STACK February 2016 Issue 136

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28 FEBRUARY 2016
EXTRAS
Ross’s fly-on-the-wall observations resulted in
the first factual, blow-by-blow account and inside
view of the ruthless business mechanism of the
American motion picture industry. Her article,
published in five parts, rocked Hollywood to
its core and ensured that never again would a
journalist have such free access to the movie
business as Miss Ross had during the filming
and editing of The Red Badge of Courage.
Shooting had over-run by 12 days but Huston
and film editor Margaret Booth, working
night and day, had a 95-minute cut ready for
previewing by early October 1950. The first
viewing was a small private affair that included
Huston’s movie friends, WilliamWyler, Sam
Spiegel and columnist Hedda Hopper, who at the
end of the picture stood and applauded Huston.
Hopper told the beaming director, “John, that
was the best war picture I have ever seen”.
But the first sneak preview shown in
a downtown Los Angeles theatre proved
disastrous. Patrons had paid to see a light
comedy but were now shown Huston’s graphic
war film instead. Halfway through the screening
a large number of the audience just got up and
walked out, and those that did remain to the
end wrote scathing comments on their preview
cards. Huston and his producer, Gottfried
Reinhardt, were devastated, as was Dore Schary.
Not so Louis B. Mayer, who had attended the
preview in person, for as he left the theatre he
had a broad grin on his face.
The following day Huston left for Africa to
begin filming The African Queen for his own
Horizon Pictures company. Schary and Reinhardt
were left holding the cut of The Red Badge of
Courage and those dreadful preview cards.
Meanwhile back at the MGM studios, an
ebullient Mayer was holding court with his old
guard. “I told that upstart Schary that Huston’s
film wouldn’t make a cent, but he wouldn’t listen
to me. Me, who was in this business when he
was still crapping his drawers! Well, I gave him
the rope and now with luck, it will hang him."
To salvage the film, Schary saw no choice
but to recut the picture to enable audiences
to understand the story a little better. By late
October he and Reinhardt had completed a full
overhaul of Huston’s movie. They added a literary
framework with an image of Crane’s novel as a
preface and a voiceover narrated by actor James
Whitmore (Schary had asked Mayer for the
services of Spencer Tracy to voice the dialogue.
Mayer refused).
Reinhardt, already feeling chagrined due to the
unexpected bad reception the film had received,
became even more dejected when Schary also
demanded that the more gruesome death and
carnage scenes be cut. Reinhardt pleaded that
the 'Tattered Man' scenes be retained (Huston
had firmly believed that the actor Royal Dano’s
exceptional performance as this character would
gain the actor an Academy Award nomination).
But alas most of Dano’s scenes ended up on the
cutting room floor.
A second preview proved just as disastrous
as the first, which sent a panicked Schary and
Reinhardt back into the cutting room. They cut
even more out of the film, which completely
destroyed the motivation of Murphy’s character’s
initial cowardice. The now totally butchered
film had lost its continuity, appearing disjointed
and confusing, and at only 69 minutes long,
the previously added narration became an
annoying distraction. Everyone associated with
the project appeared to have lost all fervour for
it, with the studio doing little to promote the
film. Nevertheless, this truncated version was
hurriedly given a general release on 16th March
1951. Unsurprisingly it performed badly at the
box office; after only a week it was pulled from
theatres and eventually re-released as a second
feature to an Esther Williams musical.
Mayer now moved in for the kill. Using the
film’s box office failure and its $1.5 million loss
as a good enough reason, he gave his boss,
Nicholas Schenck, an ultimatum: Either him or
Schary as overall vice-president of MGM.
Mayer’s power play failed spectacularly, for
Schenck actually welcomed the chance of getting
rid of a man he had never liked. Consequently,
Mayer was unceremoniously dumped from
the studio he had run for 27 years. Some film
historians have described Mayer’s dismissal as
the beginning of the end of the golden age of
Hollywood.
So what was wrong with Huston’s original
95-minute cut? The simple answer is that it was
probably 20 years before its time. American
audiences in 1951 were not yet ready to watch
a war film with a near documentary feel that
conveyed the psychology of combat and its
effects on the common soldier. Audiences at the
time simply failed to identify with the movie’s
characters and its grim realism.
We can only guess at how many classic
scenes were contained in the 25 minutes that
were cut from the film, but Audie Murphy –
who gave a career-best performance – most
certainly knew. And perhaps that is why,
during the late 1960s, he tried to purchase
John Huston’s uncut version of The Red Badge
of Courage from MGM with the intention of
re-releasing it. But it was not to be, for the actor
was told that all the scenes cut from the original
film had been destroyed in 1951... on the orders
of Louis B. Mayer.
John Huston never went public with any
personal comments or views he may have
had on the ideological war between Mayer
and Schary at MGM, which caused his movie
to become the main casualty of that conflict.
However, my personal view – for
what it's worth – is that the whole MGM
experience seriously affected Huston’s
moviemaking mojo. I base this primarily on
the remainder of the films that he directed
followingRBoC.
Apart from his three tragi-comedies,The
African Queen, The Man Who Would Be
King, Prizzi’s Honor and his much troubled
The Misfits, his other 30-odd directed films
arguably came nowhere near the sheer
cinematic brilliance of his earlier work like
The Maltese Falcon, Across the Pacific, The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, We
Were Strangers and The Asphalt Jungle.
He appeared to lose his directorial spark
following the debacle and studio destruction
of what could have been his American Civil
War movie masterpiece .
In fact, I’ll go further and say that
following his first credited acting role in
The Cardinal (1963), his distinctive voice
and craggy appearance made him a more
outstanding character actor (in the two
dozen motion pictures he appeared in)
than a director late in his career.
Audie Murphy as the frightened boy soldier
writing a letter home to his mother
The young Henry Fleming redeems himself
at the climax of RBoC
Bob J’s personal postscript to The Red Badge of Courage aftermath