Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (95 page)

Although he continued to simmer over the budget, Warner finally permitted Hawks to quickly film the bull sequence when the director assured him no animals would be killed. For the scene, the company traveled south to a spot along the coast just north of Naples, where there was an existing ranch with a bullring. On the way, however, the stuntman who had crashed Hawks’s Alfa Romeo once before in Egypt
had another wreck in the same car, which he was driving down for the director’s use. Because of the plethora of foreign actors being used, Fehr estimated that 75 percent of the picture was dubbed, and Warner cabled to tell Hawks that he would be in Rome around the middle of August and to insist that Hawks return to
Burbank for the remainder of postproduction. One particular bone of contention
was Dewey Martin, whose Brooklyn accent was painfully obvious in the midst of the mostly British leads, but Warner learned that Martin’s contract with MGM wouldn’t permit his being dubbed. Later, after Fehr returned to Hollywood, he was asked to shoot some miniatures of stones falling to incorporate into the climax, effects that look particularly unconvincing in the finished film. Noël Howard also
shot some miniatures representing the pyramid’s interior.

Finally, on August 9, after more than four months of grueling work,
Land of the Pharaohs
completed production. An exhausted troupe celebrated at a giant wrap party in Borghese Park, and several friends later recalled having been surprised that Hawks did not seem at all impressed by a young French starlet to whom he was introduced there,
Brigitte Bardot, fresh off a bit in
Helen of Troy
.

Rome was just entering the fabled period when it became known as “Hollywood on the Tiber,” and after a brief vacation in Portofino the Hawkses, who were expecting a child in the fall, were able to partake of the thriving night life. They moved into a beautiful apartment across from a park, at 77 Via Bruxelles in the fashionable Parioli district
particularly favored by show-business figures. One night at the Hostorio del’Orso, Hawks, Dee, Fehr, and the composer Dimitri Tiomkin were already seated when King Farouk, preceded by his bodyguards, walked in with an enormous Italian girlfriend. After they greeted each other, Hawks asked the king to join their party. Farouk proceeded to consume an enormous quantity of expensive caviar, much to
the chagrin of Tiomkin, who had invited the Hawkses and Fehr to dinner. Tiomkin’s discomfort amused Hawks to no end, as it did when Tiomkin, thinking he could curry favor with the king, mentioned that he knew his mother. Only later did Tiomkin learn that Farouk and the queen mother were not even on speaking terms. For a long time, the king tried to wheedle a screening of
Land of the Pharaohs
out
of Hawks and Tiomkin, but to no avail, since showing it to the deposed monarch might seriously upset the present government. Over the summer, Hawks’s teenage daughter Barbara came to visit, hit the town with Noël Howard with her father’s consent, and was taken dancing by Fehr.

Tiomkin had come to Rome to score
Land of the Pharaohs
only under heavy pressure from Hawks, since he was desperately
afraid of flying. He adored the director, however, and the prospect of creating what was to become the most expensive musical score ever done for a motion picture up to that time was too much to resist. Tiomkin composed a striking, sometimes
brutal score with an emphasis on brass and choral chanting; strings were used to underline the appearances of Nellifer.

During his August visit to Rome,
Warner was mollified by Hawks and pleased with what he was able to see of the picture itself.
Land of the Pharaohs
was the subject of a seven-page spread in the September 20 issue of
Life
magazine; five days later, Hawks saw the complete first cut of the picture, which ran two hours and twenty minutes. Confiding to Feldman that “the picture seems better than I thought,” Hawks continued to encourage
Warner about its progress and sent him a story, written in his own hand, which he said he would like to film next, about a man in Newgate prison awaiting death, who marries a girl so that she can inherit a fortune and is subsequently pardoned and shares in her wealth.

Warner let this one pass without recorded comment, but on a personal level, the two men continued to get along amicably. Warner
had his camera department procure a 16mm Cine-Kodak “Royal” movie camera with a 25mm lens, which Tiomkin brought over for Dee’s use, while Hawks personally picked out a new Bentley, which he arranged for Warner to receive.

A few weeks later, Hawks wired Warner that the film was all cut and ran two hours and fifteen minutes. He added, “Dee also has been busy lately in production boy, weight eight
pounds running time 24 hours!” Gregg, named after Hawks’s friend Gregg Toland, was born on October 22 by Cesarean section at Rome’s International Salvador Mundi Hospital. Hawks, at fifty-eight, was delighted to have another son.

Hawks delivered
Land of the Pharaohs
to Jack Warner in early November, eleven months from the time writing on it had begun. On November 16, his boss responded:

On Friday
I cabled you that the first running of
The Land of the Pharaohs
was enthusiastically received by everyone.…

In going over the future as far as you are concerned … this is the way we see it.… Unless we get an important subject, we would not want to make a deal at this time. We believe that stories such as “Dreadful Hollow” … would be a waste of time. The picture would end up as the bottom half
of a double bill, and all the effort put into the making of it would be wasted.…

I am not going to tell you that [
Pharaohs
] hasn’t a chance of recouping its cost and making an important profit but when you spend $2,800,000 for a picture plus the cost of prints, advertising,
distribution, foreign dubbing and all that goes with it, you really have to gross a tremendous sum before making any money.
In our opinion, the motion picture industry is in too precarious a position for us to take this chance now. However … if you come across a subject which can be made in … England as an Eady Plan quota picture … we would be interested.

Because of the many years we have known each other, I do not want to make any statement which will put you in the position of keeping you from doing something else
where you can get an attractive deal. However, we are interested in making a deal provided we can set the budget and not exceed it within reason.…

Can assure you that our Company will not a leave a stone unturned on
Pharaohs
. I hope that it will come off as you put in a lot of hard work to make it all possible. You deserve high praise for having accomplished an important task.

To recover from
the laborious year, Hawks played a lot of golf, made little excursions out of Rome, and then took his family on a long trip through Europe. Leaving Rome for Switzerland in early November, they picked up a new Mercedes and drove through Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France (with a stop in Paris), then went on to Klosters, near St. Moritz, where Hawks and his wife skied nearly every day and had
so much fun that they stayed on through February. During that time, the next step in the creation of Hawks’s vaunted critical reputation was made; in the February 1955
Cahiers du Cinéma
, the great film theoretician André Bazin published an article entitled “Comment peut-on être Hitchcocko-Hawksien?,” which addressed the question of how such commercial directors as Hitchcock and Hawks could be
discussed as serious artists, an issue that would be taken up in the United States some ten to fifteen years hence.

On May 6, Warner cabled that the first sneak preview of
Land of the Pharaohs
, the night before at the Encino Theater in the San Fernando Valley, had been “excellent.” The film was judged a bit too long, however, and Hawks, acting with the advice of his brother Bill, quickly approved
a list of twenty-two cuts, all minor and designed merely to speed up the action. Both Warner and Feldman felt that the next preview, at the Huntington Park Theater on May 26, was “wonderful,” and Feldman told Hawks to expect about $4–5 million as his cut of the profits on the picture. Equally confident, Warner began showing the film to the press; considering the eventual reception of the film,
many of the initial reviews were surprisingly
good. Billy Wilkerson, the publisher of the
Hollywood Reporter
, went so far as to send the following telegram to Warner: “Up to last night I felt the greatest spectacle of all time was Griffith’s
Intolerance
but your
Land of the Pharaohs
makes it look like a two-reeler.”

Still, despite all of Warner’s sustained enthusiasm through the shoot and the
expectations that
Land of the Pharaohs
would emerge as one of the blockbusters of all time, the company finally realized that this was not a film that was going to play for months and win Academy Awards. Going the opposite route, Warner Bros. developed a sensationalistic campaign keyed around such tag lines as “The Barbaric Love That Left the Great Pyramid as Its Landmark!” and “Her Treachery
Stained Every Stone of the Pyramid.” The epic did strong business in its initial West Coast openings on June 24, playing, of course, the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, but dropped off rather sharply in subsequent weeks. When it spread out to major cities around the country over the next couple of weeks, the same pattern was repeated—solid openings, but no legs. Feeling guilty over having let Hawks
down, Faulkner agreed to appear at a Warners cocktail party for the premiere in Memphis and submitted to interviews to help promote the picture. One of the other writers, Harold Jack Bloom, was appalled by the final result and felt that Hawks had blown a real opportunity to make something unusual.

Reposing at the Villa Capri in Cannes, Hawks was buoyed by the initial returns, but it was shortly
clear that his original hopes were to be excruciatingly underrealized. Perhaps it was the fact that the story was pagan, rather than Biblical; maybe it needed a real star or two; possibly Warner was right in suspecting that the public was surfeited on ancient exotica for the moment, and no doubt Hawks was onto something when he observed, “I should have had somebody in there that you were rooting
for. Everybody was a son of a bitch.” In any event, the public proved royally indifferent to
Land of the Pharaohs
. When it finally opened in New York City on July 26, it was at the Mayfair Theater, not one of the more high-end houses in town; in five weeks there, it grossed a lackluster $89,500. The highest it ever rose in the national box-office rankings was number four, during the week including
July 4. An accounting five years later showed that the budget had run to $3.15 million. With prints, advertising, distribution expenses, and the rest, the film had ultimately cost Warner Bros. $5,716,120. U.S. and Canadian rentals amounted to $2,001,481, and the total worldwide was $4,181,909; this left Warners $1,534,211 in the hole for its trouble. All Hawks ever received for the picture was
$100,000 plus expenses, or less than he
had been earning a decade earlier when he was chafing under the frustrations of a Warner Bros. studio contract.

There was an ultimate irony. After taking a look at it, the new Nasser regime in Egypt promptly banned
Land of the Pharaohs
because, in its opinion, the characterization of the bearded Vashtar and his oppressed tribe made it appear that a Jew
had designed the pyramid. Then, in 1959, the film ended up being reissued on the bottom half of a double bill with
Helen of Troy
.

The conventional wisdom concerning Howard Hawks’s mid-1950s layoff from filmmaking—at three months short of four years, the longest hiatus between shoots in his entire career—is that he was licking his wounds after the crushing disappointment of
Land of the Pharaohs
, that he took time off in Europe to reassess what went wrong and didn’t return until he had a very clear idea
of how he wanted to proceed. This impression was fostered by Hawks himself, who claimed that he soured on the film business during that period and said, “I thought I would quit, and I did for a while.”

While there is no doubt that Hawks needed to regain his enthusiasm and get a better fix on the stories he wanted to tell, the fact is that Hawks aggressively, even desperately tried to get films
made all through this period. Even while he continued to live lavishly at the most fashionable addresses, Hawks suffered financial setbacks that made his situation even more urgent. But a combination of insufficiently prepared scripts, a balky star, a major standoff with a studio, a broken leg, and missed deals translated into a protracted dry spell that coincided with the deterioration of his third
marriage.

Despite the tremendous rigors of the shoot, all through the post-production and prerelease period of
Land of the Pharaohs
, Hawks was consumed with ideas and possibilities for new projects to begin as soon as possible. Yet again, his thoughts returned to
The Sun Also Rises
. Refusing offers for the rights from Robert Hakim and Orson Welles, Hawks told Feldman that he now wanted Marlon
Brando to play Jake Barnes and that he believed filming would have to span a year; he would send a unit to Spain in the summer of 1955 to shoot the running of the bulls, then return the following year with his actors, since it would likely be impossible to safely cover both at the same time. Feldman kept telling his friend that making an “important deal” would be no problem, but Hawks failed to make
any progress on a script, and the following year, he sold it to 20th Century–Fox.
“I thought it was hard to do,” Hawks confessed. “Zanuck paid through the nose for it, then six months later he called me up and said, ‘Howard, how were you gonna make that?’ I said, ‘Darryl, I’ll be glad to tell you for $100,000.’” Under heavy censorship constraints, Zanuck went ahead anyway, with Henry King directing
a turgid 1957 adaptation distinguished only by a couple of the performances.

The producer Sam Spiegel, fresh from winning an Oscar for
On the Waterfront
, began pursuing Hawks to direct a film from a novel he owned called
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. Hawks discussed story ideas for this prisoner-of-war thriller with the writer Carl Foreman, whom he liked despite having despised
High Noon
, and
proposed numerous changes and new characters from Pierre Boulle’s novel. “I wanted Noël Coward to play a fairy that thought of marvelous ways of killing the enemy,” he said. Years later, he maintained, “I couldn’t stand Sam Spiegel so I left it.” But in early 1955, he revealed his true reservations to Feldman: “I don’t believe I’ll do it. First, I think it’s a good story, probably get great reviews
as a picture but I don’t think it will make money. It’s a war story, no dames, expensive and too damn much work for no gain.” Instead, in the same letter to his agent, he proposed another idea: “What would you think of doing
The Last Days of Pompeii
. It’s a good yarn, very well known, and could have an amazing ending with the volcano and fire.”