Careful What You Wish For

There’s a story Howard Hawks tells, which we might take with a grain of salt, Hawks being known to embroider, when it suited him, but it goes like this.  He’s on a fishing trip with Hemingway, and Hemingway starts bitching that Hollywood can’t seem to make a decent picture out of any of his books.  Hawks says, you didn’t sell the books to the right person.  Meaning it should have been you, Hemingway says.  Oh, hell, Hawks says, breezily, I could make a good picture out of your worst book.  We imagine Hemingway fixing him with a slow stare.  Yeah, and just which of my books is the worst? he asks.  Hawks shrugs.  To Have and Have Not, he says.  OK, wiseguy, Hemingway says.  You got a deal.  And they shake hands on it. 

Hawks took the project to William Faulkner.  Faulkner’s first script had been for Hawks, in 1932, and they worked on six pictures together, the best known being To Have and Have Not, in 1944, and The Big Sleep, two years later.  It’s probably not news that Faulkner and Hemingway took potshots at each other over the course of thirty years, but there doesn’t seem to have been bad blood on Faulkner’s part.  Be that as it may, Faulkner told Hawks that To Have and Have Not would never make a movie.  The censorship problems aside, there’s no story.  Well, we gotta do something, Hawks tells him.  And they did.  They came up with a back story, everything that happened beforehand, and led up to where the book starts.  Faulkner’s script is essentially a prequel to the novel.  Hawks later said they had so much material there was enough left over for another movie.

Actually, there was enough left over for two.

Michael Curtiz cast Garfield in The Breaking Point, in 1950, and Audie Murphy starred in The Gun Runners, in 1958, directed by Don Siegel. I’ve written about The Breaking Point in this space before (in 2019). I’d put it in the Top Ten of any list of Curtiz movies, if not the Top Five. Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Casablanca, Passage to Marseille, White Christmas. The script is credited to Ranald MacDougall, but there’s a lot more Hemingway in it than there is in To Have and Have Not.  Photographed by Ted McCord, who shot an amazing amount of features and TV - most notoriously the delirious Leslie Stevens noir, Private Property – and including Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for Huston, and the early 1960’s Jack Lord series Stoney Burke. Garfield thought it was his best performance, and I wouldn’t argue, only to say that in the last few years of his life, he made Force of Evil, We Were Strangers, and The Breaking Point, and it’s an awful God damn shame he died as young as he did.  Patricia Neal definitely took a sharp turn from nice girls, here; in fact, she never did a character anywhere near as cheerfully careless and predatory before or since. This one broke the mold. And the movie itself is a sort of orphan, not exactly noir, but more overtly political, like We Were Strangers. Garfield isn’t tragic, in the classic sense, he isn’t fated, because of some character flaw, he’s in fact deeply moral. If anything, he believes too much.

The Gun Runners isn’t long on moral context.  Audie Murphy is very good in it, but he isn’t playing somebody who’s conflicted, he’s playing somebody decent.  (I think Audie Murphy’s very underrated; his two best performances are for John Huston, The Red Badge of Courage and The Unforgiven.)  Don Siegel says he didn’t think Audie was right for the part, but Siegel says he didn’t want to do the picture anyway. In any event, it’s a very tight movie, carefully set up, with good support – Everett Sloane, Jack Elam, Dick Jaeckel – but Eddie Albert steals the show as the heavy, full of smiling menace. It might remind you of the dynamic in the Randolph Scott pictures that Scott made with Budd Boetticher: the charming villain, cat-like and purring, the hero out of his depth and treading water.

There is, of course, one more. Islands in the Stream, which is Hemingway’s own remake. The novel was left unfinished, so the script for the movie interpolates not a little from To Have and Have Not, particularly in the third act. This is a class-A picture, no question. The cast, with George C. Scott in the lead, the director, Franklin J. Schaffner, fresh off Papillon, and using the same cinematographer, Fred Koenekamp, the swoony score, by Jerry Goldsmith – the composer’s personal favorite. My chief reservation is that it’s a shade too reverent.  They could have done with a little B-picture subversion, Marie Windsor snapping her gum or her garters.

Maybe that should have been Hemingway’s complaint, that the movies were too respectful.  He’s said to have liked Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but they sure sanitized the crap out of the novel. I think Hawks had the right idea. Take a second-rate book, and turn it into a pretty good picture. Treat it with kid gloves, you’ll only embalm it. Leave out the pretense, keep the mischief.

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.