Ford had won his first Academy Award for direction for the modestly produced The Informer, against Henry Hathaway’s Lives of a Bengal Lancer and the two-time Academy Award–winner Frank Lloyd for Thalberg’s production of Mutiny on the Bounty, the most expensive movie made since Metro’s Ben-Hur.
The Informer had been turned down by Fox, Columbia, Metro, Paramount, Columbia, and Warner Bros. No one at RKO except Joseph P. Kennedy had actually read O’Flaherty’s novel or was interested in having Ford make it into a picture. The book, set after the Irish Civil War, is about a man who sells out his former comrade and shifts the blame to another.
Kennedy, who had started RKO with David Sarnoff in 1928 in order to make talking pictures with the RCA Photophone sound process and had sold his remaining shares of the studio in 1934 to become a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, no longer had any direct power at the studio, but he told the RKO staff producers about Ford and O’Flaherty’s novel. “Let him make it [The Informer],” said Kennedy. “It won’t lose any more than some of those you made.”
The studio’s minimal expectations and investment—RKO put up $234,000 for The Informer (“In Hollywood,” Ford said, “that’s considered the price of a cigar”)—combined to give Ford the freedom to direct the picture as he pleased. As a result, he won the Academy Award for Best Director, his first award in twenty years of making motion pictures. Dudley Nichols won as well for Best Screenplay, but the Hollywood guilds—the Screen Actors Guild, the Screen Writers Guild, and the two-month-old Screen Directors Guild—had called for a boycott of the academy’s eighth ceremony.
The president of the Screen Writers Guild called the academy a “company union with nothing in common with the Guilds”; the Screen Directors Guild pronounced the academy “a failure in every single function it has assumed. The sooner it is destroyed and forgotten, the better for the industry.”
The academy had sided with producers over the pay cut of 1933 and continued to side with producers against the unions in labor negotiations.
For Best Picture, the academy was putting forward Thalberg’s extravagant production, Mutiny on the Bounty; the guilds were pushing the modestly made Informer.
The heads of the studios had sent telegrams to their employees instructing them to attend the academy’s ceremony, which only helped to rally support for the boycott (“You have probably been asked by your producer to go to the dinner,” a telegram from the Guilds announced to their members. “The Board feels that since the Academy is definitely inimical to the best interests of the Guilds, you should not attend”). In an effort to avert a showdown with the Guilds, the academy revamped its voting procedure for Best Picture: instead of the vote being available to producers, it would now be open to the academy’s full membership. In addition, Frank Capra, president of the academy, had hired an outside accounting firm, Price Waterhouse, to count the ballots.
Capra hoped to get around the boycott by announcing that a special award would be given to D. W. Griffith.
No one knew where Griffith had disappeared to. “We finally found him,” said Capra, “in a Kentucky saloon.”
Chaplin described Griffith as “the teacher of us all”; Cecil B. DeMille called him “the father of film.” Joel McCrea, who’d been around Hollywood seeing movies get made since 1914, had stood on the corner of Vermont Avenue as a boy and watched the building of the Babylon set for Intolerance: D. W. Griffith sitting there overseeing it all like a king, wearing white gloves, white Stetson and carrying a walking stick.
By the late 1920s, Griffith’s pictures were dismissed as old-fashioned; he no longer had artistic control of his movies, of which he believed he was the heart, soul, and mind. Following The Struggle, Griffith’s last picture, from an Émile Zola novel, The Drunkard, which United Artists pulled from general release after a week, the great director was “washed up” in the business he’d helped to create. The D. W. Griffith Corporation went into bankruptcy, his pictures auctioned off, and Griffith bought the rights to twenty-six of his films for $500. A friend of his said, “D.W. made the virginal the vogue and it reigned until Volstead, gin and F. Scott Fitzgerald gave birth to the flapper.”
“We used him,” Capra said of the annual presentation of awards. “But we had to have a hell of a drawing card to keep the Academy alive.”
D. W. Griffith (second from left), Special Award recipient at the eighth award ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. With him, left to right: Frank Capra, Jean Hersholt, Henry B. Walthall, Frank Lloyd, Cecil B. DeMille, Donald Crisp, at the Biltmore Bowl, Biltmore Hotel, March 5, 1936. (MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES)
Griffith was delighted by Capra’s invitation to accept the award and by the prospect of making the trip west. At sixty-one, Griffith was on his honeymoon with his twenty-six-year-old bride (he’d first met her when she was thirteen) and felt the trip to Hollywood would be a welcome wedding gift.
“Strangely enough,” said Capra, “he did bring the crowd in. Everybody was anxious to see D. W. Griffith.”
Among the thousand or so guests who attended the academy’s ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel were secretaries and other seat fillers who’d received the “liberally distributed” tickets.
John Ford and Dudley Nichols were among those who did not attend. Ford, treasurer of the Screen Directors Guild, accepted his award for Best Director a week after the ceremony (“If I had planned to refuse it,” he said, “I would not have allowed my name to go in nomination”). Dudley Nichols, one of the highest-paid writers in Hollywood who didn’t need the protection of the Screen Writers Guild but was one of its founding members, sent back his award for Best Screenplay. In an accompanying letter to Capra, Nichols wrote, “The Screen Writers Guild was conceived in revolt against the Academy and born out of disappointment with the way it functioned against employed talent in any emergency . . . To accept [the academy’s award] would be to turn my back on nearly a thousand members of the Writers Guild, to desert those fellow writers who ventured everything in the long-drawn-out fight for a genuine writers’ organization, to go back on convictions honestly arrived at, and to invalidate three years’ work in the guild.”
After the academy ceremony, there was talk that Griffith, once again at the town’s center, might be hired to remake Way Down East, a picture he’d made in 1920; nothing came of it.
• • •
John Ford didn’t like producers. They were to stay off his set while he was shooting a picture.
A producer had once told Ford in the midst of production that he was behind schedule; Ford ripped out ten pages from the script. “Now we are three days ahead of schedule,” he said and never shot the sequences.
Producers, to Ford, had one purpose: to deal with money. Ford had only contempt for money and refused to walk around with it.
“They’ve got to turn over picture-making into the hands that know it,” Ford said. “Combination of author and director running the works: that’s the ideal.”
“Ford was always a cop hater,” said Robert Parrish, Ford’s cutter, “by religion, by belief. He had a big streak of contempt for any kind of authority, any kind of paternal influence on him—all the producers, all the money—they were the enemy.”
When Cliff Reid, associate producer on The Plough and the Stars, went to the set to tell Ford how great the previous day’s rushes were, the director said that there must be something wrong if Reid liked them and spent the next two days reshooting the scenes at an additional cost of $25,000.
• • •
John Ford was almost blind and wore dark prescription glasses that prevented his eyes from being seen. He constantly chewed and sucked on a corner of his handkerchief. He pulled his slouch felt hat down all the way around. He wore a sport coat over a sweater and shirt without a tie, with the collar of the coat turned up—a studied form of casual negligence.
Barbara didn’t get along with Ford. She thought he was putting on an act.
Ford had a good luck shirt and wore it always.
“Why don’t you have it laundered once in a while. You smell of perspiration,” said Barbara.
“That’s part of my good luck,” he said.
“You have your good luck at home. Take it home with you,” she said.
For the part of Nora Clitheroe, Barbara was paid $5,312.50 per week—more than twice what Ginger Rogers, the third most popular actress in America, was making. Barbara was getting $42,500 for the picture with an eight-week guarantee; Ford, $63,580. The Plough and the Stars was budgeted at $483,000.
Shooting on the ten-week production started in early July; Barbara began three days later.
Ford had the actors work without makeup; he wanted them to look human.
For authenticity in Plough, Ford used photographs of the city taken on the day of the uprising as well as news photographs from London’s Daily Mirror and The Illustrated London News taken during that Easter week. Van Nest Polglase oversaw the design of the interior and exterior sets of the post office, St. Stephen’s Green, and the narrow cobbled streets that led from it to the pubs, the tobacco shop, and the sets re-creating the Dublin tenements.
Barbara worked relentlessly to perfect her accent. One night in the projection room, one of the producers decided that somebody in the picture had to be understood. The Abbey Players couldn’t change their dialect. Barbara was chosen, but the early sequences in which she used a heavy brogue were never reshot.
Barbara and Preston worked well together. Neither could work if spoken to before the shooting of a scene. If Barbara, who knew everyone else’s lines as well as her own, prompted Foster at a slipped line, he would become frantic and stop and get the line himself.
Bonita Granville played Mollser Gogan, the consumptive girl whose death is the Clitheroes’ salvation as Jack seeks refuge, in the midst of her wake, from the British soldiers searching for him and Nora hides his rifle, Sam Browne belt, and hat in Mollser’s pine coffin.
Granville, whose father, Bernard “Bunny” Granville, had been a Broadway musical star before working in pictures and whose mother was a dancer on the stage, thought Ford “casual” as a director; he didn’t try to “form a performance” with her. William Wyler had just directed the twelve-year-old in These Three and was meticulous with her about every line, every look, every thought. Ford was more interested in “the feel, the mood; he taught you about mood,” she said. “He would never try to change a line or tell you anything that you should do specifically.” Ford gave Granville “almost no direction. The one or two things that he would tell you,” she said, “would be impressive. When he said something, he knew what he wanted. Mr. Ford let me start out as a child and kind of ramble and feel it. Then he would bring it into shape.”
Barbara insisted on doing her own stunts. Foster, in one scene, throws her to the ground when she tries to prevent him from going off to fight. Ford said, “We’ll show him throwing you off and then we’ll cut to you lying on the street.”
“We’ll do no such thing,” Barbara said. “We’ll show the whole action.”
Barbara may have had only a few lines, but Nora Clitheroe was a strenuous part; the emotion, the movement, the symbolism of her character, were more demanding than if there had been pages of dialogue. The other characters talked, but Barbara dominated. It was impossible for her to “walk through” the part.
Ford saw Nora Clitheroe as life affirming; life-giving but suffering, carrying the burden of war and death; holding the man back from a cause larger than any one man or woman or love—the fight for freedom. It is the woman who selfishly fights for the life of the man she loves and fights off madness as she awaits his return; it is she, in the play, who will mourn for his martyred death (in the Nichols script Jack Clitheroe escapes death as Nora escapes the madness that would have come in the wake of his useless dying; “Aye, you’ll do the fighting,” Nora says to Jack, “but the women will do the weeping”).
Ford’s cameraman, Joseph August, photographed Barbara in one scene as a Madonna figure—shrouded in mourning shawl—a Byzantine icon against an orb of golden light.
Ford’s notion of how the picture was to look dominated every scene. With The Informer, he created a dreamlike world. With Mary of Scotland, darkness and shadow show the danger and treachery of Mary’s court, the primitive harshness of her Scotland, and the inevitability of her destiny, shaped by her own willfulness and the forces of history.
Dudley Nichols, who wrote the script for Mary of Scotland from the Maxwell Anderson play, said of Ford, “He had the true eye of the film-maker. His sight was not very good, but he had the surprising power of an inner vision.”
Darkness and shadow were central to Ford.
“I can take a thoroughly mediocre bit of acting,” said Ford, “and build points of shadow around a ray of strong light centered on the principals and finish with something plausible. You don’t compose a film on the set. You put a redesigned composition on film.”
Barbara, seated third from left. From The Plough and the Stars, 1936. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
Ford’s crew understood what he had in mind. “He didn’t want big camera movement [or] standard close-ups. [Ford] had a thing about the eyes,” said Robert Parrish, his cutter. “ ‘Look in people’s eyes, see what they’re telling you.’ ”
Ford wanted what was honest and real and simple. He went for the truth.
His main influence was Griffith. “I wouldn’t say we stole from him,” said Ford. “I’d say we copied from him outright. D.W. was the only one then who took the time for little details.”
Ford often worked with a silent camera—without a microphone—in order to be able to talk to the actors as he shot the scene. The first seven hundred feet of The Informer were silent. He believed that sound was not of primary importance to picture making. “I am a man of the silent cinema,” he said. “That’s when pictures and not words had to tell the story . . . Sound wasn’t the revolution most people imagine it was.”
Darryl Zanuck had produced The Prisoner of Shark Island in between Ford’s making The Informer and Mary of Scotland and thought the director “could get more drama into an ordinary interior or exterior long shot than any director . . . [Ford’s] placement of the camera almost had the effect of making even good dialogue unnecessary or secondary . . . He painted a picture—in movement, in action, in still shots.”
• • •
Mary of Scotland opened in New York midway through production of The Plough and the Stars. Mary of Scotland, which cost RKO $864,000—the studio’s most expensive production after Swing Time—received negative reviews; “a great treat for scholars but a bit boring for the ordinary picture audience,” said The Hollywood Reporter; Variety faulted the film’s “length and finish”; another critic summed up the picture as “a mass movement from one prison to another.”
Two of Barbara’s pictures opened soon after.
The Bride Walks Out opened in early July in New York at Radio City and in Los Angeles at the Pantages. “One of the merriest, most natural and human comedy romances,” said one critic; important, said another, “for sending Barbara Stanwyck further on a frolicsome road to the status of comedienne, a style of acting she shows increasing aptitude for since dropping the emotional drama which made her famous.”
His Brother’s Wife opened weeks later at Loew’s State and Grauman’s Chinese. On the picture’s first day, moviegoers were lined up at seven in the morning to see America’s No. 1 male draw (“Hold on to your hearts, girls”) make love to Barbara Stanwyck (“It’s Romantic Dynamite”). Early morning patrons waited on line to get into Grauman’s while the theater served them coffee and doughnuts. Bob and Barbara slipped into a preview showing. Sneak previews had taken on the excitement and devotion of religious meetings, and the unwritten law dictated attendance.
Outside Grauman’s several MGM publicity people circulated in the crowd and let it be known that Taylor and Stanwyck woul
d soon be leaving the theater. When Bob and Barbara emerged, police had to escort them through the swarms of fans.
Richard Watts referred to Bob as “the beautiful Mr. Robert Taylor, the loveliest screen hero of the season,” and the “characters, the most annoying and generally unpleasant of the season . . . Miss Stanwyck,” Watts said, “plays her role with her characteristic dull sincerity and Mr. Taylor never lets you forget his charm.”
“Overplotted; filled with hokum,” said The Hollywood Reporter, which called Taylor’s performance “nothing short of dynamite” and, together with Barbara, “a smash.” Jimmy Starr in the Evening Herald Examiner said, “Only the grand work of Taylor and Stanwyck, guided by that Van Dyke person, make [the picture] worth while.”
Despite the reviews, Taylor’s box-office draw was so strong audiences wanted to see anything in which he appeared. Universal reissued Bob’s second picture, There’s Always Tomorrow, which starred Frank Morgan and Binnie Barnes and in which Bob had only a small role.
• • •
Zeppo Marx arranged for Barbara and his discovery Fred MacMurray to appear together in the Lux Radio Theatre presentation of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. Barbara had been under contract for eight years with the J. Walter Thompson Company for magazine advertisements for Lux soap (“Nine out of ten screen stars use Lux Toilet Soap”); this was her first radio broadcast for Lux Theatre.
The show had just moved to Hollywood from New York, where it had started two years before, broadcasting from Radio City, sponsored by Lever Brothers. In New York, it was made up weekly of adaptations of Broadway productions: Smilin’ Through, Berkeley Square, Counsellor-at-Law.
In Los Angeles the broadcast had its own theater—the Music Box on Hollywood Boulevard—with an audience capacity of just under a thousand people. Cecil B. DeMille had recently been chosen as the master of ceremonies over other possible hosts, among them George M. Cohan, D. W. Griffith, Walter Huston, and Frank Morgan.
Danny Danker, vice president of Thompson’s West Coast operations, was in charge of borrowing stars from the studios and worked out the details of Barbara’s appearance with RKO and MacMurray’s with Paramount. MacMurray, at twenty-eight, was starring in Champagne Waltz, his eleventh picture in two years.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 60
