Mark Griffin (22 page)

Minnelli Goes Noir: Robert Taylor and Katharine Hepburn in the 1946 melodrama
Undercurrent
. The film features a trio of stars cast against type, some brilliantly moody photography by Karl Freund, and plenty of subtext. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

With all of the principals in place, Hepburn stepped into character as Ann Hamilton, a spunky, self-reliant New Englander. Although Ann is a whiz assisting her scientist father (Edmund Gwenn) in his laboratory, she becomes a floundering fish out of water once she marries affluent industrialist Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor). As Ann soon discovers, her volatile husband is harboring some dark secrets about his half brother, Michael (Robert Mitchum), who has mysteriously disappeared.

While Robert Taylor is effective in a refreshing change-of-pace role as the “smooth as patent leather” husband with sinister shadings, both Hepburn and Mitchum are miscast. As Minnelli recalled, “[Mitchum] was never comfortable in the role of the sensitive Michael.”
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Which is hardly surprising given that the character—a pipe-smoking devotee of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry and Johannes Brahms’s
Third Symphony
—seems more appropriate casting for Clifton Webb than the tough-talking, reefer-toting Mitchum.

Adding to Mitchum’s discomfort was the fact that Hepburn, who wielded contractual approval of her costars, seems to have only begrudgingly accepted him, though, decades later, the heavy-lidded actor contradicted the oft-repeated stories that Hepburn was openly hostile toward him. “Mr. Mitchum, don’t let them muck you about like that,” Hepburn told her costar when she noticed that the lighting for their final scene favored her but left him in the dark. Hepburn ordered the crew to rearrange the lighting so that Mitchum would be photographed to best advantage.

If Mitchum benefited from the formidable Hepburn’s take-charge approach,
Undercurrent
’s director was not so fortunate. “I thought she was very
mean to Vincente,” recalls Jayne Meadows Allen, cast in the supporting role of Sylvia Lea Burton, a glamorous socialite:

If Hepburn was an imposing, commanding presence on the set, her take-no-prisoners personality also seeped through to her performance. As a result, one never quite believes Hepburn during her character’s supposedly vulnerable moments. There’s also a jarring disconnect between the supremely confident Ann Hamilton glimpsed in the film’s opening moments and the hopelessly inept newlywed who emerges just a few scenes later. After witnessing Ann dominating her father’s household and trading zingers with a handsome suitor, one can only wonder . . . Would a woman this self-assured be cowed by anyone, let alone a group of cocktail-party dowagers? It’s to Hepburn’s credit that in several key scenes, she manages to be moving in a part that doesn’t really suit her.

With two leads thrust into awkward roles and a director thoroughly intimidated by his leading lady,
Undercurrent
is off kilter from its first frame. If Minnelli’s first dramatic picture,
The Clock
, had played to his strengths, his second nonmusical feature exposed some of his weaknesses as a director: Varied decor and costume changes are substituted for authentic character development, and at times the melodrama veers toward over-the-top histrionics. On the surface,
Undercurrent
seems the least likely of Minnelli’s movies to provide any kind of self-referential insight. And yet, here is Hepburn as an uncomfortable outcast, unhappily married to a socially acceptable spouse while her subconscious craves a more suitable soul mate—one who will understand her completely and embrace the same romantic ideals that she does.

Ann is “haunted” by her husband’s brother, who for most of the movie exists only as a disembodied kindred spirit—someone she has practically willed
into being. “I think he’s my obsession,” Ann admits. “Wherever I go, there he is. I want to forget him. I want to drive him away . . . I must.” But Ann is compelled to locate the mysterious Michael Garroway, as tracking him down also means finding the deepest, most authentic part of herself.

Katharine Hepburn, Minnelli, and Robert Taylor break for cake while shooting
Undercurrent
in February 1946. A month later, Vincente would celebrate the birth of his first child. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

“I know it was a studio assignment at the beginning of his career but it seems to me, there’s a lot of real Vincente Minnelli meaning in that film,” notes film scholar Jeanine Basinger:

Or, as Mitchum reminds Hepburn in one of the film’s best scenes, “You can’t always see that undercurrent, but it’s there.”

Most critics would take Minnelli to task for serving up what they regarded as a stylish but hollow suspense yarn. As
Time
noted, “The indigestible plot, full of false leads and unkept promises, is like a woman’s magazine serial
consumed at one gulp.”
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Despite mixed reviews, the picture was a certified hit when it was released in November 1946.
Undercurrent
would also prove to be the first of a half dozen highly profitable collaborations for Vincente and producer Pandro Berman.

Though his latest picture had moviegoers lining up at the ticket window, Minnelli was much prouder of another production—one that had debuted months earlier on March 12, 1946. “I remember one day when we were shooting, a secretary came out from Vincente’s office to say, ‘Mr. Minnelli, we’ve just had a phone call from the hospital. You have a baby daughter,’” recalls Jayne Meadows Allen.
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The baby would be named Liza after the Gershwin song.

Decades after they worked on
Undercurrent
, Allen reminded Katharine Hepburn of this momentous occasion while both were backstage during “The Night of a 100 Stars” gala. “We were talking about the day Liza Minnelli was born,” Allen remembers:

AS MR. AND MRS. VINCENTE MINNELLI made the rounds of cocktail parties and dinner parties and post-premiere parties (parties were a large part of the job in Hollywood), Judy was inevitably asked to sing. In fact, a social occasion couldn’t truly be considered a success until MGM’s resident belter took her place at the piano. Judy also ranked high on every hostess’s invitation list for another reason: She was, without question, one of the wittiest women in Hollywood. In sharp contrast to the conversationally challenged Minnelli, Garland was an extraordinary raconteur who could captivate a roomful of seasoned veterans with her outlandish anecdotes or a devastating Marlene Dietrich imitation. According to Minnelli, it was Judy’s affinity for the absurd that first triggered the idea for a film version of
The Pirate
.

S. N. Behrman’s comedy had opened on Broadway in 1942 starring the great theatrical couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The plot had been lifted from the German play
Der Seerauber
and concerned a rakish actor masquerading as a notorious seafarer as he attempts to win the heart of the mayor’s wife. “There was nothing subtle about it,” Hilary Knight recalled of the Lunts’ version of
The Pirate
. “It looked like a musical, although it wasn’t one. . . . It was all decor and style and no more successful than the movie was.”
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Scenic designer Lemuel Ayres, who had worked on the theatrical version of
The Pirate
, suggested to Arthur Freed that Behrman’s play might make for a blockbuster screen musical. Freed, Minnelli, and Garland were all excited by the idea—Judy, especially, as the material would allow her to display her largely untapped talent for sophisticated comedy.

A musical set in the picturesque West Indies would inspire Minnelli to conjure up the kind of lush tropical paradise that he had fantasized about as a boy back in Delaware. He would go to incredible lengths to make certain that MGM’s versions of exotic nineteenth-century Calvados and neighboring Port Sebastian were painstakingly thorough in terms of period authenticity. At the same time, this would be the kind of highly stylized Freed Unit utopia where pirates in snug buccaneer briefs, crucifix-sporting señoritas, and African American circus tumblers would all blissfully coexist.

With Garland in the lead, the obvious question became . . . Who would play the hammy actor passing himself off as the dashing pirate? “I never thought of anyone but Gene Kelly for the part of Serafin,” said Minnelli, believing that Kelly’s knock ’em dead charisma and athleticism were a perfect match for the part. Like Judy, Gene was enthusiastic about the project as it would let him display another facet of his remarkable talents: “I wanted the opportunity to do a different kind of dancing, a popular style with a lot of classic form, acrobatics and athletics.”
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Tongue firmly planted in cheek, Kelly would also pay tribute to the screen’s legendary swashbucklers, such as the dashing Douglas Fairbanks Sr., in what would prove to be one of his best roles.

With two of Metro’s brightest stars in place, Minnelli turned his attention to the script. Although the basic framework of the Lunt-Fontanne version was retained, much of the stage material would require revamping. On Broadway, Fontanne’s Manuela was married to the oafish mayor Don Pedro Vargas while carrying on with Serafin. That scenario could never be sanctioned by either the Breen Office or Louis B. Mayer. For MGM’s adaptation, Garland’s Manuela Alva would be engaged to the mayor, and she would be less worldly and Catholicized. However, the character would retain her wide-eyed romanticism and penchant for embarking on “mental excursions,” a facet of the story that immediately appealed to Vincente. When Manuela finally abandons her repressive surroundings to join Serafin’s theatrical troupe, this seemed to refer back to Minnelli’s own story:
I was saved from Delaware, Ohio, by the bright lights of show business
.

One writer after another (including Judy’s former flame Joseph L. Mankiewicz) would take a crack at the screenplay, but none of these scripts were judged correct. Freed then turned to Anita Loos and Joseph Than, but their version of
The Pirate
would prove to be the most unacceptable by far. In the Loos-Than treatment, the original premise was turned upside down, with the Kelly character becoming a singing-dancing pirate pretending to be an entertainer. This would never do. It was husband-and-wife writing team
Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich who came to the rescue. Within two months, they had cranked out a zesty, witty screenplay that achieved the right balance between sophisticated farce and whimsical fantasy.

In terms of the score, Freed had initially thought of Hugh Martin, who had come through with three of the finest movie songs ever written for
Meet Me in St. Louis
. “When I came out of the army, I was so anxious to get back to Hollywood that I didn’t go see Arthur, which was really wicked of me because he had given me the best opportunity of my life,” Martin recalls. “He said, ‘I’m really sorry you didn’t come to see me because I wanted you to write
The Pirate
and when I thought you were still in the army, I got Cole Porter.’ I would have loved to have done it and I felt awful. And I’ve been feeling awful for about fifty years.”
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