Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (94 page)

We’ve got a great crew Jack, I don’t know of any bunch that has taken such a beating and gone on with such spirit and cooperation. Your telegrams about the
rushes helped. I posted them and the boys would say, “Well, if we’re getting that kind of result we’d better keep going.” Outside of the weather we had the people to deal with. They are different than any nation I have seen so far. They are tricky, lie like hell, make promises they don’t intend to keep, have no idea of time.

They are like children in some ways, and like master minds in others.…
Dozens of fights each day, right while a scene was being made.… One village we were working in, an argument occurred about a dog. A man threw a rock at another man’s dog. The families of the respective men joined in. That evening the man who threw the rock had his throught [sic] cut and just before we arrived for work the next morning the owner of the dog was shot and killed.…

Our sets are ready
and look very good. Have shortened a lot of scenes in the script and eliminated some others and believe there is no reason why they can’t be as good as the outdoor stuff.… Even with the outdated studios and equipment it seems like heaven compared to Egypt.…

Jack I don’t understand this argument about publicity. I do know that if we could get together and talk it would be settled in no time.…
I don’t agree with you that I have nothing to do with publicity or thinking of ways to help sell the picture.…

For ten years have been doing exactly what I am now and it’s worked very well.… You remember the campaign on Bacall for
To Have and Have Not
. That was started by Conlon [Hawks’s personal publicity man Scoop] and me with the help of some friends on the various magazines.… It was not done
by the studio publicity department and am very sure of this statement. Conlon and I continued to work together on
Red River
and
The Thing
. .. .
I’m sure you will remember that both of those pictures were successful and in my opinion had excellent handling.

Conlon and I put in weeks of work before this picture ever started not on things usually handled by the publicity department but on trying
to reach out for a few more avenues. We wrote letters to editors and others. I think you’ll see the results in a little while and will be pleased and I assure you they won’t conflict in any way with the studio publicity. I think this all started because of the stills.… It was impossible to process the stills in Egypt. [They] would have been subject to censor, so we decided to bring the film with
us and develop it here which we did. It will be finished in a few days and sent immediately.…

Best regards, Howard.

Within a couple of weeks, both Hawks and Warner might have wished that publicity squabbles were all they had to worry about. Sets were built at two small studios, the Centro Sperimentale and the Scalera Studios; the latter, the oldest in Rome, were so primitive that they didn’t
even have permanent toilet facilities. Because of equipment problems, the continual rewriting of scenes, and the ambitious and time-consuming lighting designs of the cinematographer Lee Garmes, shooting proceeded at a painfully slow pace. Garmes, who had worked so creatively with Hawks on
Scarface
, was brought in to shoot the Rome interiors, as Russ Harlan was exhausted and extremely depressed
over the incredible poverty of Egypt and the conditions under which children grew up there. Nonetheless, Harlan stayed on to shoot second-unit footage and to knock off a promotional short for Egyptian tourism that Warner Bros. had promised to make in exchange for location privileges. In Italy, Harlan shot some additional sequences, notably exteriors, such as the pharaoh’s test of strength when he
wrestles the bull.

Joan Collins immediately jumped into a rollicking affair with her on-screen lover, Sydney Chaplin, and the two annoyed Hawks to no end by staying up most of the night partying on the Via Veneto. After a couple of weeks of gorging herself on pasta and wine, Collins had put on eight pounds, and Hawks told her bluntly that “Princess Nellifer should not look as though she is four
months pregnant.” Both she and Chaplin had trouble keeping their rolls of fat from overflowing the outfits and skin-clenching jewelry that had looked just right during costume fittings. Censorship required that Collins not expose her navel, so a fake red ruby was found to fill it. Sensitive about her protruding stomach, she sucked it in for the first take, but
this sent the ruby shooting out onto
the floor, to general hilarity. An unamused Hawks said, “For God’s sake, get some airplane glue. Get anything to keep the damned thing in place.” As she and Chaplin continued their carefree romance, their giddy mood spilled over onto the set. In the key scene in which Chaplin’s character declares his love for the princess, the actor began cracking up as he delivered his solemnly passionate lines.
Soon Collins couldn’t keep a straight face either, and after a few takes like this most of the crew members lost it as well. Hawks could barely contain himself but, of course, as Collins admitted, “The angrier Howard Hawks became the more we laughed.” Finally, Hawks bawled them out in front of everyone, called shooting off for the day, and sternly warned Chaplin and Collins to shape up fast if
they wanted to have careers after this picture. Realizing that she was stupidly risking a big break with one of the world’s leading directors, Collins resolved to go on the wagon and turn in early from then on, although it wasn’t easy since Chaplin continued to carouse the nights away.

Hawks’s mood wasn’t improved by his growing suspicion that the script might have intractable problems after
all. In Egypt, Hawks and his team could easily deceive themselves into thinking they had a great picture on the basis of the extraordinary spectacle they were capturing on-screen. Once in the studio in Rome, they couldn’t avoid confronting the hackneyed dialogue and story line, as well as their lack of a solution for these problems. Jack Hawkins, who had taken his role in large measure because of
Faulkner’s involvement, frankly felt that “some of the lines we were expected to speak were unspeakable.” Hawks reassured him in one instance by saying, “I’ll find you another. I have more used lines at my fingertips than anyone you know.” Hawkins ended up thinking that
Land of the Pharaohs
was “a perfectly ridiculous film.” Even Joan Collins realized that it was “a hokey script with some impossible
dialogue.” Much of the problem lay less with the pharaoh’s dialogue than with Hawks’s total conception of the Nellifer character, on which his formula for creating sexy young things went too far; she is a sexual vulture, a treasure-hungry villainess without a shred of refinement or sensibility. While the pharaoh was plausible enough, Hawks and his writers were entirely unable to bring any fresh
conception to the female lead; coincidentally or not, Nellifer greatly resembled the evil character played by Bella Darvi in
The Egyptian
. Although Collins’s lusty playing gives the film its greatest entertainment value, the conventional thinking behind the nature of the role makes the film resemble other epics of ancient times much more than it otherwise would.

Similarly,
Land of the Pharaohs
presents the usually egalitarian Hawksian group at its most imbalanced. Uniquely among the director’s films, this one features a dictatorial leader whose will is obeyed either by loyal subjects or slaves; the only way this task can be achieved is by threat or force, and the value of unique individual contributions is denied. The one exception lies in the strong relationship between the pharaoh
and his loyal top adviser, Hamar, very appealingly played by Alexis Minotis; while Hamar is obliged to do his leader’s bidding, their brotherly camaraderie resembles that found in many other Hawks films. Otherwise, on this one occasion, Hawks tried an approach far afield from his usual formula, but it didn’t work, which helps explain his retrenchment and recycling of stories during the final decade
of his career.

It was Noël Howard’s impression that Hawks was utterly obsessed with wealth and gold, and that he became ill at ease when the names of extremely rich men, such as J. Paul Getty and Howard Hughes, were even mentioned. One day Howard’s feelings were confirmed when he went to look for his boss and finally found Hawks alone down in the treasure chamber set, silently admiring the phony
gold and jewels, his head moving from side to side as if it were a camera panning the room. Howard didn’t interrupt him, but when Sydney Chaplin abruptly entered the scene, Howard said, “Hawks spun around. His mouth open, he threw him such an outraged look that Syd stopped dead in his tracks. Hawks quickly regained his habitual poise. With a grand gesture, sweeping the decor, he said with deep
conviction, ‘Sydney, look at all this … isn’t it …
beautiful?
’

“Sydney gave the wondrous sight a quick glance. ‘Not bad,’ he said, walking back up the steps. ‘You should see my old man’s cellars!’”

By mid-July, Jerry Blattner was able to assess what the final production costs would be. In his estimate, the film could be expected to wrap on about August 19 at a cost of $2.75 million. Stunned,
Warner fired off a blistering telegram to Hawks:

In my wildest imagination never would believe could go this figure. When we originally met in Paris you estimated you could make this picture for one million dollars plus some top star salaries of obtainable. You finalized this, setting budget $1,360,000. Then after you had scouted locations and fully estimated all the costs of the performers salaries
and costs we revised this budget by amendatory agreement under date January 25 at $1,750,000 which was ample to cover all requirements. Now it is estimated you are going over one million
dollars over that figure and I want to go on record with you. Howard I cannot permit this as it is not good business and will expose me to criticism from our entire organization.

Warner went on to deny Hawks
permission to import bulls and bullfighters from Portugal for a new sequence he wanted to shoot, claiming the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wouldn’t permit it anyway, and signed off by saying, “All my conversations with you in Europe were to avoid exactly what is happening.… I only went into deal on your firm promise that … you would keep within the budget.”

The very next day,
Hawks responded by stating that he could shoot the bullfight sequence (which had replaced the endurance run as the test of the pharaoh’s strength) in one day and pointed out that the problems on his picture were in many cases identical to those being suffered on
Helen of Troy
, which Robert Wise had just finished directing for Warners in Rome. “Everything possible is being done to better these
conditions or overcome them including working till seven or eight each night.… I can understand your anxiety and appreciate it but please also understand that after eight long months seven days a week working under every conceivable adverse condition I want to finish as soon as possible without jeopardizing what we already have.”

After raving about the footage coming back from Egypt, Warner was
a bit let down by what he saw from Rome, and he voiced concern that Hawks wasn’t using the CinemaScope format well in his interiors, as the director was showing a tendency to stay too far away from his actors. Having used CinemaScope as the raison d’être for making an epic, Hawks in the end found it clumsy and “good only for showing great masses of movement.” At face value, Hawks’s visual style
always seemed relatively plain and straightforward, but his reactions to CinemaScope, however old school, reveal an exceptional sophistication and awareness regarding the implications of the visual component of cinema. “We have spent a lifetime learning how to compel the public to concentrate on one single thing,” he explained. “Now we have something that works in exactly the opposite way, and I
don’t like it very much.” He also pointed out that because of the difficulty of cutting in the same way as before, “you lose speed as a means of exciting or augmenting a scene’s dramatic tension.” Hawks never used the wide-screen format again, even on an outdoor film such as
Hatari!
, which might have seemed to demand it.

Hawks also had big problems with the editing. On the advice of Lewis Milestone,
Hawks originally hired a Russian-English cutter named Vladimir Sagovsky. Probably referring to the difficulties of editing CinemaScope, Hawks told him before leaving for Egypt, “I want this picture cut differently than any other picture ever made.” Unfortunately, Sagovsky took him literally, cutting in close-ups where there should have been long shots, and vice versa. Seeing his material
assembled this way upon his return from Cairo, Hawks threw up his hands and insisted to Jack Warner that he needed a new editor. To the director’s delight, Warner sent over Rudi Fehr, an erudite, German-born film lover who had been a top editor and the head of the studio’s editorial department for many years; if anyone could help set the picture straight, Fehr could. Seeing that Hawks had Sagovsky
“shaking in his boots,” Fehr asked to keep his predecessor on for a while so he could save face. After looking at the assemblage, Fehr told Hawks that “the story doesn’t begin until page fifty-four.” Reel by reel, Fehr undid Sagovsky’s damage and attempted to give the footage shape and flow, with Hawks giving notes after each screening. It went slowly, for as Fehr told Warner, “One thing I have
learned about Mr. Hawks is that you have to bring your suggestions up again and again, he might not buy them the first time, but the second or third time he lends an ear.” Fehr’s great chance to shine lay in the climactic sequence of the tomb being sealed off, and he made the best of it, creating the most effective montage sequence in any Hawks film with his expert assembly of boldly composed shots
of massive stones falling into place and forever confining the treacherous Queen Nellifer, as well as the pharaoh’s loyal entourage, in the gold-filled tomb. Still, Fehr felt he never succeeded in the alchemy that was being asked of him. “I tried restructuring it, but it didn’t work and Howard knew it. I felt the picture could have had a better screenplay. They never solved their problems.”