Wild Bill

Wild Bill Wellman.

Wading through the video swamp that is You Tube I noticed Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick - The Life and Times of William A. Wellman, a 1999 feature documentary portrait of the  director on whom my attention has focused since I discovered him all those years back in my first, teen age burst of serious movie going. A whole film about Wild Bill Wellman. Count me in!

The documentary, rightly I think, brackets him with Frank Capra and John Ford as the most important figures of “classic” Hollywood. Tough luck Howard Hawks, Cecil B. De Mille, Lewis Milestone and Michael Curtiz. It’s produced by Wellman’s son and directed by Todd Robinson, son of Edward G. and director of the 2006 John Travolta Lonely Hearts. These family connections seem to have facilitated getting an impressive list of interviews. Though It’s unfair to pick among the production’s rich selection, particularly interesting are the subject’s twenty year younger wife Dorothy Coonan Wellman, star of his 1933 Wild Boys of the Road, James Whitmore, Gregory Peck, Michael Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Sidney Poitier. (I had to think about him - the answer is 1956's Goodbye My Lady).  This is both the production’s strength and limitation. 

Robinson & Martin Scorsese.

Not unlike Kevin Brownlow’s work, this one foregrounds the material representing the interview subjects. The coverage of  early years lays out material already often familiar -  WW1 Dawn patrols with the Lafayette Escadrille and detail on the meaning of his two “confirmed kills”, Wellman's horrendous plane wreck or landing his civilian flight on Douglas Fairbanks' polo ground next to the star's open air party. Less familiar is detail on his association with alcoholic director Bernard Durning or his first marriage to forgotten movie star Helene Chadwick whose mail he would subsequently find himself delivering as he worked his way up through the ranks of studio gophers.

There’s the giant gamble represented by Wings and it’s success making him throw off the restraints of a safe Paramount contract, realist films at Warners, block busters for Selznick and a deal with Zanuck which had him barter making The Oxbow Incident for his unwilling services on Thunderbirds and Buffalo Bill, followed by programmers at MGM with Nancy Davis /Regan providing surprisingly articulate recollections.

Then we settle in for a blow by blow on the fifties Warner movies which had Clint Eastwood, Tom Laughlin, Tab Hunter, Mitchum, Poitier and regrettably briefly Jane Wyman on hand to comment. These are discussed in detail though even here an Ernest Gann side bar omits Island in the Sky, the best of them. 

Island in the Sky - John Wayne.

This documentary just isn’t about to comment the fifties fall-away in Warner quality which left new faces like Elia Kazan and Jack Webb scrambling to make important work in an environment which had drained people once studio masthead talents - Roy Del Ruth, Raoul Walsh, William Keighley, even Curtiz. There's a telling interview with Henry Blanke in James Silke’s studio history “Here’s Looking at You Kid” which discusses this decline in standards.

These final, compromised films get detailed coverage while major early Wellman works like Beggars of Life (1928) or So Big (1932) just don’t figure. Heroes for Sale only scores a passing reference.

Ox Bow Incident - Fonda & Harry Morgan

The production does field some interesting insights like an excellent montage where foreground objects obscure key moments - Fonda reading the Ox Bow letter, Anthony Quinn’s Buffallo Bill death - and seeing Wings, Public Enemy, Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, Beau Geste, Ox Bow and G.I Joe butted together confirms Wellman’s extraordinary status. Alec Balwyn’s self efacing delivery of the commentary is exemplary.

OK, there are a whole lot of William Wellmans, not omitting the one who alarmed Eddie Bracken with his sadistic practical jokes. This film puts on screen someone very different to the assured, sardonic retiree I’d met twenty years before Wild Bill was made. He had the London National Film Theater hanging on every word and, as a wind up, declared he was going to recite a love poem, taking out a sheet of paper from which he read an embarrassing lachrymose verse. The organisers were studying their toe caps before it ended “and there’s the love of a child for it’s mother/ but there’s a love that surpasses all other/ the love of one drunken bum for another.” They adored him - me too.

This film’s Wild Bill Wellmann, with rough edges removed, was maybe not the most interesting but it remains a welcome addition.

George Brent, Barbara Stanwyck and Wellman Shooting Purchase Price 1932. 

 

Barrie Pattison 2020

Joan Crawford and William Falkner

CRAWFORD, COOPER AND HAWKS.

Today We Live - Crawford & Cooper

Finally managed to see Today We Live, a production that has remained elusive during all my years of hard movie going, despite a cast headed by Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone and Robert Young and the participation of William Faulkner and of Howard Hawks, a director who was all but deified by the activities of French critics in the 1960s.

It turns out to be accomplished for its 1933 origins. This one gets by as entertainment but more absorbing than any fun viewing qualities is the tussle between two of the major movie styles - a Howard Hawks male bonding piece and a Metro Joan Crawford glamor vehicle.

We kick in 1915 off with American visitor Cooper being asked by the customs man where his sympathies lie and, having nothing to say, getting his passport stamped “Neutral.” English (!) lady of the manor Crawford receives the message that her father has just been killed at the WW1 front but still receives new tenant Cooper, who is sufficiently thoughtless to request their sugar ration for his tea in the inevitable leaded window drawing room. Nevertheless it’s love at first sight and the pair go bicycling through the back lot representation of English lanes. 

This doesn’t go down too well with Joan’s childhood sweetheart Robert Young as he and her brother Franchot Tone ship out for small boat duty on the channel coast.

Gary rejects his status as “rich, neutral and out of things” signing up for the U.S. flying corps and trading their wings insignia for a Royal Air Force set. Franchot is the one to bring the news that Gary’s been killed in action. Deep in grief Joan goes off and pairs with Bob without benefit of clergy - pre code shock!

However Gary, reports of his death greatly exaggerated, turns up at the same port where Joan has had herself stationed as a nurse and he resents the new arrangement when he hears about Bob’s fun little boat trips after Gary’s used to seeing his gunners loaded out of the plane with blood pouring from their mouths. Running into Bob at a bar, he invites him to fly with them - and see real action. Sidekick Roscoe Karns, excellent in a part effectively enhanced from the usual comic relief, shows concern.

Rather than being fear stricken, Bob mans the Vickers gun and enthusiastically  takes out at least three Boche - suspense cranked up by the undischarged bomb which only he notices till they land.

After some more Madonna like close ups of Joan, it gets to be the suicide mission in the fog and rain which can be undertaken by Gary’s plane or Bob’s torpedo boat. Some genuine suspense here as Coop should get the girl because he has top billing but Bob’s claim is bolstered by the admittedly dodgy marriage bond.

Hawks appears to have found Metro an uneasy base. Both Viva Villa and (the excellent) Prizefighter and the Lady were finished by others and he never worked with the studio after these. However he does have the studio's excellent craft departments to draw on - Oliver Marsh’s gleaming images nicely reproduced on the Warner Archive disk and Cedric Gibbons design. He seems to find enough wiggle room to have the key scene with Cooper and Crawford backed with single piano rather than the usual lush orchestration. However Gilbert Adrian’s idea of period fashion is to send in Joan in something that looks like a flight attendant’s uniform from a Flash Gordon serial.

We recognise Hawks feeble comedy with the cockroach jokes anticipating Walter Brennan demanding "Was you ever bitten by a dead bee?" Also curious is Hawks' attempt to simulate clipped British English by removing the pronouns from sentences - this from the director who would pioneer lapping dialogue.

Today We Live has a family aspect being the director’s first association with William Faulkner who would continue working on his films into the fifties though it’s been said that the collaboration was often an exchange of the novelist’s prestige for the studio’s dollars. Action director Richard Rosson would again share the 1943 Corvette K225 with Hawks. His final torpedo run is the film’s highlight. This sub-plot would seem to be the origins of They Were Expendable with similar ocean speeding material. The mix of  Rosson’s footage, stock from Hells Angels, model work and studio shooting run up by editor Edward Curtiss lifts the piece from it’s soapier passages. Cooper and Karns both appeared in Wings though not in the same scenes, and Crawford’s marriage to Cooper’s Bengal Lancers co-star Franchot Tone would place her with the Group Theater in an attempt to sharpen her skills. Think Marilyn Monroe and Actor’s studio. 

Young & Crawford

Most significant is the fact that it is the first collaboration between Hawks and Gary Cooper who would combine on Sergeant York and Ball of Fire, two of the key films from the Golden Years. We’ve got to give this one points. It’s uneasy coupling works better than Cooper and Henry Hathaway’s swoony Peter Ibetson. Hawks and Faulkner hold Metro at bay better than Borzage and Scott Fitzgerald doing Three Comrades five years later.

There’s enough here to get the attention of any vintage movie freak. What the Wonder Woman audience would make of it is speculative but that’s not going to happen is it?