Speculative Cinemas

“We were just leaving the movies - Casablanca, with Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan…”  I had the idea one time to use this as the opening of a story, to signal it was alternate history.  This casting was supposedly floated, at some point, but it was a public relations stunt; Hal Wallis, the producer, later said he never wanted anybody but Bogart. 

Quentin Tarantino published a book, year before last, called Cinema Speculation, and my first thought was that he’d speculate.  For example, Howard Hawks once claimed that he was set to direct Casablanca, and Michael Curtiz was assigned to Sergeant York, but Curtiz wanted to get out of doing a picture about “hillbillies” and he, Hawks, was uncomfortable making a “musical,” (I’m not sure what he means by that, La Marseillaise, As Time Goes By?) and they switched movies.  I don’t know whether to credit this.  Hawks is clearly the right guy for Gary Cooper, and Curtiz is just as clearly the right director for Casablanca.  In fact, Warners kept two crews working simultaneously, so Curtiz could prep his next picture while he shot the current one: he was that efficient – or ruthless, some would say.  All the same, Tarantino is nothing if not a fanboy, you knew that, and you can imagine how entertaining he might be with What Ifs. 

Sam Peckinpah was fired from The Cincinatti Kid about a week in.  Ostensibly, because he was making a dirty movie; he did a scene with Rip Torn and a naked girl in a fur coat.  (“Oh,” Peckinpah says, “and I was shooting in black-and-white.”)  Not to mention, Sharon Tate got the boot in favor of Tuesday Weld, and Spencer Tracy was signed to play Lancey Howard, but Edward G. Robinson came off the bench when Tracy had health issues.  Norman Jewison gets the director credit, and Cincinnati Kid is a halfway decent picture – Robinson is terrific, too, he steals the movie – but you can’t help wondering.  In the aftermath of the Major Dundee disaster, The Cincinnati Kid could have put Peckinpah back on the map, Steve McQueen a brand name already, even if shooting a major release in widescreen color is the better box-office call.  McQueen and Peckinpah of course did Junior Bonner and The Getaway later on. 

Here’s a story Quint does tell.  McQueen passed on Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, after Paul Newman had been signed.  They offered Sundance to Warren Beatty, but Beatty wanted to play Butch, and he wanted Elvis as Sundance. 

A lot of people probably know that Dirty Harry started out as a Frank Sinatra vehicle - the original pitch for Columbo had Bing Crosby to star, too – but after they settled on Clint Eastwood, he brought Don Siegel over from Universal, to direct.  Siegel, at one point, wanted to cast Audie Murphy as Scorpio, the serial killer, because Audie Murphy had a baby face and didn’t look the part (although he’s credited with killing 241 enemy combatants in WWII).  Siegel had made two pictures with Audie, one, The Gun Runners, a remake of To Have and Have Not.  Also, if you think Audie can’t act, you should check out The Unforgiven, his second picture with John Huston.

*As a footnote, Andy Robinson, who did play Scorpio, has a good hundred credits under his belt, but it took him twenty years to shake his association with the part (he’s really  that good in Dirty Harry), and even then, it was because he wore heavy prosthetics in Deep Space Nine.

Nobody but Gable was ever going to play Rhett Butler, but there are dozens of surviving screen tests for Scarlett.  Everybody wanted the part.  1400 interviews, 400 callbacks.  Katherine Hepburn.  Paulette Goddard had a good shot, but she was shacked up with Chaplin, and not married to him, which gave Selznick the jitters.  Tallulah Bankhead.  Susan Hayward, Frances Dee, Jean Arthur, Lucille Ball, Miriam Hopkins, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Joan Bennett.  Bette Davis was an early favorite, but Warners wouldn’t lend her out.  She was chafing against studio discipline, and Jack Warner wanted to teach her a lesson.  She did Jezebel at Warners, which is basically the same story as GWTW, and the better picture, for my money.  The question is whether you can see her as Scarlett.  Or if you can see anybody else as Scarlett, once Vivien Leigh is in the room.  She takes up all the air.  You may or may not actually like the movie, but she surely makes it hers.

Cutting back to Quentin, he does get up to some mischief, not so much in Cinema Speculation, but in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you have Leo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton playing the Steve McQueen part in The Great Escape, and Damian Lewis, as McQueen, bemoaning the fact that he’s not getting into Sharon Tate’s pants. 

The question isn’t whether it’s real, but whether it’s convincing.  I personally can’t conjure up Brando or Albert Finney in Lawrence of Arabia, but they were both offered the part.  Lee Marvin walked away from The Wild Bunch to do Paint Your Wagon.  You just never know.  Somewhere out there are these ghost pictures, that never got made, or got made with the wrong talent, or somehow went off the rails. 

We’ll never get to see those movies, running in the private drive-in of our mind’s eye.  But maybe we’ve been spared. 

Capt. Blood

Captain Blood, famously, made Errol Flynn a star. It was the first of nine features Flynn did with Olivia de Havilland, and one of twelve with director Michael Curtiz. Flynn and de Havilland got along fine - she admitted the chemistry and spiked the rumors of a romance - but after a six-year run, ten of the twelve pictures delivering big box office, Flynn and Curtiz cordially loathed each other.

My own opinion is that the pictures Flynn made with Raoul Walsh in the 1940's are better movies, by and large, the best example being Gentleman Jim, but if not for the Curtiz swashbucklers, Flynn wouldn't have made it to the A-list. Curtiz was an awful bastard, by most accounts, but he brought home the bacon. Casablanca won Best Picture, and six of his other movies got nominated. He directed Cagney and Joan Crawford to Oscars, out of ten nominations overall for his lead actors.

Andrew Sarris, whose critical opinions I generally admire, feels that Curtiz had no genuine personality, as a director, that he basically ground out sausage, and that Casablanca was a happy accident, a sort of rebuttal to to the auteur theory, where the exception proves the rule. I'd beg to differ. If you say the director is in his pictures, then okay, Curtiz made an awful lot of crap. On the plus side, along with Casablanca, we've got White Christmas and Yankee Doodle Dandy. 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, the original Wax Museum. Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Angels with Dirty Faces. Eddie Robinson and Garfield in The Sea Wolf. Mildred Pierce, Young Man with a Horn, We're No Angels, and The Breaking Point ain't too shabby, either.

Curtiz was Hungarian.  He spoke five languages - "all of them badly," his son later remarked. Born a Jew in Budapest, he changed his birth name from Kaminer to Kertesz when he was nineteen, working in an acting troupe that crossed Europe. Kertesz was more ethnically Hungarian, in the anti-Semitic climate of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. He began directing theater, and directed Hungary's first feature film, in 1912. He was also on the Hungarian national fencing team that year, in the Olympics. When the war came, he served in the army. He was wounded, and invalided out. He went back to the movies, and spent seven years learning the trade. He caught the attention of Warner Brothers in 1926, and by the time he went to Hollywood, he'd already made sixty-odd pictures.  He was 39 years old.

This story, familiar in some ways, is framed by larger political imperatives, Kati Marton puts it in context with her terrific book The Great Escape (2006), subtitled Nine Hungarians Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World. The nine are Curtiz and Alexander Korda, Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz, and Arthur Koestler, for the arts, with Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neuman, for the sciences. I highly recommend it.

I'm belaboring the point, which is that where Andrew Sarris sees Curtiz spreading himself too thin, I see industry, ambition, restlessness and insecurity. Sarris regards him as sausage-maker - and in fact Warners maintained two individual film crews for Curtiz, one for the picture he was actively shooting, one for the picture he was prepping next - and I think it reveals an obsessive. There's for example the story that Curtiz grabbed for a notebook to write down a sudden idea, forgetting that he was driving at the time, and ran himself off the road.

I see Curtiz the refugee, the stranger, running in place to catch up, afraid something or someone is catching up with him. The upstart Jewish kid from Budapest, trying to break into pictures, and never quite gaining the confidence it won't all be snatched away. Curtiz in high dudgeon, with David Niven the target: "You think you know fuck everything and I know fuck nothing, but let me tell you, I know fuck all." This is not a guy who thinks he stands on rock, he's afraid he stands on sand. 

Sarris admits Curtiz has vigorous technique, but he doesn't believe Curtiz has a theme. I couldn't agree less. No, Curtiz isn't Walsh, he doesn't have the muscularity, and he for sure isn't Anthony Mann, another exile, who inhabits the true fury of separation, but what Curtiz brings to the game is an intimacy, set inside the bigger canvas, a larger scale. In his better pictures, Curtiz reveals himself to be trapped, isolated, estranged. Bogart, in Casablanca, says, "Nobody ever loved me that much."