Flashback, November 1939: Ford’s 1st Technicolor Film, ‘Drums Along the Mohawk,’ Opens

Drums Along the Mohawk, which premiered 75 years ago this week in Gloversville, N.Y., has never received the close scrutiny given two other films by John Ford released during this banner year for him, Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln. But, for someone already regarded as a master of the moving image, it marked a distinct advance: his first movie in Technicolor.

“It's no use talking to me about art, I make pictures to pay the rent,” the Oscar-winning director disclaimed about his creative aspirations. But, like an artist, this creator of “pictures” knew how to work with the materials he had at hand—including, during production of Drums Along the Mohawk, a new film process and a leading lady working way out of her comfort zone.

Ford didn’t spend much time covering a scene—actors would enter, play it out and depart—but using composition he could insert all kinds of subtleties, through depth, light and shadow, and careful camera placement. He might not come up with a particular film process, but he was always on the lookout for techniques that worked and knew how to employ them in his own projects. So, for instance, after he saw how German filmmakers F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst used shadow effectively, he borrowed from their “Expressionist” style when making The Informer, his thriller about the final days of a Dubliner with an uneasy conscience.

The director was seeking something different for Drums Along the Mohawk. The film, based on a bestselling Walter Edmonds novel, would focus not on one psychologically isolated man but on a couple who would be at the vanguard of an entire group of people. Like so many of Ford’s other movies, it was a western, all right, but one occurring east of the Mississippi. It could have been a missing entry in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Saga, about how settlers in the New York interior coped with attacks by the British and their Native-American allies during the Revolutionary War.

While not as masterful as what Ford later put onscreen in such films as The Quiet Man and The Searchers, the color scheme worked out for Drums Along the Mohawk earned Academy Award nominations for cinematographers Bert Glennon and Ray Rennahan. But, on the set of the movie, before all this was apparent, there was one important doubter: leading lady Claudette Colbert.

Then the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, Colbert was a fish out of water on the movie’s remote Utah location. It did not possess the comforts she had grown familiar with, and when she managed to secure one of these for her own use—a bathtub—her crusty director ridiculed her in front of the entire set.

Moreover, that set was about as testosterone-charged as it could get in Hollywood. Over the years, members of the so-called "Ford Stock Company" would include stunt men Terry Wilson, Chuck Hayward, and Ben Johnson; directors of photography Winton Hoch and William Clothier; prop man Lefty Hough; film editor Robert Parrish; art director Fran Hotaling; assistant director Wingate Smith, who was also Ford's brother-in-law; writers James Warner Bellah, Nunnally Johnson, John Lee Mahin, and Philip Dunne; and actor (and Ford drinking buddy) Ward Bond. 

Scan that list again. Not a woman in the bunch—rather like the army and naval crews so many of his movies would chronicle and celebrate.

As with most clashes, tensions between Colbert and Ford arose because of their wildly varying personalities. The actress’ position in Hollywood hinged, she believed, on her sassy good looks, so she insisted on being photographed on what she saw as her left—better—side of her face.

This insistence could drive much more mild-mannered men than Ford to distraction. (Twenty years later, relations between Colbert and longtime friend Noel Coward had become so poisoned by this attitude that, legend says, the dramatist confided to a friend that he would love “to wring her little neck—if only I could find it!”) It didn’t help that Colbert was skittish about how she would come off in Technicolor.

Ford was not one to indulge suggestions from an actor. In the early 1950s, one unwary youngster, 22-year-old Robert Wagner, was startled when the director struck him in the face for being so bold on the set of What Price Glory?

By comparison, Colbert should have counted herself lucky. Ford had fumed over Colbert’s attention to her dailies; then, he had barely held his temper about her desire for a tub. But what put him over the brink was the day she showed up on the set quite late.

As soon as she arrived, Ford went alone for a walk with her. When she got back to the set, she was teary-eyed. Colbert told friends that Ford had read her the riot act over her lack of professionalism.

Colbert survived that encounter, though she also endured an additional tendency of the demanding director’s: subjecting actors to harsh treatment in order to induce a desired reaction (one, Ford believed, the actor was capable of delivering). 

Colbert’s character, the newlywed Lana, would find herself on the physical and emotional brink as she tried to adjust to a life on the frontier nothing like her sheltered, aristocratic upbringing in Albany. As good—great, even—as the actress was, it is very likely that her level of realism in this role owes much to her extreme distress during production.

Why would actors put up with this torment? For one thing, of course, the chance to shine in a prestige project that, in the hands of a consummate craftsman, might provide the greatest moments of their career.

But—particularly in the case of the men on the site—Ford created an after-hours environment where cast and crew could bond as they never would elsewhere. Three decades after release of Drums Along the Mohawk, male lead Henry Fonda told director-critic Peter Bogdanovich about his first location work with the director, in an interview collected in Who the Hell's in It: Portraits and Conversations:

“It was way up—nine, ten thousand feet altitude—in a valley that was high above the cedar breaks….It wasn’t near any kind of civilization. We were there three weeks. Which meant that you can get rock-happy, to use an army expression. Nothing to do at night. So Ford set things up to do….[T]he first day he had workmen and the crew get big logs and put these logs as seats, all the way around in a big circle in which there would be a campfire. And every night there was a campfire. Every night there was some different kind of entertainment. I was made camp director.”

Participants would play accordion or guitar, sing barbershop-quartet style, play cards, or other entertainment, usually ending with a bugler playing taps from the woods.  “I never had more fun in my life than on locations with Ford,” Fonda summed up. But that was always at night: “During the day it was making the picture, you weren’t horsing around.”

Drums Along the Mohawk was the second of three extraordinary collaborations in a single calendar involving the actor and director, bookended by Young Mr. Lincoln (in which Ford persuaded a reluctant Fonda to accept the title role by arguing successfully that he wouldn’t be playing an icon, but “a jack-leg lawyer in Springfield”) and The Grapes of Wrath (netting Fonda his first Best Actor Oscar nomination). From 1939 to 1948, they would work together five times, in pieces of Americana of increasing subtlety and mastery.

Their working relationship ended tragically in 1955, because Ford acted even more egregiously toward Fonda than he had toward Colbert. The director’s alcohol-fueled bullying had worsened over time. While making Mr. Roberts, Fonda’s return to the big screen after several years on Broadway, actor and director clashed over Ford’s tinkering with the script. In an argument between the two, Fonda had hardly finished his first sentence when Ford punched the actor in the jaw, knocking him to the floor.

Fonda did not strike back against Ford, who was 10 years older, but any hope that they could finish the film together was over. Shortly afterward, Ford left the picture, supposedly for reasons of health, replaced by Mervyn LeRoy—a capable director, but hardly in his league as a craftsman.

How might the outcome of that film have turned out if Fonda had known beforehand that the only reason he had gotten to play this same role he had performed on Broadway was that Ford had told Warner Brothers that he wouldn’t even consider anyone other than the actor? Perhaps he might have been more diplomatic.

But as it happened, he did not learn the truth until a dozen years later. Once he did, the two men began to speak again. But the great, if cantankerous, director was now too sick to make another movie. There would be no other collaborations between the two.

Drums Along the Mohawk should not be overlooked amid their other works. Even though, as historian Anthony F.C. Wallace complained in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, audiences learned little about the actual facts of the battle alluded to in the film, Oriskany, the movie remains one of the best works of cinema on the American Revolution. At the close of the film, after the surrender at Yorktown is announced, Fonda’s character, Gilbert Martin, turns to his wife and says that they have much work to do. The comment stands just as well for nation-building as farming in a remote—but now, because of peace, friendlier—wilderness.

This Day in Film History (‘It Happened One Night’ Gives Rise to Screwball Genre)

February 22, 1934—When MGM and Paramount Pictures loaned Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert to Columbia Pictures for a single movie, nobody expected much to come from the results, especially the reluctant stars. But It Happened One Night—which premiered at Radio City Music Hall on this date—became a box-office hit, a multi-Oscar smash, and one of the most influential and beloved movies of all time.

Initial reaction to the film (which I touched on briefly in a prior post) was mixed: its run was not extended beyond its first week at Radio City, and a number of critics were quick to carp that this was the third movie in quick succession about a bus trip. Ultimately, of course, once word of mouth spread in the first month after its release, the film’s success triggered an entirely different trend, one of the most glorious genres in cinema history: the screwball comedy, often featuring a runaway/madcap heiress, with a plot that takes off in unexpected directions, and, above all, in what James Harvey, in his 1987 history of the genre, Romantic Comedy, calls "some new kind of energy": "slangy, combative, humorous, unsentimental--and powerfully romantic."

During its initial run, the movie made more than six times what it cost to produce, confirming that director Frank Capra, who had made it his special project, had his pulse on the audience. Its triumph at the Academy Awards the following year was even more resounding, as it became the first picture to sweep all the major categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. (In the eight decades since, only two other movies have matched that feat: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs.)  

You would think that every major star in Hollywood would do anything to appear in such a hot property, including (but hardly limited to) willingness to beg, borrow, steal, take a salary cut, murder, or sleep with the producer. You would also be wrong.

Robert Montgomery, a talented actor with some flair for comedy, turned down the male lead before the script made its way to Gable. The only reason he took it was because MGM head Louis B. Mayer wanted to teach lessons in humility and obedience to the box-office star well on his way to becoming known as “The King of Hollywood.” Gable’s rejection of a script triggered a reaction from Mayer that was swift, decisive and self-defeating: If that’s what you want, fine—but I’m lending you out to Columbia Pictures.  

In late 1933, that was far, far worse than it sounds now. MGM had the reputation as the “prestige” studio, largely due to its unparalleled group of stars and production head Irving Thalberg; Warner Brothers, as a scrappy, ripped-from-the-headlines outfit specializing in gangster and socially conscious films; and Paramount, where Cecil B. DeMille, Josef von Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch operated with comparatively little executive interference, as a “director’s studio.” On the other hand, Columbia, headed by obstreperous, penny-pinching Harry Cohn, still had not overcome its origins on “Poverty Row,” a row of offices specializing in cheap productions. Columbia had few if any A-list actors of its own, and the only way it could acquire any was if (as in Gable’s case) a star at another studio had demanded one raise or script-approval request too many.

According to Capra's marvelous and indispensable memoir, The Name Above the Title, Gable showed up at Capra’s office unshaven, drunk, and abusive enough to tell the director, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with himself and this project. Colbert, while more polite, was equally reluctant. She had not liked the results of their first collaboration several years before, and when Capra showed up on her doorstep, she announced that she would only make the movie if a) it could be completed in four weeks, in time for her planned Christmas vacation in Sun Valley, and b) her salary would be $50,000—double her normal amount at Paramount. Capra got Cohn to agree to the terms, and a visit that had begun on a rough note (Colbert’s dog had bitten Capra in the rear end) ended up better than expected.

You have to ask why the stars were so reluctant to shoot the film, aside from the fact that the initial title, Night Bus, was an unpleasant reminder of two prior box-office bombs. But other actors were equally reluctant to take on the job, particularly for Colbert’s role, the runaway heiress Ellie Andrews, which Myrna Loy, Constance Bennett, Margaret Sullavan, and Miriam Hopkins had all rejected. 

These women were not really acting like divas. In the original script, Ellie had simply been a spoiled brat—the Depression version of Kim Kardashian. At the suggestion of Capra’s friend, producer-screenwriter Myles Connolly, Ellie was rewritten not so much as a bratty heiress but as one bored by her stultifying lifestyle, a princess ready to flee from routine—sort of like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday two decades later. The resulting rewrite, completed by Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin within a week, went a long way toward making her more sympathetic to Depression audiences.

The evolution of Ellie—crucial not just to the success of the film, but to the creation of the whole screwball comedy genre—also owed something to a change in the depiction of female sexuality as a result of Hollywood’s newly enforced list of censorship norms, the Production Code. In the early 1930s, films had often featured what were deemed women of loose morals—if not outright hookers (Joan Crawford, in Rain), then kept women who had slept their way to the top or forced by circumstance into cohabitating with an exploiter (Capra’s own Bitter Tea of General Yen). All of that went by the wayside with the Production Code. Now, a madcap heiress—willful and rebellious against Daddy, like Ellie, but not promiscuous—would allow filmmakers to obey the dictates of the Production Code while still winking broadly at them.

And so occurred several of the more widely discussed elements in the movie: the glimpse of leg Ellie permits, immediately besting Gable’s Peter Warne in a hitchhiking bid; the makeshift “Walls of Jericho,” or clothesline erected by Warne in a motel room so Ellie need not fear “the big bad wolf” (i.e., him); and the naked torso revealed by Gable in the same scene. (The latter was an improvisation when Gable was having trouble maintaining the energy of the scene while removing his undershirt.)

As happens in Hollywood to this day, It Happened One Night spawned countless imitations, in an attempt to cash in on a good thing--some decidedly "B" level (The Golden Arrow), others top grade (My Man Godfrey, Bringing Up Baby). None, however (including the 1950s musical adaptation, You Can’t Run Away From It, starring Jack Lemmon and June Allyson) worked as well as the original. 

It all went back to the film's ineffable charm. Capra might have shot the film fast, but he really wasn’t interested in cutting its running time. In fact, he indulged here one of the tricks he would use repeatedly over the next dozen years of his prime: stage a scene that does not advance the plot, but makes you care about the characters. A prime example comes when the fired working-class reporter Warne teaches high-class Ellie the fine art of donut dunking.

Colbert refused to believe the film would work, even by the end of shooting (“Am I glad to get here,” she’s supposed to have told her Sun Valley friends. “I’ve just finished the worst picture in the world.”) She was initially a no-show at the Oscars, having to be called while waiting for a train to pick up her award.

A daffy, happy ending, featuring a lovely heroine who’s a bit of a bill. Not unlike the whole screwball genre itself.

Quote of the Day (Noel Coward, on Claudette Colbert)

“Claudette Colbert insisted on being filmed from only one angle, which complicated everyone’s lives in these early television days. In filming Blithe Spirit she was so uncooperative that Noel [Coward] swore he would wring her neck—if he could find it.”—The Letters of Noel Coward, edited by Barry Day (2007)

I had intended to post this quote today in the belief that September 17 was the birthday of Claudette Colbert, but it appears I was late by four days. (The original year I had for her birth—1905—also appears to be late, by two years, but it was and is a Hollywood actress’ prerogative to slice a few years off one’s age.) In any case, the quote was so good that I couldn’t let it sit unused for long.

I first became aware of the situation that drove Coward crazy—the actress’ insistence that she be photographed on one side of her face—when my high school sponsored a Career Day in which parents spoke about their jobs.

One parent with an especially interesting one—a cameraman in the television industry—mentioned in passing some of the particular challenges of dealing with Hollywood legends. Alan Ladd was so short that directors had to take special steps to make it appear he was at least at tall as his female co-stars. And Colbert wanted only her left profile to be filmed. Evidently, a nose injury left her with a slight bump on the right side, which cameramen came to christen, because of the infrequency with which it was seen, “the dark side of the moon.”

Colbert’s self-protective instincts paid off in the end: Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, audiences came to love the way her face would light up with sass.

The shot of the actress in the accompanying post was taken from I Cover the Waterfront. I like it because she appears ready to break out in one of her characteristic screwball comedy poses: merriment.

Colbert was not my favorite screwball comedienne (that would probably be Irene Dunne, the subject of a recent post of mine), but she did make at least three major contributions to the romantic comedy genre: It Happened One Night (1934), which netted her a Best Actress Oscar; Midnight (1939), starring Don Ameche and a wonderful but visibly aging John Barrymore; and Palm Beach Story (1942), her collaboration with writer-director Preston Sturges and co-star Joel McCrea.

After the 1940s, she pretty much confined herself to television and the stage. She lived on until 1996.

As for that name: No way when she was starting out was the Parisian-born actress going to make it in the movies with her real name—Emilie Claudette Chauchoin—so the more euphonious “Claudette Colbert” was born.