The Farrow Saga.

A new book about the Farrow family was pretty much inevitable and now we have Marilyn Ann Moss’ “The Farrows of Hollywood”. This joins Frans Vandenburg and Claude Gonzalez’ 2021 feature documentary John Farrow, The Man in the Shadows and Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick and Amy Herdy’s 2022 Four Part Mini Series Allen vs. Farrow dealing with oldest daughter Mia and her anguished marriage to Woody Allen. Sixty years after patriarch John Farrow’s death, attention is finally being directed to the Farrow saga. It has everything 

- celebrities, Hollywood, Hollywood celebrities, the Pope, the Queen, the Beatles, Oedipal conflict, the Black Dahlia Murders, WW2 and Australians.

Because of Paramount’s share of the market and gung ho re-issue mechanism, I saw just about all of Farrow’s films in the local movie house double features of my now distant youth, four with Ray Milland, four with Alan Ladd, three with Barry Fitzgerald. Before I even recognised his name, John Farrow loomed large. His 1947 California (prepared for Ladd and filmed with Milland) was a milestone, along with the Errol Flynn San Antonio, the models for the new cycle of Technicolor A Feature westerns, a large and agreeable part of post WW2 movie going.

I discussed this and put up my screening notes on California when I commented the Vandenburg / Gonzalez documentary in a piece for blogspotfilmalert  17 November 2021

Farrow's California - Barbara Stanwyck & Milland with extras in Edith Head outfits.

The new commentators see something mysterious in the lack of information on John Farrow and this is the point where I start to diverge from them. With the exception of the few name-above-the-title celebrities, it was rare to find material dealing with studio directors of the day. Try to locate biographies of Roy Roland, Lew Landers or Alexander Hall and the maybe a hundred more hard-working, widely circulated and usually highly paid craftsmen filmmakers, whose output kept the cinemas open. Drawing attention to them would not have been repaid at the box office and publicists were rarely nudged by people who had access to the public - fans, critics, their editors. My contemporary Australian enthusiasts thought it was all about people they read about in British material, think Luis Bunuel, Luchino Visconti or Alexander Dovzhenko - not that their work was being shown here. This would shift in the fifties with the auteurist critics, where Farrow, Roland and the rest dipped out again.

However Catholic and Australian Farrow was an irresistible target for John Howard Reid, who was just starting movie writing activity. His research blew the smoke off one of the first of the Farrow mysteries, his claim to a Newington education. The Reid biographical sketch in the Herald was reprinted in Fort Street’s alumni journal, confirming their claim to him as one of their own.

I have the Reid-Farrow correspondence. Bertrand Tavernier once expressed interest in acquiring that for one of his projects. When John started publishing, I suggested he put out his own Farrow book, which would have been unique at that stage. He hesitated, possibly just as well. Revelations that came after John Farrow’s early death showed our knowledge to have limits. Disgruntled children (and wives) underworld associations, and serial womanising pile on, along with remarkable acts of principle.

Don Quixote - Farrow script. 

We have only sketchy information on John Farrow’s early association with film. After a spot on White Shadows in the South Seas  (I guessed right there), seaman Farrow jumped ship in San Francisco and found work as a screenwriter. In this period, his association with Robert Flaherty was followed by stints with his friend William Wellman, Cecil B. De Mille, Victor Fleming and G.W. Pabst. That must be the all-time greatest movie apprenticeship. It would be so nice to learn more about it.

While it is extraordinarily difficult to see his work from this period, during which sound arrived in Hollywood, the examples that are accessible suggest that the movies that John Farrow wrote are by and large more interesting than the ones he would go on to direct. He did not take script credit on his later films but there is an obvious match between his interests and the subject matter on Two Years Before The Mast, California, Submarine Command and Botany Bay. Farrow’s one Academy award win would be for writing, on Around the World in Eighty Days, though Moss casts doubt on his participation.

Farrow married MGM's Maureen O’Sullivan, whose career could stand some more consideration in itself. As well as being Tarzan's Jane, her status as the resident juvenile in the studio's big literary adaptations of the thirties including the Fanny character in Port of 7 Seas, the MGM filming of the Pagnol original, her contract regularly placed her in nice production line efforts - with Joel McCrea in Woman Wanted or Charles Laughton in Payment on Demand. Let’s overlook Bonzo Goes to College. The Farrow marriage union would produce seven children.

It is hard to believe that his new chroniclers have viewed their way through all those Farrow productions that filled my early Saturday afternoons. Moss gives up on the pre-Paramount films but does try to provide a paragraph each on the later work. However, she repeats the now familiar furphy that presents him as a film noir specialist, listing out The Big Clock, Alias Nick Beal, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Where Danger Lives and The Unholy Wife. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that these all come from in his ten film collaboration with Farrow friend, fellow Catholic dignitary and established thriller writer Jonathon Latimer, whose Crime Club novels also provided the basis of three of that Universal series.

You can make a revealing comparison between the l935 George Raft-Frank Tuttle film of Dashiel Hammet’sThe Glass Key and the Allan Ladd-Stuart Heisler version, scripted seven years later by Latimer, who livened up the sit-down ending by having Ed Beaumont/Ladd play on the murderous tensions among the heavies.  What is being singled out is Latimer’s input. 

In fact, Farrow hit his stride in the westerns, California, Copper Canyon & Hondo (forget Ride Vaquero – he had other things on his mind there), to which we can add his scripts for Victor Fleming’s Wolf  Song and William K. Howard’s White Gold. 

When a twenty-year-old original Technicolor print of California unexpectedly surfaced for a split week at London’s Cameo Victoria, I pointed the Films & Filming crew towards it and they were unanimously surprised by its superiority to the John Farrow films they knew. John Wayne, shrewder than people give him credit, attributed the success of Wayne's Hondo to his westerns-oriented Batjac Company serving it up ready to go, while on his other Farrow film, draggy The Sea Chase, the director was on his own. Watching A Bullet Is Waiting, I was reminded how boring Farrow titles like Commandos Strike at Dawn and Where Danger Lives had been.

Farrow directed The Hitler Gang - Bobby Watson as Der further.

Let’s also note another aspect of the record that doesn’t fit, the picture of John Farrow as grim martinet, whose heavy paternal hand biographers want to see in the torturous outcome of daughter Mia's marriages. John Farrow’s sense of humor was one of the things that made Maureen O’Sullivan persist, despite his being unlikely husband material. He is the Catholic notable who used to make his obligatory confession to a Spanish-speaking neighborhood priest, one who couldn’t understand a word of what he was being told, and Farrow slipped a shot of Randolph Scott and Cary Grant in with the one of Gable and Lombard in the audience of his Technicolor rodeo short. The one outlier in his career, the Betty Hutton musical Red Hot and Blue is actually quite funny.

About now things start getting turgid. Eternal seducer John Farrow had had an affair with Sinatra’s then-wife Ava Gardner while they worked together on Ride Vaquero. This is moving out of my area of interest but it’s revealing how Farrow’s new second hand fame distorted the perception of his movies. The plot would thicken with Mia's further marriages to Andre Previn and Woody Allen with allegations and counter charges about which the couple's son Ronan Farrow published widely, becoming pin-up boy of the Me Too movement.

So the John Farrow profile remains blurred, Hollywood movie director, author, famous father, famous father in law, famous grandfather, Catholic and Australian – you could say in that order of importance. It now seems unlikely that we’ll ever get a connected picture of someone who is probably this country’s most widely seen filmmaker. I remain curious. It’s too big a piece of the jigsaw to have missing.

John Farrow, little known Hollywood movie director, did abruptly acquire the high profile of father of celebrity daughter Mia, then an unconventionally pretty young woman in whom we can see both her parents’ features (the abrupt cut to her gone sun-bleached Beachcomber in the Jan Troell re-make of Hurricane, is one of the great movie moments). Mid-sixties, Mia became New Face of the moment with the Television Peyton Place series and cemented her status as the lead of Roman Polanski’s best film, the 1968 Rosemary’s Baby - and with a marriage to Frank Sinatra  Let’s note in passing that even prettier daughter Tisa made an acting impression in the sixties Coogan’s Bluff and Fingers and her sister Prudence stopped over with the Maharishi getting a Lennon-McCartney song dedicated to her. 

Pray for Rosemary's Baby.

As for the other characters of the saga, the disfunctional Farrow clan - children official and otherwise, discarded spouses and lovers, if I had to pick out a subject for my sympathy, I’d elect Mia's adopted daughter Soon Yi Previn, who can be glimpsed, during her subsequent marriage with Allen, in Barbara Kopple’s 1997 Wildman Blues documentary. She only broke her silence when the politicals hit fever pitch, saying that she rejected the “Mommie Dearest” model but...

I don't think "The Farrows of Hollywood" is going to be the last word on Sir John Villiers Farrow, career filmmaker, author, submarine commander and determined inventor of his own legend. His life provides fascination often missing from his films. I'm still waiting for someone to reconcile the two.

John Farrow selected this studio portrait.

Barrie Pattison 2024