As soon as RKO okayed Verboten!, we cast and shot it quickly, maybe ten days, maximum. My yarn begins as the U.S. Army is rolling over the last traces of German resistance. Sergeant Brent, part of a patrol flushing out snipers from a bombed-out town called Rothbach, is wounded in the ass. When he wakes up, a picture of Hitler is staring down at him. A German woman, Helga, has dragged him to safety in a bombed-out ruin that used to be her home. Her mother is bedridden. Helga patches Brent's wound and hides him from the retreating Nazis. He finds out she's got a bitter teenage brother, Franz, whose arm was mangled by an American bomb. Brent's suspicious of Helga's real motives:
HELGA
My family lived on lies since 1933.
BRENT
What's that got to do with this?
HELGA
That was the year Germany was murdered by Der Fuehrer.
BRENT
But you all strung along with him while he was winning, didn't you?
HELGA
We believed him, until it was too late to learn he was only interested in Adolf Hitler.
BRENT
Then why didn't you Germans open your big mouths when he began throwing people into gas chambers?
HELGA
We are all guilty for not opening our "big mouths"!
As Brent recovers, he falls in love with Helga and arranges to stay on in Germany after the war so he can marry her. Working as a civilian liaison, Brent keeps Helga supplied with food, goods, and silk stockings during the harsh postwar period. But in the occupied zone, Frauleins are verboten. Brent's superior officer tries to discourage him from his romance with a German woman, assuring him that, whether Germans deny it or not, "they've had a fascist education." Meanwhile, young Franz falls under the influence of Bruno, an unregenerate Nazi and leader of the Werewolves, a secret, Himmler-inspired militia that aids escaped war criminals and wreaks havoc on occupying Allied forces. Bruno manages to get a day job at the U.S. Army HQ, allowing him to plan his attacks from within.
An American Forces radio network announcement sets the stage for the upcoming war trials:
RADIO ANNOUNCER
Before the international military trial at Nuremberg, United States Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson told the court that he not only is appearing as counsel for the Allied Powers but for the entire civilized world. He said, "The real complaining party at your bar is civilization."
Bruno and his Werewolves pursue their campaign of sabotage and violence against the Americans, provoking food riots and anti-American demonstrations. Brent himself is roughed up by demonstrators, getting suspended after the melee. That causes a big row at home with Helga, who is now pregnant. She confesses she married Brent for the food and supplies he could provide, but that she really loves him now. He feels doublecrossed, and walks out.
In Verboten! Brent (James Best) tries to talk common sense to demonstrators (above) in the Occupied Zone but a riot breaks out (below) as soon as his speech is over.
Young Franz witnesses the murder of one of the Werewolves' gang members who challenges Bruno's power lust. Helga tries to tell her brother the truth about the Werewolves, but Franz refuses to listen to her. So she makes him sit through a session at the Nuremberg trials. Among the defendants are Goring, Hess, von Ribbentrop, von Papen, Bormann, Speer, Frick, Seyss-Inquart, and Keitel. Footage screened as evidence against the war criminals-horrifying scenes of Nazi cruelty and destruction-open the adolescent's eyes to the Werewolves' real motives.
"I didn't know!" mutters the stunned Franz. "I didn't know!"
Franz's painful awakening pushes him to recognize the truth about Bruno and his gang of young fascists. The teenager helps American authorities bring a quick and violent halt to the Werewolves' activities.
My yarn was ripped from the headlines of that time. In the postwar period, the threat of a renaissance of the Nazi movement was very real. Young Hitlerian extremists had formed secret gangs. Nazism was outlawed, so the gangs went underground. They were controlled by veterans who refused to acknowledge defeat. Eventually, their movement made its way across Europe and to the United States. These lunatic sonsofbitches exist even today in America. There they are, decades later, with their fascist ideas and secret camps, their guerrilla training and their swastikas. It's absolute insanity, yet it's real.
I wanted my movie to go beyond the isolated problem with the Werewolves to the universal struggle of poor people in war-torn countries everywhere, trying to survive without a future, susceptible to extremists who promise them food and hope. In times like those, a despot can easily come to power. To prepare my movie, I'd read Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada. According to Fallada, if there hadn't been a depression after the kaisers, there wouldn't have been a Hitler. Appealing to people's bellies, Hitler promised the Germans a better life, if only they gave him total power.
Music was one of the keys for me to convey the chaotic emotions of the period. The opening of the picture has four soldiers flushing out Nazi snipers to the music of Beethoven's Ninth. No dialogue, just noble, grandiose music and ballsy, man-to-man combat. Later Brent, played by James Best, proposes marriage to Helga, played by Susan Cummings. Here again the music is Beethoven. She accepts. No sooner has the exuberant Brent gone off to his new civilian job than Bruno, the Nazi war veteran, shows up. His entrance is accompanied by a heavy Wagnerian overture, like the first act of a tragic opera. Bruno has an emotional claim on the woman, too. The contrasting music underscores the audience's doubt about Helga. Is she or isn't she a Nazi in her heart of hearts?
The first time we see Bruno, he's carrying a heavy backpack. The defeated soldier symbolizes all that's left of German youth after the Third Reich. I saw a helluva lot of young men like Bruno at the end of the war. Thousands of them were walking like robots along bombed-out roads, their faces empty, their eyes deadened. Shell-shocked and war-weary, they carried on their shoulders, along with all their worldly possessions, the crushing weight of defeat. It was a sad sight that made the futility of war stunningly clear.
Bruno was played by newcomer Tom Pittman. He had an unaffected quality I liked and a calmness that only good actors have, even if they are boiling with emotion inside. Gary Cooper was one of those natural ones. Awkward, timid, and embarrassed on the screen, Gary always appeared not to be acting at all. A casting director at Warner Brothers looked at some of my rushes with Pittman and thought the young actor had the intensity to be a star. The studio offered Tom a seven-year contract, the kickoff for a big career.
After we'd wrapped Verboten., Tom said he was taking a little vacation and drove away in his sports car. The following week my office tried contacting him. We still needed him to come by the studio and loop some dialogue. We couldn't reach him. No one had seen him for days. Tom's worried father contacted me. I called a pal who was a journalist to see if he'd heard anything. Finally we called the sheriff's office. The manhunt ended when they found Tom's corpse in his smashed-up sports car at the bottom of one of those curvy, dangerous roads up in the Los Angeles canyons. We all felt terrible about Tom Pittman's tragic and untimely death.
Among the actresses who'd read for the part of Helga was Anne Bancroft. She was under contract at Fox at the time. I adored Bancroft. She told me that she was always getting cast as the girlfriend to leading actresses, never as the lead herself. She wasn't happy about her Hollywood career and was toying with the idea of going back to the New York stage. Bancroft had a strong presence, but she just didn't correspond physically to the girl I had in mind. I would have loved to work with her on another project, but it never happened. I wished I'd written a part that suited her as well as the famous role of The Graduate's Mrs. Robinson.
To arrange and direct the musical score for Verboten! I turned to my friend Harry Sukman. There was a musician's strike going on, so Harry decided to record the Beethoven and Wagner pieces in Germany. Harry told me that when he lifted his baton the first day in that Munich studio, he was sweating. Being American and Jewish and leading a
German orchestra on German soil made Harry tremble.
The movie's musical credits cite Sukman, Beethoven, and Wagner. I wanted to stick with a classical score, but an RKO executive convinced Sukman to write a pop song for the soundtrack, too. Pop singer Paul Anka showed up at my office one day to sing the tune for me. Mack David's lyrics began, "Our love is Verboten!, they tell us we are worlds apart...." The studio thought a pop tune like that would make the picture more commercial. Paul was a sweet kid and had a great voice. But I didn't want to use that goddamned tune. I eventually relented and let them put the song over the picture's opening credits.
See, music is an essential part of every picture I make, maybe as important as the story. Before photographs and movies, people were listening to music and getting strong emotional messages. When I write, I visualize what I want to happen on the screen and imagine the accompanying music. I can actually "see" the action and dialogue better by adding music early on in the script. The music even gives me story ideas. I always pro vide composers precise instructions about the kind of music I'm looking for. Then I leave them totally free to come up with a soundtrack that best corresponds to each section of the picture.
Susan Cummings hadn't been in town too long when she came in to test for Helga in Verboten! The studio people said she looked too European, but, damnit, that was exactly what I wanted, so I hired her. She was a sweet person and did a fine job.
There was tremendous competition among the Hollywood movie composers of the day, talented guys like Sukman, Dimitri Tiomkin, Victor Young, and Alfred Newman, but there was also great camaraderie and respect. When you picked one of those great composers to do your score, the others wished him well and meant it. I didn't always work with experienced musicians or classical themes. One day in the early fifties, a tall, handsome man walked into my office at Fox with a slight limp and introduced himself as Paul Dunlap. He said he was a composer. I'd never heard of him.
"I wrote something for you," he said. "If you like it, I'll write any kind of music you want."
I liked Dunlap's work and felt he deserved a chance. He ended up doing the musical scores for The Baron of Arizona, The Steel Helmet, Park Row, Shock Corridor, and The Naked Kiss.
Columbia picked up Verboten! for distribution and did pretty well with the picture at the box office. Critics were divided. As usual, those who had an ax to grind wrote bad reviews. Believe it or not, one reviewer said my movie had "intended to minimize the Nazi movement." Holy shit, what an utterly preposterous idea, especially after I spent almost four years in the infantry dodging Nazi bullets! Commentary like that smelled of bad faith, plain stupidity, or both. It was a fact that a helluva lot of Germans were anti-Hitler. Hell, people didn't realize that a hefty slice of the twelve million prisoners in the camps were non-Jewish Germans, locked up for not supporting the Nazi regime.
French critics were crazy about the movie. A young critic named Francois Truffaut wrote a deliriously enthusiastic review for Cahiers du Cinema. Jean-Luc Godard said Verboten! made him want to stop writing about films and start making them.
While we were cutting Verboten', I realized that the movie's Nuremberg trial scene was the most crucial, the emotional centerpiece of the picture. I'd written sober words to accompany the ghastly montage of war scenes and concentration-camp footage, borrowing heavily from Supreme Court Justice Charles H. Jackson's actual opening statement at Nuremberg:
NARRAI'OR
... A most intense drive was directed by Hitler and his Nazis against German Protestants, Lutherans, Catholics. Pastor Niemeier was sent to a concentration camp. Bishop Graber was beaten up. Hitler inspired vandalism against church property. Nazi teaching was inconsistent with the Christian faith. It was the Nazi plan to suppress the Christian church completely after the War.
But with the War, the number of victims swelled to include citizens of all the nations in Europe. Included among the executed and burned were citizens from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece and other countries.
But perhaps the greatest crime against humanity the Nazis committed was against the Jews, whom they used as the scapegoat to camouflage their plan to make Hitler God and to make Mein Kampfthe Bible.
Goebbels was Hitler's co-pilot. Goebbels catered to children with campaign cries that went to the heart of the Nazi movement. Hate was the Nazi religion. Hate was their battle cry. Hate was their God.
Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since they were unable to work. The Nazis endeavored to fool them into thinking they were going through a de-lousing process.
A thousand years will pass and this guilt of the Hitler gang will still not be erased. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the gas chamber, depending on the climatic conditions. The Nazis knew when the people were dead because the screaming stopped. After the bodies were removed, special Hitler commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses. Much of this loot was then transferred to secret vaults of the Reichsbank at Frankfurt-amMein.
This was genocide, the premeditated destruction of entire peoples. Genocide, the direct result of the Nazi's claim that they have the right to destroy Hitler's opposition.
Tomorrow the world, dead or alive.
We were in a hurry when it came time to record that narration, and I couldn't find an actor to do it the way I wanted. It had to be delivered like a reporter, serene and emotionless. I'd been an eyewitness to that great agony, so I used my own voice. It was tough to do, believe me. With Verboten.! I wanted to tell people the harsh truth and never let them forget what really happened during the Holocaust.
Los Angeles,
Mon Amour
36
Throughout the fifties, I got offers to direct big movies adapted from best-selling books with major stars attached. One after another, I turned them down for a variety of personal and professional reasons. In general, making less expensive movies meant maintaining my independence, avoiding the studios' tampering with my scripts, imposing their casting and editing choices. Maybe it was a fatal career flaw, but small-budget independence was more appealing to me than all the thunder of major productions.
Following Harry Cohn's death, Sam Briskin became head of Columbia. Briskin invited me over to his office to pitch him another movie, no doubt when the studio accountants told him Verboten! was selling tickets. I told him about a murder yarn that had been bouncing around my head for years. I called it The Crimson Kimono. Two cops in charge of a murder investigation fall for the same gal. One of the detectives is white and the other is a Nisei, a Japanese American. The two men have been inseparable since their tour of duty in Korea. The girl goes for the Nisei cop, not the white one.
"Well, Sam, can't you make the white guy a sonofabitch?" asked Briskin, a little worried. "We've got to market your movie all across the country, including the Midwest and the Bible Belt."
"The girl chooses the Japanese guy because he's the man for her," I said. "Not because the white guy's a sonofabitch. The whole idea of my picture is that both men are good cops and good citizens. The girl just happens to fall in love with the Nisei. They've got chemistry."
"That's gonna be hard for average American audiences to swallow, Sam. We've got to sell 'ein tickets. Look, can't you make the white guy a little bit of a sonofabitch?"
"No, I can't! A girl can't be a little pregnant! She is or she isn't. My white cop is a regular guy."
For Chrissakes, we were supposed to be living in a "modern" age. As a boy, I remember how I wanted Lillian Gish's heroine to end up with the sweet Chinese guy in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms. Back then, I suppose it couldn't be. Thank God, times had changed. My heroine could choose the Asian guy over the white guy without the white guy being a villain.
It took some talking, but I was able to convince Briskin to do the picture my way. I got a green light to go into production with the script almost exactly as I'd written it. We shot in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo district in
the winter of '59. Nobody'd ever made a movie there before. I loved the Japanese look of that location, smack in the middle of LA's urban sprawl.
The movie opens with a stranger armed with a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson confronting a platinum-blond stripper in her dressing room at a seedy LA burlesque house. With hardly any clothes on, Sugar Torch runs out the stage door and gets shot dead in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. Detectives Charlie Bancroft and Joe Kojaku are put on the case. They're roommates and close friends. The investigation leads them to Christine Down, a beautiful artist who once painted a portrait of the victim as a geisha girl in a red kimono.
Charlie, the white cop, falls for Christine first. But she prefers Joe, the Nisei. He suppresses his warm feelings for the girl because he doesn't want to betray his best friend. Furthermore, Joe is neurotic about his racial background, believing that his growing love for Christine has brought out long-buried racist hatred in his buddy. The situation explodes at a kendo sword-fight exhibition, where the two friends go at each other violently, almost getting Charlie seriously injured.
With Christine's help, Sugar's killer is tracked down. It turns out to be a woman who mistakenly believed her boyfriend was seeing the stripper on the sly. Joe sees a parallel between the killer's crazed behavior and his own mistaken reaction about Charlie. The two buddies are able to finally talk openly about their shortsightedness. However, their love for Christine has permanently damaged their friendship. The picture closes at the Nisei Festival in Little Tokyo as Joe and Christine embrace in the middle of a group of Ondo dancers.
Though it looked like a pretty conventional cops-and-criminals movie, The Crimson Kimono was almost operatic in its tone. I was trying to make an unconventionally triangular love story, laced with reverse racism, a kind of narrow-mindedness that's just as deplorable as outright bigotry. I wanted to show that whites aren't the only ones susceptible to racist thoughts. Joe is a racist because he transfers his fears to his friend. I wrote a confrontation scene for the two buddies that comes right after their dangerous kendo sword fight. Charlie can't understand Joe's anger. This exchange gives him a clue to Joe's problem:
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 38
