Delmer Daves and his westerns

It’s a curious experience - seeing Drumbeat again after a lifetime - and it’s reassuring to find it still recognisable as one of the films that then made going to the movies the most enjoyable part of my life, even if it still doesn't quite go the distance to make it great. 

When I watched this on its first run, I was already on Delmer Daves' case. I’d admired his 1947 Dark Passage and 1950 Broken Arrow, totally different but among the most distinctive work of their day and found a few of his sharp scripts spread through TV viewing - The Petrified Forest, Unexpected Uncle, Professor Beware. This one was a return to form after his uneasy shift from Warners to Zanuck’s Fox. 

Daves would go on to continue his string of superior  westerns and I’d get to meet him in London, when he introduced a screening of The Three Ten To Yuma at the London School of Film Technique. Like all their visiting firemen, he looked round the room at the forty wannabe (mainly Afro Asian) faces at the show and identified, saying he wished he could find a way to help them on their way. Unlike the others, he then had a flash of inspiration and suggested anyone interested should call him at the studio and they could come out and watch him shooting The Battle of Villa Fiorita. He got one taker...

  Delmer Daves

I got to travel on the channel ferry on the way out with him and the way back with Oswald Morris. I saw them have six handlers manipulate a ton of Panavision camera in place to get the shunting locomotive Del saw in the middle distance building up steam, in the time it took to cover the twenty yards between there and our position. I still rate that as one of  my all time best days.

I borrowed Daves' own Sixteen Millimeter copies of  his Warner films, that had been used in a Paris Cinematheque retrospective. Christopher Wicking (later to write Absolute Beginners) was getting married the same day as my screening and wanted to postpone the ceremony so he could come but his wife had already invited her relatives ... now I am getting nostalgic. 

To get back to Drumbeat, this was considered a milestone movie because Alan Ladd had made it initiating his own Jaguar Productions, using Warners personnel and handing it to them for distribution. Ladd and Daves had co-produced the film. There was much wailing about stars taking over productions and disrupting the business model. This had of course been happening for some time, notably on the westerns with Randolph Scott and James Stewart working with with Anthony Mann.

As it turned out, Daves cherished the time he had spent living with the Indians as a young man. Drumbeat was the point where he embraced the cycle of fifties A feature westerns, which was one of the major incentives to watch the movies of the day. It came as a disappointment to me to find that he, Anthony Mann and John Sturges hadn’t formed a little club of co-conspirators. Their contact had been casual.  “A few good lunches” Mann observed. They weren’t like the later Sergios - Leone, Corbucci and Solima bonding in their time as assistants.

At Fox, Zanuck’s new recruits, like Daves, Richard Sale and Robert Wise, discovered that he earmarked all his big pictures for the veterans he had been working with since the thirties. Del used to get tongue tied going into Henry King’s office and facing a photo of Lillian Gish in The White Sister. Him directing Broken Arrow had been a lucky accident. Zanuck ran it up for John Ford, who said “I’m going to take out all that love crap.”  Zanuck came back “I like all that love crap. I’ll give it to Del.” In some measure, we owe one of the all time most enjoyable cycles of films to his producer pulling a stroppy director back into line.

Drumbeat was still early in the days of the anamorphic pro -cess and a full screen title proclaims “Cinemascope” followed by “Warnercolor”, which was actually the old Agfacolor patents seized as war reparations to produce Eastmancolor and handled by the Warner house laboratory. Drumbeat was one of the films that took full advantage of the then new combination and is full of the great western panoramas that the cycle featured, here filmed by ex De Mille cameraman Pev Marley.

Opening titles proclaim that the events and people shown are actual and only part fictionalised for dramatic effect. The Modoc wars and Indian Fighter Johnny MacKay did exist. Canby, here played by Warner Anderson, was the war’s only Serving General to be killed in action. A close examination of the film reveals that the story has been twisted out of conventional shape to accommodate the facts.

Drumbeat - Anthony Caruso, Marisa Pavan, Richard Gaines, Warner Anderson, Ladd and Frank Ferguson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We don’t hear about the treaty placing the Modocs in the same space as traditional enemies and their progressive dispossession. That’s another picture.

Drumbeat - Charles Bronson

We kick off with Ladd’s MacKay presenting himself to sentry James Griffiths at the White House gates to see President Grant and told to stroll right in and announce himself, another detail lifted from the historical record. Hayden Rorke’s Grant wants Indian Wars veteran MacKay to take over the Peace Process, something that Makay is allowed to appear ambivalent about, his family having been massacred by Indians. His background is in killing Indians but he knows personally some of the Modoc leaders, especially bloodthirsty Captain Jack, in which character we find a young, virile Charles Bronson, emerged from his bit parts under his real name, Charles Buchinsky, in the movies where he accused Andre De Toth of having hired him for his muscular build and needing to be constantly re-assured that he was there because of his acting skills - a pattern that would persist through Bronson’s career.

The stagecoach trip west gives us a better look at Grant family friend, winning young Audrey Dalton, who gets a nice scene, in which we can hear Daves, where she outlines her ambition to be a frontier woman. This runs to an Indian attack setting us up for the exposition proper where the tribal Modocs walk the same desert town streets as the settlers, in front of Elisha Cook’s General Store, with its telegraph wire connection. Then star-prospect Peter Hansen has his bit where, as the only bachelor officer at the post, he wants Ladd to convey his interest to Dalton.

All this is played in width-of-screen panoramas, where the makers are showing their awareness of the new image dimensions. The sentry braves firing rifles from the bluff peaks to signal the arrival of Ladd’s parlay group and the newcomers breaking out of the circle of whooping hostiles to complete their mission, are particularly nice. Victor Young is in best form, his score telling us what we should think about the on-screen action.

Rapidly we become aware of an approach that wouldn’t fly with today’s ethnic sensibilities. The Indians are murdering savages who have broken the treaty that gave them money and new lands better than the ones they were occupying. The settlers are faintly racist land grabbers and full-on antagonistic over Indian attacks. In The Rising, even the ones that were on meal-sharing terms with the Indians are wiped off. Rather than the familiar white renegade outrage that provokes Indian violence in The Covered Wagon or Canyon Passage, it’s Bronson coveting the soldiers’ medals. The nearest we are going to get to this again is Robert Mulligan’s late-cycle 1968 The Stalking Moon, where they go into some detail on why Gregory Peck has got to do what a man’s got to do. Of course there is a white profiteer with a good line in selling Winchesters to the hostiles and the “Good Indians” represented touchingly by Anthony Caruso and Marisa Pavan.

The redskins are an impressive lineup of makeup-tanned Latins in this film. The only authentic Native American in sight is Bronson, who had Modoc blood, and Daves gets him under the skin of Captain Jack, where impressively we sympathise though he’s the movie’s bad guy. This was the film where I began to watch Bronson seriously.

Ladd, who was the moving force behind the film, is out acted on all sides. His romantic passages with Dalton are dead weight. He was a better 1947 Whispering Smith or Jim Bowie in Gordon Douglas’ 1952 The Iron Mistress and of course he was coming off Shane. This one does have its s mart scenes like the preacher, the military and the negotiators confronting the fact that they will probably be killed in the false faith parlay that they can’t see any way to avoid.

Well, enough with all this scene setting. It’s time to get on with the business of the film with the Indians taking down those waves of blue belly cavalry kicking up dust in the sun against the red rock ranges. The action is rousingly staged on a large scale.

The film’s failure is, and always was, its inability to follow the scenes of wheeling lines of skirmishers repelled trying to take the pueblo fortress in the mountain with a hundred caves that lead to the center of the earth. The victory by attrition is rushed. Ladd (who appears to be doing his own stunts) going mano a mano with Bronson rolling down the white water cascade is pretty good (it’s the bit I remembered most clearly) but it’s an anti climax after those. 

Drumbeat is still good viewing and a marker in the parade of superior entertainment this cycle of Westerns represents.

There’s again more. Del Daves loved making his westerns (Three Ten to Yuma, Cowboy, Jubal, The Hanging Tree, even The Badlanders that brought him and a fading Alan Ladd back together) and quite a few of us career movie-goers of the day loved watching them. However Jack Warner, his old boss, called him to say he was in a bind. He’d paid out a million dollars for the rights on Sloan Wilson’s best seller “A Summer Place” and a succession of writers including Wilson himself had failed to reduce it to a workable script. He appealed to Del, who delivered something suitably filmable. Warner decided that it was logical that Del should direct and sure enough he turned out a handsome block buster. 

The film made more money than all his westerns together and forever after, as its writer-director, Delmer Daves made soapy weepers of diminishing interest. This cost us however many other superior westerns and left Del, who was aware of the process, with a decline and fall. One of my colleagues was outraged that a fellow critic referred to Villa Fiorita as “maron glacé” but the guy wasn’t far off.

Hollywood could showcase talent on an unparalleled scale but it could also fritter it away. It was disturbing to watch this happening.

The Bounty DVD of Drumbeat is passable. It can be manipulated into its correct proportions but the colour, which was one of its major assets, is washed out.

Barrie Pattison 2022.

SHOES AND MOVIES.

Luca Guadagnino's  2020 Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams is a handsome documentary which curiously is interesting on movies and shoes but dips out on bringing its subject to life.

Salvatore Ferragamo certainly had quite a life. One of a family of fourteen, he decided as a child, he wanted to be a shoemaker, though this was the lowest rung on the social ladder in Bonito his Sicilian home village, from which he moved to Florence, Naples and then to the 1907 USA where he rejected factory production by the thousands of shoes lacking the comfort of his own hand made work.  He studied anatomy in medical school for this. He participated in the shift from Santa Barbara to Hollywood by the now-forgotten American Film Corporation.

Ferragamo's life provided the relevant quota of  drama - crossing the globe in his teens, a car accident which had him designing and patenting a splint for his smashed leg. (He ran up a series of notable patents - something alien to the sharing of knowledge in his origin culture). Ferragamo mixed with Valentino, Gloria Swanson and Cecil B. De Mille (“If cowboys had boots like these the West would have been settled much quicker”), being wiped out in the Stock Market Crash and, with devoted staff entering into a potentially ruinous deal, while still bankrupt, to set up again in his historic building. He rolled through though the rise and fall of Mussolini and two world wars.

 Thief of Bagdad - Fairbanks, with Sôjin

Fairbanks’ Pixie Boots from The Thief of Bagdad (most of which he did barefoot) and Swanson’s sex-worker bow footwear for Sadie Thompson get special attention. There’s a surprisingly involving description of the construction of his arch-supporting soles and the innovative use of undisguised nylon and cork materials. We don't get any mention of cost or durability. It's another look into the Hollywood lives of the rich and famous. The people who had their homes styled by Billy Haines, walked round them in Ferrigamo shoes.

The documentary has a great range of source footage - the founders setting up United Artists where only Griffith is taking interest in the surroundings, clips from The Covered Wagon, the silent 10 Commandments, Charles Mintz’ 1935 The Shoemaker & the Elves, Italian historical actuality, Ferragamo’s own grainy B&W 8mm. home movies, which they allow to jump frames or go out of rack, a Pez digital animation, along with stills of Ferragamo handling the feet of glamour stars or surrounded by the lasts of famous people's feet - Greta Garbo, Claire Booth Luce, Gloria Swanson, Ingrid Bergman Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren. He seems to have given up on men’s footwear

Salvatore Ferrigamo & Audrey Hepburn.

The interviews let it down, fashion pundits and family, even with glimpses of Martin Scorsese and Jay Weissberg to comment the movie connection. Adding echo to the track is an interesting piece of manipulation.

Curiously the high point is the artizanal hand making of a Ferrigamo shoe, which we’ve already seen in the opening, with the family material and digital shoe ballet coming as an anti-climax. 

Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, the new Suspiria) has still shown a firmer grip on the documentary form than most fiction makers taking it on. His film has the variety and hints of significance (labor relations, the shoe maker in legend) that sustain it for most of a hundred and sixteen minutes. However, possibly due to the involvement of his heirs in the production, Ferragamo himself remains irritatingly two-dimensional.

 It would be interesting to know why the film has attracted more attention than other current non fiction.

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

The Saga of Billy Haines

William Haines had always existed on the periphery of my awareness - the nice young man who squired Marian Davies and Mary Pickford through silent comedies. His films were never re-issued or shown in Cinematheques and the copies included in the MGM bundle sold to TV were generally the ones not put to air. The fan magazines went silent. It came as a great surprise to find that in 1930 he had been the most popular male lead in Hollywood - which in 1930 meant he was the most popular actor in the world. 

 

Memory Lane - Haines and Frankie Darrow

 

This was even more inexplicable when I saw a few random titles from the Amalgamated collection and a few, more carefully selected, showed up on Warner Archive DVDs. Turned out that William Haines was the all-time least appealing movie star. He pioneered the concept of the hero as a jerk.

Just a Gigolo - C.Aubrey Smith & Haines

In Ed Sedgwick’s 1927 West Point he fakes blindness to get Joan Crawford’s sympathy. Ernest Torrence, his alienated dad, nails it as “You’re a swell headed fool” in Harry Beaumont’s 1929 Speedway. In Sedgewick’s 1930 Remote Control he comes on as broadcaster "The Radio Raspberry" doing on-air bed time stories that scare kids and gets put on chill by Ann Doran "You're quite fresh aren't you?" In Fred Niblo’s 1930 Way out West, he’s a cheating carnival barker who the cowboys are about to lynch. Passing himself of as a professional dance partner in Jack Conway’s 1931 Just a Gigolo, Haines attempts to seduce the charming Irene Purcell, to show his contempt for women. 

However when sound added his jeering voice to the persona already evolving in silents, Haines’ wiseguy character became grating. This did not deter his fans, though increasingly obvious middle age made him harder to accept as a romantic hero.

There are elements of  Haines in later Bob Hope and Mickey Rooney vehicles but it peaks with the character that Alberto Sordi would use more effectively. Throughout the body of the film he would be insensitive and abusive, paying for his sins - and ironically in the case of Haines as it turns out - getting the girl in the last reel, a George Amberson Minifer.

Three years after his popularity peaked, Haines' star career came to an abrupt halt. There was a story there, in fact, a number of stories. In the current climate we are hearing about his falling out with Louis B. Mayer, who thought Haines’ openly gay life style could cause a scandal that would damage MGM and demanded he have a sham marriage that their publicity machine could use to hose down the situation. Haines told him he’d marry a woman and ditch long time companion Jimmy Sheilds, as long as Mayer would dispose of his wife. His contract was not renewed and he never made another film of any significance.

However, as in the auto sales commercials, there’s more! Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s documentary Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The Life of William Haines, narrated by Stockard Channing and dating from 2001, is an ambitious account of Haines’ life. It predictably features his homosexuality, treating sympathetically his lifetime relationship with Sheilds, nominated as one of the great Hollywood marriages.

Sally, Irene & Mary - Haines & friends

We learn that, popular as a wise cracking teenager, who never disguised his orientation, young Haines moved to Bohemian New York in the 1920s working as a model and  joined George Cukor, Cary Grant and Orry-Kelly in the Gay Community of Hollywood. As a fresh-faced juvenile, he was acceptable in films by major directors - Alan Crosland (Three Weeks), Victor Seastrom (the lost Tower of Lies) Edmund Goulding (Sally Irene & Mary) and King Vidor (Show People) becoming prominent after Tell It To the Marines and Brown of Harvard.

The second portion of the documentary, covering Haines post-MGM career as prestige interior decorator, is more interesting and suggests he had another, more plausible talent.

Craig's Wife - Rozalind Russel.

Haines decided that rich Americans craved Hollywood glamor and set up a business interior designing their homes like movie sets. He’d already taken over the art direction of Just a Gigolo, (see photo above) with department head Cedric Gibbons keeping his distance and, more significantly, and also uncredited, Haines would go on to design the 1936 Craig’s Wife, Dorothy Arzner’s best film and one centered on Hariet Craig’s fetishised home. 

 

Frequent co-star Joan Crawford got him decorating assignments (“She may have been a bad mother but she was a helluva good friend”) and he made a deal with Carol Lombard where he styled her house free, so that the celebrity guests she entertained would see his work.

Photos, looking like stills department studies, suggest his designs as accomplished. The hand crafted ornaments and furniture he created do impress and are now high price collector’s items. His younger business partner got to decorate the White House, with Nancy Reagan one of their devoted clients.

Haines claimed that decorating was a more honest living. He didn’t have to wear make up. It wasn’t all plain sailing though. An anti-gay mob beat up Haines and Sheilds at their Manhattan Beach home in 1939. They did survive to a prosperous old age together.

However more intriguing for anyone with an interest in movie history remains how did someone achieve major star status by playing obnoxious in largely dreadful films? He wasn’t particularly handsome, unconvincing as the great lover. He didn’t have the skills of the acrobat comedians and no one would rate him a serious actor. With so many films still inaccessible, I’ve got to admit that I still haven’t sorted that one out but now that more material is finally surfacing there are some indicators.

John M. Stahl’s 1926 Memory Lane is one of the nicest pieces of Hollywood small town Americana common at the time from the hands of people like John Ford and Henry King. The script by Stahl and Benjamin Glazer starts on the night before dignified Eleanor Boardman’s wedding to local Conrad Nagel. Third billed Billy Haines shows up. Turns out that Boardman and Haines had been an item growing up together but he left town without asking her to wait for him and now she’s made her choice. Against her family’s wishes, she slips out and they walk the familiar streets, past the school house and the chorus practicing in the park, lyrics from their songs coming up as intertitles. The atmosphere is irresistible and the tension in the situation bristles.       

Plot complications worthy of a Keaton comedy and involving young tearaway Frankie Darro, place Haines at the wheel of the couple’s car outside the wedding and, after a further misunderstanding, he and Boardman find themselves stranded out of town together, with ‘phone gossip Kate Price stoking a scandal.   

Husband Nagel accepts that the incident was innocent and the newly married couple settle down. Some time later Haines re-appears in town wearing a loud check suit and bragging about his success in the big city. Invited to the house, he proves obnoxious company. At the end of the evening, Nagel drives him to the station. He sees through his pretense “Why the act?” Haines confesses that he was creating an objectionable image so that Boardman wouldn’t worry about her choice. Back home Eleanor says she wonders what she ever saw in Billy. Conrad disagrees. “I’m just getting to like him.”

The bitter sweet ending is impeccably handled by all concerned and should have made this film an enduring favorite. It is the most winning of the accessible early films by Stahl, foreshadowing the peak in his work at Universal in thirties sound with Side Street, Only Yesterday and Magnificent Obsession. It may have been the prototype to which later Haines characters were shaped.

By 1930, Haines was MGM’s big draw card. They seemed unable to capitalise on this with better films being mounted round their other former silent leading men Ramon Novarro and, despite received opinion, John Gilbert. Along with a run with James Cruze, Haines vehicles were shared out among undistinguished MGM contract directors like Jack Conway, Harry Beaumont and Edward Sedgewick.

 The Girl Said No - Leilia Hyams & Haines.

At the time sound arrived, Sam Wood was treated as another of these staff directors, only pulling away to major film status later in the decade with Night at the Opera and Goodbye Mr. Chips. There’s a June 7, 2016 piece on Wood’s early work in this blog. Wood did four of Haines' films and their The Girl Said No is cited, noting that under Wood’s direction Metro’s two grossly unappealing star personalities, Haines and Marie Dressler actually function as a focus for audience sympathy.

At the time I thought that was the end of the matter as their Tell the World (1928) A Tailor Made Man 1931, The Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford (1931) and  The Fast Life, on which Wood is uncredited, seemed lost with no one all that concerned.

Wallingford, we were told, was snared in some kind of rights bind. However while preparing this piece, I found it (without any Haines cross referencing) in a soso lift of the TCM copy on You Tube. I’d been looking for this one all my adult life and I was quite nervous about it being an anti-climax after the long wait.

Armetta, Haines (in chair) Torrence & Charles R. Moore.

In fact it proved a nice surpise, one of the more accomplished Hollywood features of its day, more assured and enjoyable than the agreeable The Girl Said No, which had been the pick of the gappy list of accessible sound Haines films.

An adaptation of George Randolph Chester’s Cosmopolitan Magazine "The Wallingford Stories",  The New Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford comes polished by a Fred Niblo - J.C. Williamson’s 1916 Australian (!) version, a George M. Cohan stage production and a 1921  film of that by Frank Borzage with Sam Hardy and Norman Kerry. (wouldn’t it be nice to see that one!) The 1931 film arrives in a neat adaptation by then regular Wood collaborator Charles MacArthur, of Hecht and MacArthur.

We get another one of those unnecessary ship board opening sequences of the day, this one showing the meeting between card sharps Haines and Ernest Torrence again, which sets up the nice personal and professional relationship between the pair, Haines demomstrating that a suspicious waiter won’t give him two dollars for the ten dollar note he offers and moving into flim-flamming captain Alfred Allen with the story that he’ll get a raise now that Billy’s new shipping company is taking over the line.

Wallingford - Haines & Hyams

There on the dock is detective Guy Kibbee determined that this time he’s going to nail con-man Wallingford/Haines despite being forever thwarted by his never putting his name on any of his rip-off deals’ paper work. The Haines-Torrence team is soon joined by Jimmy Durante, beginning his long association with MGM, already doing the Schnozzla character and playing a fragment of his “Did You Ever Have the Feeling You Wanted to leave” number. It’s actually quite disconcerting to see him go on to do a scripted character in Victor Fleming’s 1932 The Wet Parade. Durante is a car thief, who keeps on making off with the local Police rifle squad vehicle.

As a hotel scam goes wrong, (the manager he claims to know is actually Edwin Maxwell who he’s talking to) Haines picks up on the reference to employee Leila Hyams’ father selling off the family plot of land and sets out for her small town home to accuse banker Hale Hamilton of cheating the family and concoct a mining company to exploit the deal, selling shares to the locals who are only too anxious to get in on the ground floor of a monstrously profitable enterprise, the news of which Haines spreads by discussing it with town barber Henry Armetta - yet another servile black character present, in Charles R. Moore’s Bootblack.

Suspense comes from the fate of Robert McWade’s bank draft, which Billy was forced to endorse and give to mother Clara Blandick to keep in her sugar bowl. The piece works surprisingly well, as sympathy stays with the con men, who appear so much more agreeable than the greedy respectable citizens and police officers they manipulate. Touches like Billy slipping elderly char lady Lucy Beaumont a thousand dollar “bonus” out of the proceeds, to the admiration of his partners in crime, help things out but it drives on Wood’s ability to keep things moving to the original’s increasingly desperate climax - Durante jumping out of frame and back to animate the dialogue, a train-motor chase, even Haines doing a none too convincing passionate embrace with Hyams.

 Wallingford - Kibee, Torrence & Haines.

Though it’s formula plot has become familiar now, seeing it in an early incarnation intrigues. Wood regulars Armetta and Blandick are part of the polished MGM package. The contributions of first rate studio technicians properly rescourced - editor Frank Sullivan, cameraman Oliver Marsh and designer Gibbons - help make this stand out in the studio’s then frequently machine-made product.

It may be that Hollywood homophobia, stoked by a religious revival in the Great Depression, was responsible for the end of Billy Haines movie career but, looking at pieces like Just a Gigolo, we can see that in obvious middle age, Haines had out grown his screen character, like Adam Sandler, but he lacked Sandlers’ range and intelligence to modify his act. Metro had the Roberts - Montgomery, Young and Taylor - who could all do that William Haines did better than he did. The more personable Ramon Novarro and John Gilbert would face falls from fame more disastrous than Billy Haines experienced at this point.

I find it more astounding that such a limited performer could achieve his prominence, than that he failed to sustain it, but I didn’t experience that period and I can’t get to the Haines films that are its record. Watching Memory Lane and the Sam Wood films does illuminate the Billy Haines phenomenon. I don’t think I’ve exhausted the topic yet.

Norma Shearer, William Haines - Tower of Lies.

Barrie Pattison 2022.