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A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking

Page 35

by Samuel Fuller;Christa Lang Fuller;Jerome Henry Rudes


  Where's Your

  Pride, Ma?

  32

  The new head of RKO, William Dozier, approached me at a dinner party following some Hollywood premiere. He introduced himself, saying he was a fan of my work, especially Park Row. I told him the picture hadn't been a commercial success, but he didn't care because the critics loved it. Dozier said he wanted to be associated with directors who were artists. Bill was well read, honest, and straightforward, with a great sense of humor. He'd been married to Joan Fontaine for a few years, but when we met, he had gotten remarried to Ann Rutherford, a gracious woman who'd played Scarlett O'Hara's little sister in Gone with the Wind (1939). Martha and I shared some great evenings with Bill and Ann, listening to Ann's hilarious stories about working with Mickey Rooney in the "Andy Hardy" movies. Bill ended up a television producer and a very wealthy man, thanks to his fathering the Batman series on TV with Adam West in 1966.

  Dozier understood I was under contract at Fox but could do my own projects as well. He invited me to meet his boss, Tom O'Neill, president of the General Tires Company, which owned RKO. Businessman and movie lover, O'Neill asked me if I had a picture I wanted to produce with them. I told Dozier and O'Neill about my unforgettable experiences with the Karaja. Propelled by my frustration about the nixing of the Tigrero project, I'd written an Indian yarn called Run of the Arrow, set in the far West. I'd done a lot of research on American Indians, going through stacks of materials I requested from Washington about each of the tribes.

  I pitched them my story. O'Meara, an embittered Confederate soldier, shoots the last bullet in the Civil War, wounding a Union officer named Driscoll. But O'Meara can't accept surrender to the North. He heads out west, teaming up with an Indian scout, Walking Coyote. The two of them are captured by the Sioux. O'Meara is forced to make the "run of the arrow," a tribal ritual and grueling test of endurance. His life is saved by Yellow Moccasin, the squaw he ends up marrying. The Sioux are now his people, but the real test of allegiance is for O'Meara to kill an American. The Sioux attack an American fort, under the command of the same Driscoll from the Civil War. O'Meara shoots Driscoll, but saves the soldier from slow torture at the hands of the Sioux. In his heart of hearts, O'Meara is still an American.

  The boys at RKO loved my yarn and gave me a green light to produce the picture the way I wanted. Indians would be depicted as a community of people with their own rules and rituals, not-as in most studio movies-like a pack of marauding killers. My deal stipulated that RKO and I had to agree on the principal cast. Dozier wanted Gary Cooper to play O'Meara. I'd have loved to work with Gary, one of the most handsome and popular leading men in Hollywood. Except he wasn't right for the part.

  With Rod Steiger on Run of the Arrow, in 1957. I'm trying to show Rod how I want him to play the opening scene when he fires the Civil War's final bullet. He was going to do it his way, no matter what.

  "I need the opposite of Cooper," I explained. "The character's hateful, a misfit. I want this newcomer, Steiger. He's got a sour face and a fat ass. He'll look awkward, especially when he climbs up on a horse. See, my yarn's about a sore loser, not a gallant hero."

  "Sam, this Steiger fellow has never had a lead in a picture," said Dozier. "A lead with a fat ass and a sour face? Who's going to want to see a picture starring that guy?"

  I spewed off a short list of leads played by character actors. Of course the best example was Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in William Dieterle's 1939 classic, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  "Look, Bill, as much as I am dying to work with Coop, if he plays O'Meara, my story's unbelievable. I don't know this Steiger personally, but I saw him in Ella Kazan's On the Waterfront. He's got a face right out of a Matthew Brady photograph. I want Steiger."

  Dozier continued to push for Gary Cooper. I finally convinced him to hire Steiger. This was a decade before Steiger's great performances in Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965) and Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967). It was the first time Steiger got top billing and the money that went with it. I think he earned more on that picture than I did. After all, I was only the writer, director, and coproducer.

  Steiger couldn't have cared less that I'd fought for him to be my lead. From day one when he arrived on our set in St. George, Utah, he manifested his I'm-going-to-do-things-my-way-and-you-can-all-go-to-hell-ifyou-don't-like-it attitude. I felt confident Steiger could play O'Meara the way I wrote the character and make his inner turmoil believable. That was key to making the entire story credible. So for the good of the picture, I had to find a way to work with this erratic, brooding actor. Sometimes that required direct confrontation. Other times, I let him have his way. The problem was Steiger had talent but he tended to overact.

  O'Meara was of Irish stock. He needed to have a southern accent tinged with bitterness. With my coaching, Steiger worked on a believable Irish brogue, laced with a deep southern drawl. To get the character's gloomy contempt, Steiger decided on his own to mumble his lines. It was a trick he must have picked up with Marlon Brando and his other pals at the Actor's Studio in New York. Rod kept demanding reshoots to get his lines just right. I never like to do more than a couple of takes, but I let Steiger have his way, even if it was terribly boring for everyone except him. A helluva lot of his lines were muttered. I'd make sure that stuff would end up on the cuttingroom floor.

  When it came time to shoot Steiger's "run of the arrow" scene, he was sick. He insisted that I postpone the scene so he could do it himself. We were on a tight schedule. I said no and went ahead with a stunt man, mounting a camera on a truck and focusing on the stunt man's feet as he raced across the prairie. Steiger was pissed off. He decided to be even more mule-headed, if that were possible.

  There's a scene in the movie when the cavalry and the Sioux meet on horseback. It was a long dolly shot that we set up early in the morning. I told Steiger how I wanted him to play the scene. He listened to me, then went ahead and did it his own way. It was all wrong. I knew what he was trying to pull, and, goddamnit, he wasn't going to have it his way that time.

  Up on the crane, Joe Biroc, preparing a shot of the Sioux on horseback. A consummate cameraman, Joe was open to my crazy ideas about unusual angles.

  "Rod, let's do it again! Whether you like it or not," I yelled down to him from the crane, "you're going to do it my way!"

  We shot the scene over and over. Steiger refused to follow my direction. By noon, cast and crew were losing their patience with this war of wills between the director and his lead actor.

  "Listen, Rod," I called out. "You're going to do it my way or we'll stay here till the goddamn moon comes up!"

  Stubborn and enraged, Rod started screaming all kinds of insults up at me.

  "Okay, lunch!" I yelled.

  By the time we came back from lunch, Rod had figured out that he couldn't win. He finally did the scene my way. There were other incidents like that, but, thank god, I've forgotten them. Despite the clashes, I still have a lot of admiration for Steiger. He did some terrific work in that picture. The scene when O'Meara and his mother are talking on a bridge at the end of the Civil War always brings tears to my eyes.' O'Meara is deeply angry about losing the war. Steiger's face is seething with frustration. You can see in his eyes the terrible damage the Yankees have inflicted on him, his family, and the South.

  "Where's your pride, Ma?" Steiger mutters. "Where's your pride?"

  When O'Meara confesses that "the savages have more pride than we do," he's setting up his pivotal decision to leave home rather than accept the Yankees' sovereignty. All Southerners felt what he's feeling after their loss. To this day, Southerners never refer to the "Civil War," but opt for the more equitable "War Between the States."

  Another scene where Rod excelled as O'Meara is when, on his way home after the war, he sits listening to a man who's singing a soft, slow Confederate ballad. We'd researched that song and made sure it was authentic. At first it sounds like just a nice tune. Gradually, the lyrics make you realize
the deep hatred that burned in the hearts of Southerners. You can see it on Steiger's face. He was able to reflect their reality.

  I insisted on putting that resentment in a historical context by announcing at the beginning of the movie:

  THE DEFEAT OF THE SOUTH WAS NOT THE END OF THE WAR, IT WAS THE BIRTH OF THE UNITED STATES.

  Setting up for the "run of the arrow"scene, a genuine Sioux test of endurance

  Up in Utah, I had few diversions except visiting my old friend Raoul Walsh, who was up there at the same time shooting The King and Four Queens with Clark Gable and Eleanor Parker. Our locations were only a couple miles apart. Hell, isolated out there in that barren place, it was like working ass to ass. After sundown, Raoul would come over to see me in my trailer. He was always fun to be with. Over cigars and drinks, Walsh told me he loved his actors but hated the script he was shooting. When I told him my story, he liked it better than his own.

  "Why don't we swap?" he suggested one evening.

  "Swap?" I said.

  "Sure, Sammy!" Raoul laughed, winking at me with his one good eye. "You do my picture and I'll do yours!"

  I laughed with him, but explained how much this picture meant to me after the demise of my Tigrero project. Every time he'd come over to our set, Raoul would continue to rib me, saying with a twinkle in that good eye, "Just let me do a few scenes, Sammy!"

  Walsh wasn't the only director who wanted to take a crack at Run of the Arrow. Back in preproduction, I'd gotten a call from Mervyn LeRoy, one of Hollywood's preeminent moviemakers, who'd heard about the project. Surely one of the great ones, Mervyn was having a difficult period in the fifties. He offered me a helluva lot of money up front to let him direct the movie. I had to say no thanks.

  Over and above my Indian obsession, I had another objective in doing Run of the Arrow. I wanted to create the rare Western that linked powerful images with emotional turmoil. The bright, clear Utah landscapes are constantly contrasted with O'Meara's dark, brooding nature. Full of hate and confusion, O'Meara is trying to make hard choices between his own selfinterest and larger responsibilities to his family, his people, his nation. Every facet of my yarn is full of contrasts, but nowhere more obvious than in the confrontation between races.

  First, it's whites against blacks. An early scene in the movie has a Yankee soldier and a Southerner talking. The Yankee, superbly played by Brian Keith, asks the Southerner about the KKK people who dress up in white robes and attack blacks.

  "Free, white, and Christian," says the Yankee sarcastically, "putting pillowcases over their heads and lynching black people!"

  The Southerner replies that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

  "Yes," says the Yankee, "it's always the other guy."

  Then, it's reds against whites. When O'Meara meets up with the Sioux, a lot of racial bells start ringing, usually in unexpected ways. First, they almost kill him with their run of the arrow, one of many genuine Sioux rituals that intrigued me in my research. O'Meara is easily caught in that deadly pursuit, but Yellow Moccasin saves his life out of compassion, even though whites are considered invaders to the Sioux. I threw a wrench into the typical movie plot by having O'Meara marry the squaw. He goes through with it to save his ass. Later, he learns to love her. His new life with the Sioux is about as far from his beloved Dixie as you can get, physically and spiritually.

  In my research, I'd studied the Oglalas, the Iroquois, and the Seminoles, who migrated, along with the Sioux, from the North, sometimes from as far away as Canada. I also read a great deal about the Cherokees, the Cheyenne, the Shawnee, and the Apaches. I found mention of plenty of mixed marriages in frontier days. Indian women who married white men fared better. In most cases, white women who married Indian men were ostracized by their own people and barely tolerated by the tribes.

  The heart of my movie is about O'Meara's personal reconciliation. It's a painful journey, smoothed a little by the loving squaw, played by Sarita Montiel. Sarita was the Brigitte Bardot of Spain back then, married to my dear friend, the director Anthony Mann. Red skin or not, Yellow Moccasin is the best thing that ever happened to O'Meara. I wanted to show that different races can get along if there's real tolerance. In one of the early drafts of my script, I was trying to show the couple's intimacy while revealing O'Meara's ironic self-deprecation. I had O'Meara asking Yellow Moccasin, "Did you marry me to change your luck?"

  When I grew up, there was an old saying that when you slept with a woman or a man of a different race, you were trying to change your luck. It was too long to explain and could have been misconstrued, so I cut the line out of the final draft.

  Mixing whites and Indians in movies was hardly original. Ford often had Indians capturing white women as slaves. Hawks had a white man marrying an Indian woman in one of his pictures. It was Cecil B. DeMille who made the first picture about a relationship between a white man and an Indian woman, The Squaw Man. He did that story three times, in 1914, in 1918, and again in 1931. In the first version, he used a real Indian, Red Wing, to play the role of his heroine, Naturich. In the second version, he used a white actress, Ann Little. And in the third version, he gave the part to Lupe Velez, a Mexican.

  I wanted to cast as many real Indians as I could get. We hired all the Sioux we could find in Utah. I also made a scouting trip through the Dakotas, locating more Sioux, real descendants of Sitting Bull and Red Cloud. I ended up with a few white actors playing Indian roles. The great Jay C. Flippen played Walking Coyote. A handsome Mexican American named Frank de Kova played Red Cloud. A stunt man named H. M. Wynant was Crazy Wolf. I cast newcomer Charles Bronson as the Sioux chief, Blue Buffalo, who incarnated everything I cherished about American Indians from my boyhood readings of James Fenimore Cooper.2 Bronson (born Buchinsky) was at the very beginning of his career, twenty years before those Death Wish films. He looked magnificent as an Indian, with that strong, muscular body, hard face, and stony smile.

  The Indian boy, Billy Miller, was half Cherokee and half Apache. I made him mute like I was until the age of five. I remember Billy fondly, as I do all the youngsters I used in my other films. They were scripted into adult tales brimming with problems and struggles. That came from my own youth, a very small person thrown into a world full of adult predicaments. I respect children in all my movies. Like me, they have to figure out things fast. Father figures help them grow up. Whatever they see, hear, or feel will help them forge the future, our future.

  Once back from Utah, I needed a good editor to work with me on the movie. Out of the blue, Gene Fowler, my old friend and mentor, dropped in at our RKO production office to visit me. I was thrilled to see the Grand Old Man again. It'd been a long time. His roguish sense of humor was as fresh as when I'd first met him in the twenties. Gene was accompanied by his son, Gene Jr., who'd worked as an editor with Fritz Lang. I asked the young Fowler if he'd like to cut my new picture. He said okay, so I hired him on the spot. My life was full of happy coincidences. Fowler Senior had edited my writing, and now Fowler junior was editing my movie. I couldn't have been in better hands.

  While Gene Jr. and I were cutting Run of theArrow, Steiger's mumbling was just one of the many problems we had to solve. Santa Montiel was gorgeous to look at, but her accent was incomprehensible on the sound mix. We needed somebody to rerecord Santa's lines in a hurry. My wonderful secretary and assistant, Anita Uphoff, who was with me for almost twenty years, brought in a gal she knew named Angie Dickinson. Angie was holding down a day job at RKO, waiting for a break as an actress. Angie had a great voice, not to mention those gorgeous legs. I told Angie to come over to the editing room when she got off work. She ended up redubbing every word of Montiel's dialogue. When she finished the job, I promised Angie I'd repay her effort by finding a part for her in an upcoming film. As it worked out, Angie Dickinson played the lead in my next movie, China Gate (1957), her first starring role and the start of a big career.

  On the back of this photo with his handwritten dedication 'Sam Fuller's tutor,
Prof Fowler, " Gene Fowler wrote: "Honorary Doctor of Social Security and President Emeritus of the Free Loading Sons of America, I am shown here accepting new awards bestowed on me for my invention of the streamlined celluloid cuff The Oscars were donated by a pawnbroker who is retiring from business. "

  My friend Victor Young was working on the score for Run of the Arrow when he passed away. That was a very sad day for me. What a wonderful man he was! I was asked to write Victor's obituary, and I agreed as long as it was incognito. Victor had had a fabulous career that began back in the thirties, with over 170 films scored and Oscar nominations all over the place. He finally won an Oscar at the end of his life for "Written on the Wind," for which Sammy Cahn did the lyrics.' Victor was doing some of his greatest work when I knew him: The Quiet Man (1952), Shane (1953), Johnny Guitar (1954), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954). Victor knew how to enjoy life and make others enjoy theirs. I'd miss him terribly. Our mutual pal Max Steiner finished the score for my film as a token of friendship to Victor. Max made sure all monies were paid to Victor's estate. The loving credit in the film reads:

 

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