When RKO passed on Tibbs, a disappointed Ray switched to lobbying for the more cerebral Arthur Kennedy, arguing that the stage-trained actor would make an intriguing contrast with the manlier Mitchum. Kennedy was a former Federal Theatre actor who’d starred on Broadway in two Arthur Miller plays for Elia Kazan; in 1949 he had collected his first Oscar nomination playing Kirk Douglas’s hobbled brother in the boxing movie Champion. This time Ray got his way: Wald said yes to Kennedy. Kennedy himself played hard to get, though, and Ray had to lure him to a long drinkathon at Lucy’s and conquer his doubts before he agreed.
Hughes and Wald were more interested in the actress who would play the ranch hand’s wife. Ray tried to interest Lauren Bacall in the female lead, but he never was able to nurture the kinds of long-term ties with stars that gave other top directors leverage with the studios. Again and again, for example, Ray and Bogart announced projects, but they never made another film together after In a Lonely Place. Except for Bogart, Mitchum (counting the repair jobs), and two lesser names—Robert Ryan and Gloria Grahame—Ray never worked with the same star twice.
Hughes and Wald wanted the sexiest possible leading lady, someone with obvious va-va-voom. Wald made overtures to Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox, who was willing to loan out his studio’s prize actress, Susan Hayward. The red-haired former fashion model, who’d originally come to Hollywood to audition for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, had matured into a serious, admired performer with three Oscar nominations to date.
Yet Hayward was tricky to persuade; she was reluctant to join Mitchum and Kennedy in “This Man Is Mine,” fearing that her character would inevitably be overshadowed by the two leading men and the rodeo setting. Wald tried to assuage Hayward’s concerns by promising to stoke her scenes in the eleventh-hour rewrites, and RKO agreed to give her top billing, above Mitchum and Kennedy. The actress met with Hughes himself, who could be charming when necessary; evidently the charm offensive was mutual, for reportedly, the studio boss and the star would later embark on an affair.
Hayward then met with the two-man club of Ray and Mitchum, knitting as she listened to their pitch. Ray painted a glorious vision of the rodeo film in his halting, not entirely coherent manner—“a bit like a librarian,” Mitchum recalled, “a bit cerebral.” After a while Hayward lost patience and threw down her knitting. “Hey, I’m from Brooklyn,” she said. “What’s the story?” The director turned to Mitchum and said, “Tell her, Bob.”
The first day of photography was scheduled for the week before Christmas. Ray immersed himself in last-minute cast and crew decisions and planning. Folksy Arthur Hunnicutt was added to the cast, fourth-billed as Mitchum’s sidekick, an addled ex-rodeo performer. Although the rodeo world was dominated by men, and as full of drinking, gambling, and partying as the life of a Hollywood director’s, Ray cast several lesser-known actresses in vivid small parts, including Maria Hart as a trick rider and Lorna Thayer as an ill-fated wife. Their performances would add to the film’s rich tapestry.
After shooting valuable second-unit footage at Pendleton, cinematographer George E. Diskant had taken another assignment; he would never again work directly with Ray. But Diskant was replaced by another strong choice, Lee Garmes, a veteran visual experimenter with first-rate credits dating back to 1916; his moodily lit compositions were influenced by his worship of Rembrandt.
Ray insisted that the final script still needed touching up, and he and Mitchum may have brainstormed a few bits, especially for Mitchum’s scenes, but studio records show that Andrew Solt, Alfred Hayes, and Norman Krasna also churned out last-minute rewrites during filming.
If the director wrote his best stuff for Mitchum, the professionals had their hands full trying to please the leading lady. Hayward balked at her sketchy, one-dimensional character. “I went down on the set where sat, pouting, Susan Hayward,” Solt recalled. “This woman had the foulest mouth that I’ve ever heard in my life. She sat there and said, ‘No, I’m not going to say these lines, they insult me.’ And there sat Mr. Mitchum, who couldn’t care less, and Nick blowing his top.”
With so many cooks in the kitchen, the scenes featuring both Hayward and Mitchum were scripted to a fault. Never mind that Hayward defied credulity as a wife faithful to her stolid husband, cooking pot roast and saving money to buy a house while fending off repeated advances from the more magnetic Mitchum. Implausible it may have been, but the recently cuckolded Ray made the sanctity of marriage a theme in this film and several others.
Prickly about the script, Hayward was also resistant to Ray’s directing style—another leading lady, like Joan Fontaine, who didn’t go in for too much deep thinking. Her scenes with Kennedy were undemanding, but she may have been right to suspect that Ray and Mitchum were somehow allied against her. With his practiced diffidence and yen for practical jokes, the beefy star kept Hayward off-balance in their important scenes together. “Mitchum would bare his stomach just as we were about to shoot and he’d growl and Susan—a delicate young thing at that time—would get upset,” Ray recalled. “It did Mitchum’s heart good.”
Hayward’s schedule was tight—she was booked to go to work immediately after the rodeo film in The Snows at Kilimanjaro for 20th Century-Fox—so Ray had to shoot her scenes first. And soon after Hayward finished her part, Ray himself was unexpectedly sidelined: His Sunset Strip bungalow caught fire, and as he was coming down a ladder carrying his pet boxer, Ray missed the last three rungs and stepped on junk and glass in his bare feet. “The injury has been growing worse rather than better,” wrote Hedda Hopper. The film’s original director, Robert Parrish, filled in for a few days as Ray went to the hospital for tetanus treatments—the first hint of a physical jinx in this strapping man’s career.
When he returned to the job, Ray finished up the studio interiors and then took the remaining cast and crew on the road for two weeks, chasing rodeos around the South and West.
In its final form, Ray’s rodeo picture would combine documentary-style glimpses of actual rodeo life with graceful, naturalistically photographed drama. The rodeo footage was matter-of-fact, but the emotionalism of the staged scenes was high-pitched, at times even overheated. As with Ray’s finest films, the end result was a unique blend. Plot and genre conventions had gradually been shaved away in the scripting process; the episodic nature of the story reflected Ray’s ruminative personality, its plotting was secondary to the character studies and emotional landscape.
In the story, the amiable ranch hand played by Arthur Kennedy is transformed by success into a hard-drinking rodeo headliner with a rampant ego. In the film’s later scenes, where he clashed with Mitchum, his mentor turned rival, Kennedy was at his best. Although Ray later listed Kennedy, along with Bogart and James Dean, among the true “naturals” who understood his directing “shorthand,” Kennedy himself wasn’t quite so sure.
“A strange guy,” Kennedy recalled of Ray in one interview. “Had a most peculiar way of giving direction. I could never quite grasp his meaning. I’d agree to everything, then try to figure out what the hell he meant.”
At Hughes’s behest, RKO had tried to mold the project into more of a woman’s picture (hence the title: “This Man Is Mine”). But from the start Ray saw the picture as Mitchum’s showcase. The aging rodeo star, Jeff McCloud, was clearly the director’s favorite character: his surrogate, a nomadic loser, wounded physically and psychically. In an early scene, filmed just after Christmas, McCloud returns to his childhood home. When the old-timer living there says that marriage is lousy and coming home is like visiting a graveyard, the cowboy nods knowingly.
Once upon a time, McCloud muses, he had fame and money. He didn’t throw the money away, he reflects; “it just sort of floated.” When Kennedy’s character, Wes, asks if he was ever scared riding in the rodeo, he replies cryptically: “I’ve been scared and I’ve been not scared . . .”
Some of this muttered brilliance might have come from Ray, or Mitchum, or both. Stoned or sober, they decided eve
ry issue together. Ray made small gestures to please his friend—having Jimmie Dodd sing “The Chilly Winds,” one of the star’s favorite old-time songs, in a raucous rodeo party scene, for instance. Their two-man club grew stronger during the filming. Mitchum didn’t have the producer or star power of a Bogart; he was more like the director, a rogue and rapscallion and skirt chaser; a lush and a dope smoker. (Mitchum had famously been arrested for marijuana use; Ray once claimed to have briefly shared a jail cell with him.) A hugely gifted artist, Mitchum prided himself on walking through certain films just for the money: not this one, though.
As Ray had learned on their earlier pictures, Mitchum was like Bogart in at least one respect. “Both were genuine sight readers,” Lee Server noted in his Mitchum biography, “both were good for up to six takes only and then would stray or dry up. If there was still a problem or a technical mistake with the sixth take, Ray would go to something else and come back to it later.”
The director’s oddball side wasn’t entirely lost on his sympathetic leading man. Mitchum and his brother John (who had a bit role in the rodeo film, as he had in Knock on Any Door) dubbed Ray “the Mystic” for his habit of roaming the set restlessly, as though he were questing for hidden treasure, then plunking himself down in his chair “in such deep concentration that nothing would penetrate it”—before suddenly coming to an epiphany and leaping up to give a command.
Ray prompted Mitchum at length, according to Server, “craftily connecting the washed-up, drifting character of Jeff McCloud to things he knew of Mitchum’s personal history and inner life. Mitchum thought Ray sounded like a screw-loose prophet when he got going on a subject, but Ray had pushed the right buttons—Mitchum’s fondness for losers and outsiders, his memories of Depression wandering and homelessness.”
Despite his genuine affinity for Ray, however, Mitchum could only take so much of Vakhtangov and Stanislavski. “When I act, I come in and say, ‘What page is it and where are the marks?’ But Nick is a fellow who likes to discuss the scenes with the actors . . . what my background was, what the background of the rodeo bulls and horses was . . .”
As another actor, Robert Wagner, who worked with Ray later on, said, “Nick was all about conflict. That’s all he cared about. He was always after you to pull things out that were about conflict. You can’t live like that all the time, except I think Nick did.”
Mitchum took what worked; the rest went in one ear, out the other. Ever the diffident antihero, he compelled more than one producer in his career to worry over whether the beefy star was showing enough energy in his pictures. Early on during the making of the rodeo film, Wald, who religiously watchdogged the dailies—dashing off memo after memo insisting on this angle or that line of dialogue—sent Ray a note: “We should be most careful in avoiding Mitchum walking through scenes sleepy-eyed.”
Once they got away from the studio, the two-man club romped through the rest of the scenes on the schedule. The director was thrilled about the rodeo scenes. He loved rubbing elbows with the rodeo journeymen playing fleeting parts. “He was happiest when the rodeo stars themselves were around,” said Richard Baer, a young assistant to Wald. “They were men’s men, and I think Nick [himself] was coming across that way. I always heard rumors to the contrary, in terms of his sexual preferences. [But] he certainly had a lot of swagger to him.”
Out on the road, the director strapped sixteen-millimeter cameras on the chests of riders; both Mitchum and Kennedy defied studio insurance policies to get up on the bucking horses and Brahma bulls, capturing one-of-a-kind imagery from their precarious perches. “Even Ray felt compelled to show he had what it took,” wrote Server, “hopping aboard a bucking bronco at the San Francisco Cow Palace.”
As he watched the accumulating footage in the screening room, Wald soon realized that this time Mitchum wasn’t sleepwalking—and neither was Ray. Something else was happening on the screen. Between Ray, Mitchum, and cinematographer Lee Garmes, the scenes added up to a visual tone poem, a paean to the harsh, lonely rodeo life and ruined male ethos embodied by Mitchum and his character. As with Bogart in In a Lonely Place—or, for that matter, Farley Granger in They Live by Night—Ray had crafted a heart-on-the-sleeve portrait of a noble outsider whose glory lies in his vulnerability and impotence. “The most poignant drama in the lives of rodeo riders was portrayed by Mitchum walking across an empty rodeo arena,” one critic later wrote, “the wind blowing rubbish behind him.” The dailies, with their melancholy, tragic quality, were a great improvement on a script that had never quite seemed to come together.
Mitchum liked to give the impression that he was trying to finish each day as soon as possible in order to disappear inside a trailer and break out the booze. Ray was more the patient, brooding type on the set. But under Wald’s prodding the director was never as efficient, finishing “This Man Is Mine” before Valentine’s Day 1952. Then Ray, Wald, and three-time-Oscar-winning editor Ralph Dawson went to work organizing the footage, melding the Hollywood scenes with the reels and reels of second-unit and stock footage. Mitchum rarely watched his own pictures, but he was intrigued by Ray’s passion and questing, and when the footage was about two-thirds assembled he asked for a private screening. Mitchum watched the film alone in the projection room; afterward, Ray recalled, the normally diffident star floated out of the room “walking about ten feet high.” They celebrated by drinking too much at Lucy’s, the Mexican restaurant across from RKO.
Howard Hughes also viewed an assemblage and liked the footage so much he decided to improve on his own title. Demanding a new list of suggestions, he circled one: The Lusty Men. Wald and Krasna, half-amused, thought he might have misread it as The Busty Men.
Ray and Mitchum took fishing trips to La Paz, and they got together now and then for dinner, always conspiratorial in their friendship, sometimes inviting Jane Russell along to join in the laughs. They mused about forming an independent film company with money from a wealthy Texas buddy of Mitchum’s. But somehow—despite their fruitful collaboration on The Lusty Men—none of these future projects ever materialized. Ray and Mitchum never made another film together.
While Ray was busy with this picture about a man who sacrifices his life for a friend, his own mentor Elia Kazan was standing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities faced with a dilemma: name names or sacrifice his skyrocketing career.
When Kazan made his first, confidential appearance before HUAC, on January 12, 1952, he admitted to having belonged to the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, but he refused to name any fellow comrades. Before that executive session, Kazan held a late-morning meeting with Raphael I. Nixon,* an ex-FBI man who headed research for the Committee. Trying to convince Kazan to cooperate, Nixon handed over the “friendly” testimonies of writers Budd Schulberg and Richard Collins and director Edward Dmytryk (all from the 1951 hearings), urging Kazan to read and be guided by their repentant transcripts.
In his forty-five-minute afternoon session, Kazan readily confessed his own Communist activities. When he was pressed for the identities of others in the Group Theatre cell, though, Kazan would not budge, insisting it was a matter of “personal conscience” to hold his tongue. He declined to comment on the politics of other people—including even John Howard Lawson, who had already been branded a Communist and served jail time.
At the time, the congressmen appeared satisfied by the humble tone of Kazan’s limited testimony. “There was no question of Kazan being cited for contempt,” wrote film historian Brian Neve, “despite his refusal to give names.” And the matter might have died there—if “the fact of Kazan’s appearance, and crucially, his unwillingness to give names,” in Neve’s words, hadn’t been leaked to the press by Representative Harold H. Velde, a Republican congressman from Illinois. Right-wing journalists and an anti-Communist with a Hollywood Reporter column led an attack on Kazan, and 20th Century-Fox began to exert pressures on the director. Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was contending
for Oscars in 1952, and his latest picture, Viva Zapata!, was a 20th Century-Fox investment just heading into national release.
Kazan was Zanuck’s star director, and the mogul pleaded with him to stop shielding others and to stand up and protect himself and his career. Higher up the ladder, company president Spyros Skouras called Kazan in and had a sympathetic talk with the director, but according to Kazan, the studio executive “implied I couldn’t work in pictures anymore if I didn’t name the other lefties in the Group.” Kazan agonized over what to do, consulting with longtime friends across the political spectrum. The author of Viva Zapata!, novelist John Steinbeck—once a leftist himself, now a dedicated anti-Communist—advised him to heed Zanuck. Playwrights Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman urged him to hold firm. Kazan’s wife, Molly Day Thacher—“a guide, a critic, a mentor, a constant advisor,” in Kazan’s words—had converted to anti-Communism and felt it was her husband’s patriotic duty to make a clean break with the past and name names.
Finally, Kazan later recalled in his autobiography, “I began to measure the weight and the worth of what I was giving up, my career in films,” in his words “surrendering” his profession and livelihood “for a cause I didn’t believe in” any longer. The stage and screen director requested a new executive hearing, and on April 10, 1952, he delivered a prepared public statement and sworn affidavit to HUAC representatives. As prearranged, the Committee did not cross-examine Kazan, and “no doubt,” as historian Eric Bentley later wrote, the closed-door session preserved Kazan “from hecklers in the audience.”
In his statement, Kazan noted his participation in the Theatre of Action, where there was “Communist thought and behavior and control,” in his words. “But,” Kazan added, explaining why he balked at identifying the Communist controlmongers of the Theatre of Action (thus sparing Ray any identification), “I did not attend their political meetings, so I cannot tell which of the actors were Party members and which were not.”
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