Yordan met with Crawford, who complained vociferously about her scenes and Vienna’s characterization. “I have no part. I just stand around with boots on and have a few stupid scenes. I want to play the man. I want to shoot it out in the end with Mercedes McCambridge and instead of me playing with myself in a corner. Let Sterling play with himself in the corner . . .”
Crawford insisted that Ray had “betrayed” her, favoring McCambridge over her, and that certain cast members were conspiring against her. No one treated her with respect. She was the star, she was taking the most risks, it was her movie, and she wanted her scenes boosted.
Yordan talked it over with Ray in his motel room. It was the beginning of a long, mutually profitable relationship—Yordan would write and produce more Ray films than any other person—though never a very talkative one. “Nick didn’t hardly ever say anything,” Yordan explained. “In fact, he would sit with his back to you when you talked to him. Look out a window, even if it’s night. And I would say something and wait fifteen minutes, then Nick would turn around and he still wouldn’t say anything.”
Yordan said he could revise Crawford’s dialogue to give it more of an edge and he would rework the ending to contrive a more cathartic showdown between the star and McCambridge. Bob Thomas reported that Yordan revised exactly three scenes and no more. No script drafts exist to confirm any of the details, but it may be that Chanslor had given Johnny Guitar too much action at the climax. The on-the-spot changes would leave Johnny out of the showdown entirely, giving Vienna and Emma the death duel that became the film’s cult-favorite finale.
When Ray grew morose about all the infighting, Yordan tried to cheer him up. “When you get up in the morning, when you are shaving and look-ing into the mirror, say to yourself, ‘I’ll never work with Joan Crawford again,’ and then in eight weeks it’ll all be over.” Yordan waited forever for Ray to say something, until finally the director spoke: “Never is a long time.”
The location rewrites gave an added smartness and toughness to Crawford’s dialogue. The romantic repartee between Vienna and Johnny Guitar, in particular, was at times like screwball comedy delivered with solemn faces.
JOHNNY: How many men have you forgotten?
VIENNA: As many women as you’ve remembered.
JOHNNY: Don’t go away.
VIENNA: I haven’t moved.
JOHNNY: Tell me something nice.
VIENNA: Sure, what do you want to hear?
JOHNNY: Lie to me. Tell me all those years you’ve waited. Tell me.
VIENNA: All those years I’ve waited.
JOHNNY: Tell me you’d have died if I hadn’t come back.
VIENNA: I would have died if you hadn’t come back.
JOHNNY: Tell me you still love me like I love you.
VIENNA: I still love you like you love me.
JOHNNY: Thanks. Thanks a lot.
It wasn’t hard to rewrite Chanslor, Yordan recalled; the whole script was “nonsense” anyway. “I think it took me about a week,” he recalled. But Wasserman informed the writer, “You’re on payroll for the whole picture, so you’d better stay on.” Yordan remained on the payroll as the studio’s liaison on the set, in effect taking over from Ray as the “acting producer” of Johnny Guitar. To the already grueling daily schedule of seven A.M. calls were now added nightly script conferences, with Yordan and Ray and Crawford sitting in and going over the next day’s pages.
For Ray, losing this standoff with Crawford meant losing one more recognition he sorely wanted. He wouldn’t see his name up on the screen as producer—now or ever.
Filming resumed after Yordan had sufficiently massaged the script, but Crawford—whom Ray later called “one of the worst human beings” he’d ever encountered—never stopped treating the director like a Judas. Making Johnny Guitar, first in Sedona and later on soundstages in Hollywood, was an “appalling” experience, Ray told Gavin Lambert a few years later. “Quite a few times I would have to stop the car and vomit before I got to work in the morning,” he recalled.
Ray tried forging a bond of solidarity with Sterling Hayden, but the actor playing Johnny Guitar wasn’t enjoying himself either. Hayden recalled it as “an extremely difficult time for me.” He was haunted by his HUAC testimony. His marriage was on the rocks, yet his wife insisted on keeping him company on location. (The couple would marry and divorce three times.) He felt foolish toting around a guitar. “I can’t play guitar and I can’t sing,” Hayden said in one interview. “They put twine on the guitar so, in case I hit it, it wouldn’t go ‘plunk.’ ”
The director connected deeply with only one of the four leads: the stage-trained Mercedes McCambridge. In his novel Chanslor had described Emma’s “hate-mottled face,” and Ray exhorted McCambridge to become “straight sulphuric acid,” in his words. The actress exulted in the part of the unhinged rabble-rouser. There is no more riled-up woman in any Western.
Crawford never stopped treating her costar like her real-life enemy. The rivalry between Crawford and McCambridge, real enough behind the scenes, fueled their animosity on-screen. Cast members were forced to choose sides, and most chose McCambridge. Crawford told friends and reporters, in late-night drunken phone calls, that the younger actress was a “witch” trying to lay a curse on her. Their feud, initially reported in Arizona newspapers, traveled with the company back to Hollywood and filled show business columns in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Mirror, Confidential, and many other publications.
“I wouldn’t trust McCambridge as far as I could throw a battleship,” Crawford told the press.
“I tried to talk to Joan—to reason with her, but she turned her back on me,” rejoined McCambridge, a strong-willed woman who didn’t surrender easily.
Hayden chimed in: “There is not enough money in Hollywood to lure me into making another picture with Joan Crawford. Her treatment of Mercedes was a shameful thing.”
“If I ever see her [Crawford] again,” said Hayden’s wife, who had also clashed with the steely-eyed diva, “I’ll probably strike her in the face.”
The director stood by, wringing his velvet-gloved hands, saying almost nothing on the record (though later he was a source for Bob Thomas’s Crawford biography). The iron fist was not an option when your leading lady was also the producer. Later, rehashing events in her memoir, Crawford didn’t admit her affair with Ray and refused even to mention McCambridge by name. She did suggest, however, that the director may have connived and rejoiced in the feud.
At one point, according to Crawford, she was speaking by phone to an old journalist friend, the columnist Harrison Carroll, urging Carroll to stop covering the on-set bickering, when the director happened by and grabbed the phone out of her hand. “Keep it going, Harrison! It’s good for the picture!” Ray bellowed into the phone, according to Crawford.
He was right: The feud was good for the picture—both for its publicity value and for the tension it lent to the actresses’ performances. For that matter, Ray’s breakup with Crawford may have been good for the picture too. “Whatever works, works,” as Kazan had said. Crawford had been playing steel-plated ladies for two decades; she didn’t really need a director to tell her what to do. Her persona was as well defined as Bogart’s or Mitchum’s. But her furious, glint-eyed performance was one of the best any actress ever gave in a Nicholas Ray film and never did she seem as tortured a romantic as she did in this picture, under her former lover’s direction.
At Republic, the interior shooting for the Western wound down in early December, and then Ray plunged into the editing room with one of the studio’s expert editors, Richard L. Van Enger, who’d won an Oscar for Sands of Iwo Jima. They stuck a Peggy Lee ballad on the end of the film, and the release of Johnny Guitar was scheduled for May 1954.
Once again, regardless of all the offscreen drama, Ray had proven his mettle with a touchy star. He had taken a well-worn genre, imbued it with his personality and style, and extracted a final result that pleased the studio. The nasty goss
ip about the Joan Crawford Western, as everyone in Hollywood understood, was icing on the cake. Ray’s name suddenly seemed to be on every producer’s lips, and MCA’s Herman Citron was quickly able to shuttle Ray into another Western with another ex-Warners’ star.
This time the suitor was a major studio, Paramount, which had been tempted by a relationship with Ray one year earlier before pulling the plug on the expensive Lisbon. The producers were William H. Pine and William C. Thomas, the so-called Dollar Bills who ran the studio’s B unit with a knack for thriftily accounted pictures that always made money.
James Cagney was the star of the new Western, called Run for Cover. Although Cagney’s involvement gave the project a “shaky A” status, the Paramount Western still had a smaller budget than Johnny Guitar; Ray’s salary would also be smaller, because the script was ready to go when he signed his deal. MCA got him three thousand dollars weekly for ten weeks of preproduction and filming, starting in mid-March 1954.
Like Crawford, Cagney had come to the end of a long-running obligation to Warner Bros. Earlier in 1954, he had folded the separate independent company he ran with his younger brother William. After nearly a quarter century as a reliable box-office icon whose tough-guy veneer rivaled Humphrey Bogart’s, Cagney was freelancing for the first time.
Though Cagney was a horse lover and outdoors enthusiast, his Hell’s Kitchen accent made him an unlikely candidate for Westerns; his only previous attempt, 1939’s The Oklahoma Kid, had been a send-up of the genre costarring Bogart. Though Cagney was considering retirement, he was enticed into Run for Cover by an original story that let him play the rare good guy, and by the Dollar Bills’ agreement to shoot at least 30 percent of the film out of doors in the real West.
Cagney’s part was tailored for the actor; he would play Matt Dow, a gentle man, capable of violence, who was trying to leave behind a mysterious past including a wrongful conviction and prison term. Cagney had approval over the studio’s choice of director, but he was won over first by Ray’s reputation for working with actors and then, in person, by the man, as pensive and enigmatic as Cagney himself. Having spent much of his career working with studio contract directors, the star was hoping for something unusual, even offbeat, with Ray at the helm.
By the time Ray was hired, Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. had turned in their story treatment, and Winston Miller was putting the finishing touches on the screenplay. Miller, who helped write John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, among other solid credits, said that Cagney himself had a hand in the script. “I was in my office one day when he appeared at the door and introduced himself, said ‘I’m Jim Cagney,’ ” recalled Miller. “I said, ‘I know.’ He said he liked the script and would I mind if he made a suggestion. I said, ‘Of course not.’ He said this had nothing to do with his part, and he was so humble, almost, so considerate of the way you wrote something . . .
“His suggestion was that if I built up the part of the heavy it would help the whole picture. He was quite right. But he was so modest about wanting to make a suggestion.”
Miller never even met Ray. By the time the director took charge of the Western, the schedule had been set, the sequences broken down for costs, and the start date was coming up fast. The director concentrated on organizing the cast and crew and planning the photography.
The second lead in Run for Cover was a character named Davey, a young man befriended by Matt Dow. On the trail together, Matt and Davey both get caught up as innocent bystanders in a train robbery. The two men are mistaken for robbers, and Davey suffers crippling injuries at the hands of a rabid posse. When Matt becomes sheriff of the local town, he makes Davey his deputy, but the injured young man remains resentful and turns to crime.
For the part of Davey, the director thought right away of John Derek. The young star of Knock on Any Door had made strides in his career since they’d worked together, and Ray thought he could improve on Derek’s inhibited performance in their first film—an opportunity to correct a failure that had stuck in Ray’s craw. The character Derek would play was another tough kid desperate to prove his manhood—like Bowie from They Live by Night, Turkey in Johnny Guitar, or Nick Romano, Derek’s earlier role in Knock on Any Door.
For Cagney’s love interest, the Swedish rancher’s daughter who falls in love with Matt Dow, Ray picked the Swedish-born actress Viveca Lindfors. He cast Grant Withers as the heavy and called back Ernest Borgnine, from Johnny Guitar, as an auxiliary bad guy. The other billed actors were all new to his pictures.
Sentimental about Colorado, which had served him well during the making of On Dangerous Ground, Ray scouted out a patch of high country on the edge of the San Juan National Forest, and by the last week of May the Run for Cover company was deployed above Durango near the small town of Silverton, whose streets and buildings could be tricked up to look like the Old West.
The director and his simpatico star tried to make a few changes to Winston Miller’s script, at one point devising an episode with Indians playing a game Ray had researched—a sort of horse polo with hats—which was intended as a departure from standard Hollywood Westerns. (“What do they do,” Ray mused, “when they’re not being Indians?”) But the omnipresent Dollar Bills frowned on departures from the officially approved pages, and their tinkering was constrained.
Try as he might, Ray still couldn’t find the key to unlocking John Derek. The handsome young actor wasn’t as stiff this time as he had been in Knock on Any Door, but neither was his character as well-rounded, or sympathetic, as Nick Romano. And Derek still couldn’t deliver on his big emotional scenes. One person who knew them both thought that Derek was nervous because he believed that Ray nursed a platonic crush on him.
Viveca Lindfors, the female lead, found Ray ambiguous, an insecure man who hid behind his image as a “controlling” genius. Like Joan Fontaine, Susan Hayward, and Joan Crawford, the actress listened to the director, then went her own way. “He’s a talented man, a combination of big shot . . . I mean, he really thinks of himself as a very brilliant human being, right?” Lindfors said later, but “on the other hand, there’s a fragility there that makes him protect something, so it’s very difficult to be open with Nicholas . . .
“In my estimation,” the actress continued, Ray didn’t “know how to meet anybody on equal ground. It didn’t bother me at all in those days. I sort of even was seduced by his soft-spoken, kind of sensitive” directing style.
In Cagney, however, Ray found another champion. Most directors stood back a safe distance from the self-made, instinctual actor. Cagney wasn’t accustomed to intelligent counsel from directors, but he welcomed it. Cagney was never much of a parent figure or sex symbol, but Ray ushered him ably through surrogate-father scenes with Derek and graceful romantic ones with Lindfors. Cagney’s standout scene was a most anguished moment at the end of the film when he believes he has no choice but to kill the treacherous Davey; then, realizing too late that Davey had been about to repent, he weeps, abjectly, before the camera.
The director said later that he tried to draw on the star’s natural “serenity,” his “great love of the earth” and “understanding of loneliness.” The result was a heartfelt performance. But Ray himself later admitted that “the vehicle itself wasn’t strong enough” to support the performances and complained that he “didn‘t have enough time” to be inventive. Cagney would always hail Ray as “a good man” who tried hard to make Run for Cover a good film, and to the end of his life the star remained furious about bits that Ray shot that were left on the cutting room floor.
“Both Nick Ray and I had put in some ingenious touches,” Cagney complained to biographer John McCabe. “Offbeat stuff. But the assholes who cut the picture were unhappy with anything they hadn’t seen before, and when the things we put in would come up—because they were too new to the boys who were sitting in judgment on what should have been in the picture—anything that was novel was out.
“It became just another programmer.”
&nbs
p; In late April 1954, just before Ray started filming Run for Cover, Republic studio chief Herbert J. Yates tried to organize a premiere party for Johnny Guitar for “live” broadcast on KTTV in Los Angeles. But the event fizzled when Sterling Hayden declined to attend, Mercedes McCambridge claimed her invitation never arrived, and Joan Crawford contrived to be somewhere else that day. The bad blood lingered. “I should have had my head examined,” Crawford told an interviewer years later. “No excuse for a picture being this bad or for me making it.”
Many American critics agreed at the time. The Hollywood Reporter described the Joan Crawford Western as “one of the most confused and garrulous outdoors films to hit the screen for some time,” while Bosley Crowther in the New York Times pilloried it as “a fiasco . . . a flat walk-through—or occasional ride-through—of western clichés.” Mae Tinee in the Chicago Daily Tribune thought it was preposterous, self-conscious, and “just plain pathetic.”
While a few U.S. critics found the film superficially entertaining, reviewers in England and France, where Ray continued to boast an auteurist cachet, saw it as something else altogether: a film with hidden delights. Though she decried the film’s dialogue, which “never strays a syllable from the intense,” the London Spectator’s Virginia Graham was among the first to notice that Johnny Guitar may be “all hopelessly unconvincing and foolish, but because it is acted with such dedicated earnestness, and is, in a sense, a parody of itself, it gives a perverted pleasure.”
Francois Truffaut reached deep into his bag of superlatives to praise the new Western. “The realism of words and poetic insights,” the Cahiers du Cinéma auteurist rhapsodized, is “much like Cocteau. This film is a string of preciosity, truer than the truth. . . . It is dreamed, a fairy tale, a hallucinatory Western. . . . Johnny Guitar is the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream. The cowboys vanish and die with the grace of ballerinas. The bold, violent color (by TruColor) contributes to the sense of strangeness; the hues are vivid, sometimes very beautiful, always unexpected.”*
Nicholas Ray Page 32
