by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
As Gay slogged through the seemingly endless rewrites, there were “streams of memorandums flowing” between Blaustein, studio chief Sol Siegel, and a determined but continually undermined Minnelli. Every aspect of the production, from the epic to the minute, was hashed over. Film historian George Feltenstein once digested the 6,000 or so pages contained in the studio files on The Four Horsemen and discovered that the trouble had started at the top and trickled down: “Sol Siegel, whom Minnelli had the great success with on Some Came Running, had transitioned from being an outside producer to head of production… . Siegel was really the one who was forcing all of these changes on Minnelli. There are letters from Vincente, in which he is begging and pleading for them not to do this and not to do that. But they wouldn’t listen.”9
Brian Avery (best remembered for his role as Dustin Hoffman’s rival in The Graduate), played Paul Lukas’s son in Four Horsemen. Avery recalled that Vincente made an indelible impression from the very first casting call:
Mr. Minnelli wore these long-sleeved yellow cashmere sweaters and he had a twitch. Sometimes the sides of his cheeks would kind of twitch when he talked and he generally had a cigarette. He said to me, “What kind of parts do you specialize in?” And I said, “Sons.” So, he cast me and it was an extraordinarily wonderful experience. I got to spend five weeks on what was then and may still be the largest soundstage in the world, which was Stage 15 at MGM.10
Apocalypse Now: Ingrid Thulin, Minnelli, and Glenn Ford on location for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1961. Pushed to the breaking point by her director, Thulin walked off the set. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
On that stage, Avery and most of the principal players appeared in a dramatically charged dining-room sequence in which Heinrich von Hartrott (Karl Boehm) reveals that he is a Nazi and the major conflicts of World War II are metaphorically played out as domestic drama. Although Avery was befriended by several of his veteran costars, his on-set experiences also included the inevitable dose of self-absorbed star behavior. “He was a piece of work,” Avery says of leading man Glenn Ford:
Glenn had read his own publicity, I guess. He was not friendly. The entire time I worked on the film—those five or six weeks—and sat across the table from him all day long, he never once greeted me or said, “Hello” or “Goodbye” or acknowledged my existence. Meanwhile, Charles Boyer is treating me like a son, I’m going to lunch with Lee J. Cobb all the time, … but Glenn Ford would sit and make jokes with Yvette Mimieux about some dwarf doing each of them under the table.11
In sharp contrast, Avery found his director a thoroughgoing professional: “Mr. Minnelli ran the set very well. He was attentive. He was always there if you needed to speak to him about something. He was very interested in the women. I remember when Ingrid Thulin was on the set and he was very, very present to her.”12 Some might say omnipresent.
In late December, a crisis emerged when Ingrid Thulin, perilously close to having a nervous breakdown, walked off the set. Thulin was the latest in a long line of actors who found it difficult to adjust to Vincente’s unconventional and often quite literal hands-on approach. In a letter to Thulin’s agent, Paul Kohner, the actress’s husband, Harry Schein, detailed her miseries—not the least of which was a strained relationship with her director:
In Sweden, when a director shows an actor how to do a scene, how to act, one feels that either the director or the actor is an amateur. Since Ingrid not only likes Minnelli as a person but also admires his films and certainly knows that he is no amateur, she is now convinced that he considers her to be an amateur. She feels like a puppet or marionette instead of like the professional actress she is… . Ingrid has told me that Minnelli often wants her to look at him while he is showing her how to move, look, stand. She is then so occupied in studying his plastic and mimic movements that she loses not only her memory but also her concept of the scene… . Even if working conditions will be improved, I doubt that she will change her mind about her future activities in Hollywood.13
On December 31, 1960 (the same day that Thulin’s husband wrote his letter), Minnelli was focused on someone other than his beleaguered leading lady. At the Palm Springs home of Joan Cohn (widow of Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn), a justice of the peace married Vincente and Denise Giganti in a decidedly informal, off-the-cuff ceremony that seemed to recall the rushed nuptials in The Clock. Laurence Harvey, who had been considered for Ford’s Four Horsemen role, served as an attendant.
Vincente and the third Mrs. Minnelli, the colorful Denise Giganti. Rex Reed dubbed her “Queen of Group A,” the grand empress of Hollywood’s power elite. Those less enamored of the lady referred to her as “Denise, Inc.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
After returning to Beverly Hills with his charismatic third wife in tow, Vincente resumed work on The Four Horsemen. The only element of the film that received as much attention from Minnelli as Ingrid Thulin were the four horsemen themselves. At several points throughout the film, Tony Duquette’s andiron statues, representing Conquest, War, Pestilence, and Death, come to life, and the figures can be glimpsed galloping through an apocalyptic void. “All he worried about were the horses,” recalls Hank Moonjean, who served as the first assistant director in Paris. “It must have been at least five days to shoot that, maybe even longer, and it was so difficult. And the poor horses—we thought they were going to die. Extremely difficult. I don’t think any of that could ever be repeated.”14
Following a preview in October 1961, substantial changes were made to the picture. “There was so much cutting and reshooting, they had to rerecord the entire score,” says George Feltenstein. Alex North’s underscoring was tossed and replaced with some stunning new music by André Previn. It was also decided that Ingrid Thulin’s soft-spoken delivery and tenuous command of English were causing many of her lines to be lost. The orders came down that the actress would be dubbed, and her voice would be supplied by none other than Angela Lansbury. As Brian Avery remembered, “It was so remarkable that you had a Swede playing a French woman who is dubbed by an Englishwoman.”15
John Gay believes that studio politics also played a part in the dubbing. “I never had any problems with Ingrid Thulin’s voice,” Gay says. “Of all the troubles we had going on, I thought Ingrid Thulin was wonderful. She was a terrific actress. I think it was MGM—the big wigs—I don’t think they could understand her.”16 In fixating on The Four Horsemen’s auditory alterations, MGM seemed to be missing the big picture. For starters, Glenn Ford and Ingrid Thulin appeared to be mere acquaintances throughout the film instead of lovers.
“The only memory I have—without going into anything that is just completely unkind—is my father saying that there was absolutely no chemistry between Glenn Ford and Ingrid Thulin,” says Paul Henreid’s daughter, Monika. “There are people who are on fire as lovers and you get what they call ‘movie magic,’ and there are people who play opposite each other and absolutely nothing happens. I think this is just a case where absolutely nothing happened.”17
Nevertheless, MGM executives seemed to be looking at a completely different movie. “You could have heard a pin drop during the entire showing,” Metro executive Bob Mochrie reported to Vincente after a preview screening in late December. “I’m sure the public will be equally impressed and the word of mouth will be terrific. Pictures like this don’t come very often and I would like you to know that we will do all in our power to properly launch this great attraction.”18 Mochrie was no prophet.
When it was all over—the 250,000 tons of military equipment, the 15,000 extras, the disembodied voice of Angela Lansbury—this $7 million “great attraction” just seemed to sit there on the screen. In his review for the New York Herald Tribune, Paul V. Beckley summed up the opinions of many when he wrote:
Warfare here is tidier than it ought to be, considering the basic point of the film. The prevailing tone is of genteel civility, sleek coiffures, delicately chosen furnishings… . Ingrid Thulin, who will be remembered as on
e of Ingmar Bergman’s group, here is over-powdered, over-cosmeticized to the virtual exclusion of the vivid charm she possessed in the Bergman pictures… . I suspect any moviegoer could suggest a dozen films that in recent years have made the basic point this film undertakes but made it urgently, passionately and with deep conviction. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse fails precisely on this score.19
“The whole thing is a mess,” says George Feltenstein. “But it didn’t have to be. Had Vincente been able to make the movie he wanted, I think it would have turned out beautifully.”20
31
Don’t Blame Me
THE DECREE CAME DOWN from MGM’s new studio chief, Joseph Vogel: “MGM is now in the business of producing family pictures.” As the director of a Roman bacchanal that featured infidelity, attempted suicide, and an orgy, Minnelli had good to reason to be worried. It was unlikely that Two Weeks in Another Town would qualify as Vogel’s idea of wholesome family entertainment. In fact, Minnelli’s movie paled only in comparison to one other holdover from the studio’s previous administration: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, in which James Mason harbors an intense erotic obsession with teenager Sue Lyon. While Disney had ushered in the ’60s with Pollyanna and The Parent Trap, the MGM lion was now roaring over the likes of Boys’ Night Out, in which four men (three of them married) maintain a “bachelor pad” that comes complete with Kim Novak—though even that scenario seemed tame compared to Minnelli’s excursion into hedonistic excess.
Spurred on by the international success of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which featured egoistic moviemakers squabbling against Roman backdrops, MGM’s former regime had pounced on a property with a similar setting and attendant freewheeling sexuality: Irwin Shaw’s coolly received 1960 novel, Two Weeks in Another Town. In Shaw’s novel, Jack Andrus—a physically and emotionally scarred NATO adviser—is summoned overseas to supervise the dubbing on a troubled movie that his mentor, Maurice Kruger, is directing in Rome. Once there, Andrus finds himself in the director’s chair, and his on-set battles are matched by his clashes with his capricious ex-wife, Carlotta.
After a self-imposed, three-year hiatus, John Houseman was once again producing pictures for MGM, and Two Weeks in Another Town seemed like the perfect project to welcome him back. Despite their skirmishes on The Cobweb and Lust for Life, Minnelli was Houseman’s first and only choice as director. Two Weeks (which would be shot partially on location in Rome) would reunite Vincente not only with Houseman but also with leading man Kirk Douglas,au screenwriter Charles Schnee, and composer David Raksin. With so much of the Bad and the Beautiful team reassembled, comparisons between that film and Two Weeks in Another Town were inevitable. In fact, it often seemed like the earlier picture was haunting this latest effort, which was not so much a sequel as a more oregano-flavored remake.
Charles Schnee had worked wonders in terms of fleshing out George Bradshaw’s Tribute to a Bad Man and transforming it into The Bad and the Beautiful. But adapting Irwin Shaw’s solemn prose would prove to be more problematic. In early script conferences, it was decided that many of Shaw’s plot elements would be altered or streamlined for dramatic effect. It was Metro’s head of production Sol Siegel who suggested that audiences should be introduced to a Jack Andrus who has hit rock bottom—recovering from a nervous breakdown in a mental institution. This would prove to be one of the few good ideas a studio executive would have regarding Two Weeks in Another Town.
After reviewing an initial draft of the script, Motion Picture Production Code supervisor Geoffrey Shurlock thought Schnee had remained far too faithful to Shaw’s text: “The portrayal of free and easy sexual intercourse is so graphically depicted herein that any pretense of presenting it in a moral light would appear to be almost ludicrous,” he wrote.1 And during the Vogel regime, a sequence in which Jack Andrus was the headliner at an orgy would have been about as welcome as a stripper at a church social. Despite the fact that it had taken Schnee almost a year to knock out a treatment and two full drafts of Two Weeks in Another Town, he was asked to go back and reshape some of the material with an eye toward refashioning hard-core smut into soft-core smut.
Metro’s front office believed that the superlative cast that was assembled might distract the eagle-eyed censors from the plot’s tawdrier elements. In addition to Kirk Douglas, Two Weeks would feature Edward G. Robinson, Oscar-winner Claire Trevor, Cyd Charisse, and the eternally poised George Hamilton, who immediately felt ill at ease as the picture’s resident bad ass, Davie Drew.
“The character I was playing was a real bad boy—a cross between James Dean and maybe Warren Beatty,” says Hamilton:
I got the role because of Minnelli, but it wasn’t really me and it wasn’t something that I was terribly comfortable playing. But all they wanted me to do was come to Rome and shoot … though they were constantly getting behind. So, they just gave me a Ferrari and a lot of per diem, and I drove around Rome till three or four in the morning because we were doing night shooting and they never called me. They just had me on stand-by all night. So, I didn’t get to see much of the shooting in Rome. I was just there and living the life of what was going on … the real La Dolce Vita.
It was an interesting period because it was Elizabeth Taylor and Cleopatra and that whole era. So, I was right in the middle of all of that. But as far as filmmaking goes, I think the picture that Kirk had done earlier with Minnelli [The Bad and the Beautiful] was much more on the money than this. [Two Weeks] was this kind of almost Fellini-esque movie. And it really wasn’t grounded in reality. It wasn’t even grounded in movie reality. It was almost like a comment on another era and another time, and that time happened to be La Dolce Vita. But it really didn’t ring true—our movie. It seemed to me very phony as a film. It had all of that back projection going on… . When you have those techniques and the times were changing, all of a sudden, it looked very old-fashioned to me… .
So, there we were in Rome, but we were still very much Hollywood at the same time. I never felt as though we were shooting scenes about something real.2
Back projection aside, Minnelli’s biggest challenge on Two Weeks appears to have been competing with himself. For the specter of The Bad and the Beautiful hovers over the picture. At one point, Minnelli goes full tilt self-reflexive: Kirk Douglas’s Jack Andrus screens clips of Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful. Later, in a dramatically charged sequence, Jack’s reckless driving—with a hysterical Carlotta along for the ride—seems intent on recapturing the effect of Lana Turner’s automotive meltdown. And even composer David Raksin can’t refrain from appropriating portions of his haunting Bad and the Beautiful score for Two Weeks.
“They were doing this sort of, kind of like a sequel to The Bad and the Beautiful. Could they do it twice? That was sort of the idea,” remembers actress Peggy Moffit:
Kirk Douglas in search of a little La Dolce Vita in Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town. The film would find favor with the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd and a young film critic named Peter Bogdanovich, who said that Minnelli’s Roman bacchanal was “surely the ballsiest, most vibrant picture he has signed.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
There was a sequence in Two Weeks that was supposed to be a very stylish orgy in Rome. I was friends with John Houseman and he said, “I want you to meet Vincente Minnelli about this part. So I did and was cast. It was a glorified-dress extra kind of thing… . It turned out to be a totally soporific scene that does not come off at all. When I look at Vincente’s other movies, I’m impressed with how wonderfully staged and thought out they were, but my impression was that he had totally run dry on this one—though everybody was absolutely mesmerized by him and revered him, from wardrobe and make-up to the grips and gaffers. It was like “his holiness.” They would do whatever he asked… .
I remember Minnelli staring at the cocktail table where Leslie Uggams was sitting and he would twitch away and say nothing. We would be standing there for hours and then he would finally say something to a set decorator
and it would be about something he didn’t like—like the roses on the coffee table. He wanted gladiolas. And so, somebody would go scurrying all over the MGM lot to try and find a bunch of fake gladiolas… . I walked away thinking, “He’s fooled everybody … he’s got no talent whatsoever.”
Well, of course, that’s absurd. He had great talent. I think he did great things, but Two Weeks was utterly deadly. And so, this idea of debauchery and wild car chases and passion and all of that certainly did not permeate the film—or the set, for that matter. Nobody lit anybody’s fire on that one. Trust me.3
Whatever sparks may have existed in Minnelli’s original cut of Two Weeks in Another Town were snuffed out by Joseph Vogel after he screened the film and ordered a drastic re-edit. Considerable cuts were made without consulting either Houseman or Minnelli. After Houseman fired off an angry letter to MGM’s legal department, the producer was allowed to reshape the film—but he was only allowed to use Vogel-approved footage. Understandably, Minnelli was outraged that Two Weeks had been wrested away from him. In its final form, the story was missing so much meat that the result is not so much a complete movie but 107 minutes of rushes.
“The picture should have been better than it was,” Cyd Charisse reflected years later. “When I finally saw it, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the story—it was so disconnected—and I’d been in it.”4 The reckless, pre-release editing pared away not only wholesale chunks of the narrative but revealing bits of character. In the studio-sanctioned version, Charisse’s Carlotta comes off as a soulless, self-absorbed virago. In Minnelli’s version, the character had more shading. “Last time I counted, I had over a thousand dresses,” Carlotta admits in a deleted sequence. “More than four hundred suits. Including the first suit I ever owned—a hound’s tooth gabardine I bought in Macy’s basement for nineteen ninety-five. It’s a trait of mine. I can’t stand to give up anything I’ve ever owned.” With the back story removed, Carlotta’s clinging to her ex-husband seems inexplicable and odd—like so much of the film in its truncated form.
