Movie Quote of the Day (‘Advise and Consent,’ on ‘A Washington Kind of Lie’)

 

Johnny Leffingwell [played by Eddie Hodges]: “The phone—Senator Munson.”

Robert Leffingwell [his father, played by Henry Fonda]: “Tell him I've gone out.”

Johnny: “Why?”

Robert: “Because, Johnny, he'll want to do some things that might obligate me.”

Johnny: “I mean, why do you want me to lie? If you're in, you're in; if you're out, you're out.”

Robert: “Son, this is a Washington, D.C. kind of lie. It's when the other person knows you're lying, and also knows you know he knows. You follow?”— Advise and Consent (1962), screenplay by Allen Drury and Wendell Mayes, adapted from the novel by Drury, directed by Otto Preminger

Quote of the Day (Preston Sturges, With His ‘Rules for Box-Office Appeal’)

“1. A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
2. A leg is better than an arm.
3. A bedroom is better than a living room.
4. An arrival is better than a departure.
5. A birth is better than a death.
6. A chase is better than a chat.
7. A dog is better than a landscape.
8. A kitten is better than a dog.
9. A baby is better than a kitten.
10. A kiss is better than a baby.
11. A pratfall is better than anything.”—Oscar-winning screenwriter-director Preston Sturges (1898-1959), “Eleven Rules for Box-Office Appeal,” quoted in Alessandro Pirolini, in The Cinema of Preston Sturges: A Critical Study (2010)

The image accompanying this post is from my favorite Preston Sturges comedy, The Lady Eve (1941). I love how Henry Fonda plays bumbling brewery heir Charles Pike with a mix of enthrallment and alarm as he falls under the spell of the alluring gold digger Jean (played by Barbara Stanwyck). 

And well he might: As Jean tells a confidante, in one of the great lines in Sturges’ hilarious script: “I need him like the ax needs the turkey.”

Flashback, May 1943: Anti-Lynching Film ‘Ox-Bow Incident’ Jars American Conscience

In the middle of a war fought against foreign dictatorships, the western The Ox-Bow Incident—released in U.S. theaters 75 years ago this week—delivered a somber warning: Under the auspices of democracy, even a group of rambunctious individualists can be manipulated by a bullying poseur into overriding the rule of law. 

I remember watching The Ox-Bow Incident in sociology class in high school. It was like dunking in ice-cold water a group of adolescents whose principal preoccupations were the correct party to attend that weekend, Sunday afternoon football, and catching the eye of the opposite sex every day of the week. The movie was obvious—especially in a letter read by Henry Fonda that should have had “MESSAGE” written all over it—but it was just the type of thing that kids needed then.

Come to think of it, that lack of subtlety might be the only way to get through to some adults today who need to heed the movie’s caution that “law is the very conscience of humanity.”

The “incident” at the heart of the movie—the lynching of three innocent men on the Nevada frontier in 1885—had particular meaning for star Henry Fonda (left, in the attached image, with Dana Andrews, center), whose witnessing of a similar event on the streets of Omaha at age 14 in 1919 inspired his subsequent lifelong liberalism. (That episode is described in Scott Eyman's recent dual bio of lifelong friends Fonda and James Stewart, Hank and Jim.)

Now, with race riots bursting out in some of America’s biggest cities and Japanese-Americans compelled into internment camps, Fonda, screenwriter-producer Lamar Trotti, and director William Wellman wanted to signal, in unmistakable terms, the dangers in disregarding laws and the rights of minorities.

Lynching, though reduced in number, was hardly absent from either Americans’ memory or even short-term experience nearly a year and a half after Pearl Harbor. The three recorded in 1943, as well as the 16 that occurred in the 1941-45 war years, were, to be sure, a good deal lower than the 20 of 1935, let alone the postwar high of 83 in 1919. 

But the attempt to pass federal anti-lynching legislation had proven as futile as it was unrelenting. The last serious attempt to do so, in 1938, had foundered when President Franklin Roosevelt decided he could not support the bill lest it fracture a New Deal coalition that included a segregationist Southern contingent on Capitol Hill. 

Highlighting this situation in a western, seemingly far removed from contemporary reality, seemed tailor-made for a cinematic treatment more palatable to audiences. (Especially the year 1885, the last time that the number of white lynching victims outnumbered black ones.) But just about every studio in town rejected “Wild Bill” Wellman’s pitch. 

As a last resort, the director took the treatment to Darryl Zanuck. Wellman’s last encounter with the Twentieth-Century Fox head had ended in disaster: a fistfight on a camping trip. After getting over his surprise over hearing from Wellman again, Zanuck called him back as promised within 48 hours and agreed with him that it was a great project. 

Even so, Zanuck was dubious about the commercial prospects of such grim subject matter. He only ended up giving the green light to the project for three reasons:

*Wellman’s prior record of commercial success;

*The director’s agreement to keep a tight lid on costs, which would improve its slim chances of earning even a slight profit; and

*A commitment on the part of Wellman to direct, sight unseen, two other scripts of Zanuck’s choosing, in return for approving Wellman’s dream project.

Within these restrictions, Wellman created an admirably lean, taut western with a low budget that worked to its advantage. 

At only 75 minutes long, the movie tells its story swiftly, like a novella. The need to compress characters forced Wellman and Trotti to combine characters and make them more complex—which worked especially well for the African-American preacher Sparks (significantly, the first character among the posse to vote against the lynching) and the mob’s Mexican victim (played by a scene-stealing Anthony Quinn). 

Moreover, instead of the wide vistas that were a staple of the genre, Wellman began with shots of a small town and the bar that served as a flash point of civilization before switching to nocturnal scenes that symbolized the posse members’ individual and collective descent into moral darkness.

Although 1885 was surely chosen as the date for the novel and film because it was when the American frontier was still considered open, it also happens to be the last year in which white lynching victims outnumbered black ones. From this point on, the practice became overwhelmingly a weapon of racial control. Viewing lynching as a realistic possibility on the frontier enabled audiences to understand the stark issues this extrajudicial resort to murder posed outside of a racial context.

Zanuck was correct about the film’s poor prospects. From its earliest previews, audiences didn’t know what to expect and were not happy with the film’s tragic ending. But he was also right that it was a story worth telling. Critics hailed it immediately, and, despite its box-office failure, it earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination. (Very unusually, the movie earned no other Academy Award nomination besides that.)

Sometimes considered the first “serious” western novel, The Ox-Bow Incident is also considered the forerunner of the “psychological” and “allegorical” western film genres. It dispensed with gunfights, guys in white and black hats, confrontations with Indians, and cowboy heroes. Instead, it considered the fragile circumstances by which men in society maintained the thinnest veneer of civilization.

It starts from the first scene in the bar, and hinges on the distorted sexual dynamics that will play a role in the later resort to vigilante justice. Told that a woman he had an understanding with, Rose, has unexpectedly skipped town, a drunken Gil (played by Fonda) ends up pummeling another townsman and, in turn, is knocked out by the bartender. As much in need of the restraints of the law as anyone else in town, he is also left gravely aware that he is an odd man out. When sidekick Art Croft (played by Harry Morgan) says they didn’t have to ride with the posse, Gil responds testily: “Look kinda funny if we hadn't, wouldn't it?” 

To satisfy the Hays Office, Hollywood’s censorship arm, Twentieth-Century Fox was forced to make Gil into a less passive member of the posse. The resulting changes helped solidify the Fonda’s image as the personification of American decency and fighter against injustice, one that he would enhance with 12 Angry Men, The Wrong Man, and The Best Man.

Trotti’s script, like Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s novel, dispensed with the usual genre clichés about the goodness of the common, uncorrupted man of the West. The denizens of Bridger’s Wells are animated by displacement, fear, and resentment of the outsider—all too malleable material for a cruel man with a will to power like “Major” Tetley, who dresses up in a Confederate uniform even though, Gil tells Croft angrily, he never served a day in the army.

Carter and Croft are buffeted by the same forces afflicting the other members of the posse, though. Opening and closing shots of them riding into town establish them as solitary drifters, with no standing in the community that would allow them to effectively challenge Tetley or influence the posse’s vote on whether to string up the unlucky trio they come across at night out in the valley.

In fact, nothing stands out so much in the film as the overwhelming ineffectuality of opponents of the lynching. The fiercest of these, the elderly storekeeper Davies, is dismissed with, “Shut up, Grandma. Nobody expects you to go.” Major Tetley browbeats his son into participating in the posse with, “I’ll have no female boys bearing my name.”

The two potboilers that Zanuck got Wellman to make in exchange for the director’s special project, Thunder Birds: Soldiers of the Air (1942) and Buffalo Bill (1944), are little remembered today. But many of the great westerns to come that explored the psychology of westerners or that used the West as allegorical settings for the issues of their time were made possible by The Ox-Bow Incident: The Gunfighter, High Noon, The Naked Spur, The Searchers, Vera Cruz, Cheyenne Autumn, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven. 

In trying to show readers how Germany, the country that produced Goethe and Beethoven, could cause the mayhem of Kristallnacht, Clark set his tale of a mob that yields up their individual consciences in a setting far closer to home: the American West. 

Those who doubt that such a tragedy—featuring a leader who denounces opponents as weaklings, and followers too nervous or apathetic to stand firmly in the way—can occur in today’s America have not paid much attention to the news recently.

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 (Birth of Margaret Sullavan, Golden-Age Star Gone “Haywire“)

May 16, 1911—Margaret Sullavan, who glittered briefly as one of golden-age Hollywood’s finest actresses, then became one of the victims in a family as cursed as any in a Greek tragedy, was born on this date in Norfolk, Va.—or so she would claim.

(I wrote “claimed” in the above partly because several Internet references I came across gave her year of birth as 1909. Since a gentleman never asks a lady her age, we’ll take the actress’ word for it.)

There’s a good chance many reading this won’t recall Sullavan’s name—or, if they do, might confuse it with Maureen O’Sullivan (yes, Jane to Tarzan, not to mention Mia Farrow’s mom), who not only possessed a surname that sounded like hers but also was almost exactly the same age (born a day later); labored at the same studio, MGM, in the 1930s as an ingénue; and left in the 1940s to devote herself to her family. Talk about doppelgangers!

If you can distinguish between the two ladies, here’s what you’re likely to know about Margaret:
1) She starred in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), a sparkling Ernst Lubitsch comedy whose plot was copied by, among other films, the Judy Garland vehicle In the Good Old Summertime, the Broadway musical She Loves Me, and Nora Ephron’s too-clever-by-half Internet-age version, You’ve Got Mail.

2) Offscreen, her seemingly blessed family life—marriage to magnetic theatrical agent and producer Leland Hayward, three bright, attractive kids—collapsed due to her divorce, the children’s mounting depression, and her own suicide—a story recounted in eldest daughter Brooke Heyward’s 1977 bestseller, Haywire.

It’s a measure of the greatness of the Hollywood studio system that, though she worked in it for less than a decade, Sullivan had 16 films to her credit. But it’s a measure of the triviality of the same system that the actress, despairing of “this bizarre place,” refused to sign a long-term contract and left the studio as soon as she could. We do not, then, have the kind of vast, multi-decade filmography left by her MGM rival for roles and men, Katharine Hepburn.

I first became aware of Sullavan through a series held in the 1980s at New York’s late, lamented film revival house, the Regency: “Screen Teams.” I wasn’t surprised at other teams in this series—Tracy and Hepburn, Powell and Loy—but I was to find the immortal Jimmy Stewart paired with Sullavan, whom I hadn’t heard of up to that point.

As it happened, Stewart and Sullavan might have made for the most natural team of them all. After all, the two of them, along with Henry Fonda (Stewart’s great friend and Sullavan’s first husband), started out as part of the repertory University Players in Falmouth, Mass.

Sullavan pushed for Stewart to be her co-star after he joined MGM. In all, they made four films together. As for Fonda: though his marriage to Sullavan foundered after only two months, the two stayed on good terms thereafter, and their children became friends.

Children…this might be as good a point as any to deal with the tragedies that finally overwhelmed Sullavan and her family.

The first thing people would want to know is: how could it all go so wrong? How could children--and their parents--who seemed to have everything--a father’s personal plane that he flew everywhere, nannies, Jimmy Stewart for a babysitter, parties with Hollywood’s finest among the invited guests, with the children receiving invitations to pose for the cover of Life Magazine (Brooke) or join the famous Williamstown Theater Festival (younger sister Bridget)--have seen it all fall down?

It started with the parents’ tendencies--a wandering eye (Leland’s) that led to infidelity and divorce; a high-strung temperament (Margaret’s) that had already made most of her directors regard her as a pill and a half, and that only worsened in time. As Margaret advanced into middle age, her hearing difficulties radically worsened. Now that she had pretty much abandoned Hollywood for Broadway (she originated the role of “Sabrina” that went to Audrey Hepburn on the screen), this latter problem was disastrous--she would miss cues.

It all came to an end for Sullavan on New Year’s Day 1960, when she died of a drug overdose. It was eventually ruled accidental, but the coroner’s report was widely understood as a heavily hedged act of mercy to a heartbroken family.

Nor was that the end of the Heywards' problems. Bridget and Bill, each in a mental-health institution at the time of their mother’s death, would also kill themselves: Bridget, 21 years old, only eight months later, and Bill, in 2008, at age 66, with a shot to the heart.

Following Bridget‘s funeral, Brooke Heyward poured out her anguish to family friend Tom Mankiewicz: "I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm 23 and divorced with two kids."

Mankiewicz, looking down from the 10th-floor apartment where the reception was held, laid out her choice in the starkest possible terms: "Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say, 'I'm going to live,' because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had. Either you jump out the window or you live."

Hayward’s memoir, a #1 bestseller on its initial appearance, was released again this year, having gained additional poignancy because of the recent death of her brother.

As overwhelmingly sad as the offscreen life of her mother was, I can’t end this post with that tragedy. Had Margaret Sullavan lived the happiest of lives, she still would have been worth writing about because of her shining, if all too briefly glimpsed, talent.

Her fans (notably including Stephen Sondheim), though not quite a cult, note that she had only one indisputable classic, The Shop Around the Corner. But, as Orson Welles (who would certainly know about such things) once noted, “Sometimes one is all you need.” I would argue, though, that there is another unfairly neglected film of hers: Three Comrades (1938), the only film of hers that garnered her an Oscar nomination (also the only screenwriting credit for F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Sullavan was attractive enough to have become a silent-film actress, but the talkies were ready- made for her. It’s not so much her petite frame that everyone always remarked about her, but that voice--husky but supple. Critic Dan Callahan describes its range, with remarkable precision, in a film-by-film assessment in the online film journal Bright Lights:

“When you first hear it, it sounds limited and ephemeral, like Billie Holiday's singing voice. But Lady Day could do just about anything with her voice, and Sullavan's vocal range is limitless too, not hamstrung by particularity, but freed to roam wherever she chooses. She could bring it down low for a big booming growl; she could lift it up high, higher, oh higher!; or she could keep it in a middle register and break it into a thousand tingling laryngitis pieces.”

Shorter--but, like Sullavan herself, more magical--was the description of the same voice provided by the silent film actress turned shrewd observer of the place where she once worked, Louise Brooks: “That wonderful voice of hers. Strange, fey, mysterious — like a voice singing in the snow."

Movie Quote of the Day (Barbara Stanwyck, Putting the Make on Poor Henry Fonda)

Charles Pike (played by Henry Fonda): “Now you, on the other hand, with a little coaching you could be terrific [at playing cards].”

Jean Harrington (played by Barbara Stanwyck): “Do you really think so?”

Charles: “Yes, you have a definite nose.”

Jean: “I'm glad you like it. Do you like any of the rest of me?”—The Lady Eve (1941), written and directed by Preston Sturges

The Lady Eve, released 70 years ago today, furnished Barbara Stanwyck with one of her golden opportunities to do what she did best onscreen: demonstrate that she was forever deadlier than the male. Even the sharpest of studs become inadvertent prey for "Stanny," as demonstrated in the unforgettable moment she sidles down the stairs in Double Indemnity, making you sense immediately that Fred MacMurray’s seemingly wised-up insurance salesman is already toast.

Henry Fonda’s Charles Pike is such a poor dumb sap that, had his character been transposed to film noir, it would have been a case of cruel and unusual punishment. Instead, this shy, none-too-bright heir to an ale fortune provides Stanwyck with some of the great moments in the screwball comedy genre that Hollywood buffed to a high sheen in the Forties and Fifties.

Even before Jean’s nose becomes the topic of conversation, it’s Jean’s legs that get Charles’ attention: this card sharp trips the ale heir when they’re on an ocean liner. Later, annoyed by his rejection, she puts him through another scam: impersonating a grande dame.

Early on, she evokes chuckles when, sizing Charles up, she announces, “I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” By the film’s denouement, she’ll discover, to her surprise, that she needs him, period--the most unlikely and delightful of love stories.

One of the great crimes of Hollywood is that it never saw fit to present Stanwyck an Academy Award while she was in competition, waiting until she was in her mid-70s before giving her one of those honorary Oscars that attempt to redress wrongs to aging former box-office idols while there’s still time. (The presenter that night was John Travolta, who admitted later to being stunned that he was standing there next to a woman who had long been an idol of his family growing up in my hometown, Englewood, N.J.)

The year that The Lady Eve came out was one of the years she could have won. (Instead, the Academy awarded the Best Actress trophy to Joan Fontaine, for Suspicion.) She could easily have been nominated that year for The Lady Eve, or even for her tough-as-nails reporter in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe. Instead, her nomination was for a turn maybe even funnier than the one she had in The Lady Eve: the deliciously named nightclub singer Sugarpuss O’Shea in Ball of Fire.


In a wonderful centenary tribute published three years ago in The New Yorker, critic Anthony Lane wrote of the female in the accompanying photo: “It was a face that launched a thousand inquisitions: the mouth too tight to be rosy, and a voice pitched for slang, all bite and huskiness. When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck.”

This Day in Television History (“Lonesome Dove” Premieres)

February 5, 1989—Debuting on a Sunday night when a Canadian cold front made many Americans disinclined to step outside the warm confines of their homes, Lonesome Dove became a major critical and ratings success for CBS. The star-studded adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel not only marked the end of a way of life for the two aging Texas cowboys at its center, but also the end of the heyday of the major network miniseries. 

Though I had seen a prior issue of the magazine in, of all places, a Manhattan newsstand, the February/March issue of American Cowboy finally led me to part with some of my hard-earned cash. The cover story on the 20th anniversary of Lonesome Dove was every bit as good as I had hoped. It brought to mind many fond memories of the mini-series that I followed breathlessly at the time, and it filled me in on quite a bit I didn’t know before. 

(McMurtry is not a fan of the miniseries made from his book, believe it or not. According to an Entertainment Weekly article, one of the major bones he has to pick with it is that Clara Allen—my favorite character in the creative property and, evidently, one of his—looked nothing like the actress who played her, Anjelica Huston. Instead, the person he visualized in the role was—are you ready?—Diane Keaton. Now, I’m as much of a fan of Keaton as anyone, but I have serious doubts about how her 20th-century urban sensibility would translate into the century before.) 

The author of the article, Tom Wilmes, obviously did his homework, rustling up nearly every surviving major person associated with the TV epic (with the notable exceptions of Robert Duvall and Danny Glover). For many who’ve seen the show or read the book, Wilmes’ description of the creative genesis of this property will be eye-opening (I did not realize, for instance, that the rights were optioned by, of all companies, Motown). Believe it or not, however, I think I’ll be able to add more sidelights about this tangled (or should that be tumbleweed?) tale. 

Before he fleshed it out as a novel, McMurtry sketched out the story of former Texas Rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call as a film treatment, Streets of Laredo (a title dropped temporarily, then picked up as the sequel to the book and mini-series). Peter Bogdanovich, fresh off his triumph with another McMurtry project, The Last Picture Show, was set to direct. Several of the cast members—Bogdanovich’s new paramour Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson, and Ellen Burstyn—had starred in that critically acclaimed 1971 movie. Another set of actors, the Clancy Brothers, were, to say the least, unconventional choices. 

But the real projected stars of the film would have made this a project for the ages. Think of it: Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and John Wayne, all in the sunset movie of their careers. 

When contacted for the American Cowboy article, McMurtry noted that the project appeared to be coming together when it ran into an obstacle: Wayne. “He would have been the Call character in that story, and he didn’t want to play what he considered to be an unlikable, hard-ass character. When he wouldn’t do it, everyone else lost interest.” 

That statement is intriguing, but I think there might have been somewhat more than this at play. If Wayne did not want to play an unsympathetic character, there would have been an easy way around that: Pick either Fonda or Stewart to do it. 

The glorious thing about all three actors is that each could have probably played McCrae as well as Call because they had displayed such versatility in their prior westerns. With a bit of negotiation, one of these two could have switched roles with Wayne, so that he’d get to play talkative Gus while Fonda/Stewart would handle reticent Call. 

But there was another problem with the casting issue: the best roles of Wayne’s career had been as hardasses. I’m not talking about his Sgt. Stryker of Sands of Iwo Jima, his Oscar-nominated turn as the marine who’s tough on his men mostly because the Japanese will destroy them if he doesn’t turn them into killing machines. No, I mean Red River, in which he played a cattle boss who gives adopted son Montgomery Clift the most awful of times, or, better yet, The Searchers, in which he offered a daring portrait of an unregenerate Western racist. 

Even suppose, for the sake of argument, that he was now balking at playing these kinds of antiheroes. I think Wayne would have come around if advised to do so by his mentor, John Ford. Why do I believe this? Because in 1997, I went to an author lecture/signing at Fairleigh Dickinson University featuring Bogdanovich, who was promoting his book Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Legendary Film Directors. I can see now how Bogdanovich came to play a psychoanalyst on The Sopranos: he may have come to filmmaking originally through his work as a movie critic, but his brilliance as a mimic, imitating, in turn, Stewart, Fonda and Wayne, convinced me that he could have made a very comfortable career as an actor as well as a director, had he chosen to do so. 

According to what Bogdanovich said at the FDU lecture, Wayne had, in fact, asked Ford his opinion of the script. The problem was that the great director was now dying. A film about the death of the West—in fact, at a point when the western, the genre that Ford had brought to a creative apogee, was itself going through a decline—was too grim a reminder of Ford’s own mortality. 

So Ford told Wayne not to do the film, and the project collapsed, only to be revived, more than a decade later, with a nearly equally brilliant cast (with Tommy Lee Jones cast as Call, along with Duvall, Glover, Huston, Diane Lane, and the late Robert Urich)—though, inevitably, not one so mythically associated with the western genre. 

Lonesome Dove also arrived toward the end of the heyday of the multipart miniseries on American network TV. Arguably the first, an adaptation of Leon Uris' QB7, had been telecast in 1974. A year after Lonesome Dove saw the appearance of War and Remembrance, which was not the success of its predecessor, The Winds of War. Thereafter the networks left these prestige projects for cable TV. The broadcast landscape has been the poorer for its departure.