On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Thanks to Midnight, Brackett and Wilder were now not only a respected team but a team that made money. They plucked the best secretary in the pool, Helen Hernandez, and installed her as their own assistant. In January of 1939, the president of the Screen Writers Guild and his slightly feverish young partner began to compose a new script. The film was not going to be a high-end comedy like Midnight or Bluebeard, and it wasn’t being written for a top director like Liesen or Lubitsch. No, this was to be a Jackie Cooper high school picture called What a Life, and it was to be directed by someone named Jay Theodore Reed. The reason Brackett and Wilder wrote this movie can only be guessed: some executive assigned it to them. Maybe the Deanna Durbin movie had done well.

  Then again, since What a Life began as a hit Broadway show, it may have been one of those Hollywood projects that seemed higher-class at the time. Whatever the case, What a Life hasn’t survived as much more than a curious throwaway. Paramount bought the rights from the playwright, Clifford Goldsmith, but in characteristic fashion it was taken away from him and handed over to Brackett and Wilder for a rewrite so complete that Goldsmith’s credit was ultimately reduced to “based on the play by Clifford Goldsmith.” Jackie Cooper hadn’t been the first young actor set for the role of clumsy Henry Aldrich, the sad-sack boy-hero; an unknown, William Holden, was announced for the lead. But Holden was soon replaced and ended up in Columbia’s boxing melodrama, Golden Boy, and Jackie Cooper took over the role of Henry.

  Like the Deanna Durbin movie, What a Life concerns the travails of an adolescent. This teen, however, is more or less a mess. Poor Henry can’t do anything right. The other kids pick on him, and the teachers blame him for everything that goes wrong at school. In fact, the real troublemaker is sports star and all-around he-boy George Bigelow (James Corner), who makes Henry the fall guy. Nerdy Barbara Pearson (Betty Field) wants Henry to ask her to the dance, but he’s too shy. The school secretary helps Barbara transform herself into a beauty; George makes his move; Henry gets depressed. (Yes, this was all being adapted for the screen by the men who went on to make Five Graves to Cairo, The Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard.) Dumb Henry, under strong parental pressure to get into the Ivy League, cheats on a test and winds up expelled. Not only that, but he’s accused of swiping the school’s musical instruments and pawning them, a heist actually committed by George. Henry finally proves who the real thief is and, to top it all off, he asks Barbara to the dance. The end. (Ironically, this was the start of one of Paramount’s most successful series. There were eleven Henry Aldrich movies—Henry Aldrich for President (1941), Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour (1942), Henry Aldrich Haunts a House (1943), Henry Aldrich Plays Cupid (1944)…. The series’ tag line became inescapable: “Henry? Henry Aldrich!” “Coming, Mother!”)

  By mid-March 1939, What a Life was in production and Brackett and Wilder could move on to something more engaging. Ernst Lubitsch was preparing a romantic comedy for MGM about a humorless Russian envoy and a suave, kept Frenchman. Lubitsch had recently brought Walter Reisch in to help him work out the bugs in this long-troubled script. Finally, to give it some more snap and polish, Lubitsch convinced MGM to borrow Brackett and Wilder from Paramount.

  The idea that eventually became Ninotchka had been brought to MGM in 1937 by Gottfried Reinhardt, who proposed Greta Garbo for the lead. The story, by Melchior Lengyel, was based on a three-sentence note Lengyel had written with Garbo’s approval: “Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad after all.” By January 1938, the leading man had been cast: Garbo would play opposite William Powell.

  Lengyel’s screenplay bears little resemblence to the script Lubitsch finally shot. Scott Eyman has traced its development and reports that originally the three Russian commissars who add such ridiculous luster to the film weren’t at all comic. In addition, the central male character, Leon, “becomes a drunkard when a business deal falls through and, at the end, he accompanies Ninotchka to Moscow.”

  Late in 1938, Gottfried Reinhardt worked on two different screenplays for the film—one with Jacques Deval, the other with S. N. Behrman. Ninotchka wasn’t even an Ernst Lubitsch project at this point. George Cukor was going to direct it. But Cukor soon left the project for another film with more prestige, Gone with the Wind. By that point Behrman and Reinhardt had worked out the Eiffel Tower scenes, some scenes in Leon’s apartment, and the first draft of the working-class restaurant scene in which Ninotchka laughs. (In fact, Ninotchka’s advertising concept, “Garbo Laughs!” predated the writing of the laughter.)

  Garbo gave MGM two choices for Cukor’s replacement: Edmund Goulding, who’d directed her in Love and Grand Hotel, or Ernst Lubitsch. L. B. Mayer wasn’t wild about the Lubitsch option—Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow had been a money loser—but he decided on Lubitsch anyway, eventually acceding to the director’s key demand. Lubitsch would have complete control over the screenplay.

  He immediately began reworking the whole thing with Walter Reisch, though he told Samson Raphaelson that he was sorry Raphaelson was busy working on his own play because otherwise he would have hired him to write Ninotchka. MGM had originally hired Walter Reisch to be a director as well as a writer, but the Vienna-born Reisch realized he couldn’t speak English well enough to direct, so he renounced that clause of his contract. Reisch and Wilder had become close friends in Berlin and stayed that way; they eventually spent fifty Christmases together. Lubitsch was very fond of him as well. (Not everyone liked Reisch. Kurt Weill once recorded his impressions of a Hollywood party by noting that “a movie and operetta writer, Walter Reisch, was leading the conversation. He ought to be shot right after Hitler.”)

  Ninotchka changed rapidly under Reisch’s influence and began to acquire the comic panache for which it became famous. For example, Behrman’s script for Ninotchka involved a nickel mine. Reisch turned it into diamonds. Lubitsch explained the shift from nickel to jewels to Behrman in one of two ways: either Lubitsch said, “The nice thing about jewels is that they are photogenic” or, more colorfully, “You can photograph them sparkling on the tits of a woman.” But even after Reisch’s rewrite, Ninotchka still needed something that Reisch alone apparently couldn’t provide, so Brackett and Wilder joined him in March to finalize the film’s structure, tone up the dialogue, and give the whole thing one last polish. At first, Lubitsch still wasn’t satisfied with what Brackett, Wilder, and Reisch came up with. He didn’t much like the first forty pages, so they converged at Lubitsch’s house for a conference. And they were still stumped—until Lubitsch went to the bathroom and, once more, emerged with the solution. “Boys,” he said, “I’ve got it. I’ve got the answer. It’s the hat!”

  For Wilder, the ridiculous hat that Ninotchka mocks, then covets, and ultimately wears defines Lubitsch’s essential style:

  We worked weeks wondering how we could show that Garbo, in Ninotchka, was becoming bourgeois—that she was starting to become interested in capitalist things. We wrote a bunch of different things, then one day Lubitsch said, “We’re going to do a scene with the hat.” She would be seen arriving at the start, accompanied by three commissars; she then passes in front of a window in which she sees a rather extravagant hat. She says, “How can a civilization survive when women put such hats on their head! It’s the end of capitalism!” [Her actual line is: “It won’t be long now, comrades.”] Then she passes in front of the window and laughs. Later, finally, she chases the three commissars out, closes the door, opens her package, takes the hat out, puts it on and looks in the mirror. That’s pure Lubitsch—total simplicity.

  Wilder’s conclusion is emphatic: “That’s not a screenwriter’s idea. It’s the idea of a plastic artist.”

  A month later the three writers and their director were nearly finished with Ninotchka’s script. Unlike Midnight, this film was a happy marriage between director and writers. Mitchell Leisen couldn’t touch a single word without bein
g met with a violent protest from Billy, but Lubitsch could scrap whatever he pleased without a whole lot of dissent. Originally, Ninotchka was supposed to comment on the discomfort of the hard benches offered to third-class train passengers by saying, “We communists, we will change this from the bottom up.” Garbo thought it was crude and refused to utter it, but Billy caused no scenes to protect the script (though the line itself may actually have been Lubitsch’s). In fact, Wilder rarely if ever caused real trouble with men who’d earned his respect. This particular collaboration was so successful that on April 8, Reisch, Brackett, and Wilder did what few screenwriters have ever done: they petitioned MGM to include the director’s name along with their own in the screenplay credits, a request that was not met.

  “He wasn’t just a gag man,” Billy has said of his mentor. Lubitsch was a writer: “He would look at our stuff and go ‘Ho ho, very good,’ and scratch out the next line. He’d read a bit more, go ‘Ho-ho,’ and scratch out another line. What he did was purify, and that was what made him a great writer.”

  On another occasion, Wilder expanded on the debt he owed to Lubitsch. Almost forty years after Lubitsch’s death, Wilder still talked about his father figure in a mix of past and present tenses:

  I think that all the pictures that he made should have his name as a collaborator, at least on the script. You don’t just sit down and write, “Lubitsch does this.” You come up with twenty suggestions, and he picks the one that makes a Lubitsch touch. The way his mind works, everything is by indirection. He is not the kind of director who hits you over the head and says, “I have two and two. And two and two makes four. And also, three and one makes four.” He just says, “Here is two, and here is two.” And then he lets the audience add it up. The audience is the co-writer. And that’s where the laugh comes in…. His technique is clear to the last village idiot, but he makes him feel that he is very smart.

  Garbo, in contrast, was weird. Her contract with MGM granted her the right to cancel her participation in Ninotchka, an option she came close to exercising. She appeared on the MGM lot for a meeting with Lubitsch one day, but she refused to get out of her car, so Lubitsch proceeded to the parking lot, climbed into Garbo’s passenger seat, and spent two hours talking the peculiar star into staying in the film. In particular, Garbo was worried about the champagne-drinking scene. Confusing acting with being, Garbo was not only worried about her screen image, but she was also terrified of acting like a foolish lush in front of other people on the set. It was episodes like this that led Lubitsch to call Garbo “the most inhibited person I have ever worked with.” As Wilder points out, she just didn’t fit in around the movie colony: Garbo was “as incongruous in Hollywood as Sibelius would have been if he had come to write incidental music for Warner Bros.”

  For her part, Garbo found Lubitsch crude, and she didn’t particularly enjoy making the picture. “He was a vulgar little man,” she once said, though she did tell other people over the years that Lubitsch was a “marvelous little man” who was to her “like a loving father.”

  As Ninotchka headed into production, the male lead, William Powell, became ill and had to bow out, so Lubitsch offered the part to Gary Cooper, who turned it down. According to Wilder, Lubitsch then offered it to Cary Grant. He, too, declined. Finally, Melvyn Douglas accepted the role.

  For a film as widely admired and indelibly titled as Ninotchka, it comes as a shock to learn that MGM executives tried to change its name. Had Nicholas Schenck, the head of Loew’s, Inc. (MGM’s parent company), not insisted that the film retain its title, Ninotchka would have been released as one of the following: A Kiss from Moscow or Intrigue in Paris for the international flavor; This Time for Keeps, The Love Axis, Time Out for Love, A Kiss in the Dark, or A Kiss for the Commissar for the sake of romance; We Want to Be Alone for the sake of the reclusive star’s already tired reputation for privacy; Give Us This Day for an entirely out-of-place bit of reverence; or, most cleverly, A Foreign Affair.

  During the production, one of the screenwriters tried to watch Lubitsch actually film a scene with the great Garbo, but he didn’t get very far. It was either Brackett or Wilder. No one can be sure, because each of them claimed the episode as his own. Brackett had a crush on Garbo, so Brackett’s story went, and he hung around the set, trying to gaze upon her as she worked. But despite the fact that he kept a secure distance between himself and the neurotic star, Garbo saw him anyway and insisted that stagehands put up a black screen between her and the peeping eyes of Charles Brackett. Still, Brackett found a small hole near the bottom of the screen and got down on all fours to peep through. Billy arrived on the scene and remarked, “What would the directors of the Adirondack Trust Company say if they could see you now?” (On another occasion, Brackett claimed that Lubitsch himself carved the hole: “The only way I was able to watch her at work was to get Lubitsch to cut an eye-hole in the screen, and I peeked through that.”) The other version is Billy’s: “I remember going to the MGM studios one day and seeing Garbo on the set. I’d never seen her in the flesh before, and naturally I was very excited. But as soon as she knew I was around she insisted that a large screen be placed around her so that I couldn’t see what was going on.”

  For all its charm, Ninotchka is nonetheless saturated with a looming sense of global catastrophe. There is a consistent thread of pessimism in Lubitsch’s work; as critic Enno Patalas describes it, “Lubitsch’s cinema is not a cinema of revolt. But making use of the movement inherent in things as they are, it pushes them a little further along toward their own self-destruction.” But by the time he made this deceptively light comedy, current events had given Lubitsch an irrefutable reason to see the world in a dark, disturbing light. As the film critic William Paul writes, “In a universe of playful characters, Ninotchka must appear a fool, but the world itself has changed in this film: poised on the brink of chaos, it seems to certify her seriousness.” “We did it with the best intentions,” Comrade Kopalski explains to Ninotchka; “We can’t feed the Russian people on your intentions,” she replies, and she’s right.

  Three bumbling but appealing Soviet trade representatives arrive in Paris to sell off some crown jewels. They peer into a gorgeous Parisian hotel and decide to upgrade from their low-rent hotel, the Hotel Terminus. Comrade Buljanoff (lovingly played by Felix Bressart, who’d had such trouble with his dragon-landlady in the short film Wilder wrote for Robert Siodmak, Der Kampf mit dem Drachen) expresses his fear of reprisal from his Soviet superiors. “I don’t want to go to Siberia!” he exclaims. “And I don’t want to go to the Hotel Terminus!” is Comrade Iranoff’s cosmopolitan reply. When they inquire about the price of a room, the concierge is blunt, but not blunt enough: “Well, gentlemen, I’m afraid our rates are rather high,” to which Buljanoff responds, “Why should you be afraid?” The three Russians look at each other and laugh, enjoying their private joke.

  Buljanoff, Iranoff (Sig Rumann), and Kopalski (Alexander Granach) soon make a mess of the sale. The Romanovs’ surviving heir, the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire), gets wind of the transaction and claims that the jewels are rightfully hers. Swana’s gigolo-boyfriend, Count Leon D’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), helps her tie up the sale by bamboozling Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski with legalities, prompting the Soviets to send a stern, humorless official, Comrade Ninotchka Yakushova (Garbo), to get the job done. Ninotchka holds no truck with gentility of service in capitalistic Paris. When the porter at the train station tries to carry her bags, she fights him off with socialist logic: forcing someone to carry someone else’s luggage is “social injustice,” she tells him, to which he replies with equal moral certainty: “That depends on the tip.”

  Ninotchka is grim and unforgiving by nature; that’s why she’s funny for the whole first half of the film. The writers make this point with a line so cruel it takes one’s breath away. Buljanoff asks, pleasantly, “How are things in Moscow?” and Ninotchka replies: “Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be few
er but better Russians.” This reference to countless murdered Soviets may be the first truly offensive line in Billy Wilder’s screen career. He went on to write many more of them in the years ahead, of course; it was Wilder, not Lubitsch, who eventually earned a reputation for being the master of mass bad taste. Wilder learned from Lubitsch something even more long lasting than how to construct a scene and how never to talk down to an audience. With the inclusion of this single line of dialogue Lubitsch taught Wilder that bad taste is worth risking as long as you remain true to yourself and your art. If the audience didn’t laugh at a good line, it might be the fault of the audience, not the writer.

  Ninotchka bears some screwball traces, the most obvious of which is that Ninotchka insults D’Algout repeatedly, and, as a direct consequence of her contempt, he’s charmed. “As basic material,” she notes in characteristic utilitarian fashion, “you may not be bad. But you are the unfortunate product of a doomed culture. I feel very sorry for you.” “Ah, but you must admit that this doomed old civilization sparkles. Look at it—it glitters!” “I do not deny its beauty. But it’s a waste of electricity.” Later, when she agrees to accompany him back to his apartment—she justifies it on the grounds of ethnographic study—Ninotchka reveals in a singularly dirty line that she had been injured while serving with the Soviet Army during the advance on Warsaw: “Would you like to see my wound?” Leon is dazzled by the prospect: “I’d love to!” he says excitedly. Unfortunately for him, it’s behind her neck.