Quote of the Day (Joan Collins, on Film Great Billy Wilder)

Favorite occupation: "Watching a Billy Wilder movie while eating Belgian chocolates."—British film and TV actress Joan Collins, quoted in "The Proust Questionnaire: Joan Collins," Vanity Fair, January 1995

I’m all with “Dynasty’s” diva on this one. 

Mention even only about a half-dozen of the movies of Billy Wilder—born on this date in 1906--and you’re likely to find something that’s appeared on at least one all-time best film list: Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, Witness for the Prosecution, Some Like It Hot, or my favorite of the bunch, The Apartment.

If, as Dustin Hoffman observed, every actor has at least one Ishtar on their resume, then every director has at least one minor-league Heaven’s Gate on theirs. (Pity the one with a major-league Heaven’s Gate on theirs.) 

Even most of Wilder’s box-office misfires, however, have something interesting and even redeeming about them, including The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Fedora, and one that has really grown to something like cult status with the years, Ace in the Hole. (See this prior post of mine on the moral and spiritual dimensions of this dark, dark film.)

The March/April issue of Believer Magazine, focusing on film, includes a brief appreciation--and, better yet, a DVD attached--of a film Wilder wrote before fleeing Nazi Germany: People on Sunday. 

The movie, co-directed by future Hollywood mainstays Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with Fred Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity, A Man for All Seasons) serving as assistant cinematographer, is definitely on my “to watch” list for the summer.

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Taylor, One-Upping Joan Collins Again)

“I'm still ahead by three."—Elizabeth Taylor, in a letter to Joan Collins after the latter’s fourth divorce, quoted in Rex Reed, “Wine and Dynasty: Joan Collins at Feinstein’s,” The New York Observer, November 29, 2010

Back in her youth, Joan Collins won a dubious nickname: “The Poor Man’s Elizabeth Taylor.” They were both what a friend of mine (and he knows who he is!) has termed DHBBs (i.e., “Dark-Haired British Beauties”), and were only two years apart in age. But it was Taylor who got the major studio offer and pictures—first the MGM contract, then Father of the Bride, Giant, Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—not to mention Oscars (Butterfield 8, Who‘s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and the first million-dollar contract for a film (Cleopatra)--while Collins became The Queen of the B’s.

Even in her love life, Collins was trumped by her contemporary from across the ocean. In the late 1950s, after she had barely established a foothold in Hollywood, Collins went through such a staggering spree of lovers (including a reported 14 in one fortnight) that she won the industry nickname “The British Open.”

But for the newspapers, nothing could compare with Taylor breaking up the marriage of America’s then-sweethearts, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher—unless it was Taylor embarking on a tempestuous affair on the set of Cleopatra with Richard Burton, leaving both their spouses (now including Fisher) behind.

As the two actresses aged, they looked elsewhere to make their marks. For Taylor, it was the stage (The Little Foxes and Private Lives, the latter with Burton, now her ex), as well as AIDS activism. Collins finally found a sphere where she couldn’t be one-upped (or, in the case of divorces, three-upped) by Taylor: television, where Dynasty brought her the mega-stardom that had long eluded her.

Collins became notorious, in her Dynasty days, for being difficult. But I find humor, particularly at one’s own expense, to be a significant saving grace, and in her new one-woman show at Feinstein's she relates Taylor's letter (quoted above). In the end, neither lady has to take a back seat to the other in the survival technique of laughing at one's self.

This Day in Film History (Hawks, Faulkner Take on “Pharaohs”)

June 24, 1955—It’s not every day that a film written by a Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize winner gets made. It’s even rarer when the literary lion in question takes up the project after, not before, winning these laurels.

But that’s with happened with William Faulkner, whose collaboration with director Howard Hawks, Land of the Pharaohs, opened in general release on this date in the United States. Faulkner wasn’t sole scribe on the project, mind you—Harry Kurnitz and Harold Jack Bloom were listed as co-screenwriters—but still, Warner Brothers was delighted that the world-famous novelist (in the image accompanying this post) lent his prestige to this movie starring Jack Hawkins, Sydney Chaplin and a young starlet named Joan Collins.

Faulkner’s time in Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties produced five credited screenplays (including the classics To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep), and 15 uncredited ones (including Mildred Pierce). After the Malcolm Cowley-edited The Portable Faulkner revived interest in his fiction, he had little financial incentive to continue writing screenplays—especially if it was one of those epics of ancient times that Hollywood turned out in such regularity in those years, such as Land of the Pharaohs.

But that didn’t mean Faulkner still didn’t feel compelled to write for Tinseltown, at least in this case. The bond of friendship and loyalty to Hawks ran deep.

As late as 1945, when Faulkner’s work was out of print and the financial wolves were not too far from his door, Hawks had enabled him to keep going with well-timed film work. They had the same interests (notably, flying) and could sit together quietly for hours together, hardly saying a word but somehow understanding each other.

So, as Jay Parini tells the story in One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004): In mid-September 1953, after a binge of whiskey and Seconal landed him in the hospital, Faulkner was back home at his beloved Oxford, Miss., home Rowan Oak when Hawks called him from Paris with the offer of a film project: Land of the Pharaohs. The director was so anxious for Faulkner’s services that he agreed to go along with the novelist’s request not to fly to France until his latest novel, A Fable, was completed. (Faulkner family lore even holds that Hawks phoned Rowan Oak eight times before the Nobel laureate acceded to his wish.)

A good thing, too, because within a month Faulkner had collapsed again from another binge.

Part of this might have related to Faulkner’s near-constant thirst for alcohol, but, in a letter to his beloved mother, he also expressed frankly his reluctance to fly to Europe for the project: “I dread going very much, hoped until the last something would happen and I would not have to. But it may not be as bad as I think.”

It was.

Faulkner’s date of arrival in France was December 1, 1953. Hawks waited and waited with Kurnitz, but their collaborator was nowhere to be found.

It turned out that Faulkner, rather than flying to Paris, went to Geneva, then took a train to the City of Lights, where, after an obligatory stop at a bar, he ended up rather the worse for wear, with a four-inch slash across his forehead. Somehow, the confused writer made clear to the cops attending to him that he needed to meet Hawks, and they obligingly dropped him off at the director’s hotel.

Hawks decided that if they were going to get any work done, they needed to get away from Paris, where all sorts of opportunities for trouble lay in wait for Faulkner, so he spirited him and Kurnitz to Stresa, Italy, then to Switzerland.

What came from all of this? Well, it was one of the few failures in Hawks’ long and storied career (not surprising—Faulkner admitted afterward that, since neither he nor Hawks knew any pharaohs personally, he made them talk like Southern generals). Hawks didn’t get back to directing again for another four years. When he did, he was so thrilled with the product—the John Wayne western Rio Bravo—that he eventually repeated the plot twice more (El Dorado and Rio Lobo).

At least the premiere in Memphis, Tenn., afforded Faulkner a nice cocktail party, plus the chance for a swell family reunion. And the making of the film gave the film colony—and Faulkner scholars—lots more legends to dine out on.

I chuckled reading the Amazon.com reviews of the DVD. Quite a few males of a certain age had very pleasant memories of the young Ms. Collins, dressed in the movie with as little as the film censors would allow in those days.

For much of her early career, the actress was thought of as a kind of poor man’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor. Hawks and Faulkner, however, surely must have sensed something different in her. How else to explain, for instance, the classic line they gave her as the seductive Princess Nellifer—“ Even a queen may be lonely”—except as a kind of Vamp-in-Training for her later career-capping turn as Alexis on Dynasty?