Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  While Ariane is ostensibly dusting her father’s office, she surreptitiously dips into his confidential files. She comes across a file full of newspaper clippings documenting Frank’s escapades. She becomes intrigued with the aging Don Juan and contrives to visit him at his hotel. When Ariane crosses the threshold into Frank’s suite, the innocent ingenue is entering the adult world of an infamous philanderer, with all its secrets and lies. Ariane does not reveal her name to Frank but masquerades as a mystery woman with a notorious past. She soon falls under the lothario’s spell and thus begins a series of afternoon tête-à-têtes with him. Ariane insists on seeing him in the afternoon so she can tell her father she is rehearsing with the orchestra of which she is a member.

  Ariane says that Frank has an American face like a cowboy’s—a reference to Cooper’s sagebrush movies. Having never dated a slick American playboy before, the sheltered Ariane endeavors to fathom the personality of Frank Flannagan and his ilk. She tells a friend, “They’re strange people, Americans. When they’re young, they have their teeth straightened, their tonsils taken out, and gallons of vitamins pumped into them. Something happens to their insides; they become mechanized, dehumanized.” She concludes, “ ‘I’m not even sure whether he has a heart,” since Frank maintains that all love affairs should be transitory.

  Wilder himself has spoken of Americans, including himself, in an uncomplimentary fashion: “We are the most hard-boiled, undisciplined people in the world. First our heroes smack their girl’s face with a grapefruit,” as James Cagney does in Public Enemy (1931), “and then they kick mothers in wheelchairs downstairs,” as Richard Widmark does in Kiss of Death (1947). “How much farther can we go?”60 How far will Frank go to hold on to Ariane?

  That Frank is growing jealous of Ariane’s roster of former lovers is evident when he notices the ankle bracelet she is wearing. She claims that it is a gift from a former lover, when actually it is a key chain. He abruptly tears it from her ankle because he did not give it to her. Ariane’s anklet recalls the provocative ankle bracelet worn by Phyllis in Double Indemnity.

  Tormented by this nameless female’s exotic tales of her former lovers, Frank goes so far as to hire Claude Chevasse to uncover her true identity. Claude soon learns that the woman he is investigating is his own daughter. To his chagrin, Claude, “the record keeper of affairs of indiscretion,” realizes that his daughter has become a “candidate for one of her father’s file cards.”61 Claude implores Frank to forget her. “Give her a chance,” he pleads. “She’s such a little fish; throw her back in the water.” Frank accordingly tells Ariane that he has bought a train ticket for a holiday on the Riviera—without her. He reminds her of his cynical motto: “He who loves and runs away lives to love another day.” Ariane nevertheless accompanies Frank to the depot to bid him adieu.

  The following sequence begins with “a view of a smoking, chugging locomotive in a splendid vaulted railway station.”62 This is one of the very few scenes in his film that Wilder borrowed from Czinner’s movie. Frank has boarded the train; it begins to move. Ariane rushes along the platform, assuring Frank through her tears that she will continue her promiscuous life after he is gone. Ariane explains the tears by saying, “It’s the soot; it always happens to me at railroad stations.” This is a reference to David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), in which Laura, the heroine, gets a cinder in her eye while standing on the station platform, and Alec, the handsome hero, removes it for her.

  Frank now realizes that his emotions have been genuinely touched by this disarming girl. At the last moment, “as the train picks up speed, Frank lifts her aboard and carries her to a seat in the back,” writes Dick, who has done the best analysis of this film in English. “Be quiet, Ariane,” says Frank. He calls Ariane—once his anonymous lover—by her name for the first time.63

  Claude, who has shadowed Ariane and Frank to the train station, remains standing on the platform, along with the four gypsy musicians. They saw away with gusto at “Fascination” for the last time; since the quartet was associated with Frank’s seductions, they have been left behind for good.

  Wilder did not like Claude’s final voice-over, assuring the audience that Frank and Ariane would soon wed. When Frank sweeps Ariane up in his arms and takes her to his compartment, “that is the real ending,” said Wilder.64 In any case, at the fade-out, the strains of “Fascination” swell sublimely to a peak as Waxman marshals the full orchestra for the film’s finale.

  Love in the Afternoon was released in June 1957. Most critics welcomed it as “a sheer delight,” “a cascade of bubbles and belly laughs,” and—most significant for Wilder—”the type of sophisticated fare Lubitsch would have undertaken with delight.”65 As Brownlow notes, “If Lubitsch had lived, he’d have made just such a picture.”66 Audrey Hepburn was captivating as the wistful Ariane; her wide-eyed wonder and innocence “rang as true as a small silver bell.”67 Yet Maurice Chevalier, more than one critic noted, nearly stole the picture with his winning performance as the quirky, mischievous private eye specializing in cases of amour.

  One reservation about the movie was that the aging Gary Cooper “frankly has a much longer count on the calendar” than the wispy, effervescent Audrey Hepburn. Cooper seemed to lack conviction and hence was disappointing as the protagonist. Barson quips that in Love in the Afternoon, “Coop sometimes looks as though he’d like to doff his tux, don his buckskin gear and ride off to hunt buffalo.”68

  Some other reviewers complained that 130 minutes was an excessive running time for a lighter-than-air love story; more decisive editing by Azar and Harrison would have provided better pacing.

  François Truffaut, speaking for the young, feisty film critics at Cahiers du cinema, was disappointed in Love in the Afternoon. Truffaut griped that it was a sentimental, old-fashioned movie; he preferred the rash, somewhat cruder Seven Year Itch. Wilder, wrote Truffaut, had become “a lecherous old balladeer out of touch with the world.”69 But Truffaut’s panning of the film did not represent the generally good notices the movie garnered throughout Europe.

  Indeed, the movie made a better showing at the box office in Europe, but Allied Artists had sold the rights to the European distribution of the film to finance the making of the picture in the first place. Love in the Afternoon was not a moneymaker for Allied Artists. To make matters worse for the studio, William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion also failed to become a smash hit in America. Thus neither of Allied Artists’ first two prestige pictures propelled it into the big time, as it had hoped.

  When Allied Artists was forced to cut back on its ambitious plans to become a major Hollywood studio, the Mirisch brothers decided to desert it. In July 1957, only a month after the premiere of Love in the Afternoon, Walter, Harold, and Marvin Mirisch established the Mirisch Company, their own independent production company, with a view to releasing their pictures through United Artists (UA).

  In 1919 UA had been formed by Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. to distribute the pictures they made. When they inaugurated UA, one Hollywood executive joked, “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”70 But UA was still operating nearly four decades later. It did not make movies but financed and distributed films made by independent producers, who were multiplying in Hollywood as the studio system fell into decline. In the 1950s, UA, now headed by Arthur Krim, had released such successful pictures as The African Queen and High Noon. With Walter Mirisch as production chief, the Mirisch brothers arranged with Krim to base their production unit at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood, where UA had its headquarters. The Mirisches leased studio space on the Goldwyn lot to make their pictures.

  For his part, Wilder was pleased to be working with independent production companies and no longer associated with major studios like Paramount, Twentieth Century–Fox, and Warner Bros. He put a birdcage in his office at the Goldwyn Studios, with a stuffed bird perched on top. He explained, “The bird sitting atop the cage is symbolic of my final free
dom from my imprisonment by the majors: the bird has escaped the cage. I call the neighborhood where the major studios are in Hollywood the Bermuda Triangle.”71

  Edward Small, whose independent production company also released films through UA, had acquired the film rights to Agatha Christie’s hit play Witness for the Prosecution. Small planned to produce the picture in partnership with Arthur Hornblow Jr., who had produced Wilder’s first Hollywood picture, The Major and the Minor. They signed Wilder to cowrite the screenplay and to direct Witness for the Prosecution, to be made at the Goldwyn Studios for UA release. Wilder said that he was glad to be making another movie in Hollywood; filming abroad was overrated. “It’s much easier technically to shoot a picture in Hollywood,” because the studio facilities were second to none. “If you’re going to perform a delicate operation, why not do it in the best hospital?” Moreover, France, where Love in the Afternoon was shot, “is a place where the money falls apart in your hand, and you can’t tear the toilet paper.”72

  11

  Remains to Be Seen

  Witness for the Prosecution

  I would win most of my cases if it weren’t for my clients. They will waltz into the witness box and blurt out things that are better left unblurted.

  —Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, barrister,

  in the telefilm Rumpole and the Confession of Guilt

  Falling in love again, never wanted to.

  What am I to do?

  I can’t help it.

  —Frederick Hollander, “Falling in Love Again”

  (Marlene Dietrich’s signature song)

  Witness for the Prosecution began its artistic life as a short story that Agatha Christie published in 1933 in Britain in a volume titled The Hound of Death. The story was published in the United States in 1948 in the collection Witness for the Prosecution. When another playwright sought permission to turn the story into a play, Christie decided to adapt it for the stage herself. The play opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in London on October 28, 1953. “When the curtain came down on my ending,” Christie recalled, the play and its author were greeted with a standing ovation.1 After a run of 468 performances in London, the production moved to Broadway on December 16, 1954. The play was a smash hit there, running for 646 performances; it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best foreign play.

  Independent producer Edward Small, who had produced the classic film noir Raw Deal (1948), purchased the screen rights to Witness for the Prosecution at a high price, since Agatha Christie was a popular and prolific mystery writer whose works were outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible.2 Small hired Billy Wilder to cowrite the screenplay and direct the picture for one hundred thousand dollars plus 5 percent of the gross profits. Small would act as executive producer; his partner, Arthur Hornblow Jr., was to produce the picture. Wilder very much wanted to work again with Hornblow, who “had given me my first chance to direct.” Hence Wilder did not grumble about relinquishing the producer’s chores to him. As things turned out, Wilder recalled, Hornblow “took a dark load off my shoulders.”3 It was Hornblow, not Wilder, who went to the front office to talk them out of shaving the budget.

  Wilder was interested in filming a Christie mystery because he had read her work over the years. Asked about the influences on his films, he replied, “If there was any influence on me, it must come from the books and plays I read. . . . My work is not sugarcoated, I don’t use the sugar tongs,” he explained. “But I don’t sit down and say, ‘Now I’m going to make a vicious, unsentimental picture.’ ” The tone of the film depended on the source story.4

  Stephen Farber points out an interesting parallel between Witness for the Prosecution and Sunset Boulevard. The relationship of Leonard Vole, the young fortune hunter, to Emily French, the wealthy widow whom he eventually murders, “is an almost identical, cut-rate version of the same parasitic relationship of Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond,” once again motivated by greed and ending in violence.5

  Small said that “Marlene Dietrich made no bones about wanting the role of the German-born Christine Vole, Leonard’s wife.” As she grew older, Dietrich had not been offered many worthwhile parts. She was convinced that this film would give her the opportunity to prove that she was still an accomplished actress and not merely a headliner at Las Vegas, where she periodically entertained. “Billy Wilder, her old comrade from prewar Berlin, endorsed her for the role of Christine,” Small said. Both Wilder and Hornblow recommended Charles Laughton to play Sir Wilfrid Robarts, and Small approved the casting of both Dietrich and Laughton.6

  Small himself suggested Tyrone Power for Leonard Vole. Admittedly, Power was no longer the box office knockout he had been in the 1940s, when he played the swashbuckling hero of several costume dramas. Nevertheless, Small was confident that Power’s name still had marquee value. Power at first declined the role, since he suspected that he would be overshadowed by the well-known scene stealers Dietrich and Laughton. “Ty changed his mind,” said Small, “when I offered him a salary of $300,000.”7 Besides, Power, like Dietrich, welcomed the chance to prove by his performance in this picture that he was a serious actor and not just a movie star. “I’m sick of all these knights in shining armor parts; I want to do something worthwhile, like plays and films that have something to say,” Power said at the time. “Someday I will show the fuckers who say I was a success just because of my pretty face.”8 He also wanted to be directed by the renowned Billy Wilder. By December 1956, the leads were all cast.

  With shooting only six months away, Wilder got down to writing the script in earnest. His partner this time around was Harry Kurnitz, who had twenty years of experience as a screenwriter. He had, for example, written the screenplay for Carol Reed’s thriller The Man Between (1953). Moreover, he had authored many mystery novels under the pseudonym Mario Page. Kurnitz was not a young screenwriter who would defer to Wilder as Wendell Mayes had done. In fact, Kurnitz reminded Wilder of the intractable Raymond Chandler. Wilder thought Kurnitz was not as serious about devoting himself to the screenplay as he himself was. Kurnitz countered that he was simply not a workaholic like Wilder. He believed firmly in a nine-to-five workday and was not inclined to work overtime as Wilder pestered him to do. And, unlike Edwin Blum and other veteran screenwriters of the Wilder wars, Kurnitz was impervious to Wilder’s sarcastic insults. He was a fast man with a verbal punch who bounded back with clever jokes of his own aimed at Wilder. Even Wilder had to acknowledge that Kurnitz helped him turn out a solid screenplay.

  In adapting Witness for the Prosecution for the screen, Wilder realized that Christie concentrated primarily on the tantalizing ingenuity of the plots of her stories, while she treated characterization perfunctorily. Wilder viewed the murder mysteries she churned out as essentially exercises in puzzle solving. On the level of character delineation, Wilder observed, Christie’s mysteries were like “high school plays.”9 Wilder was less interested in showing how the mystery was solved than he was in portraying the characters’ encounters with the evils of a corrupt society.

  Accordingly, said Wilder, “We changed a few things from the original.”10 To flesh out the barrister’s character, Wilder gave the overweight Sir Wilfrid a heart condition brought on by overwork. He also gave the barrister a nurse, the peckish, fluttering, relentlessly vigilant Miss Plimsoll, who is charged with keeping Sir Wilfrid from suffering another heart attack. Wilder obtained the services of Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s wife, for the part; she was best known for playing the title role in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Sir Wilfrid views Miss Plimsoll as a meddling nuisance. In giving him “a foil in Miss Plimsoll, Wilder humanized the character by making him a flawed human being who stubbornly resents the nurse’s ministrations.”11 “If you weren’t a woman, Miss Plimsoll,” he explodes at one point, “I would strike you!” When she confiscates his cigars and brandy—both of which are proscribed by doctor’s orders—Sir Wilfrid fumes, “I’ll snatch her thermometer and plunge it into her shoulder blades!” It would
be “justifiable homicide.” Such humorous byplay between them provides some much-needed comic relief.

  Wilder and Kurnitz inserted some flashbacks into the screenplay to keep the film from bogging down into a static, talky courtroom drama. The most crucial flashback, which is based on a reference in the play’s exposition, depicts how Christine came to meet Leonard, her husband-to-be, when he was a British soldier in Hamburg at the end of World War II. Wilder took the liberty of working into this flashback a cabaret scene that he had dropped from the screenplay of A Foreign Affair, in which a brawl breaks out when a sailor attempts to paw Erika. Steven Bach notes, “Christine is another version of Erika, singing in an off-limits dive that is nearly a replica of the earlier picture’s Lorelei Club.”12 Indeed, Dietrich’s performance as Christine in Witness for the Prosecution “stands next to her portrayal of Erika in A Foreign Affair in revealing her considerable but sadly underused talents.”13

  For the scene in Witness for the Prosecution, Dietrich needed a ribald song to sing while playing her accordion and serenading the American enlisted men in the café with her sassy charm. Frederick Hollander, who supplied the songs for Dietrich in A Foreign Affair, had gone back to Germany. So, with the help of Matty Malneck, who was scoring Witness for the Prosecution, Wilder and Dietrich dug up a German ballad about Hamburg’s red-light district titled “Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins” (On the Reeperbahn at half past midnight). It was composed by Ralph Arthur Roberts, an actor-manager with whom Dietrich had worked in a cabaret in Berlin in the 1920s. Jack Brooks provided the English lyrics for the number, which became “I May Never Go Home Anymore.” In the flashback, when Christine finishes the song, some sailors get rambunctious, and one of them grabs Christine. In the ensuing melee, one leg of Christine’s slacks is ripped open well above the knee.