This Day in Film History (Death of Andrzej Wajda, Influential Polish Director)

Oct. 9, 2016— Andrzej Wajda, a director, writer, and producer who electrified international audiences with poetic, complex treatments of life under totalitarian rule, died at age 90 in Poland from respiratory complications.

Through October 22, New York’s nonprofit cinema Film Forum is commemorating the centennial of his birth with “Andrzej Wajda 100,” co-presented by the Polish Cultural Institute New York and DI Factory and co-financed by the Polish Film Institute. 

It’s a testament to the filmmaker’s tireless productivity that the 25 movies shown during these three weeks represent less than half of his career output of full-length pictures, documentaries, shorts, and television projects.

Like Oliver Stone, Wajda was a political provocateur who examined onscreen the collective traumas his nation experienced in the 20^th century.

Several were linked by theme, if not plot: his “Three War Films” of the 1950s (A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds) treated ethical dilemmas of during the Nazi occupation of Poland, while two movies from a couple of decades later, Man of Marble and Man of Iron, turned to Communist domination of the nation in the postwar period.

This subject matter could be challenging in its grimness. The prologue of Kanal, for example, tells viewers immediately that none of the heroes of the Warsaw uprising in the city’s sewer system that they are about to see make it out alive.

Communist atrocities affected Wajda and his family personally. His father was among the captured officers executed in 1940 by the Russian KGB in the Katyn Forest, a massacre denied by the USSR until 1990. In the 1950s, Communist censors began to interfere with his work—notably during A Generation, when they deleted one scene that became lost forever.

Even in exile from Poland in the early 1980s, Wajda continued to comment on how Soviet-style revolutionary fervor could devolve into terror, albeit through the prism of history rather than current events. Danton (1983), financed with aid from the French government, raised hackles in that nation’s left wing.

At a time when the Socialist government of Francois Mitterrand included Communists as coalition partners, an intellectual firestorm developed over the implied comparison to the USSR drawn by its title character, a onetime firebrand of the French Revolution who became one of the most prominent victims of the Reign of Terror. Warning of the excesses of his former ally, radical Maximilien Robespierre, Danton (played by Gerard Depardieu) says, “Revolutionaries, like Saturn, devour their own children.”

The daily exigencies of filmmaking led Wajda to make many critical production decisions on the fly. Sometimes this could drive his associates crazy. In a short documentary, Wajda’s “Danton,” one crew member observed the unusual demands made during that 1983 biopic:

“As one scene or a new idea occurs to him, it’s a disaster for us, because he’ll say, ‘It’s not 20 extras anymore. Tomorrow we need 70, 80, 90.’ And that’s the hardest work for us, quickly to find the people he wants, almost from one minute to the next. That’s because he always has an idea and he wants this idea immediately. He just told us that tomorrow we need 12 men who will be naked and will be thrown in a mass grave, a pit where they bury the dead. We will need 12 men who will agree to be naked and be thrown on top of each other.”

On the other hand, Wajda’s openness to spontaneity from other sources resulted in some of the most resonant performances in international cinema.

Case in point: Zbigniew Cybulski, cast in Ashes and Diamonds as Maciek, a young anti-Communist Home Army resistance fighter assigned to assassinate an incoming commissar, Stefan Szczuka.

Initially dubious about having the actor play what he conceived as a dashing romantic hero, Wajda was even more nonplussed when Cybulski wore clothes more in keeping with the current generation—notably tight-fitting jeans, a green jacket, and pepegi (Polish slang for casual canvas shoes or sneakers).

But, as recounted by Polish screenwriter and film critic Bartosz Staszczyszyn, Wajda reflected: “I let him act as he wished, and that saved me.” The actor’s combination of restless energy, humor and vulnerability led him to be regarded as “the Polish James Dean.”

(In fact, in the 1982 analysis, Running Time: Films of the Cold War, journalist and movie critic Nora Sayre preferred the European to the American, contrasting his raw, authentic portrayal of an ordinary young man caught in a life-or-death political struggle with Dean’s much lower-stakes anguish in Rebel Without a Cause.) 

The film is set at a watershed moment in Poland’s history: the last day of the war, but the first of a very uncertain peace (which, it turned out, was dominated by another foreign power, the Soviets, rather than the Nazis). “The end of the war isn't the end of our fight,” Szczuka says. “The fight for Poland and what kind of country it's to become has only just begun. Today or tomorrow or the day after, any one of us could die.”

Or, as Maciek, in more down-to-earth fashion, says, “The main thing is to find a way through this mess without being tricked or getting bored. What else is there?”

From the opening scene to the fated conclusion, that “mess” is depicted with the kind of visual brilliance that Wajda, who had studied after the war at a Krakow arts academy, brought to all his films. 

Shot through with shadows, smoke, and fog, the cinematography underscores the existential dilemma that Maciek—with his eyesight already severely damaged from too much time in Warsaw’s sewers during the Resistance—now regards as pointless. “In many ways,” according to a "Self-Styled Siren" blog post from eight years ago, the film’s atmosphere of dark cynicism made it “a gangster film, with Poland’s future on the line instead of loot.”

Wajda and Cybulski actor collaborated on three more films and on the Polish theater scene before Cybulski died in 1967 in a tragic train accident.

The director immediately influenced by Wajda was Roman Polanski, who acted in two of his films. But Wajda also had an impact on the work of the film school whiz kids who entered Hollywood in the late Sixties: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg.

Certainly, Wajda’s technical mastery repays frame-by-frame viewing. But his maturity, his ability to look past divisive ideologies to the complex humanity that unites all his characters, is something to be embraced but incapable of being taught.

This Day in Film History (Louis B. Mayer Loses MGM Showdown)

June 22, 1951—Loews Inc. announced the results of a long-rumored feud in its Hollywood subsidiary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM): production chief Dore Schary would replace Louis B. Mayer (pictured) as head of the largest of Hollywood’s seven major studios.

The press release mentioned that Mayer was becoming an independent producer, but it was inconceivable to longtime employees—including many who came out the following day to bid him goodbye—that the mogul would voluntarily end his 27-year reign, including a stretch when he was the highest-paid man in America.

Those suspicions proved correct: Mayer had traveled from his Hollywood offices to the studio’s New York-based financial directorate to present an ultimatum to Loews President Nicholas Schenck: It’s either Schary or me. Instead, Schenck called his bluff and forced his resignation.

Forget about Schary: Mayer had also talked down his boss so much that it would have been a miracle for word of the backbiting not to reach Schenk eventually.

They spoke constantly—"two or three times a day in an age when coast-to-coast telephone calls were not so easily made as they are today,” according to David McClintick’s account of a later Tinseltown-New York power struggle, Indecent Exposure—but were seldom on each other’s wavelengths.  Mayer referred to him variously as “The General," "Nick Skunk," “the smiler and the killer," and “the big cheese.”

Ironically, Mayer had brought back to MGM the number-two he came to loathe. A former screenwriter, Schary was chafing as production chief at RKO after its acquisition by the increasingly eccentric Howard Hughes when he was invited back to the lot he had once known as his professional home.

Schary’s key demand for his return—that he bring along his pet project, Battleground—sparked conflict between himself and his new boss.

One of the most grittily realistic WWII dramas released in the early postwar period, it was anathema to Mayer, a mogul not just of old-fashioned tastes but even Victorian ones. If his movie factory could have churned out only musicals and Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy series, he probably wouldn’t have minded very much. 

In contrast to Mayer’s conservative Republican sympathies, Schary—two decades younger—was an industrial-strength New Deal Democrat who wanted more socially conscious fare like Battleground that sent a message.

Battleground’s triumph with critics and, more important, the public (it was one of the top box-office hits of 1949) boosted Schary’s cachet with Schenck while undermining Mayer’s.

With television emerging as a rival medium, lost court cases weakening studio control over stars and movie houses, and international Communism threatening audience optimism across the country, Mayer no longer seemed in touch with public tastes. The question was, would Schary?

Mayer might have been wrong about the commercial prospects for Battleground, but turned out to be right about another war film on the bubble in his final days at MGM: John Huston’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Even with an authentic war hero, Audie Murphy, as the lead, audiences stayed away, proving Mayer’s contention that they would find it too depressing.

In the long run, Schenck might have been correct that Mayer was too old and set in his ways to continue running MGM, but it did not mean that Schary was the right leader to steer the studio through its choppy new waters. 

A highly capable scriptwriter and playwright (as he would show in a few years with his biopic about polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt, Sunrise at Campobello), he proved less adept at managing talent or sensing what audiences wanted. Any positive impression generated by his geniality faded once his corporate mismanagement became apparent.

In contrast, even before he participated in the 1924 merger that established MGM, Mayer had been involved with the movie industry in multiple capacities, so he knew the business thoroughly.

While Schary soon frustrated the studio’s musical hands with his complete lack of interest in the genre, Mayer valued their contributions.

And, while Schary would in a few short years drive away stars like Clark Gable from their longtime home, Mayer, for all his paternalism, sincerely wanted to prove there was no hype in MGM’s longtime slogan, “More stars than there are in the heavens.”

There was no ultimate victor in the MGM showdown. In late 1955, Schenck would be kicked upstairs when Arthur Loew Sr. became president of his family company. Among Lowe Sr.’s most notable moves in his single year at MGM was firing Schary, who spent his remaining quarter-century of life doing what he probably was most cut out for to begin with: writing.

As for Mayer, he was able neither to make a go at independent producing nor in regaining control of MGM when the studio’s declining finances wore down investors’ patience. 

When he died in 1957, though some deplored his penny-pinching tendencies, others would have agreed with one of his stars, Katharine Hepburn, when she wrote in her autobiography, “L.B. Mayer was a shrewd man with enormous understanding of an artist. He was not stupid, not crude. He was a very sensible fellow, and extremely honest.”

This Day in Film History (‘Virginia Woolf’ Erodes Censorship Barriers)

June 21, 1966—Mike Nichols was so worried about the reaction to his film directing debut, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that he left the Pantages Theater early with the movie’s editor, Sam O'Steen.

Nichols need not have been concerned about the popular or critical reception to his adaptation of one of the most acclaimed yet controversial plays of the postwar period. 

With the draw of real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, this scalding marital drama may have been, at $7.5 million, the most expensive black-and-white movie ever produced, but its $10.3 million box-office take ensured profits for Warner Bros.

Over the winter, Hollywood poured more honors on the film, with 13 Academy Award nominations, including for every category in which it was eligible—the first time this had occurred since Cimarron in 1931. Subsequently, wins went to Taylor (her second Best Actress win), Sandy Dennis for Best Supporting Actress, and Haskell Wexler for Best Cinematography.

From the moment Edward Albee’s play opened on Broadway in 1962, it was considered a hot property—but also, in some quarters, too hot to handle. Its frequently profane language and sexual explicitness unnerved the trustees of Columbia University enough that they overruled the recommendation of its Pulitzer Prize panel that the award go to the playwright.

Acquiring the property was unusual for Jack L. Warner, an aging mogul with conservative tastes that increasingly veered towards prestige musical blockbusters like My Fair Lady and Camelot.

At least sone among the studio hierarchy felt qualms about the finished product, which retained much of Albee’s incendiary dialogue. At one early screening, Life Magazine reported, one Warner executive groaned when the lights came up, "My God! We have a $7 million dirty movie on our hands!"

They were right to be concerned. Though the Production Code that had restricted profanity and sex onscreen for the prior three decades was coming under increasing fire from filmmakers and critics, it still presented roadblocks.

The Catholic Legion of Decency, which aimed to identify and boycott any movie it deemed morally objectionable, represented an especially significant roadblock to widespread distribution and popular acceptance of the film. Archbishops and priests promoted pledges by the faithful to avoid any cinema that the organization condemned.

Nichols had fought constantly with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to stick as closely as possible to Albee’s original dialogue and plot. He had survived being removed when generous starting hours for Taylor and Burton left the production 30 days behind schedule and with double the budget. He was not about to let the picture sink before it had a good chance of being seen by the public.

When the 80 judges for the Catholic Legion panel met, Nichols promised Warner execs, he would have his good friend Jacqueline Kennedy—practically a venerated figure after her husband’s assassination—sit behind prominent clerics like “Monsignor What’s-His-Face” and pronounce at the picture’s conclusion, “How Jack would have loved it."

The plot worked, as the Legion assigned Virginia Woolf a new rating—A-IV (“morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations")—which took into account the work’s moral seriousness while signifying that its often scabrous language and subject matter were not for the squeamish.

After haggling with Warner Bros. over its content, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) used a similar strategy as the Legion, designating the film as the first to bear the notice, "No one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent." Its first attempt at a rating system followed two years later.

While the censorship walls crumbled rapidly on the nation’s cinemas in the late 1960s, it took a bit longer for the old restrictions to fade on television. I well remember the first time the film aired on CBS in February 1973.

Then 13 years old, I wondered exactly what was being signaled when the “Tiffany Network” issued its pre-viewing disclaimer urging parents and “sensitive viewers” to use “judgment and discretion.” I soon received what The New York Times’ Howard Thompson termed “an adult earful.”

Nowadays, in whatever medium it appears, it is seldom that such editorial handwringing occurs. Although CBS aired the show starting at 9 pm, when many kiddies would be fast asleep, Turner Classic Movies, for instance, has been known to show it during daytime. 

(A waggish filmmaking friend of mine once noted that TCM never had to worry about children watching their movies, as the cable channel’s average viewing age was 65!)

Viewers who couldn’t get beyond the blistering language that caused so much sturm und drang were likely to miss the symbolism of the names given the feuding, sadistic middle-aged academic couple at the heart of the play and film: George and Martha.

Like the first American President and his wife, Albee’s couple were unable to conceive—certainly not a baby, perhaps only drink-induced disorder and destruction among fellow academics ostensibly oriented towards reason.

This Day in Film History (Death of Stanley Kramer, Postwar Liberal Producer-Director)

Feb. 19, 2001— Stanley Kramer, a director and producer who stirred audiences’ consciences with provocative sociopolitical content, died at age 87 at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, Calif., from complications of pneumonia.

It had been more than two decades since Kramer had retired from the movie business, and more than three since his films had made money or even won critical acclaim. In the quarter century since his death, both conservatives and liberals, in agreement on little else, believe that he was as stodgy in technique as square in outlook.

But Kramer had a two-decade run in which he attracted major stars and made profitable movies with content that risk-averse, politically conservative studio executives regarded as radioactive. 

He might not have been the flashiest, most innovative director, but he was important for making Cold War America look in the mirror he held up to it on injustice at home.

Coming of age in Hell’s Kitchen in New York during the Great Depression, hearing his mother extol her clerical job at Paramount Studios in Gotham, Kramer eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he got ground-up training in the film industry as a carpenter, screenwriter, editor, and producer before his rise was interrupted by a stint in the Army Signal Corps during World War II.

The fracturing of the studio system in the late 1940s opened the way for someone like Kramer who had, in effect, adopted guerrilla tactics in producing his early independent pictures, on the cheap and on the fly. Because of its sensitive subject, Kramer shot Home of the Brave (1949), generally considered the first movie on racism to be distributed by a Hollywood studio, in seventeen days in total secrecy under a different title.

A five-year contract he signed as an independent producer for Columbia Pictures in 1951 guaranteed a steadier financial base and higher budgets, but at the price of being second-guessed by studio head Harry Cohn, whom Kramer later described as “vulgar, domineering, semi-literate, ruthless, boorish and malevolent.”

High Noon, a taut western with a not-so-subtle message about the dangers of McCarthyism, represented perhaps his greatest triumph in this period while also damaging a friendship and giving him a reputation for having the courage of someone else’s convictions.

After his producing partner, screenwriter Carl Foreman, ran afoul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities for refusing to “name names” of Communists he had known earlier in the industry, Kramer bought his share of the partnership, and would have totally erased his participation in the movie were it not for protests by director Fred Zinnemann and star Gary Cooper.

A move into the director’s chair, Kramer felt, was a natural progression for him, considering how he had become so involved with all aspects of his films to date. 

But it took a couple of years before he hit his stride with The Defiant Ones (1958), with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts forced to overcome their differences over race—a dramatic encapsulation of the conflict starting to rage in earnest in America during that time.

Over the next nine years, Kramer would delve into nuclear annihilation (On the Beach, 1959), evolution and church-state relations (Inherit the Wind, 1960), antisemitism (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961, and Ship of Fools, 1965), greed (his atypical 1963 breakneck farce, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), and, most controversially, interracial marriage (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967, in the image accompanying this post).

What The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael lambasted as Kramer’s “irritatingly self-righteous” themes may have limited the director’s critical acceptance. But with his movies continuing to mint box-office gold, Hollywood congratulated him—and itself, for appreciating him—with the Irving Thalberg Award for overall excellence at the 1961 Oscars.

But after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Kramer never had another success. A self-described New Deal Democrat, he fell out of step with youth that gravitated towards more radical “New Left” politics, telling film historian Donald Spoto that he had been “somewhat viciously attacked along the way for being part of a ‘do-good' era.”

I don’t think that audiences simply tired of Kramer’s politics or of his largely stationary camera. Many were driven to distraction by his earnestness, an outlook that naysayers found out of place in an age gone so stark, raving mad that it required movies with the kind of subversive style and substance of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.

I question whether any Kramer-directed movie has served as fodder for film-school sessions on technique, but, by directing 14 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances, he displayed a deft touch with often skittish professionals, and his influence runs stronger than many cynics care to admit:

*Aaron Sorkin’s penchant for courtroom drama (the scripts for A Few Good Men and The Trial of the Chicago Seven) and preachy politics (The West Wing) owes much to him.

*Quentin Tarantino has compared him to Oliver Stone, except that the controversial J.F.K. auteur was not a “clumsy filmmaker” like Kramer.

*And, with Judgment at Nuremberg, Kramer paved the way for Steven Spielberg’s searing Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List.

Today, the Producers Guild of America presents the Stanley Kramer Award to honor films that highlight significant social issues, including, for example, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Normal Heart, and Get Out.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Ronald Colman, Sterling Star of Silent and Sound Eras)

Feb. 9, 1891— Ronald Colman, an Oscar-winning actor who personified courtliness from Hollywood’s silent to sound eras, was born in Richmond, England.

Probably because I was annoyed by what seemed like an unduly stiff performance as an amnesiac war casualty in Random Harvest (1942), I was put off for years by Colman. I changed my opinion after watching his world-weary diplomat in Frank Capra’s adaptation of the James Hilton novel Lost Horizon (1937).

But it was his depiction of brilliant, alcoholic, self-sacrificing lawyer Sydney Carton in the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that finally convinced me that Colman was a sterling talent, well-deserving of his reputation as one of Hollywood’s best leading men of the 1930s and 1940s.

Understandably, the actor saw this as one of the best roles of his career. Not only did he agree to shave off his trademark mustache to play the part, but, with great good humor, he recited his climactic speech from the film whenever Jack Benny visited him on the comedian’s radio and TV shows.

After a half-century, I think I really should re-watch Random Harvest, which enjoys a reputation as one of the finest romantic melodramas of Hollywood’s golden age. 

Colman himself had been badly wounded in the Great War while serving in the London Scottish Regiment (a legendary unit in which actors Basil Rathbone, Herbert Marshall, and Claude Rains had their own harrowing experiences, as related in this 2015 post on the “Sister Celluloid” blog).

The war was as psychologically as physically devastating, as Colman recalled later:

“I won’t go into the war and all that it did to all of us. We went out. Strangers came back. It was the war that made an actor out of me. When I came back that was all I was good for: acting. I wasn’t my own man anymore.”

Undoubtedly, it was Colman’s identification with the traumatized veteran in Random Harvest that helped him overcome an often far-fetched script—and win an Oscar nomination.

The war did not end Colman’s travails. Determined to appear on the New York stage, he initially encountered a long period of unemployment, to such an extent that he was reduced to scrounging for food. (“Figuring out the best way to spend five cents in an automat was an art at which I became adept. Doughnuts were the main standby.”) At last he broke through.

Colman found film to be the real, where he made his mark, however, when director Henry King cast him opposite Lillian Gish in the 1923 silent The White Sister. The movie was so successful that the trio reunited for Romola the following year.

Unlike many silent-film idols, Colman had no trouble adapting to sound. In fact, the new technology enhanced his career because he could take advantage of his distinctive voice: rich, cultured, mellifluous, enhancing his image as an English gentleman.

“Colman only really hit one note with it, a sort of wistful oboe note, but that note was enough if the writing of the picture suited his restrained lyricism,” wrote Dan Callahan in an October 2025 post on his “Stolen Holiday” blog.

No matter what genre he tried—western, melodrama, detective film, romantic comedy—Colman’s gentlemanly persona was tinged with melancholy, a trait of his off-screen temperament. That sense was reinforced early in his career because of a disastrous first marriage.

Colman wed Thelma Raye in haste in 1920, a union he came to rue as, stricken with jealousy at his increasing success, the actress took to stalking him. Increasingly withdrawn under this pressure, Colman was relieved when she sued him for divorce 14 years later. Fortunately his second marriage, to Benita Hume, was longer (20 years, until his death) and far happier.

To the greatest extent possible, Colman tried to live with discretion, so the public knew little of his private circumstances. What it saw onscreen, it loved. 

In addition to the films I mentioned previously, I also enjoyed him in The Talk of the Town (1942), a comedy in which his straitlaced lawyer risks his nomination to the Supreme Court by aiding an escaped convict whose innocence he comes to believe in.

With his fourth Oscar nomination in 1947 for A Double Life, Colman finally won formal recognition from his peers by winning the coveted statuette, as a Shakespearean actor whose latest role—the jealousy-maddened Othello—begins to mirror his own life.

(A recent biographer of Colman, the prolific Carl Rollyson, has a astute analysis of the actor’s “graceful, literate masculinity” in this Spring 2024 article for Humanities, a journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

This Day in Film History (Death of Ward Bond, Prolific Character Actor and Wayne Sidekick)

Nov. 5, 1960—Ward Bond, an actor with more than 200 credits on the big and small screen—including his starring role on the long-running TV western Wagon Train—died of a heart attack in Dallas.

Most likely, you have seen this busy character actor with the gruff voice and everyman persona in at least two films during the course of a year: on March 17, as a fishing- and boxing-loving priest in The Quiet Man; and, at Christmastime, in It’s a Wonderful Life, as James Stewart’s small-town cop friend Bert. 

In all, he appeared in 13 movies nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (though he himself was never cited).

It is doubtful that Bond, when he heeded a recruiting plea by USC football teammate John Wayne to serve as an extra in the 1928 John Ford film Salute, expected to enjoy a three-decade Hollywood career.

Bond made 23 movies with Wayne and at least that many with Ford, and offscreen the trio would form a boisterous friendship marked by hijinks and epic drinking bouts, often on the director’s yacht. Ford even had Bond play his alter ego (a director named "John Dodge") in the 1957 film Wings of Eagles.

Despite their friendship, the cantankerous Ford gave Bond (and Wayne) endless grief while filming. At one point, during location shooting of The Searchers, Bond had pulled the plug on a camera in order to use his electric razor, unaware that a scene was being filmed then. 

Knowing the director’s explosive temper and penchant to humiliate cast and crew members for an offense, the cameraman didn’t tell Ford what Bond had done till several years after the actor’s death.

Bond’s collegiate athletic career and continued burly build in adulthood encouraged the illusion of a vigorous physical health that he did not possess. He was disqualified from serving in World War II because of epilepsy and suffered from high blood pressure during the four seasons he spent on Wagon Train.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who questioned Bond’s professionalism or work ethic. But he was not universally beloved in the industry, particularly after he co-founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. 

In the postwar period, this organization became one of the most virulent forces behind the blacklists maintained to stamp out communist or even merely progressive views in Hollywood.

This right-wing activism turned off many Hollywood liberals so that, ironically, Bond found himself underemployed in any films that did not involve Wayne and Ford. 

It wasn’t until he secured the role of western scout Major Seth Adams on Wagon Train that Bond could reach something like his former presence on the screen. But at that point, his presence loomed larger than ever in Hollywood, as the NBC series placed #2 in the Nielsen ratings from its second through fourth seasons.

It came as a surprise in the industry, then, when Bond had his fatal heart attack. Wayne delivered the eulogy for his longtime friend, and, he observed not long before he died, he would think of what roles his friend and extremely versatile character actor might have played had he lived longer.

This Day in Film History (Jack Lemmon, ‘America’s Everyman,’ Born)

Feb. 8, 1925— Jack Lemmon came by his flair for the dramatic right from the start, when his flamboyant mother—"Tallulah Bankhead on a road show"—gave birth to her actor son while in an elevator in Newton, Mass.

His mother never had another child after that experience, he chuckled in later years.

Audiences saw themselves in Lemmon to such an extent that a documentary on his career was called “American’s Everyman.”

But it was his intelligence, intense preparation, improvisational skills, and ability to get along with directors with different working methods that made him a favorite with colleagues as well as audiences, leading to eight Academy Award nominations—and two victories—to go along with two Emmys, Kennedy Center honors, and a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute.

I remember when I read the news of his death back in 2001 and feeling stupefied that this actor I had watched since childhood would no longer be making any films. What impressed me especially about his career was how well he moved from primarily comic parts (Mister Roberts, Some Like It Hot) to dramatic ones (Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome). Among today’s actors, I think that only Tom Hanks has handled such a transition so adroitly.

Two films that I saw as pivotal in Lemmon’s career change came in the early Sixties.

With The Apartment (1960), Billy Wilder called on him to make several head-spinning changes from hilarity to near-tragedy, most notably when his drunken Chuck Baxter does the cha-cha as he tosses his jacket onto his bed—only to do a terrified double-take when he realizes that the co-worker he adores is passed out there after swallowing sleeping pills.

Two years later, in Days of Wine and Roses, the humor and charm that Lemmon endows PR man Joe Clay is critical to keeping the audience’s sympathy as he cajoles his wife into taking drinks so he won’t be alone—a decision with leads them on a downward spiral that threatens their marriage and lives.

The actor threw himself so thoroughly into the role that, when Clay experiences the DT’s while in a straitjacket, crew members had to shake the actor to snap him out of his hysterics.

In the 1970s, he made something of a specialty of the middle-aged man at bay—what critic Judith Crist termed a "harassed man — outflanked, outranked and outmaneuvered"—in films like The Out-of-Towners, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The China Syndrome, and the film that won him his Best Actor Oscar, Save the Tiger.

Some more bits of trivia about Lemmon:

*While deeply affected by what he learned about alcoholism in Days of Wine and Roses, it took him another 20 years before he could quit drinking for good.

*Though he readily admitted, in this 1989 “Desert Island Disk” interview, to never learning to read music, he was an accomplished, self-taught pianist who demonstrated his talent in 10 of his 60 films, as noted in Fred Wasser’s 2011 NPR report.

*Wilder and Lemmon made seven films together, including the director’s last, Buddy Buddy (1981).

*He was often cast with Walter Matthau and even directed him in Kotch (1971).

This Day in Film History (‘Godfather Part II,’ Oscar-Winning Sequel, Opens)

Dec. 20, 1974—Two years after The Godfather broke box-office records, the sequel went into general release in the U.S., in a production that was more generously budgeted, longer, more ambitious—and with a far more tragic vision of the American Dream.

The Godfather Part II duplicated its predecessor’s success, garnering six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  Many critics regard it as even superior to the first. 

Though it mirrored the original in many respects, it departed from it in relying less on memorable killings (e.g., the toll-booth murder of Sonny) and one-liners (“leave the gun, take the cannoli”) and more on narrative structure, characterization, and symbolism.

While Francis Ford Coppola was initially reluctant to direct Part II (even suggesting Martin Scorsese for the job), he came around to the idea because of two factors.

First, he insisted on—and won—greater creative control, largely sidelining his nemesis on the first film, Paramount studio exec Robert Evans, in the process.

Second, he was so disturbed by the audience’s delight at a sneak preview for the first film—the final scene, where the door is closed on Kay Corleone as her husband Michael conducts “business” as the new don—that he wanted to leave no doubt whatsoever that a fissure had appeared in their marriage and that the crime boss had endangered his soul.

In other words, he wanted to definitively disprove critics who thought the first film had romanticized the Mafia by depicting them as devoted family men rather than as killers. By the end of Part II, Michael Corleone sits utterly alone, as his focus on “business” has left him paranoid and questioning how it could have all gone so utterly wrong.

What went wrong for the Corleones, the film suggests, is also what went wrong with the American empire.

The movie, while covering roughly the years from 1957 to 1960, actually reflects America’s dark post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood, in which cynicism about government lies and corruption became the order of the day. 

Coppola settled on the architecture of this epic with parallel stories of two fathers of roughly the same age, Vito and Michael Corleone, tracing the rise and decline of their family—their personal one as well as the criminal one they head.

I discussed Part II briefly 10 years ago in this post. I had seen bits and pieces over the years, both in The Godfather Saga (a chronological TV presentation beginning with nine-year-old Vito Corleone in Italy through the death of his son Michael roughly three-quarters of a century later) and on AMC (where, over the last few years, Parts I, II and III have been run as holiday mini-marathons).

But a couple of days ago, for the first time, I saw Part II as a complete entity in its own right, reel to reel. The richness I (re)discovered convinced me it was worthwhile exploring in greater depth.

Its nearly half-hour more of running time compared with Godfather I gave co-screenwriters Coppola and novelist Mario Puzo more time not only to convey atmosphere, but also to offer hints about character motivations and relationships.

This time, knowing the major plot points of the movie, small, seemingly minor moments loom larger, as with the pills that Michael takes on the way to meet partner Hyman Roth—perhaps a means of alleviating the tension and anxiety of running a far-flung criminal enterprise and of surviving an assassination in his own home.

Coppola has likened the film to a saga about a king and his three sons. The imperial theme resonates most loudly and mournfully when Corleone consiglieri Tom Hagen and “soldier” Frankie Pentangeli muse on the Roman Empire:

Hagen: “You were around the old timers who dreamed up how the Families should be organized, how they based it on the old Roman Legions, and called them 'Regimes'... with the 'Capos' and 'Soldiers,' and it worked.”

Pentangeli: “Yeah, it worked. Those were great old days. We was like the Roman Empire. The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire.”

Hagen (sadly): “Yeah, it was once.”

While thoroughly of its own time, Part II anticipated much of the disillusionment in America over the last few decades by detailing the costs of the intersection of entertainment, politics, business, and crime.

Perhaps the most vivid example is when Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista meets with United Fruit Company, United Telephone and Telegraph Company, Pan American Mining Corp., South American Sugar—and Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth.

Visually, it echoes the scene from Part I when a grief-stricken Vito Corleone calls a summit meeting of the Mafia families to call a halt to their bloody vendetta—as the inclusion of Corleone and Roth with the more conventional companies implies that little difference exists between ostensibly non-criminal and criminal enterprises.

That sense is reinforced when Batista thanks a group member for the Christmas “gift” of a solid gold telephone, and later when Roth confides to colleagues: 

“There’s no limit to where we can go from here. This kind of government knows how to help business, to encourage it…We can thank our Friends in the Cuban government, which has put up half of the cash with the Teamsters on a dollar-for-dollar basis and has relaxed restrictions on imports. What I'm saying is that we have now what we have always needed: real partnership with the government.”

Roth is voicing the code of businessmen that has prevailed so often from Adolf Hitler to the wanna-be dictators of today: the transgressions of government heads matter little so long as they can forge a “real partnership” that allows them carte blanche to operate.

It has been a devolutionary process even near the start of the movie, when nine-year-old Vito and other passengers gaze longingly at the Statue of Liberty, coming just a few scenes after we see what has happened over 50 years later: Vito’s now-grown son Michael tangling with a zenophobic U.S. senator over a bribe to secure a Las Vegas casino gambling license.

This Day in Film History (‘Murder on the Orient Express’ Serves Up Prime Agatha Christie)

Nov. 24, 1974— Dame Agatha Christie couldn’t have been more pleased at the all-star screen adaptation of one of the most beloved of her 66 detective novels, Murder on the Orient Express, released in the United States on this date.

It’s remarkable how much the judgements of youth can stand the test of time. That, at least, was the case for me with how I felt about the production that director Sidney Lumet molded.

I should tell you that, though I’m a fan of Margaret Rutherford’s four Sixties films as Miss Jane Marple, Dame Christie didn’t appreciate how far these movies departed from her original plots. 

She had no such complaint with this latest adaptation, though: the screenplay by Paul Dehn (with an uncredited contribution by Sleuth playwright Anthony Shaffer) stuck closely to what she wrote, while adding touches of light humor that never descended into campiness.

Other Christie adaptations have come and gone, with some even being remade. But when I saw Murder on the Orient Express (hereinafter abbreviated as MOTOE) early in high school, I put it in the upper tier of Christie films with And Then There Were None (1945), another all-star vehicle.

Starting with the sumptuous soundtrack by Richard Rodney Bennett and the production and costume design by Tony Walton, this was a sumptuous, old-fashioned production—and that was before any of the actors said a word!

When I viewed MOTOE again several weeks ago on Turner Classic Movies a half century later, I was taken once again with the incredible gallery of actors assembled for Dame Christie’s “Grand Hotel” on the rails, including Martin Balsam, Richard Widmark, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Michael York, Lauren Bacall, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, and Rachel Roberts.

It was a conscious strategy on Lumet’s part, as he figured that the audience would find it easier to keep the multiple characters straight by casting well-known actors in the roles—and it worked.

Three actors stand out, for me, in this galaxy of stars:

* Sean Connery, as the first major one cast—whose luster, after a decade as James Bond, made him the most bankable;

* Albert Finney (pictured, with that amazing mustache); many in the cast, Bacall remembered, came to the project at least in part for the chance to work with this superb actor chosen to play Belgian detective Hercule Poirot;

* Ingrid Bergman, who rejected Lumet’s initial suggestion that she play the role of Princess Dragomiroff  for that of the Swedish maid because the Scandinavian actress felt a greater affinity for the character—an instinct that was rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

This Day in Film History (John Ford’s Silent ‘Iron Horse’ Makes Loud Noise at Box Offices)

August 28, 1924— John Ford might have exhibited contempt for studio bosses, but they just had to grin and bear it—especially when they saw the results for his silent western The Iron Horse, which premiered in New York City on this day.

Over the next four decades, whenever the western as a genre looked licked with audiences or critics, Ford came riding to the rescue, like one of his pistol-packing heroes. It even happened a mere 20 years after American cinema, for all intents and purposes, began with The Great Train Robbery, as audiences were already beginning to tire of the form.

Critics were turning up their noses at innumerable William Hart and Tom Mix shoot-‘em-ups when Paramount’s The Covered Wagon (1923) took a different tone: patriotic, focused on the nation’s Manifest Destiny. Fox Film Corp. decided to one-up its rival with a movie about the transcontinental railroad, to be made by its rising in-house filmmaker.

The Iron Horse not only was the movie that effectively made Ford an A-list director by virtue of making the top-grossing film of the year, but also the one that established his template for the rest of his career: dragging cast and crew hundreds of miles from studio bean-counters and nay-sayers, out on location, where he could act as a combination of general and summer camp director.

The 29-year-old was already carving out a niche as a cranky, go-my-own way helmsman, having been called back to a movie he’d been removed from, Straight Shooting (1917), after Universal head Carl Laemmle realized that, even with his penchant for breaking rules, Ford was a talented moviemaker.

Over the next six years, Ford would make for Universal and the studio he then moved to, Fox, more than 30 movies.

But Ford was entrusted with an especially heavy responsibility at the end of that period with this new assignment. This, he understood, was going to be an epic, 2½ hours long.

The first thing he did was haul the 300 cast and crew members on circus trains out to Dodge, Nevada, more than 270 miles from Los Angeles. The location shooting would not only lend a greater sense of realism but, more important from Ford’s perspective, remove him from day-to-day scrutiny from Fox.

Not that the studio didn’t try. At one point, Ford read a message from Fox, urging him to shoot faster to stay within the budget. By way of a response, he held the message aloft and asked a sharpshooter to shoot a hole in it, sending the note back where it came from.

By starting location shooting right after the new year, Ford and his army of film professionals were also going to get some sense of the privation that 19^th-century pioneers had experienced.

“There was real suffering on that picture,” property man Lefty Hough recalled. “It was hard, tough, awfully primitive conditions. Christ, it was cold.”

They arrived just as a “baby blizzard” blew in. Temperatures dropped so low that crew members slept in the warm army uniforms the studio provided. (That didn’t prevent a dining car steward from dying from pneumonia he had contracted three weeks into shooting.)

(See Linda Laban's article this week in The Guardian for more details on the harrowing shoot.)

One morning, everyone awoke to find a fresh snowfall had blown in overnight. The shooting schedule had called for the ground to be barren of snow, so everyone set to work, successfully shoveling out within an hour.

What could have made matters worse was that there was no finished script as shooting began. That, in a way, suited Ford just fine: It made everybody on set even more dependent on him to finish the picture.

While the cameras were rolling, Ford could be crusty, even bullying and abusive. When they stopped for the day, he acted more like a benevolent dictator.  In the evenings, the small temporary city he had set up enjoyed dancing, songs (often featuring the mariachi musicians he loved), and even a bootlegger.

(Ben Mankiewicz's recent multi-episode entry in his "The Plot Thickens" podcast has great details on the fun after-hours set on this and other movies directed by "Pappy" Ford.)

The film’s young star, George O’Brien, would epitomize another aspect of Ford’s career: tapping a character actor with just a few credits for a career-making turn. Fifteen years later, Ford would do the same, with more lasting results, for John Wayne in Stagecoach.

But O’Brien shared some traits with Ford that The Duke couldn’t, including Irish-American ancestry and fierce pride in his naval service. Even when O’Brien’s career faded after WWII, Ford made room for him in his “stock company” of actors, including Fort Apache (1948) and the director’s last Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

(More than a half-century after O’Brien and Ford worked together on The Iron Horse, the actor’s son Darcy O’Brien gave a starring role to his father and a supporting one to “Pappy” in his roman a clef about growing up a prince of Hollywood, A Way of Life, Like Any Other.)

When Ford was finished, he had miraculously brought The Iron Horse in under the $280,000 budget set by Fox (which itself was a bargain compared with the $500,000 allotted by Paramount for The Covered Wagon). It grossed $1.5 million, propelling him to the forefront of American filmmakers.

Ironically, of his four Oscar victories for Best Director, not one came from any of the 56 westerns he made throughout his career as Hollywood’s most honored filmmaker.

This Day in Film History (Death of Wallace Beery, Oscar-Winning Lovable Lug)

Apr. 15, 1949— Wallace Beery, whose burly frame and gruff voice propelled him from supporting roles to an Oscar-winning box-office mainstay, died of a heart attack at age 64 at his Beverly Hills home.

The character actor, one of the busiest of the silent and early sound eras, started in the entertainment industry at age 16 with Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant to the elephant trainer, then transitioned to musical variety shows before heading west to Hollywood in 1913.

Over the next 15 years, he appeared onscreen 150 times, chiefly at Keystone, Universal, and Paramount Studios, before the arrival of sound led the industry to a virtually wholesale liquidation of much of their talent.

Beery was looking for work when “Boy Wonder” MGM producer Irving Thalberg sensed potential in the actor. 

It was a shrewd guess: Within a year, the illness and death of Lon Chaney opened up an opening for a plum role as a three-time murderer in jail for life in The Big House, and screenwriter Frances Marion, noticing Beery eating spaghetti at the studio’s cafeteria, reminded her of San Quentin prisoners she’d interviewed during her research for the movie.

Beery was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the role, and he would win it for playing a washed-up prizefighter desperately providing for the son he loves in the 1931 movie The Champ (remade, to far less box office and critical acclaim, in 1979 with Jon Voight).

Throughout the Thirties, MGM did everything it could to milk their suddenly hot property for everything he was worth, in such films as Mexican outlaw Francisco Villa in Viva Villa!, grasping capitalists in Dinner at Eight and Grand Hotel, and Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

The last three roles could be at best edgy and at worst treacherous. But the studio assembly line that emphasized typecasting increasingly frustrated the actor so that, by the end of the decade, his acting “took on the boozy self-consciousness of a department store Santa with a chronically overdeveloped sense of his own charm,” according to Tom Sutpen’s February 2006 post from the blog for Bright Lights Film Journal.

Audiences couldn’t get enough of the actor. With his lined face and beefy build, he looked like one of them, and film fans weren’t as besotted with physical perfection as they would become in later decades. They were disinclined to believe that someone seemingly so earthy and easygoing could be unprofessional and perhaps violent away from the cameras.

It did not become known till years later, then, after MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer and his PR crew were no longer around, that the reality regarding Mayer was quite different.

There seems little doubt, for instance, that Beery couldn’t stand juvenile actors, because they had the unconscious habit of stealing scenes from them. As adults, Dickie Moore, Margaret O’Brien, and Jane Powell all described him as abusive, and O’Brien even accused him of stealing her lunch!

But the youngster who seems to have suffered the most at Beery’s hands was Jackie Cooper. The success of The Champ led the studio to pair the two in three more pictures that must have been absolute agony for the youngster.

The extent to which Beery wreaked havoc on adults is just as egregious as his conduct towards juveniles, if more disputed. One of the more persistent stories that emerged after his death was that he and two friends got into a drunken brawl in 1937 with Ted Healy that resulted in the death of the creator of The Three Stooges.

Details have varied over the circumstances surrounding Healy’s death, and I am inclined to believe that Jon Ponder, in this “West Hollywood History” blog post, disproved the story.

But it says something about both Beery’s dark side and MGM’s fabled ability to fix scandals that so many industry observers were ready to credit the tale.

At the time of Beery’s death, he was involved in a paternity suit, charged by actress Gloria Schumm with reneging on an agreement to give her child his first name. The court dismissed the proceedings after the actor’s death.

The other unseemly tale involving Beery and adults concerned Gloria Swanson, who claimed that, on the night of their wedding (which fell on her 17^th birthday), he returned from the hotel bar to rape her. When the future Sunset Boulevard star became pregnant, she wrote in her autobiography, he gave her a concoction that induced an abortion.

The marriage only lasted two years. It would take six decades, but Swanson would finally have revenge of a sort on her ex in her memoirs. 

She related in its opening pages the story of his mistreatment of her. Combined with the other stories that others have come out with, it makes laughable the Los Angeles Times obituary that observed that he was “soft spoken, unexcitable and entirely lacking in temperament at home.”