Flashback, December 1945: ‘They Were Expendable,’ Ford Tribute to Naval Courage, Premieres

They Were Expendable, MGM’s somber, stirring tribute to the American PT-boat sailors who first battled skeptical military brass about their craft, then Japanese invaders in the Philippines in the first desperate days of WWII, opened at Loew’s Capitol Theater in Washington, DC, in December 1945, with an audience including many in the military it honored, such as Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.

Navy personnel also helped create the film, including screenwriter Frank Wead, a retired WWI pilot; director John Ford, a captain in the Navy Photographic Field Unit; and one of the two male leads, Robert Montgomery, a real-life PT skipper in the recently concluded war.

One key cast and crew member, however, was not involved in the war: the second male lead, John Wayne, who nevertheless used the movie to recast his image successfully as a towering American hero.

Ford and Wayne made 20 films over 35 years, but in certain ways this may have been the most pivotal. It certainly was the one that tested the most the boundaries of their working relationship and friendship.

Ford, who had enlisted in the Navy even before Pearl Harbor, had spent much of the prior four years in a documentary crew filming battles, including Midway (where he continued shooting even after being wounded, earning a Purple Heart for his gallantry). Throughout that time, he had been after Wayne to “get into” the fight.

But Wayne—34 and able-bodied at the outbreak of hostilities at Pearl Harbor—kept finding one reason after another not to join up. He had suffered an injury during college that continually hampered his function (though it hadn’t bothered him much while performing his own stunts several years before). He was the sole support of his family (though that status would change, as he was about to enter divorce proceedings). He couldn’t get out of a contract with Republic Pictures without triggering a lawsuit (though he didn’t test to see whether Republic head Herbert J. Yates was bluffing). He wrote Ford about joining his photographic unit but kept postponing joining until after his next picture.

In the end, Wayne was exempted from service due to his age and family status. That didn’t sit well with, for instance, Pacific Theater vets who, upon encountering Wayne on a USO tour, booed him raucously (an incident recalled in William Manchester’s WWII memoir, Goodbye, Darkness).

While not a draft dodger, Wayne had not pressed his case as vigorously as other stars had done. That rankled Ford, who before long was ridiculing him repeatedly in front of the entire crew.

The baiting was in keeping with the longtime on-set behavior of Ford, an alcoholic bully who would often pick one person on each film to abuse. The director had, in prior movies, taken Wayne to task for, among other things, “walking like a pansy.” 

Now, almost as soon as shooting began on Ford’s birthday in February—with co-star Montgomery serving inadvertently as a model of doing one’s military duty—Wayne found himself subjected to abuse on a subject that would haunt him for the rest of his life: the not-so-subtle imputation that he was a "shirker."

Ford may have reached his zenith in sadism when he asked why Wayne couldn’t even salute properly. Watching his co-star reduced to what another actor in the production called “a quivering pulp,” Montgomery had had enough. If Ford was subjecting Wayne to this treatment on his behalf, the director should stop the treatment right now, Montgomery said.

Ford eased up—but only on this movie. More than a decade and a half later, while shooting The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford asked James Stewart, a decorated pilot, what he had done in the war. Then he turned to Wayne to ask what he had done.

One has to ask why Wayne continued to endure this abuse—particularly by the early 1960s, the time of production on Liberty Valance, when he was a box-office institution. Gratitude to Ford for rescuing him from “B” Westerns with Stagecoach can only account for some of his forbearance.

True, there was also the possibility that Ford would offer Wayne the chance to play increasingly psychologically complex variations on the ideal of American manhood. But I think something else was involved, the same dynamic behind Montgomery’s work on this movie: the chance to learn from a master of movie-making.

By the mid-1940s, Montgomery—more famous these days, as I indicated in a prior post, as the father of Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery—was a highly regarded actor with his eye now trained on behind-the-camera work. A year later, he would finally have the chance to direct his first film, an unusual adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s detective novel The Lady in the Lake.  

But as he was playing the lead in They Were Expendable, Lt. John Brickley (based on the real-life war hero Lt. John Bulkeley), the actor—a bit nervous about not being in front of the camera for three years during the war—was thinking about the next turn in his career. He didn’t protest when Ford, after filming a scene according to his suggestion, then told him to take the reel home with him, as they wouldn’t be using it.

Weeks later, after Ford suffered an injury while on location in Florida, he had Montgomery film action sequences while he was recuperating. In what must have thrilled the actor, Ford later claimed that he couldn’t tell the differences between these scenes and those he had filmed.

As for Wayne: Playing Brickley’s second-in-command, Lieutenant "Rusty" Ryan, was not only a chance for a high-profile role in something besides a western, or even for making sizable elements of the public forget his less-than-glorious part in the war, but also an opportunity to learn lessons in directing from the universally acknowledged master of the art.

By this time, a project of his own was germinating in Wayne’s mind: making a film about the Alamo. Over the next 15 years, he would hire researchers and put much of his own money behind this account of the legendary last-ditch stand against Santa Ana. Even now, he was absorbing by osmosis how to frame shots and other aspects of film.

The Alamo was similar to They Were Expendable as a study of sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds. But, if film could be likened to song, Wayne had learned the words but not the music that would make the experience indelible.

Over the course of his long career, Ford assembled a de facto stock company of actors who, for better or worse, were willing to endure his on-set dictatorship. He knew their talents and fit roles to them, and had learned to work even more smoothly with screenwriters such as Wead and Frank Nugent (a former movie critic who would write the script for The Searchers and other classic Ford westerns).

Wayne could not count on the same assets in making The Alamo. He could not secure actors he had hoped for principal roles (Clark Gable, Charlton Heston), so he had to hope that the ones he did secure (Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey) would mesh well with each other under his direction—a hope unfulfilled in the final product. 

More fatally, for all his interest in recreating the Alamo with almost documentary exactness, Wayne lacked Ford’s intense psychological identification with his material. From Midway to D-Day, Ford had not just filmed men under fire but also, as one himself shooting amid the roar of battle, he had imbibed their attitude toward war as a matter of stoic grace under pressure rather than an exercise in jingoism.

Some of the best moments in They Were Expendable are of men suddenly facing awesome odds with silent, grim but certain resolution: being told, one by one, at a social gathering that Pearl Harbor has been attacked, or, through a fluke of fate, losing one’s place on the plane taking select sailors to the comparative safety of Australia. The Alamo exhibits none of this fatalistic attitude. It is more committed to waving the flag than in honoring the qualities that led men to carry it in the face of death.

The result: while They Were Expendable did not lure a war-weary public to the box office, it has increasingly won critical acclaim as one of the best WWII movies, while The Alamo is a long epic that, for all its admirable intentions, lacks the psychological insight, pacing or extraction of actors' best talents so characteristic of Ford classics.

This Day in Television History (Montgomery’s Version of O’Hara’s “Appointment” Airs)

May 11, 1953—In the fourth season of the anthology series named for him, Robert Montgomery appeared as Julian English in NBC’s adaptation of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. 

The episode remains the only treatment, on either the large or small screen, of a tale of drinking, depression (financial and mental) and fate among the eastern Pennsylvania country club set that placed among the Modern Library’s list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as Time Magazine’s list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923.

In the 1930s O’Hara worked for a while in Hollywood. Several of his novels and many of his short stories (including the collection John O’Hara’s Hollywood) focused on the film colony. 

For the most part, however, Hollywood made a hash of his work. Adaptations emphasized the romantic, the sentimental, and the sensationalistic while blunting the often bitter ironies and shrewd social observations present through most of his best work.

Big Vs. Small Screen Treatments

Ten North Frederick (1958), with Gary Cooper, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Suzy Parker, is generally regarded as the best of the bunch because of the quality of the performances. But the attempt to telescope the sprawling novel left critics such as the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther confused. A Rage to Live (1965), with Suzanne Pleshette, suffered even more from compression. And Elizabeth Taylor owed her Oscar for Butterfield 8 (1960) more to her offscreen near-fatal illness than to the quality of her performance. 

(MGM, hoping to cash in on her notoriety for stealing Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds, dusted off the 1935 O’Hara tale of Prohibition-era drinking and promiscuity, one that they hadn’t been able to film for years because of Production Code restrictions. The actress was not enthralled with the property, calling it “the most pornographic script I have ever read.”)

In contrast, the small screen has treated O’Hara far better, perhaps because it has focused on properties that were smaller in scope to begin with. 

If you’re old enough and had a sharp-enough attention span, as I was in high school in 1976, you might fondly remember Gibbsville, on for all of seven episodes, with a pre-Deer Hunter John Savage as the O’Hara stand-in, James Malloy, and Gig Young as an alcoholic reporter.

Better yet was the 1987 PBS version of the O’Hara novella “Natica Jackson,” with Michelle Pfeiffer, just starting her ascendancy as a serious actress, playing a glamorous 1930s star who gets caught up in an affair and shocking tragedy.

Best of all might be Montgomery’s adaptation of the book commonly considered O’Hara’s best. At the time, the teleplay, directed by Herbert Bayard Swope Jr. and written by Irving Gaynor Neiman, was considered successful. Today, Appointment in Samarra seems poignant: a half-forgotten actor of achievement meeting a novelist similarly neglected by posterity.

Baby boomers are likely to recall Montgomery, if they do at all today, as the answer to a trivia question: “Who was the father of Elizabeth Montgomery?” The actor (that’s his picture accompanying this post) deserves to be better known than simply the dad of the Bewitched star, as anyone who spends any time watching his work on DVD or Turner Classic Movies can attest.

An Ambitious Actor-Hyphenate

The studio system liked to fit stars into personality types that people could understand, and the one that MGM chose for him was the sophisticated playboy—something you can easily grasp, given that Montgomery for years was considered one of the best-dressed men in Tinseltown.

But the actor wanted to stretch, and before long he showed he had the chops for it. His performance in the 1937 version of Emlyn Williams’ Night Must Fall, as a psychotic lower-class killer, went wildly against type and won him an Oscar nomination, as did his role in Here Comes Mister Jordan four years later. 

(Modern audiences might be more familiar with remakes of both films: Albert Finney in a more obvious, inferior version of the former, and Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait, a pretty good reworking of the latter.)

An unexpected stint finishing up They Were Expendable for John Ford gave Montgomery a hankering for directing, something he very soon indulged with two film noirs: The Lady in the Lake, the most innovative (if not necessarily successful) cinematic adaptation of a Raymond Chandler mystery, and Ride the Pink Horse, his version of the Dorothy B. Hughes novel.

But the new medium of television beckoned, with NBC offering the chance to do a series that he would produce, host and, when the urge hit him, star in. Loving a challenge –and perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall for his continued prospects as a leading man as he approached his mid-40s—Montgomery jumped at the chance.

Starting in 1950 and continuing for the next seven seasons, “Robert Montgomery Presents…” was one of the live, dramatic anthology series that television did so well in those days. 

As I argued in my tribute to the late television writer James Costigan, the anthology series provided numerous opportunities for fledging literary talents such as Costigan, Roald Dahl, Richard Matheson, Reginald Rose, Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, and Ray Bradbury to cut their teeth. 

It also provided Montgomery with another achievement: the Emmy for Best Dramatic Program in 1952, along with nominations in that category for 1951 and 1953.

Why did O’Hara allow Montgomery to adapt his best novel? I haven’t yet been able to determine how the two met, whether through mutual associations dating back to 1930s Hollywood or more recently. 

But the prickly novelist must have liked the job Montgomery performed on The Farmer’s Hotel, an inferior 1947 novel that the producer adapted for his show in 1952. Certainly, with the Modern Library reissuing Appointment in Samarra in 1953, a TV adaptation would bring it greater attention.

Affinities Between Novelist and Producer

Equally likely, the two might have found that in certain respects, their backgrounds and attitudes meshed. In other words, Montgomery had a liking for the author and enough affinity for the material to assure it would be treated with respect, as seen in the following ways:

* Both men had daughters on whom they doted: O’Hara lavished on Wylie the kind of unconditional affection that few others were privileged to know, while Montgomery gave Elizabeth her first television acting credits on his show.

* Both men hit creative troughs in the 1940s: Montgomery desperately needed reassurance from John Ford on the set of They Were Expendable that his acting skills hadn’t rusted after the interruption of World War II, while O’Hara admitted to having experienced “creative sterility” at nearly the same time.

* Both men hungered to see action in WWII: O’Hara’s physical ailments precluded any active service, despite shameless attempts at lobbying friend James Forrestal for a commission. Montgomery was more fortunate, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. His last production was The Gallant Hours, a 1960 biopic about Admiral William F. Halsey, his Pacific commander.

* Both men were liberal in the 1930s but became Republicans in the postwar era. Montgomery served four terms as President of the Screen Actors Guild. O’Hara supported FDR during the 1930s. After the war, both men grew increasingly conservative. By 1947, Montgomery, along with Ronald Reagan and George Murphy, had become a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the 1952 Presidential campaign, he advised Dwight Eisenhower on how to present his speeches and appearances. (Eight years later, Ike thought Nixon would have outperformed JFK in the first Presidential debate if Montgomery had been his adviser.) The Cold War shifted O’Hara increasingly to the right as well—so much so that, nearly two decades later, he seriously alienated much of the liberal critical establishment—and made himself look plain stupid—by writing in a mercifully short-lived weekly Newsday column that Martin Luther King Jr. did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

* Both men were born into affluence, but were forced to fend for themselves when their fathers died relatively young. Dr. Patrick O’Hara had risen high in society in Pottsville, Pa., but he died intestate. Much of his remaining money left in trust for John and the rest of his children vanished in the bank failures of the Depression. Similarly, Montgomery had known privilege as the son of an executive with the New York Rubber Co. But when Henry Montgomery Sr. died, catastrophe followed the settlement of his estate, as it did with Dr. O’Hara’s. Robert took work as a mechanic’s helper and tanker deckhand before becoming an actor.

In terms of understanding the nuances of O’Hara’s novel, the last point of similarity with the novelist was probably the most fortunate for Montgomery. He would have understood that Appointment in Samarra was about much more than just the frank treatment of sex that had attracted the attention of smuthounds after publication in 1934. 

Unlike later Hollywood screenwriters, he would have been keenly alert to the book’s nuances about upward and (in Julian’s case) downward mobility, as well as the desperation not far below its surface.

A good thing the star-producer brought this kind of feeling to the adaptation, because in another crucial respect he would have been dismissed out of hand. Without plastic surgery, Montgomery would never have been able today to get away with his habit of playing characters considerably younger than himself. (Insanely, at age 50, he took on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby for TV, a role at least two decades his junior.)

That age differential was not much better when Montgomery played O’Hara’s doomed Gibbsville socialite. By all rights, the episode should have been a mess. But to my surprise and relief when I watched it several years ago at the Museum of Television and Radio (now the Paley Center for Media), it was anything but that.

Several years later, Paul Newman’s effort to purchase the big-screen rights to Appointment in Samarra foundered when O’Hara insisted on one million dollars upfront. From the Terrace (a property, I think, that might have worked better as one of those 1970s miniseries) was the consolation prize. To date, Montgomery’s version of Appointment is the only one that’s ever been attempted.

Newman would have been more age-appropriate for Julian English than Montgomery but, I’ve come to believe, not necessarily better. He would never have been to summon the elegance that Montgomery evinced so effortlessly (as you might expect from someone who for a long time refused to carry wallets because they ruined the drape of his suits).

More important, Montgomery’s age meant that he endowed English with a weariness not so apparent on the written page, where the character comes off often as a truculent drunk rather than a desperate man. That weariness is essential for eliciting sympathy for his fate.

“Fate.” That word brings us to another reason why the adaptation worked so well, in contrast to so many others involving O’Hara. 

Set over three days during the Christmas season, it obeys the classic unities necessary for tragedy dating back to the Greeks—unlike the decades-sprawling social histories that increasingly consumed O’Hara’s attention in the last two decades of his life.

An Unfortunate Denouement

O’Hara’s well-known boorishness ensured that some of his best work never made it to film. Eight years after their largely successful collaboration on Appointment in Samarra, O’Hara took umbrage over, if you can believe it, telephone etiquette when Montgomery inquired about the possibility of adapting his fine novella from the Sermons and Soda-Water trilogy, “Imagine Kissing Pete.”

As you might expect with an actor-hyphenate, the busy Montgomery had his secretary call the novelist before he came on the phone. As Geoffrey Wolff recounts in a revealing anecdote from his half-terrific, half-exasperating The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara, the novelist wrote that “Bob Lovett” and “Jim Forrestal” had made their own calls to him.

 Montgomery’s response effectively ended what could have been another mutually rewarding project: “It does not give me any greater confidence in our security to know that they were so meticulous in not offending your sense of telephone propriety.”

All of this is a shame. Many O’Hara aficionados such as myself wish, as the author with more short stories published in The New Yorker than any other writer, that O’Hara had been more careful how he treated people who could affect his reputation for the better, particularly one like Montgomery who approached his work with understanding. 

The flameout of this relationship demonstrates what so many of his would-be friends knew too well: how impossible he could be.

It was not always that way, though, and I’d like to close this post with an incident that shows the writer at his best, the way he was with people like Philip Barry, John Steinbeck, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. At the end of the performance of Appointment in Samarra, cast and crew decided to head out to Manhattans’ “21 Club” to celebrate. (This was three months before a near-fatal health scare put O’Hara on the wagon for the duration of his life.)

One of the crew was hanging back, probably out of shyness: a young stage manager named Dominick Dunne. O’Hara would have none of it: “I want you to come, too.” Dunne did and, I’m sure, came away with a tremendous appreciation for the older writer’s way of eliciting information from friends and the nuances of class—material that has been the stuff of his own fiction all these years later.