by Mark Harris
With Europe still fresh in his experience, Huston had a keen interest in the brewing war and its political roots, and soon after Jezebel, the studio gave him a writing assignment that would fuel that passion and consume him for a year: Juárez, an expensive, overscaled nineteenth-century historical drama about the emperor Maximilian, installed by France as Mexico’s monarch, his mad wife Carlotta, and Benito Juárez, the country’s president. Huston would work with two other writers, Wolfgang Reinhardt and Aeneas MacKenzie, and all three men shared Reinhardt’s vision that “the dialogue, as far as it is political and ideological, must consist of phrases from today’s newspapers; every child must be able to recognize that Napoleon in his Mexican intervention is none other than Mussolini plus Hitler in their Spanish adventure.”
Huston was enthralled by the lengthy process and the three-way writing effort, which he said was “by way of being dialectic” given Reinhardt’s historical knowledge of Europe, MacKenzie’s love of “the monarchical system,” and his own status as “a Jeffersonian Democrat espousing ideas similar to those of Benito Juárez.” And he knew the film was lucky to have a home at Warners, the first studio that seemed willing to champion a strong anti-Hitler allegory. Throughout 1938, as Germany’s threat to Czechoslovakia became ever greater, the three writers redrafted their script to make the parallels even more explicit. At one point the screenplay ran to 230 pages, a blueprint for what would have been a four-hour movie. With each new draft, Huston in particular would embroider, adding lines like “Our task is to fight the tyrant . . . fight . . . fight . . . to keep the cause of democracy alive.”
It’s not clear that Huston’s preferred version of the screenplay would ever have been filmable, but when Juárez finally foundered, what undid months of his work wasn’t corporate trepidation but movie-star egotism. Warner Bros. had given the title role to Paul Muni, at the time the studio’s most prestigious male star. In the last few years, Muni had made a specialty out of transformative historical roles in costume dramas, having played Louis Pasteur and Emile Zola. Though still held in critical esteem, he was a vain and humorless man who was beginning to panic about his waning box-office strength and would do anything to get his own way. When he read the script and saw that his character was written with aphoristic minimalism while his costars Brian Aherne and Bette Davis got all of the big emotional scenes as Maximilian and Carlotta, he brought his brother-in-law onto the production and had him rewrite the entire screenplay to amplify his role, while the director, William Dieterle, stood by haplessly. “The first thing Muni wanted was more dialogue. . . . He just tore the script apart and ruined it,” said Huston.
At the end of 1938, a few months before Juárez was released, Wyler helped Huston bounce back from his disappointment by hiring him to do a final polish of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s script for Wuthering Heights, which he was about to start for his boss, the independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. Huston gratefully took the job but declined credit, saying, “Hecht and MacArthur had written a beautiful screenplay but it was almost in treatment form, so I put it into a screenplay. . . . For me to have intruded my name would have been vulgar.”
Wuthering Heights and Juárez had their premieres within days of each other in April 1939. Wyler’s movie was rapturously received, and despite Goldwyn’s infamous remark that “I made Wuthering Heights—William Wyler only directed it,” the film—lushly mounted, extravagantly romantic, and perfectly suited for audiences who sought refuge from the troubles of the modern world—did a great deal to burnish Wyler’s growing reputation; in what later came to be seen as an epochal year for American movies, it won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best picture, edging Gone with the Wind. Juárez ended up as little more than an unhappy footnote; the version that was first tested before audiences was received so poorly that Warner Bros. immediately cut twenty-five minutes out of it. The parallels to Hitler and Mussolini that Huston had worked so hard to instill remained thunderously clear, starting with the opening titles, which refer to a “dictator” building a “war machine,” and the first scenes, in which Napoleon III (Claude Rains) intones, “Let the world know that the conquest of Mexico is only the beginning of the fulfillment of our holy mission.” Reviewing the movie in the New York Times, Frank S. Nugent took notice that Hollywood finally seemed to be shaking off its studious neutrality about Europe; he wrote approvingly that “in the contest between dictator and democrat the Warners have owned their uncompromising allegiance to the latter. . . . With pardonable opportunism, they have written between the lines . . . the text of a liberal’s scorn for fascism and Nazism.” But other critics were chillier; the movie, which was still long and ungainly, was a costly box-office flop, and the experience left Huston determined not to have his work undercut again. “I knew that if I’d been the director instead of William Dieterle, this wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “So I knew I was going to have to be responsible for the things I wrote” by becoming a director. “That was the only way I could survive.”
Juárez failed in part because its elliptical, propaganda-as-historical-allegory approach felt quaint to an audience that had been watching goose-stepping German soldiers in newsreels every week and was now primed for tougher, more direct attacks on Hitler from Hollywood. The week Huston’s movie opened, it was overshadowed by the premiere of an energetic Warner Bros. crime drama that marked the first time any studio had allowed a movie to take as its subject the perceived German threat within U.S. borders. The challenge built into the new film’s ad campaign took aim not only at the pusillanimous self-interest of other studios but at the evolving taste of moviegoers. Finally, Warners announced in its slogan, the public would have a chance to see something that had been too long kept off screens: “The Picture That Calls A Swastika A Swastika!”
TWO
“The Dictates of My Heart and Blood”
HOLLYWOOD AND WASHINGTON, APRIL 1939–MAY 1940
Confessions of a Nazi Spy opened in New York City on April 28, 1939, the day Hitler gave a speech at the Reichstag in which he made it clear that he considered Poland to be his for the taking. Its title alone was shocking: The word “Nazi” had never before appeared in the name of a major studio movie, and this one had been the subject of controversy from the moment Warners had acquired the movie rights a year earlier. Confessions was directed by Wyler and Huston’s close friend Anatole Litvak, a Ukrainian-born Jew who had fled Germany as the Nazis rose in the early 1930s. The story was based on a former FBI agent’s account of the infiltration of a ring of Nazis within the German-American Bund in New York City. Other companies had openly opposed Warners’ intention to make the film; the head of Paramount’s internal censorship department warned that if Confessions was “in any way uncomplimentary to Germany, as it must be if it is to be sincerely produced, then Warners will have on their hands the blood of a great many Jews in Germany.” Some within the Production Code office, which had never been particularly sympathetic to the industry’s Jewish leaders, argued that the movie courted disaster by failing to depict Hitler’s “unchallenged political and social achievements” and would be “one of the most lamentable mistakes ever made by the industry.” Others feared that it would inflame anti-Semitic accusations that Hollywood was clannishly advancing a Jewish interventionist agenda. As Confessions sped toward production, Warner Bros. assumed that it would inevitably be banned in many European countries (which it was) and might also face serious opposition from state and municipal censorship boards (which it did not). But the studio stood by its conviction that the country was ready for the movie, and was aided considerably by its star, Edward G. Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg), who lobbied hard to play the FBI agent Robinson, telling Hal Wallis, “I want to do that for my people,” and who proved to be an articulate and compelling spokesman for its themes. “The world is faced with the menace of gangsters who are much more dangerous than we have ever known,” Robinson told a reporter. “And there’s no reason why the motion pictures shouldn’t
be used to combat them.”
Opinions about the movie’s quality varied, but it had arrived at the perfect moment—one in which Warners’ delivery of exactly the blunt-force drama promised by all the advance publicity looked not simply shrewd, but bold and prescient. “Hitler’s pledge of non-aggression toward the Americas reached the Warners too late yesterday,” wrote one reviewer. “They had formally declared war on the Nazis at 8:15 A.M. with the first showing of their Confessions of a Nazi Spy at the Strand. Hitler won’t like it; neither will Goebbels.” Variety wondered about its “bearing on German-American relations” and worriedly described it as “a wartime propaganda picture in flavor and essence.” And a few weeks after the movie opened, Time called it “as matter-of-fact and unmincing as a newsreel, undiplomatic as an artillery bombardment” and reported that other studios, noticing the long lines outside theaters, were dusting off “productions calculated to please haters of Hitler & Co.” Among the filmmakers mentioned was Charlie Chaplin, who was working on a comedy about der Führer and a lookalike that he had tentatively titled The Dictator.
For Hollywood, there was no going back, and so, a year after he had failed to get RKO to greenlight Paths of Glory, George Stevens thought it was time to try again with a new project. Gunga Din’s success had made him even more valuable to the studio, and recent headlines had shaken him out of his antiwar stance. Now, rather than directing another comedy or musical, he wanted to take on the Nazi threat. Stevens was an avid reader who, when he wasn’t shooting a movie, could happily spend a day in an armchair paging through one book after another, and in late 1938 he had come across two newly published novels that he thought were ideal for adaptation. One of them, Address Unknown, told the story of a Jewish bookseller in the United States and his business partner, a Gentile German American who returns to the homeland and becomes enraptured by the Third Reich, then destroyed by it when he is mistaken for a Jew. The other, The Mortal Storm, was set entirely in contemporary Germany and traced the professional and personal disintegration of an anti-Hitler professor and his family as the Nazis rose to power. Both novels were brutal, vividly anti-Fascist tracts with appropriately unhappy endings.
George Schaeffer, RKO’s president, was one of the few studio chiefs who was not Jewish; he was also arguably the most risk-averse of all his colleagues. When Stevens urged Schaeffer’s lieutenant Pandro Berman to acquire movie rights to the novels, Berman warned him that Schaeffer was “definitely afraid [to] commit . . . to any picture that is propaganda against anything. . . . He has every wish that we make a picture with regard to Americanism or democracy but [is] opposed to any specific movement against any other force.” Address Unknown was immediately ruled out as a possibility; Berman cabled Stevens that “after serious thought [I] believe if [RKO] would be willing to proceed with a picture that might be classed as anti-Nazi propaganda that we would do better to consider Mortal Storm.” But Stevens barely had a moment to hold on to that hope. Later the same day, Berman cabled him again, gently but firmly pushing him toward more benign material, an adaptation of a melodramatic novel about the sins and sacrifices of a pair of British nurses called The Sisters, which the studio felt would make a fine “women’s picture” and put Stevens back on familiar turf.
Stevens was furious. At times of distress or adversity, he tended to turn inward, becoming withdrawn rather than combative. So it was characteristic that rather than confronting Berman or Schaeffer, he drafted a long letter to himself in which he railed against RKO, complaining that he had worked tirelessly for the studio, that he had been given just four weeks off in the last four years, that he had never been thanked for delivering Gunga Din, and that the company’s heavy hand was making it impossible for him to “do first-rate pictures” that were “comparable in quality to those of the first-rate directors.” Stevens was in the middle of a contract renegotiation with RKO, and in the spring of 1939 he reluctantly re-signed with the company and agreed to make The Sisters (which was retitled Vigil in the Night) as his next film that fall. Other directors would make the movies he had proposed; almost immediately, the rights to The Mortal Storm were sold to MGM, Columbia acquired Address Unknown, and before he had shot even a foot of film under his new contract, Stevens began to feel certain that he was at the wrong studio.
• • •
In the spring of 1939, Frank Capra was at the height of his power in the film industry. He had just tested his authority in a remarkable game of brinksmanship between the Screen Directors Guild, which was petitioning the National Labor Relations Board for certification as a union, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which was in the late 1930s the primary representative of the interests of studios and which fiercely opposed unionization. Capra, who had been president of the Academy since 1935, had recently overcome his initial reluctance to join the SDG and had become its president as well. He thus had the power to turn himself into a kind of Trojan horse who could undermine either institution from within—that is, once he chose a side. He could have gone either way, but ultimately he chose to cast his lot with directors and, although he disliked them, unions. Capra threatened to resign from the Academy—the strong implication being that the creative community of Hollywood, which gave the organization whatever credibility it had, would quickly follow—unless antiunion producers agreed to leave the Academy altogether. It didn’t come to that, but the producers did agree that the Academy would no longer play any role in labor negotiations. In one bold stroke, Capra had permanently altered the Academy’s role in Hollywood, and had helped strengthen the SDG. Then, perhaps even more impressively, he managed to broker a peace between the SDG and the Association of Motion Picture Producers. In February, when the Academy presented him with a surprise third Best Director Oscar for You Can’t Take It With You and President Roosevelt’s son James, an aspiring producer, showed up at Los Angeles’s Biltmore Hotel to give the film the Academy Award for Best Picture, the honors were widely seen as a recognition not just of Capra’s artistry but of his service to the industry.
It was a surprising moment for Capra to decide to make Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Hollywood was beset not only by labor unrest, but by racketeering charges, the stain of organized crime in its largest trade union, and accusations that it was rife with Communists. In addition, a serious antitrust case was being pursued by the Justice Department; as one columnist would soon write, “it is probable that the industry has never faced blacker days.” The studios were trying to curry favor in the nation’s capital, not alienate it, which meant that the timing was spectacularly bad for a script that painted the entire political establishment as a swamp of crooks and cronies. Moreover, Mr. Smith’s screenwriter, Sidney Buchman, was actually a Communist. (Like many in Hollywood at the time, he was attracted by the party’s committed opposition to Fascism.)
Buchman, who became a victim of the blacklist two decades later when he refused to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, said that Capra was “terribly suspicious” about the possibility that his screenplay for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington might contain a “hidden message” that would not be apparent to him until it was too late. But what seems most remarkable about the dialogue and storyline of the finished film is that, while replete with the quasi-populist anger that Capra had first dramatized in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, its politics are completely nonspecific. The idea of making the movie as a sequel to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was dropped when Sam Goldwyn refused to loan Gary Cooper to Columbia. But Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) is very much a cousin to the pugnacious innocent that Cooper played; he’s an overgrown child, the head of the Boy Rangers and publisher of a kiddie newspaper, who is appointed to fill a Senate vacancy. He has no experience, little knowledge, and very few concrete ideas; his primary virtue, according to love interest Jean Arthur, resides in his “plain, decent, everyday common rightness. And this country could use some of that. Yeah. So could the whole cockeyed world.” Capra’s definition of the “cockeyed world”—a favorite
locution that he would go on to use in both private letters and subsequent movies—was broad enough to encompass the entire U.S. Senate, which is steeped in corruption and pork-barrel politics, as well as most reporters, several of whom Smith beats up after they write stories noting, correctly, that he is a stooge who doesn’t understand how he’s being used. Nobody in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington belongs to any party or espouses any recognizable cause—Smith’s only big idea is a “national boys’ club,” and the closest he comes to stating an ideology is his argument that “lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for” and his climactic plea to “love thy neighbor.”
The contradictions—a veneration of the little guy but a deep distrust of a bunch of little guys once they coalesce into a mob, a pronounced contempt for the intellectual elite intermingled with a hyperpatriotic montage of monuments to great political thinkers—were pure Capra. “He was a very simplistic man,” said Buchman. “His view of the world came down to that of a fairy tale. . . . For him a politician or a capitalist were [sic] always marionettes representing good or evil. . . . I really believe that he never knew what Mr. Smith actually was saying.”
