by Mark Harris
Whether this is a good or a bad thing is something about which Meet John Doe consistently hedges. “Hitler’s strong-arm success against democracy was catching,” wrote Capra. “Little ‘fuhrers’ were springing up in America . . . the ‘new wave’ was Blood Power! Riskin and I would astonish the critics with contemporary realities: The ugly face of hate; the power of uniformed bigots in red, white, and blue shirts; the agony of disillusionment; and the wild dark passions of mobs.” But Capra had never quite let go of his veneration of Mussolini, and in the film, he and Riskin careen from exalting ordinary people in theory to expressing shock at how easily a would-be dictator—in this case, a press baron—can hypnotize them; the film winds up suggesting, inadvertently, that any populace that pliable probably shouldn’t be trusted. And “Doe” himself comes off as what the critic Andrew Sarris, writing in the 1960s, called “a barefoot fascist, suspicious of all ideas and doctrines, but believing in the innate conformism of the common man.”
Meet John Doe is less a narrative than a snapshot of Capra’s own overheated and erratic political impulses at the time he shot it. Somewhat ominously, he conflated the gullible average Americans in the story with his movie’s potential audience, calling them “my John Does.” But he didn’t need the public’s verdict; he knew he was in trouble even before he began production. “The first two acts were solid; the third act was a wet sock,” he wrote. “Our story problem was self-inflicted: To convince important critics that not every Capra film was written by Pollyanna, Riskin and I had written ourselves into a corner.” Or, more specifically, onto a roof: Capra and Riskin knew that the movie would have to end with “John Doe” ready to make good on his promise to jump off a building, but neither man had any idea how to get him out of it. At one point, Capra called in Jules Furthman, a veteran screenwriter whose credits dated back to 1915, and asked him to consider doing a rewrite. Furthman declined. “You guys can’t find an ending to your story,” he told the director, “because you got no story in the first place.”
Capra’s uncertainty about his own storytelling couldn’t have come at a worse time. As he shot Meet John Doe in the summer and fall, American movie theaters were suddenly filled with pictures that knew exactly what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it. Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator became the first major Hollywood movie to lampoon Hitler on screen. The Mortal Storm finally opened, and despite MGM’s unwillingness to identify Germany and Hitler in the script by name, Variety called it “the most effective film expose to date of the totalitarian idea . . . a combination of entertainment and democratic preachment,” and the New Yorker identified it as the first movie “that can be considered of any major consequence” to take on Hitler. United Artists imported an uncompromising British drama called Pastor Hall, about a peace-loving minister imprisoned in a concentration camp after he resists the storm troopers who overrun his small village; theaters ran it with a filmed introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. And on the day the United States began peacetime conscription for men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one, Paramount released Arise, My Love—a romantic drama about a European war correspondent (Claudette Colbert) and a soldier of fortune (Ray Milland); Billy Wilder’s script for the movie overtly identified American apathy about the rise of Hitler as a moral evil. Paramount had cautiously insisted on shooting “protection takes” that would soften the film’s extensive and explicit anti-Hitler dialogue for release abroad, but with the studios’ business in Europe now at an end, Hollywood no longer had anything to lose. The rougher version of the movie was widely released and audiences could hear Milland say of Hitler and Germany, “We’ll get another crack at those big boys. War is coming, and I can smell it.” The film’s last line urged Americans directly to “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?’”
“Themes which had been skittishly skirted or avoided altogether in less perilous times have lately been advanced upon the screen with exceptional fervor and frankness,” reported the New York Times. “Films are fast assuming the role predestined for them in time of crisis.” The week Capra finished shooting Meet John Doe, the bombing of London began. He still didn’t know how the movie would end.
FOUR
“What’s the Good of a Message?”
HOLLYWOOD, EARLY 1941
At a packed black-tie banquet at the Biltmore Hotel, William Wyler stood on stage, waiting patiently to be humiliated. It was February 27, 1941, the night of the 13th Academy Awards, and for the third time in five years, he was a nominee. His film The Letter had opened in November to general acclaim, especially for Wyler and Bette Davis, who was also nominated. But as he and Talli drove to the ceremonies that evening, they were both at peace with the fact that it probably wasn’t going to be his night. What they didn’t realize until Frank Capra walked out to the podium and began to speak was that an unanticipated and particularly stinging public embarrassment was in store. Capra was hard at work in the editing room on Meet John Doe, and he may have been too preoccupied to consider the gracelessness of what he was about to do. When the time came to announce the winner of the award for Best Director, he decided to break form and, instead of reading the list of nominees, called them all to the stage and instructed them to shake one another’s hands in front of the audience.
Wyler left his wife’s side and grimly walked away from his table to join his competitors—first-time nominee Alfred Hitchcock, who was up for Rebecca, the veteran Sam Wood, who had directed Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle, and George Cukor, who was in contention for The Philadelphia Story. As the four men shuffled in place and muttered pleasantries, Capra opened the envelope and revealed that the winner was the only nominee who had announced in advance that he had no intention of showing up: John Ford, for The Grapes of Wrath. Ford, who had already finished his next picture for 20th Century Fox, an adaptation of the long-running Broadway play Tobacco Road, had told everyone that win or lose, he planned to be in Mexico on a sailing trip with another of that year’s nominees, his Grapes of Wrath star Henry Fonda, “for as long as the fish are biting,” and he was as good as his word. As Darryl Zanuck stepped to the stage to collect the statuette for him, Wyler and his fellow losers awkwardly made their way down the steps and, recalled Talli, “all had to slink back to their tables.”
When a colleague of Ford’s sent him a congratulatory telegram about his second Oscar, the director sternly replied, “Awards are a trivial thing to be concerned with at times like these.” That was largely posturing; in practice, Ford had almost as great an appetite for recognition and honors as Capra did, and was at least as zealous about curating his reputation. (Right around the time of the ceremony, he approved a Fox press release in the guise of a written and reported story headlined, “John Ford’s Pictures Win Acclaim and Money”; many small-circulation papers ran the release as news, which was then a routine practice.) His reasons for staying away that year probably had as much to do with the widespread (and, it turned out, correct) assumption in industry circles that Rebecca was going to beat The Grapes of Wrath for Best Picture as with any concern about the propriety of participating in a ritual of collective self-celebration while Europe was being torn apart. It’s likely that he was also happy to be out of the country given that Tobacco Road had just opened to withering reviews. Ford himself had little use for the movie, a grotesque story of southern sharecroppers that seemed as tin-eared about regional poverty and family struggle as The Grapes of Wrath had been acute, and it’s unclear why he took it on in the first place or made such a rushed and sloppy job of it.
Distraction may have been part of the problem. Even as Ford shot the picture, he was devoting more of his time and energy than ever to preparation for war. In that, he had a willing partner in Zanuck, his longtime boss, who now preferred to be known as “Colonel.” That January, Zanuck had accepted a commission as a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Signal Corps, and as chair of the Academy
Research Council, he had recently agreed to oversee the making of four training films. Zanuck stood just five foot two, which could make the fits of energetic excitability to which he was prone appear comical; Ford sometimes referred to him as “Darryl F. Panic.” For his part, Zanuck would make fun of the director for the nervous habit he had of chewing on a sodden, ragged handkerchief while he worked. But the two men shared a sense that America’s involvement in the war was coming sooner and on a greater scale than most of their colleagues anticipated, and Ford didn’t hesitate to say yes when Zanuck asked him to supervise production of a short Signal Corps instructional movie.
He could not have matched Ford with a less likely subject. Official Training Film 8-154, a coproduction of the corps, the Academy, and the Surgeon General’s office, was called Sex Hygiene; it was an explicit, for-inductees-only documentary about what young servicemen should do if they’re exposed to syphilis or gonorrhea, replete with frontal nudity and excruciating close-ups of penile chancroids. Ford’s sensibilities in this area were prim, almost chaste; he had been married to the same woman for twenty years, and despite the occasional romantic crush on a leading lady, his weakness was widely known to be alcohol, not women. But whatever distaste he had for the subject, he either overcame it or translated it into gruff man-to-man language: Sex Hygiene is full of talk, infused with the sternness of Ford’s Catholic upbringing, about the dangers of coming in contact with a “contaminated woman,” the importance of using condoms (and of testing them for leaks), and the consequences men face in exchange “for the satisfaction of their sexual impulses,” including the remarkable assertion that any woman who makes herself sexually available to a soldier “probably” carries a disease.*
Although the twenty-six-minute Sex Hygiene gets its message across with straightforward candor, Ford’s hand can be discerned in the film’s relatively sophisticated structure—it’s framed as the story of a group of soldiers who go see a sex-hygiene training film, and Ford moves seamlessly between the main narrative and the movie within the movie. He turns his camera on his audience of soldiers, tracking in on a dozen different faces in sequential close-ups as each young man takes in the harsh reality of what he’s being told about his body, something “most men know less about . . . than they do about their automobiles,” according to the unsmiling lecturer. And Ford’s heart seems to be in the sharp warning that ends the movie, when a doctor tells the boys that nothing is more likely to endanger the health of a soldier than a bad decision made when he’s drunk. “Zanuck . . . said to me, ‘These kids have got to be taught about these things . . . do you mind doing it?’” Ford told Peter Bogdanovich. “It was easy to make. We did it in two or three days. It really was horrible, not being for general release. We could do anything—we had guys out there with VD and everything else. I think it made its point and helped a lot of young kids. I looked at it and threw up.”
Ford was also approaching his duties as head of the Field Photo Unit more seriously, amassing camera and sound equipment from the studios, dividing the photographers, editors, and sound men whom he had spent months recruiting into nine discrete units, and arranging training sessions for the men at the Naval Reserve Armory in Los Angeles. In January, he drew up a budget proposal for Field Photo that recommended the navy allot $5 million for the first year, $3 million for the second, and $2 million for year three of what he believed would be a long engagement. In addition, he urged that funds be set aside for the development of new cameras that would be designed to withstand the battering that they would undoubtedly take during daily use in sea combat. Ford also got his somewhat starstruck navy superiors in San Diego to authorize another quasi-spy mission for the Araner along the Mazatlán coast, a three-week mission that does not appear to have been a matter of urgent national security but did dovetail nicely with his desire to go fishing during the Oscars.
For Wyler, losing the Academy Award to Ford was the bitter anticlimax of a fall and winter that he had spent working on projects that had come to nothing. He was now in his sixth year under contract to Goldwyn. After his first twelve months working for the stubborn, mercurial producer, Wyler had written to him begging that his contract be severed since they were both so unhappy. Since then, their tense, testy relationship had, if not mellowed, at least deepened into a kind of mutual respect and understanding about the value each man had to the other. Goldwyn had the bankroll and the willingness to buy great dramatic properties for his best director, and didn’t force him to make three films a year like a studio workhorse, and Wyler had great sway with him as, in his friend Lillian Hellman’s words, one of “the only . . . people in the Goldwyn asylum who [wasn’t] completely loony.”
In 1940, Wyler was eager to get to work on an adaptation of Hellman’s Broadway play The Little Foxes, for which Goldwyn had managed to pry Bette Davis loose from Warner Bros. But by September, Hellman’s adaptation of her script still wasn’t ready, and while he was idle, Wyler found himself a pawn in a complicated set of deals that Goldwyn was engineering with two different studios. In order to obtain Davis, the producer had agreed to loan Wyler and Gary Cooper to Warner Bros. for Sergeant York, the story of a pacifist who became one of World War I’s bravest heroes; it had all the makings of a biopic that Harry and Jack Warner believed would serve as a rousing interventionist reminder of the glories of fighting for your country. Cooper was a perfect fit for York; Wyler, who had previously evinced little flair for action films and had no taste for jingoism, was not. As soon as he got the assignment and realized the screenplay was months away from being shootable—his friend John Huston was about to be brought aboard for a rewrite—he begged off. Goldwyn didn’t waste a week before loaning him out again, this time to 20th Century Fox, where Zanuck offered Wyler $85,000 to direct How Green Was My Valley.
This time, Wyler was enthusiastic: Richard Llewellyn’s just-published novel about life in a Welsh coal-mining town, and Zanuck’s ambitions for it, were much closer to his heart than Sergeant York had been. The record-shattering success that David O. Selznick had achieved with Gone with the Wind, which was still the most popular movie in U.S. theaters nine months after its opening, had emboldened every studio head to take chances on a grander scale, and initially Wyler and Zanuck seemed to share a vision for a big-budget, four-hour Technicolor adaptation that could rival anything from Selznick in its scope. But even before Wyler came aboard, Zanuck was having problems with the proposed film: He was determined to oppose any attempts to turn the novel into a polemic for workers’ rights, despite the fact that the most exciting and dramatic sequence in Llewellyn’s episodic, leisurely five-hundred-page best seller was built around a miners’ strike over unsafe conditions. In the summer, Fox had rejected a draft of the script by a writer named Ernest Pascal who had highlighted the unrest among the town’s workers. Zanuck may have been worried about presenting English mine owners as villains at a moment when American sympathies for the British were at their highest, but he also complained that Pascal’s script had turned the novel “into a labor story and a sociological problem story instead of being a great, warm, human story. . . . The labor issue should serve only as a background. . . . This is far from a crusade picture.”
Bizarrely, Zanuck decided to implement those changes by replacing Pascal with Philip Dunne, a founder of the Screen Writers Guild, an active member of Hollywood’s progressive left, and perhaps the most vigorous pro-labor writer in the industry. For the last three months of 1940, Dunne and Wyler collaborated in a daily struggle to wrestle a story that took place over sixty years into a shootable script. While Dunne wrote and rewrote, Wyler went through a hardcover copy of the novel, page by page, jotting down dialogue, props, gestures, and even colors that he wanted to include in the finished film. With production scheduled to begin early in 1941, he also concentrated on casting. For each role, he worked from a long list of possibilities, considering everyone from Laurence Olivier and Henry Fonda to Merle Oberon, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Ida Lupino. Only for the role of Huw, t
he young boy at the center of the story, did he make up his mind early. Fox’s Lew Schreiber wrote to him that a twelve-year-old “boy by the name of Roddy McDowall” had recently fled England with his family and made a screen test. Wyler saw the footage, and under the name “Huw” in his casting notes, he simply wrote, “The little English refugee.”
McDowall’s casting would prove to be one of the essential elements in the success of How Green Was My Valley, but in other areas, Zanuck opposed Dunne and Wyler at every turn. With the economic constriction of the worldwide movie market that the war had caused, Zanuck now wanted to back away from his original plans for a lengthy epic and was horrified when Dunne turned in a 260-page first draft. And Zanuck and Wyler clashed constantly, an inevitability since Wyler had always struggled with his own lack of screenwriting experience (“Willy couldn’t write a line, but he knew what you could do,” said Dunne), while Zanuck fancied himself a story-structure savant. For weeks, he pummeled Wyler with one objection after another: He and Dunne weren’t narrowing down and focusing the narrative sufficiently; labor unrest was still too much a part of the story; their vision for the movie was unfilmably long and expensive; the tender, modest qualities of the book were being lost.
Even as Wyler pared Dunne’s screenplay into a more shapely form, he felt besieged. “It is going to be a very simple job to bring this script down to a proper length,” Zanuck told him, “and I believe my judgment at the present moment is much closer to the judgment of an audience than is your judgment.” At the same time, Wyler’s own assistant argued to him that his streamlining was resulting in a narrative that was “smooth—even—and dull. . . . The people who are now left in our story are . . . unexciting and colorless characters.” Dunne revised the draft again, and a note came back saying, “The lack of suspense is still felt. Each sequence is interesting in itself but . . . the story never reaches a climax.” In December, Zanuck lowered the boom, telling Dunne and Wyler that they had “so far failed to achieve that which you set out to do many weeks ago . . . you are never going to achieve it unless you get some help. . . . You have been given every possible chance and even you must admit that the net result has been unsatisfactory. . . . I think it is high time that I step out of my role as a non-belligerent observer and become active creatively. . . . it is the only way I know how to produce.”
