian situation: a group of men engaged in a dangerous profession and the valorizing of male camaraderie.
William Wyler Page 14