Hollywood Madonna (25 page)

Authors: Bernard F. Dick

BOOK: Hollywood Madonna

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One might ask the same about the bell tower climax in Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
(1958), which bears a resemblance to a similar one in
The Stranger. The Stranger
was Loretta’s last film for International, although she would return to the new Universal-International (UI) for two films, including her last. Goetz and Spitz were fortunate to find a producer in “S.P. Eagle,” soon to be known as Sam Spiegel, who
adopted the alias
to avoid deportation because of his criminal record. Eagle’s identity was common knowledge in Hollywood, and with the backing of powerful friends, he managed to become an American citizen after World War II—just at the time that the place of his birth, Galicia, was about to become part of what was then the Soviet Union. If he had been deported during the Cold War, it would have meant death or the gulag.

By 1954, he felt confident enough to identify himself as Sam Spiegel, the producer of
On the Waterfront
, occasioning one of
Variety’
s cleverest headlines: “The Eagle Folds Its Wings.” But even in the mid-forties, Spiegel knew how to gain access to the studio’s coffers, using a combination of charm, business savvy, and clever networking, even though, as director William Wyler’s wife, Talli, put it: “
He operated
on the edge of a financial precipice better than anybody I ever saw.” That may have been
true, but if he fell over it, there was always a safety net: a bank, a financier, a friend, or backers who were repaid not with a check but with an invitation to one of his legendary parties.

As a Jew who knew that there were still war criminals at large after World War II ended, Spiegel was attracted to the script of
The Stranger
, in which an ex-Nazi assumes a new identity and takes up residence in Connecticut. It was Spiegel who put the package together and helped Goetz and Spitz sell it to RKO, on the basis of both the script and the A-list cast: Edward G. Robinson, Loretta, and Orson Welles. It was Spiegel who entrusted the screenplay to Anthony Veiller and John Huston (uncredited), with Huston scheduled to direct. Spiegel changed his mind, once he learned that Welles would not appear in
The Stranger
if he could not direct it. Huston went on to better films (
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
and
The Asphalt Jungle
), and Welles came on board, promising to behave and bring the film in as budgeted. Welles would never behave. Put him behind a camera and he was like a kid in a toy store.
When Welles wanted the script changed
so that the Nazi hunter would be a woman, played by his friend and Mercury Theatre alumna Agnes Moorehead, RKO wisely refused, as Spiegel expected. Moorehead was a fine character actress but not a star. Welles agreed to all the terms, but for him, making
The Stranger
was
a joyless experience
. The billing in
The Stranger
was deceptive: Edward G. Robinson as Wilson, the Nazi hunter, who tracks down Franz Kindler (Orson Welles), a former top-ranking Nazi masquerading as Charles Rankin, a history instructor at a Connecticut prep school. Second billed was Loretta, as Mary, Rankin’s wife. Welles may have been third, but his presence, both as actor and director, permeated the film. Welles, also uncredited for his contribution to the screenplay, was the kind of director who imposed his signature on anything with which he was involved, even projects he disliked.

Visually,
The Stranger
bears Welles’s signature: chiaroscuro lighting; spectral faces; silhouettes, menacing and otherwise; high and low angle shots; and long takes (but not as long as those in
Touch of Evil
). There are other Wellesian touches. Exactly who decided that Rankin’s first name would be Charles is unknown, but one cannot help but think of Charles Foster Kane, who dominated his second wife, Susan Alexander, just as Rankin does Mary. The scene in which Mary, still dubious about her husband’s Nazi background, is asked to look at newsreel footage of the death camps that ends abruptly with the film flapping off the reel recalls the News on the March sequence in
Citizen Kane
, at the end of which the projector sputters, as if exhausted from the ordeal of compressing
seventy years of a life into seven or eight minutes. Mary is also a Supreme Court justice’s daughter; Kane’s first wife, Emily, was a president’s niece. Clearly, Welles was more than the film’s costar and director; he was its auteur, courtesy of Veiller and Huston.

When Rankin discovers that Mary’s brother has learned his identity, and then, that Mary has, Loretta is forced to play the imperiled wife/avenger, which she does well—although audiences were only interested in how Rankin would meet his fate. Perhaps Veiller, Huston, and/or Welles brainstormed and
recalled the way
Uncle Charlie (Welles alumnus Joseph Cotten) in Hitchcock’s
Shadow of a Doubt
(1943) planned to get rid of his niece (Teresa Wright), who has figured out that he is the Merry Widow murderer. He weakens a step on the outdoor staircase, which, if his niece loses her balance, could result in a broken neck.

Rankin asks Mary to join him at the church tower, where he is working on the clock, whose biblical figures—one of which is a spear-wielding angel—revolve on a track when the bell tolls. Rankin saws off a rung of the ladder leading to the tower, which he then glues together. Mary, however, has asked her brother Noah (Richard Long) to go in her place;, fearing that her housekeeper has had a heart attack, she stays behind. Noah brings Wilson with him; when Wilson nearly falls to his death, he realizes what Rankin had done.

Knowing what her husband had in store for her, Mary sets out for the tower, where Rankin has taken refuge and where she intends to kill him. Wilson arrives, and the gun goes off, activating the mechanism that starts the statues circling around the belfry. Rankin is skewered on the angel’s spear. Clasping the figure, now the avenging angel, the two come crashing down. How could Loretta compete with such a
coup de théâtre
or with Orson Welles, arguably the greatest showman in American film? Her work, as usual, was respectable, but she was in an Orson Welles production, in which the auteur hogged the spotlight, leaving everyone else, except Robinson, in shadow. Still, she endured the shoot,
despite occasional bouts of illness
and a schedule that wreaked havoc with her five-o’clock-quitting-time policy. At least twice, on 18 October and 1 November, respectively, she worked from 4:30 p.m. to 10:50 p.m., and again from 6:00 p.m. to 2:40 a.m.

Loretta’s last day was 30 November 1945, after which it was back to Paramount for two pictures for Hal Wallis, two for Sam Goldwyn, and three for the man for whom, she once said, she would never work again, Darryl F. Zanuck. But how could Loretta pass on playing a college student, a nun, and a somnambulist?

Mother and daughters. Left to right: Elizabeth Jane (Sally Blane), Polly Ann, Mother Gladys, and Loretta. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.