Me 'N' "DOS" (And "GWTW")...

I'm a big fan of "Gone With the Wind" AND David Thomson, the movie critic-writer of movie studies and bio of none other than "DOS" aka "David O (for "nothing," like Harry S for nothing Truman) Selznick" the son of movie "pioneer" Lewis J. Selznick and brother to Myron, one of the uh "founders" of Hollywood agentdom.

Thomson wrote a bio of Selznick that appeared in 1992 and he also wrote the script to Ted Turner "Classics"' "The Making of GWTW" which I find one of the most ENTERTAINING documentaries on film making ever -- that and "The Battle Over 'Citizen Kane,'" a PBS "American Experience" docu also well worth your time.

I also just saw again Selznick's attempt to reproduce (pun hm!) "GWTW" with his mistress-later wife the winsome Jennifer Jones in 1945 (released in '46), "Duel in the Sun" in which Jones, with her 1943 Oscar winning performance as Catholic saint and mystic Bernadette Soubirous, turns into a confused and so exploited (but sexy!) Mexican girl abused by all, especially by a particularly nasty Gregory Peck!

That film was a success albeit not so as "Wind" yet was dissed by critics at the time as "Lust in the Dust" (sounds like Time magazine!) though such as Martin Scorsese now admire it.

I found it almost a "feminist" movie in that EVERYONE -- her father, her mother, her "step"mother, the "nice" brother, the "bad" brother -- abandon "Pearl Chavez" to her "fate" as mean Gregory Peck's plaything as "Lewt (Lewd?) McCanless." And then of course blame her for being "a whore." Only Walter Huston's crazy preacher Jubal Crabbe, "the sinkiller," recognizes the dilemma she's in -- being beautiful but ignorant and "unprotected."

Anyway Selznick started out as his father Lewis J's fair haired Jewish son who eventually marries Louie B Mayer's younger daughter Irene (Mayer "a very fierce lion indeed" as a founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer eh) and then goes off "on his own" with the Whitney Wall Street money to produce well "Gone With the Wind" as well as lesser productions and becomes consequently a "legend" in Hollywood though never "the hero" he once was in 1939.

From "Showman: The Life of David O Selznick" by Thomson:

"LB {Mayer} was full of the great journey...from Russia and being a junk dealer to becoming the highest paid executive in America. He outdid others in word, gesture, pride, self denial (and pride at the denial). He was very strong physically; he could be cruel and brutal emotionally; he was as easily 'moved' as dust; and he liked nothing more than to 'move' others. He was the greatest 'actor' on the lot..." (p 71)

His daughter Irene on "LB":

"'My father was not only omnipotent, he was omniscient. ...I got him mixed up with God because of the word "Almighty." Fortunately I was saved by the ten commandments; many of them I didn't understand but the first commandment said "Thou shalt have no other god before Me" and I clung to it. If it hadn't been for that I would have been afraid of my father.'" (p 77)

The Joan Crawford story I promised:

"Joan Crawford was only doing {the film} 'Dancing Lady' because LB had begged her. David {Selznick} won her over with a challenge. Screen writer Allen Rivkin recalled a conference where the producer played on her 'professional' pride --

"'so David throws a curve at her. He says "Joan I don't know if you can play this part; it's kind of tarty. I think it's more Jean Harlow's style." Well Joan kind of bristles...and she says "Look Mr Selznick I was playing hookers before Harlow knew what they were so let's not hear any talk about 'style' because I know more about 'that' than she ever will!"'" (p 158)

Great Hollywood story if one knows anything about both Crawford (a one time "chorus girl" named Louise Le Sueur) and Jean Harlow and her "mommy complex."

I'm just getting into the "GWTW" part of the book and I'll find some excerpts from that -- you know just to keep stuff going here while Harsch "insults" me and everybody else "plays dead"!...

Bits and pieces in the Thomson bio of Selznick strike:

Re "GWTW" "{t}here were harsher comments {as per the reviews of Margaret Mitchell's epic published in the summer of 1936}.... The Nation and The New Republic {magazines} began to argue that the book was deeply conservative and none too sympathetic to blacks. Margaret Mitchell was jubilant at such attacks: 'I would be upset and mortified if the left wingers liked the book. I'd have to do so much explaining to family and friends!" (p 216)

Selznick, a Jew albeit a very "secular" one, was also becoming somewhat "careful" of certain sections of the best seller; he wrote in a production memo:

"'It would be difficult if not impossible to clarify for audiences the difference between the "old" Klan {i. e., the "heroic" one celebrated in D. W. Griffith's classic "The Birth of a Nation"} and the Klan of our times {i. e., the anti Catholic, anti Jewish, anti FDR, racist one eh}.... I think we have to be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger which I do not think should be difficult.'" (p 226)

Wellll -- not "difficult" from a WHITE point of view, Jewish notwithstanding -- in fact the movie does create "real" and memorable black characters with strong qualities, positive as well as negative. Black actress Hattie McDaniel after all won an Oscar as best supporting actress as "Mammy" although the rest of her career, like the other notable black actress in the pic, the inimitable Butterfly McQueen, consisted mainly of playing various versions of "the maid."

There IS a "Klan" sequence in the movie but it is disguised -- when "the men," including Ashley Wilkes and Frank Kennedy, Scarlett O'Hara's CURRENT husband, organize to attack a camp of free blacks in revenge for attacking (unsuccessfully of course) Scarlett as she drove her buggy by such. Also white "carpetbaggers" from the north influence "simple darkies" to vote for them (by promising the requisite "forty acres and a mule") and arrogant "yankees" and free blacks lord it over the former slaveholding aristocrats in the film.

Still the dialogue has a few zingers, especially when "Big Sam" (Everett Brown) the Tara plantation's black foreman informs "Miss Scarlett" than he and some of "the boys" have been requisitioned by the confederate forces to "dig trenches for the white soldiers to hide in." And headed for the job they sing "Go Down Moses (Tell Old Pharaoh To 'Let My People Go'!)" Little sure but something.

And in the 1946 "Duel in the Sun" the abused protagonist "Pearl Chavez" played by Jennifer Jones is Mexican and Lionel Barrymore's ranch patriarch "Senator Jackson McCanless" continually subjects her to his racist remarks, cowing apparently everyone else and reinforcing his son "Lewt" (Greg Peck) in Lewt's view of Pearl as proprietary "goods" to be "used" and then discarded at will.

(The "catch" in "Duel" is that Lewt actually falls for Pearl but his abusive behavior especially toward the "good" brother "Jesse" played by Joseph Cotten -- Lewt is kin to Rhett Butler and Jesse to Ashley Wilkes in "GWTW" -- as well as to Pearl results in a gunfight -- "duel" in the Arizona sun -- between them! Unique hm for a western in the 1940s!)

Another notable concerning the scriptwriter Sidney Howard:

"The script occupied Howard from the middle of December {1936} to February 10 {1937}. Though he gave some time to revising {his new} play...he was devoted to 'Wind' -- except when he was complaining {to director George Cukor} about {President} Roosevelt stacking the supreme court." (p 227) So many Republicans in Hollywood eh!

Another LB Mayer story:

"LB loved 'A Star is Born' {a Selznick production famously remade in the early 1950s with Judy Garland}: '...{DOS} took that story -- if it came to me I'd say "Make it or don't make it what do I care; it's been done forty times anyway" -- he took that story and made a tremendous picture out of it!' But if Mayer 'loved' any movie about {"his"} Hollywood there was something wrong with that movie." (p 238)

As some may know Mayer HATED Billy Wilder's 1950 film about Hollywood, "Sunset Blvd.," which is a picture that I'd say had everything "right"?...

I don't even know that Harsch finds any of this "interesting" anymore but I still like to "discuss" movies which I guess are MY "real" religion -- the gospels come across MUCH better in the movies than on paper!

I sit in the Wildflower Bread Company on my days off work eating breakfast and reading of course, lately the Thomson bio of "DOS." I found this passage (THIS morning) particularly "striking":

"In 1949 {the year I was born}...David {Selznick} began to travel as a policy. He would spend time in London, Paris and Italy to feel how drastically the war {WWII} had changed ordinary lives. He was in cities affected by bomb damage, rationing, displaced persons as well as the Berlin airlift and the threat of worse {"atomic"} conflict. There is no sign this weighed on him: he never denied himself the best hotels and he found his company still among celebrities and cafe society.

"In postwar America there was much to inspire confidence: the fact of victory, the reunion of families and bounce in the birthrate {see "The Best Years of Our Lives" eh}. the prosperity that buoyed new families in suburban homes and which made it prudent to rid the country of un-American elements.

"For most Europeans recovery was slower and more painful. It was not as easy to believe in the gutsiness of a Scarlett {O'Hara} ensuring survival. Though the fantasy still worked: as 'Gone With the Wind' premiered in many countries after the war it did fabulous business. But there were new films more disposed to realism and less coherent about fantasy. David would have his name on one in which a beautiful woman walked straight past the lovelorn hero at the end, as if he didn't exist.

"This was 'The Third Man' and it was a big hit but David didn't seem attuned to what was happening in it. There is a scene...where Harry Lime {Orson Welles} teases his friend Holly Martins {Joseph Cotten} about believing in literary models applied to life: 'Give myself up?! This is a far better thing?! The old limelight and the fall of the curtain? We aren't heroes Holly, you and I! The world doesn't make heroes outside your books!' Here was a pointed reappraisal of the chivalry of 'A Tale of Two Cities' -- yet David was considering remaking {his -- Selznick produced it at MGM} hit of 1935.

"{But t}he American audience began to give up on the movies a few years after 1945.... {I}t is easy to suppose television made the change but tv came after the trend had begun. There were larger, less certain reasons. People went back to school, they worked overtime to carry the mortgage and they had children.

"The Audience Research Institute reported a decline in weekly attendance at the movies from 81 million in 1946 to 69 million in 1948. Every studio suffered and no executive knew what was happening or how to deal with it. Moreover by 1948 there were only one million tv sets in America. Perhaps the movie trick no longer worked in the old way.

"But as the audience dwindled -- and the decline would accelerate in the 1950s -- so there were different kinds of films. There was film noir, the last Hollywood genre, with not a happy ending in sight. 'The Third Man' was Viennese noir but as the decade ended there were many films made in America filled with disquiet and visual claustrophobia...{and} in his uncommon turmoil of success and failure and his venture into psychiatry {see "Spellbound"}, David had approached the mood. He had some of the furious energy of a trapped soul...." (pp 532-33)

David Selznick's last major picture was the 1957 "A Farewell to Arms," a remake of the 1932 version of the famous Hemingway novel with Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes which was rather well received and often thought well of today.

I haven't seen that film in some years now but I have seen several times the '57 which features none other than Rock Hudson as "Frederic Henry" and Jennifer Jones, Selznick's second wife, as the nurse "Catherine Barkley." It is NOT well thought of and not by David Thomson either but I just watched it again and found it very moving, very absorbing, very "romantic" but also very "hard" in its portrayals of war ("the retreat from Caporetto" is HARROWING, as "grim" as anything seen in a "war movie") as is the "ordeal" of Catherine's birthing of their baby which results in a "tragic" end.

Sometimes yes the movie (beautifully filmed by Oswald Morris until he quit because of Selznick's constant harassment) resembles a "travelogue" of Italy and yes Rock Hudson ought to have had his hair cut as director John Huston ("fired" or simply walked away -- Charles Vidor took over and did a fine job I believe) wished and maybe Jennifer J WAS a "bit" too old for her part but her face is so expressive without being so "conventionally beautiful" as per Hollywood and she is appropriately "low key" but yet agonizingly poignant in her prolonged labor and ultimate death.

Vittorio De Sica as the cynical doctor who is Henry's close friend is also both amusing and tragic in his attitudes toward religion, "the war" and re his own execution as a "provocateur" and "defeatist." And Hudson IS a "good" actor perhaps DESPITE his inordinate good looks and he is quite affecting in a number of scenes.

So ONCE AGAIN I must "dissent!" from the movie critics and live up (or down as it may be) to my "reputation" as "too easy" on films (I like)!

Also according to Thomson a few years afterward Selznick and Jones were in Pamplona for "the running of the bulls" (made famous in EH's "The Sun Also Rises" and in the 1950s film, not as "good" I'd say as "Farewell," with Ty Power and Ava Gardner and Errol Flynn) and who but Papa Hems himself should be there with "Slim" Hawks Hayward (the 1940s model, prototype for Lauren Bacall's character in Howard Hawks' "To Have and Have Not," based VERY roughly on the EH novel).

Hemingway approached the Selznicks and proceeded to "ream them out" yelling that they'd "ruined my book!" Slim tried to restrain him and David O and JJ just "took it," sad and weary. I read the book so long ago so I can't "comment" but whether "they ruined it," it seems to me "they" made a "good MOVIE" anyway...

Let me recommend the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger production of a truly different sort of film, "Gone to Earth," a 1950 British pic with an all Brit cast but for Jennifer Jones who portrays a "wild Welsh girl" of the late 1890s with such panache and vivacity she barely seems ever an American actress much less from Oklahoma of all places!

The movie is yet another of "love gone wrong" as per "GWTW," "Duel in the Sun," "A Farewell to Arms," even "The Song of Bernadette" if one REALLY notices -- this about a young woman who identifies with "the wild," with animals and woods and has a young fox as her "pet" but is chased (literally) by a wolfish man of the manor, a fox HUNTER, portrayed by a devilish David Farrar in the Gregory Peck in "Duel" manner.

Jones is however courted and ostensibly "won" by a modest and rather timid in the sexual sense parish parson, Cyril Cusack, but the "lord of the manor" seduces the girl away yet the parson becomes determined to take her back and does which leads to the inevitable I guess but utterly surprising tragedy!

Sounds perhaps like a rather "simple" film but it's surfeited with a kind of "druidic" power in conflict with "civilization." And by the way there's a really ECCENTRIC performance by the Welsh born actor Hugh Griffiths (most remembered by Americans as the vibrant sheik in "Ben Hur" for which he won an Oscar) as the lord's "servant" of sorts.

It's quite one of the most UNUSUAL movies I've ever seen and beautifully filmed on the Welsh-English border. I urge you to "try it"! (Jones is remarkable!...)