Fourth of four parts
Re “ ‘The Little Foxes’ Is Next on the Best of ’41 List”
[Editor’s Note: Although 1939 is frequently considered the single strongest year for films in Hollywood history, our historian, Mr. Hawkins, counters that 1941 may have been superior. Here is the final chapter in his epic work.]
9. “Sergeant York” starred Gary Cooper as a pacifist-turned-World War I hero Alvin York. Directed by Howard Hawks, and also starring Walter Brennan and Joan Leslie, the film nicely balances early 20th century scenes of rural America against grim wartime battles.
Cooper won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Brennan was nominated for Best Supporting Actor as the pastor of a country church in Tennessee. In the previous year, 1940, Brennan had won his third Academy Award as gun-toting, whiskey guzzling Judge Roy Bean in “The Westerner.” In that film, Cooper played a drifter Gary Cooper played a drifter who becomes a lawman and brings Bean to justice.
10. “High Sierra” stars Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart. Raoul Walsh directed. This was Bogart’s breakout role where he no longer had to play second fiddle to George Raft, Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney.
Again, Raft turned down the role of Mad Dog Roy Earl because he didn't want to play another gangster. Paul Muni also turned down the role of the doomed bank robber out for one last score.
Director Walsh went to Jack Warner. He begged Warner to let Bogart take the part. “I hate his guts!” Warner told Walsh. “Besides, he called me a fairy.”
Bogart had been suspended for refusing to appear as one of the Younger brothers in a forgettable Western entitled “Badmen of Missouri.”
John Huston forged a close friendship with Bogart that would last until Bogart's death in 1957. Huston was the screenwriter who was adapting W.R. Burnett's book of the same title. The character of Roy Earle was supposed to be based on John Dillinger. After Dillinger had been gunned down by the FBI in Chicago, J. Edgar Hoover decreed that any studio attempting to produce a biography of Dillinger would find itself audited by the IRS. To enrich the prospects, Bogart and Dillinger had similar facial features. When Bogart made his stage entrance in “The Petrified Forest,” audiences in New York, gasped. They thought they were seeing Dillinger in the flesh.
Huston and Walsh convinced Warner to let Bogart play the lead, but Ida Lupino got top billing.
The film was remade three times. In 1949, “High Sierra” was remade as a Western with Joel McCrea playing the doomed badman. Raoul Walsh also directed this version. Some critics believe it was a better film. In “Colorado Territory,” the opening jailbreak sequence and a train robbery gone wrong are classic action pieces.
Film buffs love to point out the similarities in “Colorado Territory” and later badman epics such as “The Wild Bunch” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
My good friend and mentor, Gil Perkins, a stuntman and actor, had the distinction of working in all three versions. He was a highway patrolman in “High Sierra” and a member of the posse in “Colorado Territory.” In the Gordon Douglas version, “I Died A Thousand Times,” he played the sniper who climbs a mountain wall and shoots Roy Earle, this time played by Jack Palance.
11.”Meet John Doe.” Produced and directed by Frank Capra, the film’s stars were Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arnold, James Gleason and Walter Brennan.
After Frank Capra directed “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” he left Columbia Pictures and Harry Cohen to form his own production company.
He took an office at the Selznick Studios where he and Robert Riskin bought a story from Richard Connell and Robert Presnell. They developed a morality play about a disgruntled newspaper reporter (Stanwyck) who has just been fired and creates a grassroots political movement as a hoax. Trouble is, it starts to grow across the country.
Gary Cooper plays a burnt out baseball player conned into becoming John Doe, the idealistic reformer so disillusioned with the American political scene that he's going to jump off the Empire State Building on Christmas Eve.
Capra felt that he'd written his hero into a corner. They wrote three endings for the film but they were not happy with any of them. This was the last time Capra and Riskin worked together. Riskin felt Capra got all of the credit for the films they did together. Once, he tried his hand at directing.
However, for “Magic Town” in 1947, with James Stewart and Jane Wyman, the reviews were so bad it almost finished Stewart's career.
I met Frank Capra one time in 1979 at the American Film Institute. The Screen Actors Guild Conservatory was housed there, and I was visiting a group of actors when Capra walked into the office unannounced. He told us he was about to give a lecture and the classroom was empty. Would we like to sit in on his class? Eight of us filed into the classroom and listened to him tell about his tribulations on “Mr. Deeds Goes To Town” in 1936. Someone asked him how, in the era when the Producer was in total control and the studio system was in place, did he get the freedom to make the pictures he made. Capra's simple reply was:
“I always respected the money. I lived by my budgets.”
12. “The Strawberry Blonde” was directed by Raoul Walsh. The stars in the film set in New York in the1890s were James Cagney as a dentist infatuated with a gold-digger (Rita Hayworth) and his marriage to Olivia de Haviland.
Director Walsh grew up in New York during the period he colorfully re-creates in this film version of a play called “One Sunday Afternoon.”
Walsh met Mark Twain, ran away from home when he was 13 years old, took a ship around the Horn to Panama, then signed up for a cattle drive to Texas. When he was in El Paso, he was taken under the wing of Texas John Slaughter, the town marshal at the time.
Walsh played John Wilkes Booth in “Birth of a Nation.” Then took a film crew to Mexico where he shot the exploits of Pancho Villa.
At the age of 77, he made his final film, 1964’s “A Distant Trumpet.”
There were other films of interest in the banner year of 1941. Among them:
“Suspicion,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starred Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
“The Lady Eve” was Preston Sturges' comedy romp with Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck.
Walt Disney's “Dumbo.”
“Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” a fantasy directed by Alexander Hall, starring Robert Montgomery as a prizefighter sent to heaven before his time. His assignment: to find another body to inhabit.
Later, it was remade as “Heaven Can Wait,” with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.
“You'll Never Get Rich” marked the first teaming of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth.
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” starred Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner. The director was Victor Fleming. Tracy hated himself in the title role. But I feel the film is better than critics at that time thought of it.
Ingrid Bergman played the prostitute that Tracy torments as Mr. Hyde.
She was going to play Tracy's fiancé originally. But she switched roles with Lana Turner.
Edward Ashley screen tested with Bergman for the role. He recalled that she wore no makeup and had the most beautiful complexion he'd ever seen.
“She was five feet, eleven inches tall in her stocking feet,” Ashley said, laughing at the idea of short actors like Tracy and Charles Boyer romancing her.
In the remarkable year of 1941, war raged across Europe and Asia. By the year’s end, the United States was inevitably drawn in.
The Manhattan Project, a top secret atomic research program, began in Los Angeles and Chicago, and from this start, the atomic bomb was developed.
In August, President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met secretly aboard a battleship in the Atlantic and drafted the Atlantic Charter.
Heavyweight champion Joe Louis knocked out seven contenders in 1941.
Lou Gehrig died.
The late F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, “The Last Tycoon,” supposedly modeled after Irving Thalberg, was published posthumously.
Rita Hayworth was dubbed “the Love Goddess.”
Eleanor Roosevelt announced that because her husband was so busy, no formal White House functions would be held.
Mr. Hawkins may be contacted at rjhculvercity@aol.com
