Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  On top of that, many of the Italian performers knew no English and spoke phonetically, giving their lines a strange, arrhythmic tone. Retake after retake was required. And then there was the business of the unions. When the shoot was over, Humphrey remembered that “Italian labor was divided into two camps: reds and whites. We weren’t permitted to use the Commies, though they represented the best technicians.”

  Besides all this there was Truman, who made no attempt to hide his homosexuality, swishing around wearing a lilac scarf and an ankle-length camel’s hair coat. Humphrey, who made a habit of railing about “fags,” didn’t know what to make of this short, flamboyant Puck. At first he gave Truman a wide berth, mocking his gestures and loudly referring to him as “Caposey.” But as the filming went on, he found himself beguiled by the little man.

  There were two reasons for Humphrey’s turnaround. Truman could be outrageous, but he was a true professional, generating dialogue on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. He never seemed to need a break, save for eccentricities like phoning Rome to speak to his pet raven, Lola (who answered back), and going to a hospital to take care of an impacted wisdom tooth (where he turned out twelve pages despite the pain). Also, the little man was a lot more combative than he looked. One afternoon Humphrey was feeling particularly macho. Sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Palumbo, he kept challenging various crew members to arm-wrestle as they passed through. These contests were won handily and, spotting Caposey, the champ called out, “How would you like to take me on?” Truman accepted the invitation, pulled up a chair, and locked fingers with him. Seconds later, Humphrey’s arm was down and it stayed there. “Would you mind doing that again?” Humphrey inquired. “Yes, for fifty dollars.” Humphrey put money on the table—and lost again. “As we stood up,” Truman remembered, “he caught me in a bear hug. He meant it affectionately, but there was also a certain kind of frustration-malice in the way he did it. ‘Cut that out, Bogie!’ I said. But he kept on squeezing me. ‘Cut that out!’ I said and hooked my foot behind his leg and pushed. Boom!” Humphrey tumbled back and suffered a hairline fracture of the elbow. As Huston observed, Truman was “a little bull.” Unfortunately, his taurine prowess resulted in a delay of filming while the star-producer received medical attention. Yet the two men became fast friends. “I really liked Bogie,” Truman insisted. “He was one of my all-time favorite people.” Humphrey had similar feelings; he wrote to Lauren, “Wait till you meet our screenwriter. You have never seen anything like him. At first, I didn’t think he was real—but he grows on you, and now I’d like to carry him around in my pocket, and take him out whenever I need a laugh.”

  He would need a lot of laughs to offset the feelings of imminent disaster. During one sequence, Huston planned to film Morley in a car. At the last moment he decided that a long shot could be used, making the actor superfluous. Heading downhill, the automobile crashed as the cameras rolled. Morley looked on, appalled: “I might have been killed.” Replied the director, “Yes, but you weren’t, were you, kid? So now you’re fine, just fine.” That was the trouble. With Huston, everything was always first-rate. That was his party line, no matter how dubious the weather, the work conditions, the picture itself. According to Morley, some years back Huston had been strolling down Fifth Avenue when he encountered a corpse lying on the pavement. Every other passerby ignored it; not John. He bent over and felt the man’s wrist for a pulse. There was none. As an ambulance pulled up, he assured the stretcher bearers, “He’ll be just fine … just fine.” Humphrey wanted to share in John’s general euphoria, but now his instincts told him otherwise. When the picture wrapped, he returned home full of forebodings. A special screening was set up so that he could consider the film objectively. Before the first reel ended Humphrey saw what was wrong: Beat the Devil was an unattractive mélange of styles and genres. And there was actually footage in which the voice of a Bogart imitator could be heard. During the weeks of postproduction in London, Huston felt that the star didn’t sound like himself in certain scenes. Without asking permission, the director hired a versatile young actor named Peter Sellers to do some dubbing. (Save for those three men, no one could tell the difference.)

  Humphrey felt certain that the critics would crucify the picture, that audiences would then pass it by, and that Santana would have to eat the loss. He consulted an old friend, Nunnally Johnson, a veteran producer, who had been associated with drama (The Grapes of Wrath), farce (Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid), and musical comedy (Lauren’s latest, How to Marry a Millionaire). Nunnally thought the film might be salvageable. He screened the print for two veteran film cutters, Gene and Marjorie Fowler. They agreed; Beat the Devil had possibilities—if it could be reconstructed. As it stood now, the first half hour was a straight caper picture. Then, without warning, it lurched into self-satirizing farce. From long experience, the Fowlers knew that a confused viewer is a hostile viewer. They went to work, rejiggering some interior scenes and front-loading the final one. Beat the Devil now opened with some of the conspirators in chains, on their way to prison. Johnson furnished a line for Humphrey, speaking over the footage: “These are four brilliant criminals at the climax of their most magnificent effort.” That would give audiences the necessary signal: a monumental send-up was about to be unreeled. Or so it was hoped. But in a letter to Humphrey, John Huston seemed to have lost his trademark buoyancy. “If the humor comes off—as I pray it will—I believe it will make some very tidy sums. On the other hand, if the joke should fall flat—well, God help me.”

  Flat is what it fell. The distributor, United Artists, had no idea how to promote the thing. One campaign pushed its dramatic side: BOGART MEETS HIS MATCH IN THE WORLD ADVENTURE THAT BEATS THEM ALL! Another, acknowledging that movie studios were frantically trying to woo audiences away from their television sets, struck a self-mocking pose: YOU HAVE SEEN COLOR—DIMENSION—CINEMASCOPE BUT NOW—WE PROUDLY PRESENT ON THE SMALL FLAT SCREEN BEAT THE DEVIL IN GLORIOUS BLACK AND WHITE!

  When he wrote his memoir some two decades later, Huston’s memory proved faulty. “A few critics hailed the film as a little masterpiece,” he claimed, “but they were all European. There was not an American among them.” Actually several U.S. reviewers admired Huston’s movie. The New Yorker found it “a hugely entertaining work,” comparing its “bright lunacy” to the novels of Evelyn Waugh. And Time was amused: “as elaborate a shaggy-dog story as has ever been told.” For the most part, though, Beat the Devil was accorded a lukewarm reception. The big names in the cast made it seem like an expensive home movie, a sniggering in-joke for the kind of people who lived in Malibu Beach Colony.

  The same held true for the European reviewers. A few enthusiasts made themselves heard. But the majority of journalists and cinéastes considered Beat the Devil a filmed charade, made for the amusement of its participants. The public was advised to stay away. It was just as Humphrey and John had feared. Audiences were bewildered and angry, and the word of mouth was terrible. “It should have been called Beat the Customer,” griped one viewer. Fearing a week of empty theaters, a Detroit chain canceled bookings of the film. The owner of a Baltimore movie house promised to give ticket holders their money back if they didn’t like the picture. He had plenty of claimants.

  Yet the saga of Beat the Devil still had far to go, and so did its star. In the early 1950s, the Eisenhower presidency represented the sunset of the war hero. Just as an emerging generation stood ready to take over the political scene, a group of ambitious young actors waited in the wings. Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and Paul Newman were on the rise, ready to take over the leading roles once played by the likes of Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy—and Humphrey Bogart. By the time Beat the Devil appeared Humphrey should have been considered the Ike of film actors, honored, appreciated, but growing more obsolete by the day. (After all, he was only nine years younger than the chief executive.) That was not the way it played out.

  Somehow, Humphrey always managed to ride the
wave of popular culture. It was not an accident. Luck played its part, of course, and he appeared in many a loser in the theater and on film. But when a pivotal role came his way, he always managed to seize the moment and move his career to the next level. The Bogart reputation took off in the 1930s when Broadway plays like The Petrified Forest crystallized the national angst. In the 1940s, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca established Humphrey’s reputation as the American male par excellence, operating in a compromised and often evil world, a man without illusions. “I don’t mind a parasite,” Rick tells Ugarte. “I object to a cut-rate one.” Even so, this hard-bitten cynic has a heart—a vulnerable one, protected by a screen of acrimony and wisecracks: “Tell me,” he asks Ilsa, “who was it you left me for? Was it Laszlo, or were there others in between? Or aren’t you the kind that tells?”

  And now, in the 1950s Humphrey was about to be plunged into an entirely new genre, a category that, at that point, had no name. A generation later, film critic Roger Ebert argued that Beat the Devil was the first “camp” movie, an accident waiting to happen. He praised Capote’s elliptical dialogue, singling out Jones’s line “They’re desperate characters. Not one of them looked at my legs” and Lorre’s description of time: “The Swiss manufacture it. The French hoard it. Italians want it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook.” Ebert also took delight in the film’s improvised style, “half-serious” attitude, and patent absurdities: the ex-Hungarian Lorre, his hair dyed blond, is named O’Hara; the heavily accented Lollobrigida declares, “Emotionally I am English”; Humphrey claims, “I was an orphan until I was twenty. Then a rich and beautiful lady adopted me.” There is a scene, Ebert points out, on a veranda overlooking the sea, “where Bogart and Jones play out their first flirtation, and by the end of their dialogue you can see they’re all but cracking up; Bogart grins during the dissolve. The whole movie feels that way.”

  That style was off-putting in the 1950s, the mark of the unprofessional, the bum. Over the years, though, Beat the Devil made money by becoming a cult favorite. That cult had many members, but Humphrey was never one of them. “Only phonies think it’s funny,” he insisted. “It’s a mess.” True enough; even so, camp followers delighted in that mess. In her celebrated essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” Susan Sontag offers some definitions. “Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy.… The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful.” In a triumph of irony, the flamboyant, sibilant Capote had taken two unassailable symbols of ur-masculinity, John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, thrown them both to the ground, and then helped them to their feet.

  iii

  Herman Wouk spent four years in the navy aboard destroyer-minesweepers, and his fourth novel grew out of that experience. Published in 1951, The Caine Mutiny hit the best-seller list and stayed there for nine months. Three years later he turned the courtroom portion of his tale into a stage play. The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, directed by Charles Laughton, and starring Henry Fonda and Lloyd Nolan, toured the country before settling in for a long run at the Plymouth Theater in New York. Meanwhile, the book had been sold to Columbia Pictures.

  The film adaptation had a troubled beginning. Humphrey hungered for the role of Captain Queeg. Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, knew the situation and took full advantage. On the surface, all seemed well, but privately Humphrey told Lauren, “This never happens to Gary Cooper or Cary Grant or Clark Gable, but always to me. Why does it happen to me? Damn it, Harry knows I want to play it and will come down in my price rather than see them give it to somebody else.” And so he did, settling for much less than his customary $200,000.

  Then there was the matter of Edward Dmytryk. One of the Hollywood Ten, he had been given a six-month sentence for contempt. In jail he had griped to his fellow ex-Communist Ring Lardner, “You writers can write under other names. What the hell can a director do?” It was the first hint that he was about to jump-start his career by getting off the blacklist. After four and a half months behind bars (about a third of the time he had spent in the Party), Dmytryk let it be known that he wanted to meet “the toughest anti-Communist in town.” That was Roy Brewer, leader of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and one of the most adamant right-wing union chiefs in America. Brewer believed in rehabilitation at a price. For Dmytryk the price was a total repudiation of his past and the naming of names for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Appearing voluntarily before the committee in 1948, he filled the air with big names and small ones. These included screenwriter John Howard Lawson, whom he accurately described as the “high lama of the Party”; Jules Dassin, director of The Naked City; and Frank Tuttle, who had directed seven Bing Crosby hits. After naming twenty others as onetime Communists, Dmytryk was deemed fit to direct a film about the War of 1812.

  Four pictures later he was hired to direct The Caine Mutiny, but he was still not sanitized enough for the U.S. Navy. Fortunately for Dmytryk, the film’s technical adviser, Commander James Shaw, had impeccable credentials: he was a decorated veteran of Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. The commander intervened on behalf of Columbia Pictures, persuading his superior officers that Dymytrk was now an impeccable patriot, as were producer Stanley Kramer and the entire cast. Columbia offered other assurances. The movie would provide a spirited endorsement of career officers and their crews, and the screen would show a paragraph stating that the U.S. Navy had never experienced a mutiny. (In fact there had been two mutinies. The first, in 1842, resulted in the hanging of three men, one of them the eighteen-year-old son of the secretary of war. The second occurred in 1944, when military workers at a northern California dock refused to resume loading ammunition after a merchant ship blew up, killing more than 300 men. The assembled officers found 258 protesters guilty, imposed bad-conduct discharges on 208, and court-martialed the remaining 50, who were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. The sentences were commuted shortly after the Japanese surrender in August 1945.)

  There were other difficulties, however, and these could not be managed so easily. In the Wouk novel, Captain Queeg is an interesting, conflicted man. By the last year of the war, the faithful husband and father, a valiant leader under fire, has become a burned-out by-the-book martinet. Does his failure of nerve threaten the Caine and every man aboard her? Or is he merely going through a bad patch like many another battle-weary combat veteran? It was up to the reader to decide. The other officers were also given dimension and complexity. The theatrical version kept that complexity because it only included the court-martial. Thus the two-hour running time could be spent on character as well as on plot development. The film ran about the same length, but included a long preamble and a postlude concentrating on Ensign Willie Keith (Robert Francis), a wellborn Princetonian in love with a club singer, but afraid to tell his haughty, dominating mother. As in many another oceangoing tale, from Captains Courageous to The Rover Boys, Keith grows up at sea. Unfortunately, the male ingenue and his story consumed valuable footage and minutes without adding much to the proceedings. The story of Captain Queeg had to be confined to the middle third of the movie, and it was up to Dmytryk and his cast to make the drama come alive in the time allotted to them.

  No screen actors of this period could have done more with their parts. Even the smallest roles were filled by men with real faces and personalities. As the barely able seamen Meatball and Horrible, Lee Marvin and Claude Akins provided memorable comic relief. Fred MacMurray had spent his early career impersonating genial, all-American types. But he reversed course in 1949, playing a heel in the classic film noir Double Indemnity. At the age of forty-six he assumed another unsympathetic role. Lieutenant Tom Keefer, a novelist in civilian life, is a weak man with a glib tongue and a façade of good fellowship. Ever the agent provocateur, Keefer persistently labels Queeg a “classic paranoid,” a “Freudian delight” who “crawls with clues,” encouraging Lieutenant Steve Maryk (Van
Johnson) to seize control of the Caine. Johnson, the blond, freckled “boy next door” in a dozen MGM pictures, had suffered a horrific automobile accident in 1943. For the rest of his life he wore a metal plate in his skull, and his still-handsome face was left with discernible scars. They gave the thirty-eight-year-old a hard-worn and serious demeanor he had lacked in earlier films. Johnson displayed an unaccustomed authority in The Caine Mutiny, especially during the typhoon scene, where Maryk deposes the glassy-eyed captain, assuming full charge of the ship.

  Once ashore, Lieutenant Maryk and his fellow officers are arrested. At the tense court-martial they’re reminded that mutiny is a capital crime; the only thing standing between them and the noose is an effective defense attorney—if Lieutenant Barney Greenwald is up to the job. As the court-appointed lawyer, the forty-two-year-old José Ferrer used his rolling bass and contemptuous glare to great effect.

  Each officer testifies about the condition of the ship, the captain’s fitness, whether they thought the mutiny justified. All but one backs Maryk. To save his own skin Tom Keefer denies the truth and states that he wanted no part of the takeover. Yes, he worried about Captain Queeg’s stringent orders, but never, ever thought him incapable of command. As the Caine’s Iago, MacMurray might have stolen the film, had it not been for Humphrey’s towering performance as Queeg. Reaching back to the Fred C. Dobbs of Sierra Madre and the Dixon Steele of Lonely Place, the fifty-five-year-old added his own experiences in the navy, as well as his knowledge of human behavior, closely observed. “Queeg was not a sadist, not a cruel man,” he was to write. “He was a very sick man. I don’t know whether he was a schizophrenic, a manic depressive or a paranoiac—ask a psychiatrist—but I do know that a person who was any one of those things works overtime at being normal. In fact he’s super normal until pressured. And then he blows up. I personally know a Queeg in every studio.” Audiences saw none of the overstatements and tears Lloyd Nolan had employed on Broadway. Queeg begins his testimony in a reasonable tone and then, as Greenwald inexorably leads him on, descends into an angry, pitiable figure hovering on the threshold of madness.