STACK #136 Feb 2016

EXTRAS

visit stack.net.au

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

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

The young Henry Fleming redeems himself at the climax of RBoC

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.

Bob J’s personal postscript to The Red Badge of Courage aftermath

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 following RBoC.

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

FEBRUARY 2016

28

jbhifi.com.au