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.
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.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| George Brent, Barbara Stanwyck and Wellman Shooting Purchase Price 1932. |
Barrie Pattison 2020
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