On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  The facts, of course, are quite different. If Hornblow was indeed feeling generous toward his writing team, it was because none of the treatments he’d bought or commissioned met his satisfaction. First there was a complete script, written by John Szekely and Benjamin Glazer, dated November 1939; next came a treatment by Jacques Théry and Ketti Frings in early March. This was followed later in March by another treatment, this time by Frings on her own. Szekely and Glazer turned in another draft of their script on the same day. Soon thereafter, Hornblow handed the project to Wilder and Brackett, who submitted their first draft on June 18 and continued to work on revisions through the first week of August. The script they wrote for Arise, My Love is assuredly their own—there are too many Billy-isms for it to be otherwise—but it’s obvious that the writers read the earlier drafts they had at their disposal, since they transferred the two central characters and several key incidents more or less directly.

  Still, Arise, My Love is thoroughly suffused with Billy Wilder’s tough but romantic sensibility, not to mention Charles Brackett’s literary rhythms. While playing casino with a priest in the hours before his death, Tom (Ray Milland) tells the padre of his choice of last words: “I sort of wavered between ‘Death to Tyrants’ or ‘Long Live Liberty!’ But I finally decided to say it with music. What do you think of this: (singing) ‘Lookie lookie lookie, here’s goes Cookie …’” “Isn’t there anything I can do for you?” the priest inquires. “Yeah, gimme some better cards.”

  Pardoned after his wife begs the Fascist prison warden for clemency, Tom is mystified. He has no wife. When he arrives in the governor’s office, he sees the woman who’s saving him—it’s Claudette Colbert, wearing a fabulous hat. His passport is produced. The governor reads: “It says here, ‘Thomas Fuller Martin, born June 22, 1906.’ (Later, the wiseacre card player modifies it further to “Thomas Fuller Mullarkey.”) Colbert, who turns out to be a lady reporter, finally pulls him out of the Fascist’s office, saying, “Oh come now, Tom—thank the governor for everything and tell him you’ve had a lovely time.” They escape by hijacking a plane. Tom hates her name—Augusta. It’s “like talking to a battleship” he remarks. “They call me ‘Gusto,’” she explains. “For years I’ve had a column—’In Paris with Gusto.’” Colbert delivers this line with a certain irony, which it well deserves. (Of the many improvements Brackett and Wilder made in this screenplay, naming the central female character “Gusto” may have been the least astute.)

  Brackett and Wilder spiced up the dialogue considerably, much to the consternation of the censors. Tom tells Gusto about his previous relationships: “Take Hazel, for instance. Hazel was the air hostess on a commercial liner I was flying from Fort Worth to New Orleans. One night in April, very bad flying weather, no passengers, just Hazel and I. That’s how I lost my commercial license.” The Hays Office flagged it as offensive, but it stayed in the film anyway. When Tom comes on to Gusto in the airplane, the writers had her express her skepticism about the depth of his feelings toward her by giving her the line, “After ten months in jail, anything would be your type—a St. Bernard.” The Hays Office flagged this one as well, but it, too, remained in the film.

  Wilder and Brackett also rewrote the scene in which the protagonist talks to his two friends so that Tom is seen taking a bath while conversing with his pals—two fresh-faced, all-American guys he’s come to Europe with. Leisen filmed the scene precisely as written, and the Hays Office was especially offended. Joseph Breen, the earnest censor, wrote a memo to Hays himself expressing his outrage: “There is a scene in this picture which, in our judgement, is a new low in purported screen entertainment.” First, according to Breen, came “shock number 1”—one of three men having this bathroom conversation appears to be seated on the toilet. (In fact, he’s on a washstand.) “Shock number 2” came when Ray Milland was seen shaving in the tub, “and the camera angles are pitched in such a way as to come as near as possible to the exposure of Mr. Milland’s sex organs.” Breen’s third shock occurred when Milland prepared to stand up in the bathtub a second or two before Leisen cut away from him. Breen minced no words in expressing his revulsion: “This whole sequence and, more especially, the scenes of Milland in the bathtub, constitute in our judgement the most shocking exhibition of consummate bad taste which we have ever seen on the motion picture screen.”

  Arise, My Love’s editor, Doane Harrison, may have reedited this sequence very slightly—Milland makes no move to stand up naked in the release print—but all the other elements that horrified Joseph Breen remained on-screen. Tom’s friends, Pink and Shep, spend a lot of time discussing Shep’s mother’s rabbit farm in New Jersey, and how she’ll send him a return ticket to the States “if the rabbits’ll only cooperate fast enough.” The rabbit business stayed in the film. Left strangely unremarked upon by the Hays Office, however, was Pink’s name. Calling a Spanish Republican mercenary “Pink” is one thing; making him the protagonist’s likable best friend is something else again. Still, “Pink” sailed through the Hays Office without remark.

  Brackett and Wilder kept Szekely and Glazer’s idea of putting the two leading characters on a transatlantic liner and having the liner be blown up by a Nazi submarine. They were all aided by recent history, since the sinking of the British ship Athenia on September 3, 1939, was the first act of violence between Germany and Britain. But Brackett and Wilder didn’t kill their characters, at least not literally. In a more complex character development, they have them commit a sort of symbolic suicide by tossing champagne glasses into the water moments before the torpedo hits. The two characters are leaving Europe and their professional lives, and, consequently, both Tom and Gusto lose sight of themselves. Tom is an energetic mercenary, Gusto is a driven journalist, but they have decided to return to America and settle down together as a sedate married couple. Facing four glasses of a strange champagne-and-crème-de-menthe cocktail, Tom proposes two toasts—the first to “those two dizzy fools with their outsized ideals,” the second to Gusto, the career woman. They drink and throw the glasses overboard. Then Gusto bids herself good-bye. She proposes a toast to Tom; they drink and toss these glasses overboard as well: “Good-bye, Tom Martin, crusader.” It’s then that the torpedo hits. But Wilder and Brackett don’t drown them; instead, they provide a more moral as well as morale-boosting conclusion. These independent spirits need to retrieve their own lost natures before they can ever hope to settle down with each other successfully as a couple.

  Wilder and Brackett end their script at the French surrender in the forest at Compiègne. Hornblow, who was most interested in keeping the film current, encouraged his writers to work each day’s war news into the script. The armistice occurred on June 22, 1940. Arise, My Love began filming on June 24. Gusto and the other war correspondents sit dejectedly after receiving their instructions from the Nazi officers. Faced with the humiliating calamity of France surrendering to Germany at the very spot where World War I had ended, one of the reporters proposes a Billy solution: “Well I don’t suppose anyone feels like a rubber of bridge?” Gusto, in no mood for cards, goes for a walk in the woods by herself. She speaks to Tom in her thoughts, and he responds: he’s found her, he’s really there, alive. The film concludes with Gusto’s rousing speech: “Remember your prayer. This time we have to say it to America: Arise, my love; arise, be strong! So you can stand up straight and say to anyone under God’s heaven, ‘All right—whose way of life shall it be? Yours or ours?’”

  Claudette Colbert claimed, years later, that Gusto Nash was her favorite role. Less well known than the roles she played in It Happened One Night, Midnight, or Cleopatra, Gusto, however contrived her name may be, is nonetheless one of the most well-rounded female roles Wilder ever wrote. She’s got all of the intelligence and wit of Eve Peabody in Midnight, but she also has an active, successful career. Moreover, both Tom and Gusto share Wilder’s own difficulty balancing their personal and professional lives. Not only do they each need, constitutionally, to work in order
to remain sane, but they’re both troubled by a sense of incompleteness for which no amount of work can compensate. Only in the Compiègne woods, with Hitler arranging the subjugation of the French nation barely offscreen, can they find any kind of peace of mind with themselves and with each other.

  Like almost everything Wilder and Brackett wrote, Arise, My Love took a distinctly ironic stance toward politics, careers, and romance. But the final irony of Arise, My Love occurred when the Academy Awards were announced. Arise, My Love won an Oscar for its fine writing—not the Best Screenplay award (Brackett and Wilder weren’t even nominated), but the award for Best Original Story. Benjamin Glazer accepted. Szekely’s name did not appear in the roster of winners and nominees, his place having been taken by the pseudonymous “John Toldy.” As Glazer noted in his acceptance speech, his writing partner had returned to Europe—Szekely was Hungarian—and stood the risk of facing severe repercussions for having (supposedly) written this anti-Nazi story.

  Billy, meanwhile, was putting his energies into two passions and a moral obligation. He continued writing throughout 1940—two other films were on the drawing boards at Paramount. And, with his ever-increasing writing income, Wilder bought some important works of art: a Picasso drawing, for which he paid $900; Henry Moore’s Recumbent Figure, a cast-lead sculpture Wilder purchased through the émigré art dealer Curt Valentin in New York; and, through Ludwig Charell’s gallery (also in New York), Miró’s Le fermier et son épouse, a gouache on board. Wilder also stepped up his involvement in the refugee crisis. According to Marlene Dietrich, Wilder, Lubitsch, and Dietrich formed the Hollywood Committee, the purpose of which was to gather money and send it to a contact in Switzerland, code-named “Engel,” who used it to liberate people from Nazi detention camps and bring them to the United States. One of those helped by the Hollywood Committee’s intervention was the composer Robert Katscher, whose song “Madonna” had so impressed Paul Whiteman. Unfortunately, Katscher was terribly ill at the time of his liberation and died shortly thereafter. Some of those who did manage to escape, thanks in part to the Hollywood Committee, were men deployed to load new prisoners onto train cars near the Swiss border. But as Dietrich notes, there were fewer and fewer escapees as the war in Europe progressed.

  Those refugees who involved themselves in such efforts as the Hollywood Committee paid a price for their good deeds—surveillance, FBI files, and an end to their privacy. J. Edgar Hoover, who tended to see all foreigners as potential spies, had become especially interested in investigating anyone who had emigrated from Germany or Austria. According to Alexander Stephan, who has been researching the files Hoover kept on the refugees, FBI agents secretly found their way into the émigrés’ houses and apartments, where they took pictures and made drawings of the mundane details of these people’s lives. Secret mailboxes were installed, messages were sent in code, reports were written in invisible ink…. Hoover’s agents went undercover to the meetings of American rescue committees, not to mention the Hollywood parties these committee members attended. There they recruited informants from among the crowd. Refugees thus reported on fellow refugees, providing not only information on their politics but details about their personal lives as well. (To date, Professor Stephan has found nothing in the FBI files pertaining specifically to Billy Wilder. It’s hard to imagine, however, that Wilder was singularly excluded from the surveillance the United States brought to bear on prominent émigré filmmakers at the time.)

  The FBI was not the only government agency interested in the Hollywood émigrés. In the summer of 1939, Congressman Martin Dies launched his first salvo in what would eventually become a full-scale war on Hollywood leftists. Dies singled out three films that, to him, represented communism’s infiltration of the American film industry: Fury, Juarez, and Blockade. The first was directed by Fritz Lang, the others by William Dieterle; both directors were refugees from the Nazis. The response from Hollywood’s establishment was swift. Leland Hayward, for instance, convinced his client Greta Garbo to decline the starring role in a drama about the Resistance.

  Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle, and Wilder’s own agent, Paul Kohner, were already intimately involved in the refugee efforts with their European Film Fund, through which Frank and Dieterle brought out the last batch of refugee writers to leave Marseilles and Lisbon in 1940 and 1941. Kohner used his studio connections on their behalf, approaching Jack Warner and L. B. Mayer, “playing on their Jewish loyalties.” As a result, Heinrich Mann, Alfred Döblin, Leonhard Frank, and Walter Mehring among others found themselves whisked from the Pyrenees to Los Angeles in a matter of days with Hollywood jobs practically waiting for them.

  For once, Tinseltown found itself distracted by something other than box office receipts and its own gossip. Each of the studios had a war picture or two in the works. Warner Bros. had International Squadron and a World War I combat film called The Fighting 69th; Columbia had Escape to Glory; Fox had Four Sons and A Yank in the R.A.F.; United Artists had Foreign Correspondent; even glossy MGM had Thunder Afloat. Paramount was developing a film about the Nazi takeover of Poland. It was called Polonaise, and it was going to be written by Brackett and Wilder, who were to start work on the script in the summer of 1940, after finishing Arise, My Love. Polonaise would be the story of a young Notre Dame football star, to be played by William Holden, who attempts to rescue his Polish mother (or possibly his grandmother, since she was to be played by Maria Ouspenskaya) after the Nazi invasion and bring her to the United States. But Polonaise never got very far. The film was postponed when William Holden decided to do a western, Arizona, for Columbia instead. Brackett and Wilder became increasingly involved with Arise, My Love, and in early- to mid-July 1940, Polonaise was canceled completely.

  In August 1940, Wilder talked with Paul Kohner about another idea—a Bob Hope comedy, something to do with diamonds. Kohner’s client William Wyler was interested in the idea, Kohner told Billy—“even with Hope”—but only if Wilder and Brackett wrote the script. But Wilder, then vacationing in Crystal Bay, Nevada, wasn’t interested. With no Polonaise and no Bob Hope comedy, Brackett and Wilder were free to write a film about a shifty, smooth-talking refugee forced to wait on the other side of the Mexican border for the United States to let him in.

  In the writing of Hold Back the Dawn, Wilder obviously drew on his own experiences in Mexicali, but the original idea wasn’t his. Paramount bought the story from Ketti Frings in 1939. In October 1940, a few weeks before Wilder and Brackett set to work developing and revising Frings’s treatment, Louella Parsons reported on the film’s genesis in her syndicated column:

  Just before Paulette Goddard caught the boat for New York, via the Panama Canal, she received word from her alma mater, Paramount, that should cheer the heart of any gal. None other than Monsignor [sic] Charles Boyer, the popular and romantic French actor, will be her costar in Hold Back the Dawn. Interesting about the story Hold Back the Dawn, written by Katherine Hartley Frings, former fan magazine writer, that it tells the true experiences of her husband in a refugee camp in Mexico where aliens are detained waiting for a quota number to come into the United States.

  Parsons was right. Ketti Frings was an ambitious young fanzine writer who fell in love with, and married, an Austrian lightweight boxing champ and ski instructor, Kurt Frings, in 1938. Since then, however, she had graduated into scriptwriting at Paramount. It was Ketti Frings, after all, who had written two treatments for Arise, My Love before the project was handed to Brackett and Wilder. Frings called her treatment “Memo to a Movie Producer.” Brackett and Wilder later claimed they hadn’t bothered to read Frings’s novel when they wrote the screenplay, but then, of course, they didn’t have to, since they worked closely from the treatment.

  Kurt Frings, meanwhile, was attracting a lot of attention, some of which was not very flattering. In April 1940, still stuck in Tijuana after two years, Frings took his case to Congress. He was not alone. The Congressional Record is littered with similar cases, all of which att
est to the tremendous difficulties and harsh bureaucratic obstacles refugees faced in their efforts to gain asylum in America. At first, Frings appeared to be headed for success. The Senate Committee on Immigration recommended that he be admitted to the States, and the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization drew the same conclusion, but President Roosevelt vetoed the bill on June 19, 1940, citing evidence of Frings’s moral turpitude.

  An official from the narcotics division of the Treasury Department became alarmed at Louella Parsons’s announcement of Hold Back the Dawn and wrote a terse letter to the Motion Picture Distributors and Producers’ New York office: “The husband referred to is one Kurt Frings, who is a notorious international character.… In the best interest of the public, a picture on such a basis may do more harm than good. Will you please let me know if your people are in a position to cooperate in this matter?”

  A small battle erupted between the Treasury Department and Paramount Pictures, and Paramount won. The film was made. Kurt Frings got into the United States and became a successful Hollywood agent. Ketti Frings went on to enjoy a productive career as a novelist, playwright, and producer; her 1958 Broadway adaptation of Look Homeward, Angel earned her a Pulitzer Prize. Brackett and Wilder’s screenplay for Hold Back the Dawn turned out to be a significant improvement on the original material, and Leisen’s direction was polished enough to make the film one of his best.