Almost Wasn't Wednesday #4: Sunset Boulevard With Mary Pickford And Montgomery Clift

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard surely ranks as one of the greatest movies of all time, and perhaps the greatest movie about the movies themselves.

Sunset Boulevard was perfectly cast with Oscar-nominated performances by William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson, but the film nearly featured very different performers in the lead roles.

Montgomery Clift had already signed on to play struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis before backing out days before filming started. "It so happens Mr. Clift had had an affair with an older woman in New York," Wilder recalled years later. "And he did not want to make his first picture playing the lead, the story of a man being kept by a very rich woman twice his age. He did not want Hollywood talk."

Fred MacMurray turned down the part, and the studio vetoed Wilder's suggestion of Marlon Brando, who at that point had yet to make a movie. Only then did Wilder reluctantly cast Holden, who despite starring in Golden Boy in 1939 had yet to make his mark in Hollywood. The compromise proved to be fortuitous, providing a breakthrough role for Holden, and introducing Wilder to an actor who would go on to star in four of his films.

The female lead proved even harder to cast. Among the many actresses Wilder approached were Mae West, Norma Shearer, Pola Negri, Greta Garbo and—particularly intriguing to me—Mary Pickford. There are many different stories about what happened next.

"Mr. Brackett and I went to see her at Pickfair, but she was too drunk," Wilder later claimed. "She was not interested." On the other hand, Scott Eyman, one of Pickford's biographers, wrote that she was indeed interested but wanted the script rewritten to emphasize Norma Desmond, a change Wilder was not willing to make. Still others have suggested Pickford simply feared damaging her image.

In any event, fellow director George Cukor soon after suggested Swanson, an inspired choice, it turns out. The performance was so good that Barbara Stanwyck kissed the hem of Swanson's skirt at the premiere.

Would the film have been as good with Pickford (or West or Shearer or Negri or Garbo) in the lead? It would have been different, that's for sure. Swanson was something of a larger-than-life figure herself and if you know her silent work, particularly the six films she did with Cecil B. DeMille, you know Norma Desmond was right in her wheelhouse. As Wilder himself noted years later, "There was a lot of Norma in her, you know."

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1960)

Norman has mother issues. Well, don't we all. At least he can keep his in the fruit cellar.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Psycho (prod. Alfred Hitchcock)
nominees: Inherit The Wind (prod. Stanley Kramer); The Magnificent Seven (prod. John Sturges); Peeping Tom (prod. Michael Powell); Spartacus (prod. Edward Lewis)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Apartment (prod. Billy Wilder)
nominees: The Little Shop of Horrors (prod. Roger Corman); Ocean's Eleven (prod. Lewis Milestone); Where The Boys Are (prod. Joe Pasternak)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: À bout de souffle (Breathless) (prod. Georges de Beauregard)
nominees: L’Avventura (prod. Amato Pennasilico); La Dolce Vita (prod. Giuseppe Amato and Angelo Rizzoli); Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring) (prod. Ingmar Bergman and Allan Ekelund); Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) (prod. Goffredo Lombardo); Le Trou (prod. Serge Silberman); Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without A Face) (prod. Jules Borkon)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Anthony Perkins (Psycho)
nominees: Ralph Bellamy (Sunrise at Campobello); Jean-Paul Belmondo (À bout de souffle a.k.a. Breathless); Yul Brenner (The Magnificent Seven); Kirk Douglas (Spartacus); Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning); Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry); Steve McQueen (The Magnificent Seven); Spencer Tracy (Inherit the Wind)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jack Lemmon (The Apartment)
nominees: Jerry Lewis (The Bellboy and Cinderfella); Marcello Mastroianni (La Dolce Vita)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Jean Simmons (Elmer Gantry)
nominees: Marie Dubois (Tirez sur le pianiste a.k.a. Shoot The Piano Player); Greer Garson (Sunrise at Campobello); Wendy Hiller (Sons and Lovers); Deborah Kerr (The Sundowners); Sophia Loren (La ciociara a.k.a. Two Women); Jean Seberg (À bout de souffle a.k.a. Breathless); Monica Vitti (L’Avventura)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Shirley MacLaine (The Apartment)
nominees: Doris Day (Please Don't Eat The Daisies); Melina Mercouri (Pote tin Kyriaki a.k.a. Never On Sunday); Paula Prentiss (Where The Boys Are)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho)
nominees: Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura); Ingmar Bergman (Jungfrukällan a.k.a. The Virgin Spring); Jean-Luc Godard (À bout de souffle a.k.a. Breathless); John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Billy Wilder (The Apartment)
nominees: Jules Dassin (Pote tin Kyriaki a.k.a. Never On Sunday); Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Laurence Olivier (Spartacus)
nominees: Charles Bronson (The Magnificent Seven); James Coburn (The Magnificent Seven); Jack Kruschen (The Apartment); Charles Laughton (Spartacus); Fred MacMurray (The Apartment); Peter Ustinov (Spartacus); Renato Salvatori (Rocco e i suoi fratelli a.k.a. Rocco and His Brothers)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Shirley Jones (Elmer Gantry)
nominees: Anouk Aimée (La Dolce Vita); Anita Ekberg (La Dolce Vita); Annie Girardot (Rocco e i suoi fratelli a.k.a. Rocco and His Brothers); Glynis Johns (The Sundowners); Janet Leigh (Psycho)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond (The Apartment)
nominees: Joseph Stephano, from the novel by Robert Bloch (Psycho); Dalton Trumbo, from the novel by Howard Fast (Spartacus)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Elmer Bernstein (The Magnificent Seven) (Score); Alexandre Trauner and Edward G. Boyle (The Apartment) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); George Tomasini (Psycho) (Film Editing)

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1959)

At the heart of every Howard Hawks action movie is the concept of the professional doing his job, and doing it well, despite the imminent threat of death, an idealized code of conduct Hemingway called "grace under pressure." We're all going to die sooner or later, Hawks seems to be saying, can't we at least do it with a bit of dignity and honor and laughter and good company?

After nearly three decades of genre defining action pictures—from Dawn Patrol to Only Angels Have Wings to Red River to The Thing From Another World—Hawks topped himself with Rio Bravo, if not the best Western ever made then certainly the most entertaining.

It's also Hawks at his most compassionate, not an attribute I would always associate with his brusque heroes and no-nonsense women. But John Wayne watches over his ragged crew—a drunk, a cripple, and later a girl, a young gunslinger and even the manager of the local hotel—like a mother hen, with a love that is sometimes tough and sometimes tender, but always genuine.

There's a lesson here for purveyors of the modern summer blockbuster: don't confuse a slowing of the action with a flagging of the audience's interest. If you don't give us a reason to invest ourselves in the characters on the screen, the non-stop action, no matter how well choreographed, eventually becomes a tedious bore.

Hawks, for example, takes time after one character's particularly intense personal crisis for a trademark song (here, "My Rifle, My Pony and Me") which not only allows the audience to catch its breath, but also adds another dimension to the friendship between the four men involved that makes the final payoff (one of the greatest shootouts in movie history) so much more satisfying—because by then you really care.



I'll take Rio Bravo with its ups and downs of pacing and mood over all the empty, rote action movies ever made.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Rio Bravo (prod. Howard Hawks)
nominees: Anatomy of a Murder (prod. Otto Preminger); Ben-Hur (prod. Sam Zimbalist); Imitation of Life (prod. Ross Hunter); North By Northwest (prod. Alfred Hitchcock); Shadows (prod. Maurice McEndree); Room at the Top (James Woolf and John Woolf)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Some Like It Hot (prod. Billy Wilder)
nominees: I'm All Right Jack (prod. Roy Boultin); The Mouse That Roared (prod. Walter Shenson); Our Man In Havana (prod. Carol Reed); Pillow Talk (prod. Ross Hunter and Martin Melcher); Sleeping Beauty (prod. Walt Disney)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) (prod. François Truffaut)
nominees: Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) (prod. Satyajit Ray); Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier) (prod. M. Chernova); Hiroshima mon amour (prod. Anatole Dauman and Samy Halfon); Ningen no jôken (The Human Condition) (prod. Shigeru Wakatsuki); Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) (prod. Sacha Gordine); Ukigusa (Floating Weeds) (prod. Masaichi Nagata)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Cary Grant (North By Northwest)
nominees: Peter Cushing (The Hound of the Baskervilles); Charlton Heston (Ben-Hur); Jean-Pierre Léaud (Les quatre cents coups a.k.a. The 400 Blows); Dean Martin (Rio Bravo); Paul Muni (The Last Angry Man); James Stewart (Anatomy of a Murder); John Wayne (Rio Bravo)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jack Lemmon (Some Like It Hot)
nominees: Tony Curtis (Some Like It Hot); Alec Guinness (Our Man In Havana); Rock Hudson (Pillow Talk); Peter Sellers (The Mouse That Roared and I'm All Right Jack)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Simone Signoret (Room At The Top)
nominees: Audrey Hepburn (The Nun's Story); Katharine Hepburn (Suddenly Last Summer); Eva Marie Saint (North By Northwest); Lana Turner (Imitation Of Life)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Marilyn Monroe (Some Like It Hot)
nominees: Dorothy Dandridge (Porgy And Bess); Doris Day (Pillow Talk)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Howard Hawks (Rio Bravo)
nominees: John Cassavetes (Shadows); Alfred Hitchcock (North By Northwest); Masaki Kobayashi (Ningen no jôken a.k.a. The Human Condition); Otto Preminger (Anatomy of a Murder); Douglas Sirk (Imitation of Life); François Truffaut (Les quatre cents coups a.k.a. The 400 Blows); William Wyler (Ben-Hur)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot)
nominees: Marcel Camus (Orfeu Negro a.k.a. Black Orpheus); Michael Gordon (Pillow Talk); Yasujirô Ozu (Ohayô a.k.a. Good Morning); Carol Reed (Our Man In Havana)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Walter Brennan (Rio Bravo)
nominees: Joe E. Brown (Some Like It Hot); Ben Gazzarra (Anatomy of a Murder); Hugh Griffith (Ben-Hur); Martin Landau (North By Northwest); James Mason (North By Northwest); Arthur O'Connell (Anatomy of a Murder); Tony Randall (Pillow Talk); George C. Scott (Anatomy of a Murder); Orson Welles (Compulsion)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Juanita Moore (Imitation Of Life)
nominees: Eve Arden (Anatomy of a Murder); Angie Dickinson (Rio Bravo); Susan Kohner (Imitation of Life); Jessie Royce Landis (North By Northwest); Lee Remick (Anatomy of a Murder); Shelley Winters (The Diary of Anne Frank)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, from the story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan (Some Like It Hot)
nominees: Karl Tunberg, from the novel by Lew Wallace (Ben-Hur); Ernest Lehman (North By Northwest); Graham Greene, from his novel (Our Man In Havana); François Truffaut (scenario and adaptation), Marcel Moussy (dialogue and adaptation) (Les quatre cents coups a.k.a. The 400 Blows); Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, from the short story by B.H. McCampbell (Rio Bravo)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Saul Bass (Career Achievement Award); Jazz on a Summer's Day (Documentary); William A. Horning and Edward Carfagno; Hugh Hunt (Ben-Hur) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Franklin E. Milton (Ben-Hur) (Sound); Ralph E. Winters and John D. Dunning (Ben-Hur) (Film Editing); Elizabeth Haffenden (Ben-Hur) (Costumes); A. Arnold Gillespie, Robert MacDonald and Milo Lory (Ben-Hur) (Special Effects)

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1944)

When in 1946 the French, who thanks to the war hadn't seen an American movie in five years, finally caught up with the backlog, they noticed something that Hollywood had apparently missed—that such movies as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura and Murder, My Sweet, were shot through with an anxiety and pessimism wholly uncharacteristic of the screwball comedies and glossy MGM musicals they had seen in the 1930s.

The French dubbed these dark movies "film noir"—and a genre was unwittingly born.

Which movie you would crown as the best film noir of all time depends in part on what you think of as film noir. The French didn't really define the term and Hollywood's studios never thought of themselves as producing something called film noir—they were just making movies that they hoped would sell tickets.

For me, the essence of noir is not about lighting or femme fatales or crime gone wrong, but simply a guy who ought to know better heading down a moral rathole anyway with the worst possible consequences. You see that over and over again in these movies—guys who think they're smarter than everybody else or who think they're luckier than everybody else or who, like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, just don't care. Watching film noir is a little like watching a train wreck—you can see it coming but you can't stop it and you can't turn away, all you can do is brace yourself for the impact.

In that sense, Double Indemnity might be the best of the noirs. Fred MacMurray commits murder, ostensibly for money and a woman, but in fact simply to see if he can get away with it. Boredom is a lousy reason for doing anything, but I'll bet you as many harebrained schemes have been hatched out of boredom as for any of the more conventional reasons.

In any event, Double Indemnity is a great movie featuring career performances from MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson.

(And before you ask—yes, I think the wig plays. It's just the sort of thing a half-smart floozy like Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson would think looks good. That and that "honey" of an anklet. It's the sort of thing women did in the 1940s in lieu of a tramp stamp.)

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Double Indemnity (prod. Joseph Sistrom)
nominees: The Curse Of The Cat People (prod. Val Lewton); Gaslight (prod. Arthur Hornblower, Jr.); Laura (prod. Otto Preminger); To Have And Have Not (prod. Howard Hawks)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Meet Me In St. Louis (prod. Arthur Freed)
nominees: Arsenic and Old Lace (prod. Jack L. Warner); Going My Way (prod. Leo McCarey); Hail The Conquering Hero (prod. Preston Sturges); The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek (prod. Preston Sturges and Buddy G. DeSylva)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Ivan Groznyy (Ivan The Terrible, Part I) (prod. Sergei Eisenstein)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Charles Boyer (Gaslight)
nominees: Humphrey Bogart (To Have And Have Not); Charles Laughton (The Suspect); Fred MacMurray (Double Indemnity); Laurence Olivier (Henry V); Dick Powell (Murder, My Sweet); Orson Welles (Jane Eyre)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Eddie Bracken (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek and Hail The Conquering Hero)
nominees: Bing Crosby (Going My Way); Cary Grant (Arsenic and Old Lace); Bob Hope (The Princess and the Pirate)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity)
nominees: Lauren Bacall (To Have And Have Not); Joan Bennett (The Woman In The Window); Ingrid Bergman (Gaslight); Claudette Colbert (Since You Went Away); Joan Fontaine (Jane Eyre); Elizabeth Taylor (National Velvet); Gene Tierney (Laura)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Betty Hutton (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek)
nominees: Judy Garland (Meet Me In St. Louis); Priscilla Lane (Arsenic and Old Lace)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity)
nominees: George Cukor (Gaslight); Sergei Eisenstein (Ivan Groznyy a.k.a. Ivan The Terrible, Part I); Howard Hawks (To Have and Have Not); Otto Preminger (Laura); Robert Wise (The Curse of the Cat People)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Vincente Minnelli (Meet Me In St. Louis)
nominees: Frank Capra (Arsenic and Old Lace); Leo McCarey (Going My Way); Preston Sturges (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek and Hail The Conquering Hero)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Edward G. Robinson (Double Indemnity)
nominees: Walter Brennan (To Have And Have Not); William Demarest (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail The Conquering Hero); Barry Fitzgerald (Going My Way); Clifton Webb (Laura)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Margaret O'Brien (Meet Me In St. Louis)
nominees: Josephine Hull (Arsenic and Old Lace); Angela Lansbury (Gaslight); Diana Lynn (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek); Anne Revere (National Velvet)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Preston Sturges (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek and Hail The Conquering Hero)
nominees: Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, from the novel by James M. Cain (Double Indemnity); Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, from the novel by Ernest Hemingway (To Have And Have Not)

SPECIAL AWARDS
John F. Seitz (Double Indemnity) (Cinematography); "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Meet Me In St. Louis) music and lyrics by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin (Song); David Raksin (Laura) (Score)

All-Time Great Directors Tournament

It occurred to me that if Erik Beck of the Boston Becks can come up with his list of the 100 best directors of all time and Monty of All Good Things can run a Classic Stars Match Play Tournament, there's no reason I can't horn in on their action and run an all-time great directors tournament.

Admittedly, I don't have time for a full-blown March Madness style tourney with 64 participants, but I can handle a sweet 16, divided into four brackets, The Silent Era, Classic Hollywood, Art House Favorites and The Modern Era.

Here are the match-ups:

SILENT ERA
D.W. Griffith v. Louis Feuillade
Charles Chaplin v. Buster Keaton

CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD
Alfred Hitchcock v. Billy Wilder
John Ford v. Howard Hawks

ART HOUSE FAVORITES
Ingmar Bergman v. Stanley Kubrick
Akira Kurosawa v. Federico Fellini

MODERN ERA
Woody Allen v. The Coen Brothers
Martin Scorsese v. Steven Spielberg

Admittedly, that leaves out a lot of favorites, both yours and mine, but what is life without disappointment and frustration.

The rounds will go off in staggered starts—Classic Hollywood today, the Modern Era tomorrow, etc.—and you'll have five days to vote on each match-up. Round Two will start next Wednesday.

Here's the Tale of the Tape for today's contestants:

Alfred Hitchcock
Born: August 13, 1899 (London, England)
Directorial Debut: Number 13 (1922) (unfinished)
Academy Awards: 5 nominations, no wins
Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (for direction): 4 wins: The 39 Steps (1935); The Lady Vanishes (1938); Vertigo (1958); Psycho (1960) (all in the category of Drama)
Three More To See: Notorious, Rear Window and North By Northwest

Billy Wilder
Born: June 22, 1906 (Sucha, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now Sucha Beskidzka, Malopolskie, Poland])
Directorial Debut: Mauvaise Graine (1934)
Academy Awards: 21 nominations (including 8 for direction), 6 wins, including two for direction—The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Apartment (1960)
Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (for direction): 3 wins: Double Indemnity (1944) (Drama), and Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960) (both Comedy/Musical)
Three More To See: Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17 and Sabrina

John Ford
Born: February 1, 1894 (Cape Elizabeth, Maine)
Directorial Debut: The Tornado (1917)
Academy Awards: 6 nominations (including 5 for direction); 4 wins—The Informer (1935); The Grapes Of Wrath (1940); How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Quiet Man (1952)
Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (for direction): 3 wins—Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes Of Wrath (1940) and The Searchers (1956) (all for Drama)
Three More To See: My Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962)

Howard Hawks
Born: May 30, 1896 (Goshen, Indiana)
Directorial Debut: The Road To Glory (1926)
Academy Awards: 1 nomination, 0 wins
Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (for direction): 3 wins—Scarface (1931-32) (Drama), Bringing Up Baby (1938) (Comedy/Musical) and Rio Bravo (1959) (Drama)
Three More To See: His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep and Red River