Mark Griffin (46 page)

Brian Avery (best remembered for his role as Dustin Hoffman’s rival in
The Graduate)
, played Paul Lukas’s son in
Four Horsemen
. Avery recalled that Vincente made an indelible impression from the very first casting call:

Apocalypse Now: Ingrid Thulin, Minnelli, and Glenn Ford on location for
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
in 1961. Pushed to the breaking point by her director, Thulin walked off the set. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

On that stage, Avery and most of the principal players appeared in a dramatically charged dining-room sequence in which Heinrich von Hartrott (Karl Boehm) reveals that he is a Nazi and the major conflicts of World War
II are metaphorically played out as domestic drama. Although Avery was befriended by several of his veteran costars, his on-set experiences also included the inevitable dose of self-absorbed star behavior. “He was a piece of work,” Avery says of leading man Glenn Ford:

In sharp contrast, Avery found his director a thoroughgoing professional: “Mr. Minnelli ran the set very well. He was attentive. He was always there if you needed to speak to him about something. He was very interested in the women. I remember when Ingrid Thulin was on the set and he was very, very present to her.”
¹²
Some might say omnipresent.

In late December, a crisis emerged when Ingrid Thulin, perilously close to having a nervous breakdown, walked off the set. Thulin was the latest in a long line of actors who found it difficult to adjust to Vincente’s unconventional and often quite literal hands-on approach. In a letter to Thulin’s agent, Paul Kohner, the actress’s husband, Harry Schein, detailed her miseries—not the least of which was a strained relationship with her director:

On December 31, 1960 (the same day that Thulin’s husband wrote his letter), Minnelli was focused on someone other than his beleaguered leading lady. At the Palm Springs home of Joan Cohn (widow of Columbia Pictures
chief Harry Cohn), a justice of the peace married Vincente and Denise Giganti in a decidedly informal, off-the-cuff ceremony that seemed to recall the rushed nuptials in
The Clock
. Laurence Harvey, who had been considered for Ford’s
Four Horsemen
role, served as an attendant.

Vincente and the third Mrs. Minnelli, the colorful Denise Giganti. Rex Reed dubbed her “Queen of Group A,” the grand empress of Hollywood’s power elite. Those less enamored of the lady referred to her as “Denise, Inc.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

After returning to Beverly Hills with his charismatic third wife in tow, Vincente resumed work on
The Four Horsemen
. The only element of the film that received as much attention from Minnelli as Ingrid Thulin were the four horsemen themselves. At several points throughout the film, Tony Duquette’s andiron statues, representing Conquest, War, Pestilence, and Death, come to life, and the figures can be glimpsed galloping through an apocalyptic void. “All he worried about were the horses,” recalls Hank Moonjean, who served as the first assistant director in Paris. “It must have been at least five days to shoot that, maybe even longer, and it was so difficult. And the poor horses—we thought they were going to die. Extremely difficult. I don’t think any of that could ever be repeated.”
¹⁴

Following a preview in October 1961, substantial changes were made to the picture. “There was so much cutting and reshooting, they had to rerecord the entire score,” says George Feltenstein. Alex North’s underscoring was
tossed and replaced with some stunning new music by André Previn. It was also decided that Ingrid Thulin’s soft-spoken delivery and tenuous command of English were causing many of her lines to be lost. The orders came down that the actress would be dubbed, and her voice would be supplied by none other than Angela Lansbury. As Brian Avery remembered, “It was so remarkable that you had a Swede playing a French woman who is dubbed by an Englishwoman.”
¹⁵

John Gay believes that studio politics also played a part in the dubbing. “I never had any problems with Ingrid Thulin’s voice,” Gay says. “Of all the troubles we had going on, I thought Ingrid Thulin was wonderful. She was a terrific actress. I think it was MGM—the big wigs—I don’t think they could understand her.”
¹⁶
In fixating on
The Four Horsemen
’s auditory alterations, MGM seemed to be missing the big picture. For starters, Glenn Ford and Ingrid Thulin appeared to be mere acquaintances throughout the film instead of lovers.

“The only memory I have—without going into anything that is just completely unkind—is my father saying that there was absolutely no chemistry between Glenn Ford and Ingrid Thulin,” says Paul Henreid’s daughter, Monika. “There are people who are on fire as lovers and you get what they call ‘movie magic,’ and there are people who play opposite each other and absolutely nothing happens. I think this is just a case where absolutely nothing happened.”
¹⁷

Nevertheless, MGM executives seemed to be looking at a completely different movie. “You could have heard a pin drop during the entire showing,” Metro executive Bob Mochrie reported to Vincente after a preview screening in late December. “I’m sure the public will be equally impressed and the word of mouth will be terrific. Pictures like this don’t come very often and I would like you to know that we will do all in our power to properly launch this great attraction.”
¹⁸
Mochrie was no prophet.

When it was all over—the 250,000 tons of military equipment, the 15,000 extras, the disembodied voice of Angela Lansbury—this $7 million “great attraction” just seemed to sit there on the screen. In his review for the
New York Herald Tribune
, Paul V. Beckley summed up the opinions of many when he wrote:

“The whole thing is a mess,” says George Feltenstein. “But it didn’t have to be. Had Vincente been able to make the movie he wanted, I think it would have turned out beautifully.”
²⁰

THE DECREE CAME DOWN from MGM’s new studio chief, Joseph Vogel: “MGM is now in the business of producing family pictures.” As the director of a Roman bacchanal that featured infidelity, attempted suicide, and an orgy, Minnelli had good to reason to be worried. It was unlikely that
Two Weeks in Another Town
would qualify as Vogel’s idea of wholesome family entertainment. In fact, Minnelli’s movie paled only in comparison to one other holdover from the studio’s previous administration: Stanley Kubrick’s
Lolita
, in which James Mason harbors an intense erotic obsession with teenager Sue Lyon. While Disney had ushered in the ’60s with
Pollyanna
and
The Parent Trap
, the MGM lion was now roaring over the likes of
Boys’ Night Out
, in which four men (three of them married) maintain a “bachelor pad” that comes complete with Kim Novak—though even that scenario seemed tame compared to Minnelli’s excursion into hedonistic excess.

Spurred on by the international success of Federico Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita
, which featured egoistic moviemakers squabbling against Roman backdrops, MGM’s former regime had pounced on a property with a similar setting and attendant freewheeling sexuality: Irwin Shaw’s coolly received 1960 novel,
Two Weeks in Another Town
. In Shaw’s novel, Jack Andrus—a physically and emotionally scarred NATO adviser—is summoned overseas to supervise the dubbing on a troubled movie that his mentor, Maurice Kruger, is directing in Rome. Once there, Andrus finds himself in the director’s chair, and his on-set battles are matched by his clashes with his capricious ex-wife, Carlotta.

After a self-imposed, three-year hiatus, John Houseman was once again producing pictures for MGM, and
Two Weeks in Another Town
seemed like the perfect project to welcome him back. Despite their skirmishes on
The Cobweb
and
Lust for Life
, Minnelli was Houseman’s first and only choice as director.
Two Weeks
(which would be shot partially on location in Rome) would reunite Vincente not only with Houseman but also with leading man Kirk Douglas,
^au
screenwriter Charles Schnee, and composer David Raksin. With so much of the
Bad and the Beautiful
team reassembled, comparisons between that film and
Two Weeks in Another Town
were inevitable. In fact, it often seemed like the earlier picture was haunting this latest effort, which was not so much a sequel as a more oregano-flavored remake.

Charles Schnee had worked wonders in terms of fleshing out George Bradshaw’s
Tribute to a Bad Man
and transforming it into
The Bad and the Beautiful
. But adapting Irwin Shaw’s solemn prose would prove to be more problematic. In early script conferences, it was decided that many of Shaw’s plot elements would be altered or streamlined for dramatic effect. It was Metro’s head of production Sol Siegel who suggested that audiences should be introduced to a Jack Andrus who has hit rock bottom—recovering from a nervous breakdown in a mental institution. This would prove to be one of the few good ideas a studio executive would have regarding
Two Weeks in Another Town
.

After reviewing an initial draft of the script, Motion Picture Production Code supervisor Geoffrey Shurlock thought Schnee had remained far too faithful to Shaw’s text: “The portrayal of free and easy sexual intercourse is so graphically depicted herein that any pretense of presenting it in a moral light would appear to be almost ludicrous,” he wrote.
¹
And during the Vogel regime, a sequence in which Jack Andrus was the headliner at an orgy would have been about as welcome as a stripper at a church social. Despite the fact that it had taken Schnee almost a year to knock out a treatment and two full drafts of
Two Weeks in Another Town
, he was asked to go back and reshape some of the material with an eye toward refashioning hard-core smut into soft-core smut.