by Mark Harris
“I jumped at it because it was an out-and-out propaganda film and [in the fall of 1941] you were not supposed to make propaganda pictures,” Wyler said. “This was an opportunity to, in a small way, make a small contribution to the war effort.” Miniver was also a perfect fit for MGM, always the most cautious and decorous of the major studios. Louis B. Mayer had stayed far away from the Nye Committee hearings that fall, and had winced when isolationists included MGM movies like The Mortal Storm and Escape on the list of propaganda films they brandished. Although the hearings had ended with a resounding win for the studios, Mayer was still squeamish about making any movies that could ignite charges of bias. This particular project was safe, he explained to Wyler, because it was about British heroism. “It’s very sympathetic to them—but it’s not directed against the Germans,” he told Wyler. “We’re not at war with anybody. We don’t hate anybody.” With that in mind, Mayer instructed Wyler to tone down a scene in which Mrs. Miniver is trapped in her home by a wounded German flyer, warning the director not to make the soldier a “self-righteous, fiendish” slogan-spouting proponent of Hitler’s policies.
Wyler was incredulous. “Mr. Mayer,” he said, “if I had several Germans in this picture, I wouldn’t mind having one who was a decent young fellow. But I’ve only got one German. And if I make this picture, this one German is going to be a typical Nazi son of a bitch. He’s not going to be a friendly little pilot but one of Goering’s monsters.”
“Well, we’ll look at the scene when it’s finished,” replied Mayer. “Just remember what I told you.” The day after Pearl Harbor, he called the director. “I’ve been thinking about that scene,” Mayer told him. “You do it the way you want.”
Wyler loved that story, and both his defiance and Mayer’s timidity grew with every retelling, but there was no question that, of all the movies whose productions were interrupted by Pearl Harbor, Mrs. Miniver changed the most dramatically as a result. Wyler had always wanted the screenplay to incorporate the specifics of the war, and the events the Minivers experience over the year during which the film unfolds would have been familiar markers to any American. The family learns of the outbreak of war in September 1939, Mr. Miniver (played by Walter Pidgeon) captains one of the hundreds of small boats used to help 300,000 British and French soldiers evacuate Dunkirk in what was known as the “miracle of the little ships” in May 1940, and the devastating effects of the Nazi bombardment of Britain throughout that summer and fall form the movie’s climax. But the entry of America into the war dramatically transformed the way the Minivers would be perceived; they were no longer merely sympathetic foreigners but examples of fortitude that Americans could follow. Before Pearl Harbor, U.S. audiences would have heard the music used throughout the film as “God Save the King”; now they were likelier to identify it as “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” The window onto those “happy, careless people” now seemed more like a mirror.
Talk of war was pervasive on the Miniver soundstage at MGM. Dame May Whitty, the seventy-six-year-old actress who was playing the town’s snobbish grande dame, spent her time between takes knitting scarves for the Red Cross and reminiscing about her days as the head of England’s Women’s Emergency Corps during the last war. And soon after December 7, actor Henry Wilcoxon told Wyler he was joining the navy. Wilcoxon was playing the village vicar, and in the film’s last scene, as the Minivers mourn the loss of their daughter-in-law and several neighbors, his character was to deliver a eulogy in a bombed church—a church “with a damaged roof, but one through which the sun now shines as it never could before.” In the shooting script that Wyler had approved in October 1941, the sermon was to end with the 91st Psalm:
I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; My God; in him will I trust. . . .
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the sorrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust.
By the time Wyler was ready to film the scene, Wilcoxon was already on active duty and had to request two days’ leave to return to the MGM lot to complete his role. The night before shooting, he and Wyler rewrote the sermon. Following the psalm, the vicar would now make a more secular speech that explicitly echoed Roosevelt and Churchill in its assertion that “this is not only a war of soldiers in uniform, it is a war of the people—of all the people—and it must be fought not only on the battlefield, but in the cities and in the villages, in the factories and on the farms, in the home and in the heart of every man, woman and child who loves freedom! . . . We have buried our dead but we shall not forget them. Instead, they will inspire us with an unbreakable determination to free ourselves and those who come after us from the tyranny and terror that threatens to strike us down! Fight it, then! Fight it with all that is in us! And may God defend the right.” The final version of Mrs. Miniver would now end with “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war” as Wyler panned dramatically up to the hole torn in the church roof—through which thirty Allied planes are seen taking the fight to the Nazis. With a final title urging Americans to “Buy Defense Bonds And Stamps Every Pay Day,” Wyler had finally made a war movie—one more immediate and impactful than he had ever imagined it would be.
With Mrs. Miniver almost finished and the reality of war sinking in, MGM granted Wyler permission to shut down production for three weeks in February and March. Greer Garson had agreed to go on a tour to help sell war bonds, and Wyler, who had submitted his application to join the Signal Corps on December 18, was, his wife recalled, “wild to get involved . . . and get to Europe. He was violently anti-Hitler. He wanted to be a part of the struggle. And also, by his nature, he wasn’t about to miss all that.” Like Capra, Wyler had been recruited by Bartlett and Schlossberg, and he was still awaiting his commission. The day after he halted work on Mrs. Miniver, he cabled Schlossberg to let him know that he wasn’t going to wait any longer for his orders; he would come to Washington, D.C., right after the Academy Awards to learn more “about my status and what action has been taken.” Wyler was thirty-nine and his second child was about to be born, but “if he had qualms, he didn’t reveal them,” recalled John Huston. “I doubt he had any. Willy was a fearless man.”
Oscar night felt like something of a leavetaking for Wyler—the last special occasion that he and Talli would enjoy together for quite some time—and they were sharing it with close friends whose marriage was crumbling before their eyes. John and Lesley Huston had been married for five years, but Huston’s infidelities had started almost immediately and were now insultingly indiscreet. During the making of The Maltese Falcon in the summer of 1941, he had had an affair with his leading lady, Mary Astor; he had since moved on to a new picture, In This Our Life, a new leading lady, Olivia de Havilland, and a romance so unconcealed that, as Huston sat next to his wife, he and de Havilland blew kisses at each other across the empty dance floor in a manner that Talli Wyler found “uncomfortably obvious.”
Huston was never more reckless than when he was riding high, and his work on two different films had made him the season’s most celebrated young director except for Orson Welles. The Maltese Falcon had been nominated for Best Picture, and Huston was a double nominee in the writing categories, for both his Falcon script and his rewrite of Sergeant York. As a neophyte director, he was still earning only a tiny fraction of what his more established colleagues were paid—his salary for The Maltese Falcon was just $1,250 a week and the five-year contract he had recently signed with Warner Bros. would, by its end, pay him only about a third of what Wyler was making. Warner Bros. had had only the most modest hopes for The Maltese Falcon when Huston started production; the studio budgeted the film at less than $375,000, and George Raft, who had been assigned to play Dashiell Hammett’s detective Sam Spade, quit the project in a huff, writing to Jack Warner, “As you know, I strongly feel that The Malt
ese Falcon . . . is not an important picture.” Just as with High Sierra, Humphrey Bogart, who got the role of Spade just four days before shooting started, became the beneficiary of Raft’s narcissism and bad judgment.
Huston had a knack for instilling an us-against-the-world team spirit in his casts; the filmmakers who had unsuccessfully adapted The Maltese Falcon for Warner Bros. in 1931 and again in 1936 were, he said, “idiots” and “assholes,” and this time they were going to do it right. “We had an odd, childlike territorial imperative about our set,” said Astor, “a sneaky feeling that we were doing something different and exciting.” They were the bad kids—especially Bogart, the star who was never the studio’s first choice, and Huston, for whom Bogart chose an affectionate, and appropriate, nickname. “The Monster is stimulating,” he said. “Offbeat kind of mind. Off center. He’s brilliant and unpredictable. Never dull.” (After visiting the set, a Look magazine reporter described Huston as “a First Class Character with a busted nose, cadaverous frame, stooped shoulder, rubber face and berserk hair—all adding up to his nickname ‘Double Ugly.’”) Initially, Warners’ Hal Wallis monitored Huston’s work closely, telling him that the tempo of his scenes was “too slow and deliberate, a little labored”; Huston, who had learned from Wyler how to soothe nervous producers, reassured him that he was “shrinking all the pauses and speeding all the action” but also told him that he was pacing each scene “with the whole picture in mind.” Wallis liked the results, but Warner Bros. kept its expectations low, opening the movie with little fanfare in October 1941.
The praise was unanimous. “The Warners have been strangely bashful about their new mystery film . . . and about the young man, John Huston, whose first directorial job it is,” said the New York Times in a rave review. “Maybe . . . they wanted to give everyone a nice surprise . . . for The Maltese Falcon . . . turns out to be the best mystery thriller of the year, and young Mr. Huston gives promise of becoming one of the smartest directors in the field. . . . He has worked out his own style, which is brisk and supremely hardboiled.” James Agee called it “frighteningly good evidence that the British (Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, et. al.) have no monopoly on the technique of making mystery films. . . . It is rich raw beef right off the U.S. range,” and the New York Herald Tribune labeled the movie “a classic in its field,” adding, “it is hard to say whether Huston the adapter or Huston the fledgling director is most responsible for this triumph.”
Warner Bros. responded by giving Huston what he thought amounted to a promotion, assigning him to an adaptation of a recent Pulitzer Prize–winning novel that was to star the studio’s two most important actresses, Davis and de Havilland. “I felt rather ashamed of the way I got into In This Our Life,” he later said. “Ambition stepped in. . . . I thought, oh, boy, I’ve arrived. . . . I did it because it was good for my career.” Huston was disdainful of the material, which offered little more than an excuse to cast Davis in a by then stereotypical role as the savage center of a troubled family; during production, he devoted most of his attention to courting de Havilland. “Anyone could see that . . . it was Valentine’s Day on the set,” Jack Warner said. “When I saw the rushes I said to myself, ‘Oh-oh, Bette has the lines, but Livvy is getting the best camera shots.” Huston kept Davis calm by letting her do whatever she wanted on camera. “There is something elemental about Bette—a demon within her which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears,” he wrote. “I let the demon go.” Davis, who preferred to fight to get her own way rather than have a director surrender to her, thought the resulting movie was “one of the worst films made in the history of the world,” and critics were not much kinder, comparing it unfavorably to The Little Foxes. Huston didn’t much care; home movies from the time show him and de Havilland engaging in romantic clowning as he pushes her into a swimming pool and then jumps in after her; she throws her arms around his neck and climbs on his back.
The Wylers were sympathetic to Huston’s wife, and Huston’s flirtation at the Oscar ceremony (from which both men went home empty-handed) made a difficult evening more unpleasant. By this time, Wyler, a four-time nominee, had taken to joking that he was going to bring an empty carrying bag to the Academy Awards just in case the voters finally felt like putting something in it, but it was not to be. For the second year running, he lost the Best Director Oscar to Ford, who was in Hawaii working on December 7th and unable to pick up his prize for How Green Was My Valley. Darryl Zanuck accepted on his behalf as Wyler sat and watched the film he had spent months developing take the statuette for Best Picture as well. (“Have you put your new Oscar on the mantle [sic] yet?” Ford wrote to Mary when he got the news. “The Navy is very proud of me. It’s made a tremendous impression. Admirals, generals, etc. have called to congratulate me. Strange!”)
Wyler quickly shrugged off his disappointment. The Little Foxes already seemed like a distant memory; days after the ceremony, he traveled to Washington, where he implored Schlossberg to finalize his commission and give him a job. Schlossberg was no more welcoming to him than he had been to Capra, calling him a “pain in the ass.” With nothing to do but wait, Wyler decided to plan a movie on his own. While in the capital, he met with Lillian Hellman, with whom he had remained close since the making of The Little Foxes, and the two hatched an idea to make a documentary about the Soviet Union’s struggle against the Nazis. Hellman got approval from the Soviet embassy for the two of them to travel to Russia to make the movie, but although the project was known to have the blessing of President Roosevelt, Wyler and Hellman would still have to find a Hollywood producer to finance it. They flew to New York to meet with Sam Goldwyn, who enthusiastically agreed to send them on a scouting mission to Moscow. But the conversation foundered when Wyler mentioned that he wanted his salary sent to Talli in monthly installments. Goldwyn blanched. “You say you love America, you are patriots you tell everybody. . . . Now it turns out you want money from me?” he spluttered. “Sam,” Hellman replied, “your problem is that you think you’re a country—and that all of the people around you are supposed to risk their lives for you!”
The notion of a documentary ended there, although Goldwyn did agree to pay Hellman to write a fictional treatment of the Soviet struggle.* With his commission still stalled, Wyler returned to Los Angeles in March to shoot some final scenes for Mrs. Miniver and to consider whether there might be any way to circumvent Schlossberg and get into uniform.
Huston was in somewhat less of a hurry to get out of Hollywood. Earlier in the year, Bartlett and Schlossberg had recruited him for the Signal Corps, and the possibility of a war adventure excited him, but so did his suddenly vital career. After years of toil as a screenwriter for Warner Bros., he had become, in the space of just a few months, one of the studio’s most valued directors. Hal Wallis was working to secure him the rights to B. Traven’s novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which Huston wanted to write and direct as soon as possible, and the success of The Maltese Falcon had so impressed Jack Warner that in early 1942 he demanded a sequel. When Warner, to his disappointment, learned that novelist Dashiell Hammett had retained all rights to his characters, he simply transferred the idea to another movie and decided to reunite Huston, Bogart, Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet in a light thriller called Across the Pacific. The studio had picked up the rights to a prescient Saturday Evening Post serial by Robert Carson called “Aloha Means Goodbye,” published in the summer of 1941, about an undercover government agent aboard a freighter who foils a plot by Japanese spies to blow up two warships at Pearl Harbor. After the war started, many scripts and story treatments involving espionage or foreign intrigue were rewritten to increase their timeliness and relevance; Across the Pacific was one of the few that was refocused away from the war. It was much too soon for Pearl Harbor to be used as the backdrop for an essentially fanciful and unserious entertainment, so Wallis had the Japanese target changed to the Panama Canal. Despite the movie’s title, the freighter never made it into, let alo
ne across, the Pacific.
Huston started shooting the movie that March, in a Hollywood that was rapidly changing. Japanese villains were being written into dozens of pictures, often as grotesque stereotypes baring their buck teeth in phony smiles and feigning exaggerated politeness behind bottle-thick glasses; more than one screenplay referred to them as a race of monkeys or dogs. The number of Japanese American actors working in Hollywood was low, and under a presidential order issued on February 19, most of them were among the 100,000 U.S. citizens facing extended confinement in internment camps. To replace them, studios often used Chinese American performers or white actors in preposterous makeup. Huston had notably avoided racial stereotypes in his earlier movies (the sole praise In This Our Life received was for a rare and exceptionally progressive portrayal of a black character). But he does not seem to have thought twice about the use of anti-Japanese caricatures; he was more invested in keeping the mood bright and energetic. The first draft of the script, submitted in January, had ended with an explicit and unsettling acknowledgment of the damage done to Pearl Harbor. As Bogart’s character stares up at “an immense armada of Japanese planes,” he says “grimly,” “This is it. We’re too late. We’ve all been too late. . . . The Japs are like a little squirt picking on a great big guy. The little guy picks up a bottle. That may work, except that when he swings it, he’d better swing it good. If he misses, the big guy finally picks him up and tosses him out the window.”