This Day in Film History (Birth of William Holden, ‘Golden Boy’ and Gipper Friend)

April 17, 1918— William Holden, who became a box-office star and Oscar winner by playing characters forced to survive by their wits in desperate, even morally dubious circumstances, was born into a comfortable middle-class environment in O'Fallon, Ill. Though born in the same state, he was miles apart psychologically from the fellow actor whose best friend and wedding best man he would become, Ronald Reagan. 

Holden and Reagan were a study in contrasts throughout their lives. Their career trajectories demonstrate the variety of ways in which fame and posterity treat Hollywood’s leading men.

Suzanne Vega’s song "Tom's Diner" refers to “an actor/who died while he was drinking/he was no one I had heard of." That actor was Holden, who passed away alone, on a throw rug in his apartment, possibly when drunk, in 1981. To me, a fellow baby boomer raised on TV, those lyrics are mystifying, as Holden starred, over three decades, in approximately 70 films, including several among the best-known of their era: Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Sabrina, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Wild Bunch, and Network. 

When Ms. Vega wrote these lyrics, while she might not have heard of Holden, it was a certainty that she would have heard of Reagan, who was in the first year of a Presidency that altered American politics and society. Virtually every obituary of the actor would have mentioned the shock expressed by the President and First Lady Nancy Reagan over the death of the man who had served as best man at their wedding in 1952.

The psychological distance between Reagan and Holden at the end of the latter’s life mirrored how the two began. Although O'Fallon is only a bit more than a three-hour drive south from Reagan’s birthplace in Tampico, Ill., the two could not have been farther apart in terms of their families.

Holden’s parents—an industrial chemist and schoolteacher—provided financial stability and an opportunity to travel abroad. But the sole breadwinner in Reagan’s family was his father, whose job (shoe salesman) and abiding health issue (alcoholism) led to constant moves in northern Illinois.

Though both landed in Hollywood in the late 1930s, it was Reagan who achieved a more secure foothold early on, with high-profile roles in Dark Victory, Santa Fe Trail, and, beating out Holden, John Wayne, and Robert Young, doomed Notre Dame gridiron star George Gipp in Knute Rockne—All American. He scored a special triumph as a happy-go-lucky small-town playboy who becomes the victim of a sadistic doctor in Kings Row, and was high enough in the Warner Brothers constellation that he was seriously considered for the role that eventually went to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. 

Meanwhile, after making a splash in Golden Boy and Our Town, Holden began to be typecast as a clean-cut, innocent young man.

World War II brought a change in their fortunes and, in Holden’s case, temperament. Reagan missed four years in what should have been his prime, sliding perceptibly from “A” to “B” list consideration. His energy was increasingly taken up by politics—first the attempt to stymie Communist influence in Hollywood unions, then in larger national questions. 

Neither man saw combat in the war, but Holden—an Air Force second lieutenant who served stateside on P.R. duties and making training films for the Office of Public Information—was crushed by the loss of a brother killed in action. 

The 1950s represented the zenith of Holden’s career and the nadir of Reagan’s, as one performance style was suddenly in sync with the public while the other lost traction. While never particularly flashy, Reagan was a highly professional actor—well-prepared and amenable to direction. But he didn’t give his directors any unexpected dimension, and his straight-arrow image now seemed vanilla. 

With WWII and Korea darkening the nation’s mood, the path was cleared for a new breed of actors—notably Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Holden—who possessed every bit of the glamour associated with pre-war leading men but also an underside that made them natural anti-heroes. 

In particular, Holden seemed drawn to a particular kind of role: tall, well-built, handsome, charming, intelligent, irresistible to women—but a hollow man who felt or behaved like a fraud. On the big screen, he was Don Draper before he had been given a suit, a martini and a borrowed name.

Holden made the most of this new environment, appearing among the top 10 box office stars six times, as ranked by Quigley Publications' annual poll of movie exhibitors. But in 1954, the same year he strode to the podium to pick up an Academy Award for Stalag 17, Reagan suffered through a humiliating Vegas variety emceeing gig.

Success or the lack of it rechanneled their energies and, consequently, careers. A shrewd deal for acting in The Bridge on the River Kwai led Holden to accept roles merely to keep his hand in a business from which he derived increasingly less pleasure. He could certainly rise to the occasion when presented with the opportunity (as in his Oscar-nominated turn in Network), but alcohol had now ravaged his face and let younger competitors such as Paul Newman and Steve McQueen in a better position to snag choice roles. On one of the foreign trips he'd taken ever since he was a child, he became so fascinated by the wilds of Kenya that he subsequently became involved in a game ranch dedicated to conservation--what he increasingly felt was the most important work of his life.

On the other hand, Reagan—with his career plummeting faster and further down than Holden’s—chose to leave acting behind altogether, in one of the most startling acts of reinvention in American history. 

It is astonishing, where different combinations of circumstance and character can lead people. In spite of a hard-scrabble lifestyle, Reagan grew up with an innate faith in the goodness of his countrymen. The “morning in America” commercial of his Presidential re-election campaign may or may not have reflected economic reality, but it certainly accorded with his faith in what people could do if left to their own devices. 

It was far different for Holden, whose performances, Bruce Bennett noted in a 2008 essay for The New York Sun, “invariably bear an end-of-the-season autumnal sadness.” Each of his characters seldom seems surprised by the world because, having taken a good, long look at himself, he has already been gravely disappointed. 

Materially comfortable in childhood, blessed with more than the normal allotment of good looks, intelligence and talent when he grew up, Holden came to believe he didn’t have what mattered—a profession that ultimately meant anything or people who would be there for him in his last hours alive.

This Day in Film History (‘Network,’ Pitch-Black Prophecy of TV News, Debuts)

Nov. 27, 1976—Network, a Swiftian satire on the degradation of broadcast news, debuted to a critical reception that hailed its ensemble cast and savage screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky. Many in the news business, however, including on-air personalities like Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and Edwin Newman, complained that the movie was exaggerated and far-fetched. 

In the end, while much of the creative talent associated with Network came away with Oscars, Hollywood bestowed Best Picture honors several months later on the Capraesque fairy tale of a Philadelphia palooka who ends up with a thousand-to-one shot in a heavyweight title bout, Rocky.

Even as I typed this last sentence, however, I realized how reductive, oversimplified and even condescending it was—not unlike Network itself at its worst. For most people, the term “Capraesque”—or, worse, “Capracorn”—evokes films by director Frank Capra filled with ultimate optimism about human beings and faith in American democracy, such as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” But there is another entry in Capra’s filmography that could be a cousin of Network: Meet John Doe (1941).

In both movies, a threat to commit suicide (in one case, actual; the other, a hoax) becomes an unexpected media sensation, courtesy of an ambitious, ethics-challenged woman. Before long, a corporate magnate grasps this unfolding story as an opportunity for profits and power—then, when he sees the protagonist’s usefulness eroding, makes him expendable. 

Above all, the two films put under their uncomfortable glare an all-too-credulous American public that can quickly morph into a mob—and, according to a post by Lara G. Fowler on the classic-film blog “Backlots,” offer pointed “reminders of the power of journalism to influence and brainwash.”

Three years ago, on what would have been Chayefsky’s 90^th birthday, I wrote a post on Network’s similarities to his earlier Oscar-winning satire of an institution, The Hospital. I thought of simply re-posting this to Facebook. But I watched portions of Network again a few weeks ago—enough to make me realize that I hadn’t even come close to capturing how much it has gained in prophetic witness through the years, even if at points he seems to be using his characters as none-too-subtle mouthpieces for his own views. 

Ryan Bort of Newsweek, for instance, has described nine Network motifs that figured into the astonishing campaign of Donald Trump (#s 1 and 2:“The latent rage of the American people” and “The allure of anti-establishment rhetoric”). All true enough. 

But at a more basic level, Chayefsky sensed how the ground was shifting under journalism, in ways that grandees such as Cronkite and Chancellor—not to mention once-prominent network execs such as Richard Salant and Richard Wald—were in no real position to appreciate, and that has only gathered momentum with the years:

*Corporate parents’ obsession with news division ratings and favorable demographics: The trigger for the plot of Network is news exec’s Max Schumacher’s reluctance disclosure to his old friend, anchor Howard Beale, that he is being sacked because of plunging viewership, particularly with the young. Now, the days when news divisions were not expected to be profit centers have long since passed, but one thing remains the same: advertisers still look to a desirable demographic segment among  a newscast’s viewership (except that now it is not the baby boomers but the millennials).

*The creation of a fourth news network, given over to sensationalism: Chayefsky may have invented a fourth network as a fictive device to get around questions of whether his nightmare scenario could really occur at CBS, NBC or ABC. But within four years, CNN had come to compete with them for viewers, and 20 years after Network’s premiere, Fox began to specialize in reality programming and, in its news programs, Beale-like shouting news personalities intent on inciting rage among listeners.

*Network vulnerability to a hostile takeover: The behind-the-scenes drama of Network is heightened by the prospect of a corporate acquisition. A decade later, Laurence Tisch’s takeover of CBS marked the point when nightmare became reality, inaugurating an era of mass layoffs, asset sales, and declining moral in the news division. And CBS was soon joined in the griddle with the rest of the "Big Three," with GE's Jack Welch and Bob Wright overseeing NBC and Capital Cities' Tim Murphy and Dan Burke exerting similar tight-fisted control at ABC.

*Exploitation of prime time by terrorists: Chayefsky was horrified by the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists pulled off an even more astonishing example of mass murder, also played out before the TV cameras. 

I couldn’t end this post without highlighting the importance of William Holden in holding the film together. None of the three actors who won Oscars for the movie—Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, and Beatrice Straight—shared scenes with each other. But Holden interacted with all of them in his role as Schumacher, the troubled, complicated heart who dealt with, in order, their power plays, insanity, and marital rage.

David Lean, who directed him in Bridge on the River Kwai, praised his fearlessness, and there are few more sterling examples than his work here as Schumacher. 

Robert Mitchum, Walter Matthau, Glenn Ford and Gene Hackman were all considered at one point for the part, but it is difficult to imagine any of them improving on Holden’s embodiment of the character. Blogger Sheila O'Malley, in a characteristically perceptive post on the actor’s career, takes note of the “deep crags, blazing blue eyes, and the seriousness behind the straight-up all-American handsomeness” that was all too obvious at this point in his career. But even that only conveys a portion of how much he inhabited the character. 

One of the most bankable leading men of the Fifties, Holden had not taken care of himself—and, two decades later, it showed. But in this last significant role, the bags under the eyes and a whiskey baritone somewhat coarsened by cigarettes only underscored a character who had seen all too much. It was easy to imagine the actor, once the “Golden Boy” of the screen, playing someone who could have been among the golden youths once recruited by Edward R. Murrow, now grimly trying to navigate the shoals of a profession no longer guided by any sense of public spirit. 

  

Chayefsky was famously insistent on having his script filmed exactly to his specifications. But I wish that director Sidney Lumet could have urged him to tone down Schumacher’s haunted confession to Faye Dunaway’s pitiless younger lover, Diane Christiansen:

“I feel lousy about the pain that I've caused my wife and kids. I feel guilty and conscience-stricken, and all of those things you think sentimental, but which my generation calls simple human decency. And I miss my home, because I'm beginning to get scared shitless, because all of a sudden it's closer to the end than the beginning, and death is suddenly a perceptible thing to me, with definable features.”

Lumet could have argued convincingly that everything in that passage after “scared shitless” could have been left out, as the sight of Holden’s careworn face said far more about Schumacher’s fear of aging and mortality than Chayefsky’s script ever could.

This Day in Film History (“Sunset Boulevard” Premieres)

August 10, 1950—Billy Wilder’s mordant melodrama about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, premiered at Radio City Music Hall, on its way to an all-time house record for a non-holiday release there with a box-office take of $166,000.

What audiences at the famous New York film palace didn’t realize, however, as they greeted the movie with rapture, was that the bitter satire had come perilously close to becoming one of the great Tinseltown bombs, courtesy of a preview audience that laughed uproariously—at all the wrong places.

The key scene in this regard was the opening, which can be seen now on recent DVD releases of the movie: “Conversing Cadavers.” In the Los Angeles County Morgue, we hear the voice of a corpse. Soon others are joining in, explaining how they got there, too.

Wilder loved this scene, but in Evanston, Ill.—chosen especially as an ideal Middle American audience that would serve as a lab test for the film’s racier themes—the audience was so busy laughing that they didn’t know what to expect from the rest of the film.

So Wilder and co-screenwriter Charles Brackett (this would be their last collaboration) huddled and came up with the iconic opening we know today: also featuring a corpse in voice-over, but this time alone, face down in a swimming pool. I don’t know if Wilder and Brackett had this in mind or not, but it echoed one of the closing scenes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, where another young man pays dearly for his dreams by being shot in a pool.

Sunset Boulevard is a cinephile’s delight, of course, from its brilliant dialogue (“I am big. It's the pictures that got small”) to the multiple ricocheting ironies of the casting (Erich von Stroheim, playing the chauffeur who used to be Norma Desmond’s director, was star Gloria Swanson’s director in real life, and a scene from the disastrous production that short-circuited both their careers, Queen Kelly, is briefly glimpsed).

For me, however, the film gains much of its power as a study in desperation. Silent-screen star Desmond’s mad desire to get back into the movie industry, of course, drives the plot, but the two men who made the film work were Swanson’s director and male co-star, both of whom were intimately familiar with despair.

As a 20-year-old transplant from Vienna, waiting for writing jobs to turn up, Billy Wilder allegedly supplemented his income as a “taxi dancer”, or paid dancing partner, in Berlin’s Eden Hotel. He went into exile from Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power, and later his mother and grandmother died in the Holocaust. He knew all too well exactly what a human being would do to survive when hungry and/or hunted (Lena Wertmuller’s Holocaust film, Seven Beauties, would have been ideal subject matter for him—if it hadn’t been too personal).

If Wilder’s knowledge of desperation derived from a painful past, William Holden’s came from much more immediate experience. After his star-making turn in 1939’s Golden Boy, his good looks had become something of a liability, as he became continually cast in boy-next-door roles. He had taken to drinking heavily, and Wilder, none too impressed with the actor’s recent work, was not thrilled that Montgomery Clift’s rejection of the role of failed screenwriter-gigolo Joe Gillis had led him to this second choice. (Make that third choice—Fred MacMurray had turned down the role, too.)

Instead, Holden channeled all of his pent-up self-loathing into the role and revived his career, and he would go on to make two other films with Wilder (Sabrina and the actor’s Oscar-winning Stalag 17) that would make him one of the box-office champions of the 1950s.

This Day in Film History (Audrey Hepburn’s “Sabrina” Debuts, After Nightmarish Production)

September 21, 1954—The original screenwriter withdrew from the project; his successor had a nervous breakdown; the male lead, a second choice, sulked most of the time; and the director, leaving his movie studio after 18 years, was writing and shooting scenes on the fly.

Naturally, Sabrina, a modern Cinderella story created by Billy Wilder with Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, and a radiant young Audrey Hepburn in the leads, became one of Hollywood’s best-loved romantic comedy classics after premiering on this date.

Anyone seeing the coziness among Wilder, Holden and Hepburn were would have mistaken this for the happiest set in the world. It’s true that William Holden got along great with Wilder—the expatriate from Nazism had lifted the actor from pretty-boy hell with edgy roles in Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17, the second of which netted him an Oscar.

As for Audrey Hepburn, everybody seemed to adore her. In particular, Wilder admired her for her professionalism and loyalty. Holden really fell for her—the married star began a love affair with her that matched their sparks onscreen.

All this left Humphrey Bogart as the odd man out, a perception that came to a head when Wilder invited Holden and Hepburn in for drinks but forgot to include Bogie (or so the director said). Whether the trio consciously excluded him or not, he never felt comfortable on the set, a situation worsened by the following factors:

* Wilder had written the part of older, stick-in-the-mud tycoon brother Linus for Cary Grant, a longtime friend. The two had long talked about making a film together, but, now that he had the chance, Grant rejected the part. In fact, he never ended up collaborating with Wilder, which the director felt was a hole in his filmography. Inevitably, that disappointment translated into how he viewed Bogie. (It didn’t help that Wilder really wanted this film to succeed; Paramount had irritated him into leaving after an 18-year association.)

* Bogart had less control over the film than his contract stipulated. In addition to $200,000, his agent won the actor script approval—a concession that turned out to be meaningless, because to secure all the leads, principal photography was moved up and accelerated. Samuel Taylor, who had contracted to adapt his play Sabrina Fair, pulled out of the film because of all the changes Wilder made in his script. His replacement, Ernest Lehman, churned out page after rewritten page until he suffered a nervous breakdown. Wilder was writing on lunch breaks during shooting, and Hepburn, at his urging, flubbed lines or feigned sickness to buy him more time.

So here you have Bogart, an established star, a professional, coming to a set where chaos reigned without the finished script. That meant he might have to read lines cold, as they’d only just been written. The star was not at all happy.

* Bogart had to endure take after take—more torture for the veteran. Wilder often required multiple takes, not because he longed for especially arty camera angles but because he demanded much of actors. Seven years later, after Wilder made James Cagney do more than 30 takes of his rat-a-tat-tat dialogue in One Two Three, Cagney decided that was his last film—until Ragtime lured him out of retirement in 1981.

With the Sabrina script a mess, Bogie was asked to do the same thing as Cagney. Oh, and one more thing: those takes increased because of his tendency to spit when speaking. How on earth could Wilder tell the actor, after a pitch-perfect line reading, that his great expectorations had ruined the backlighting?

* The difference in age and experience between Bogart and Hepburn was obvious, hideous, and unbridgeable. While solving one potential age-related problem in its leads, Paramount Studios only added another. Marvelous throaty-voiced Margaret Sullavan (perhaps best known nowadays for her collaboration with Jimmy Stewart on The Shop Around the Corner) might have been fine on Broadway in Sabrina Fair, but film cameras would have cruelly wrecked the illusion that the 43-year-old actress could play a chauffeur’s daughter.

Unfortunately, in casting the 55-year-old Bogart, Paramount had simply found another variation on the same dilemma. Bogart was a half-decade older than both the Linus of Broadway, Joseph Cotten, and the perennially youthful-looking and healthy Grant. Worse, he looked every bit his age, and more. It was said after his death in January 1957 that Bogart had refused to see a doctor about the cancer that took his life until it was far too late. Perhaps he felt the first intimations of something wrong now.

At the same time, Bogart expressed annoyance at Hepburn. It should be remembered that this was only the second starring role for the actress (who had won the Oscar the year before for Roman Holiday) and that she was only 25 years old. She admitted years later that she was “terrified” of Bogie, and he used that fear to make her feel as uncomfortable as he was, complaining about her to Holden (who took umbrage at the treatment of his lover), openly carping about her and Holden to the press, and delivering the malicious line, “She’s okay if you don’t mind 20 takes.”

* Following a period of one acting triumph after another, Bogart found himself miscast. Over the last dozen years, Bogie had expanded his range shrewdly, from murderous gangster (The Petrified Forest) to sympathetic gangster (High Sierra) to tough private eye (The Maltese Falcon) to romantic lead (Casablanca) to scruffy but lovable misfit (The African Queen). Now, he obeyed his inner siren voice advising him it was time to do comedy. Maybe it was, but not this one. An aging, unhealthy leading man would not only not look good next to the gamine Hepburn, but might even be blamed for the film’s failure. That had to rankle the justly proud actor.

* Bogart insulted Wilder and Hepburn. Wilder restrained Holden from have it out with Bogart, but felt hard pressed when Bogart turned his nasty tongue on himself and Hepburn. Hepburn’s British accent and Wilder’s Viennese one provided fodder for Bogart’s impressionistic skills. Bogart’s ultimate insult—“kraut bastard Nazi son of a bitch"—became too much to stomach for Wilder, a Jew who had lost family members in the Holocaust. Bogie forget an important rule: never insult someone who makes his living through words, particularly one with a rapier tongue himself. Now Wilder trained it on the actor, saying he had examined all the “valleys, the crevices, and the pits of your ugly face.”

Whew! It’s a miracle the family got made without people getting killed. It's a further miracle that it became a success. Four decades later, when Sydney Pollack released his remake, most critics couldn’t bear even to compare it with Wilder’s original, and quickly (and unfairly, I think) dismissed Julia Ormond’s performance in the Hepburn role.

For all the animosity between Wilder and Bogart, the two managed to end their relationship on a grace note. Wilder’s visit not long before Bogart’s death led the actor to apologize for his behavior on the Sabrina set, explaining that he was going through a difficult time.

Years later, in recalling the star’s painful but stoic exit, Wilder praised him as memorably as he had once insulted him: “he was very good, better than he thought he was. He liked to play the hero, and in the end, he was.”