The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (187 page)

Stuart Heisler
(1894–1979), b. Los Angeles
1936:
Straight from the Shoulder; Poppy
. 1937:
The Hurricane
(codirected with and credited to John Ford). 1940:
The Biscuit Eater; God Gave Him a Dog
. 1941:
The Monster and the Girl; Among the Living
. 1942:
The Remarkable Andrew; The Glass Key
. 1944:
The Negro Soldier
(d). 1945:
Along Came Jones
. 1946:
Blue Skies; Vendetta
(codirected with Mel Ferrer, Howard Hughes, Max Ophuls, and Preston Sturges). 1947:
Smash-Up
. 1949:
Tulsa; Tokyo Joe
. 1950:
Chain Lightning; Dallas
. 1951:
Storm Warning; Journey into Light
. 1952:
Saturday Island/Island of Desire
. 1953:
The Star
. 1954:
Beach-Head; This Is My Love
. 1955:
I Died a Thousand Times
. 1956:
The Lone Ranger; The Burning Hills
. 1961:
Hitler
.

Heisler waited a long time before being allowed to direct. He had joined Famous Players in 1913, and later worked for Sennett, Fox, Mary Pickford, First National, and Goldwyn before becoming an editor in the 1930s:
Condemned
(29, Wesley Ruggles);
The Kid from Spain
(32, Leo McCarey);
Roman Scandals
(33, Frank Tuttle);
The Dark Angel
(35, Sidney Franklin);
Wedding Night
(35, King Vidor);
Peter Ibbetson
(35, Henry Hathaway); and
Klondike Annie
(36, Raoul Walsh). In 1937, he was second unit director on John Ford’s
The Hurricane
, and by 1940 he was directing at Paramount.

For a man nearly fifty before he got into his stride, Heisler kept a youthful enthusiasm for visual excitement. Although willing to take on any project, he was at his best with thrillers and action films.
The Biscuit Eater
benefits from Georgia locations and fine acting from two kids, one black, one white. He made the best Ladd-Lake movie,
The Glass Key;
directed three enjoyable Susan Hayward pictures:
Among the Living, Smash-Up
, and
Tulsa;
directed Gary Cooper in the actor’s own production of
Along Came Jones
and in a good Western,
Dallas;
somehow made Ginger Rogers and Doris Day interesting in
Storm Warning;
celebrated the delightful Linda Darnell in
Saturday Island
and
This Is My Love;
made one vivid war picture,
Beach-Head;
and an excellent thriller,
I Died a Thousand Times
(a remake of
High Sierra
), with Jack Palance and Shelley Winters. It should be said that there was rubbish amid the pleasures:
Blue Skies
is dull;
Tokyo Joe
is a waste of Bogart; and
Hitler
was dreadful.

Mark Hellinger
(1903–47), b. New York
His short career as a producer earned Hellinger much respect from his writers and directors, especially Richard Brooks, whose novel,
The Producer
, is based on Hellinger. It is easy to see in his films a wish to bring authenticity to the crime picture. But his earlier films—more conventional studio works—are much more satisfactory than the attempt to make neorealist police stories. In other words, Hellinger lived at a time when substantial cinema novelty in America was still dependent on genre. In the streets of New York, Hellinger only dissipated the studio-furnished darkness of the film noir. Where he is interesting is in treating criminals as real, vulnerable people, and not as monolithic archetypes or subverted heroes. Bogart in
High Sierra
(41, Raoul Walsh) is a turning point for the actor and the genre. While
The Killers
(46, Robert Siodmak) is a fascinating fusion of Germanic atmosphere, Hemingway’s understatement, and the genre’s emphasis on ritual double cross. Especially in its detailed account of a criminal operation, it inaugurated a trend.

Hellinger was a New York journalist of high reputation as wisecracker, drinker, buddy, and Runyon-like man-about-town. He wrote for the theater and had his play
Night Court
(32, W. S. Van Dyke) purchased by MGM. He went on to work as a writer on
Broadway Bill
(34, Frank Capra) and, with Jerry Wald,
The Roaring Twenties
(39, Walsh). In 1940 he joined Hal Wallis at Warners as an associate producer and was engaged on
Torrid Zone
(40, William Keighley);
Brother Orchid
(40, Lloyd Bacon);
It All Came True
(40, William A. Seiter);
They Drive by Night
(40, Walsh);
The Strawberry Blonde
(41, Walsh);
Manpower
(41, Walsh); and
High Sierra
. He went to Fox to produce
Rise and Shine
(41, Allan Dwan), and then returned to Warners for
Moontide
(42, Archie Mayo) and
Thank Your Lucky Stars
(43, David Butler).

He was a war correspondent in the Pacific from 1943–45, but, in his last two years, worked at Warners and Universal:
The Horn Blows at Midnight
(45, Walsh);
The Killers; Swell Guy
(46, Frank Tuttle); the prison exposé
Brute Force
(47, Jules Dassin);
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
(47, Peter Godfrey); and the film that was to launch so many TV series,
The Naked City
(48, Dassin), which Hellinger narrates with the loving wryness of cozy journalese.

When he died, of a massive heart attack, he was on the point of joining Selznick, with plans to film a lot of Hemingway.

Lillian Hellman
(1905–84), b. New Orleans
In 1947, at the height of what she called “scoundrel time” (never trust good title people), Lillian Hellman wrote an editorial for the Screen Writers Guild magazine. She called it “The Judas Goats,” and it’s a stirring attack on the HUAC effort to find red streaks in the Hollywood picture. It includes this penetrating and undeniable truth: “There has never been a single line or word of Communism in any American picture at any time.” To which I would only add, “And anyone searching for the participation in Hollywood of absolutely dedicated writers, armored in talent and integrity—and whatever else—is doomed to find disappointment.”

But if you’re talking about writers with a taste for expensive fur coats, the best hotel rooms, dining with celebrities and sometimes taking them home, to say nothing of astonishing, discreet per diem arrangements, Hollywood is still the place. And still full of appeal to many of those writers essentially pledged to the word and its forms but in great need of a check—before the banks open tomorrow.

This is how it went with Lillian Hellman. She was more than just a good title person. She could see dramatic arcs and she could write dialogue. She was also a tough (if not bullying) woman with radical attitudes and hot pants. And just as the hot pants could pick on any new guy any day, so the radical attitudes were similarly flexible. And if sometimes there was a surprising shift from one point of view to another, why, ferocity and a foulmouthed, “kidding” intimidation was usually enough to blur the gap. You may feel I am mocking such a personality. Not so. It is one of the few halfway decent ways of getting through the whole mess. Further, I always have time for liars if they have hot pants: that is an imperative that will not stand for dissimulation.

In 1934, her first play,
The Children’s Hour
, opened on Broadway. One of her lovers, Herman Shumlin, produced it, and it ran 691 performances. Katherine Emery and Anne Revere played the teachers who are lovers. This was enough to get a screenwriting contract out of Samuel Goldwyn for $2,500 a week. Goldwyn was buying Broadway celebrity and more—for Hellman also had Dashiell Hammett as a lover, and the young legend that Nick and Nora Charles in Hammett’s
The Thin Man
(also published in 1934) were based on Dash and Lilly (to use the title of the 1999 TV movie where Sam Shepard and Judy Davis played the two writers).

Hellman’s initial movie assignment was a piece of silliness called
The Dark Angel
(35, Sidney Franklin). But the deal was founded, naturally enough, on doing a movie of
The Children’s Hour
. When Goldwyn heard that it involved lesbians, he said, “Never mind, we’ll make them Americans.” Whether that is genius or idiocy is still a profound question. But Goldwyn had credentials as an idiot, and Miss Lillian did not. In other words, at the very outset, the firebrand writer settled in her own mind to take the money while “they” bowdlerized her material. It became, said Ms. Hellman, a story about the dangers of slander. As
These Three
(36, William Wyler), with Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon and a screenplay credited to Hellman, it also became a muffled, wishy-washy picture that confirmed for any serious theatre person that Hollywood was for the birds.

Hellman persevered. She got into a long-term Goldwyn arrangement, and she was a picture person, selling her plays and doing adaptations of other writers’ work, and even originals:
Dead End
(37, Wyler), from the Sidney Kingsley play;
The Little Foxes
(41, Wyler), from her own play;
The North Star
(43, Lewis Milestone);
The Searching Wind
(46, William Dieterle)—plus, scripted by others, but from Hellman plays,
Watch on the Rhine
(43, Shumlin);
Another Part of the Forest
(48, King Vidor).

Put all of those together and
The Little Foxes
is the only one that would hold an audience today—and that owes a good deal to Gregg Toland’s camerawork, to a fine supporting cast, and to the chemistry between Wyler and Bette Davis.
Watch on the Rhine
is so ponderous and talky that it should serve as a warning on what governmental worries over morale can do to the entertainment picture.
Dead End
is schematic, horribly stagy, and dated.
Another Part of the Forest
was always camp material and is best known as a prequel to
The Little Foxes
.

But
The North Star
is the most absurd, and the best illustration of Hellman’s 1947 admission that not a word of communism ever got into an American film. It was a very farfetched venture, meant to celebrate the spirit of the ordinary Russian under Nazi threat. Hellman labored with the research, worked herself up into a stew of identification, and wrote in blood. Lewis Milestone took over as Wyler escaped to the real war, and—he was Russian—he tried to temper the appalling mix of ignorance and high-mindedness in a film that ended up with Anne Baxter and Farley Granger as peasants. Hellman was in tears when she saw the picture—but she let the script be published.

All I’m trying to say is that this was an author and screenwriter who wanted to have her cake and eat it. But what is cake for? And how in hell do you eat it without having it?

Of course, Hellman survived, marinaded in ugliness, booze, spite, and the question of what could you believe.
These Three
came back as
The Children’s Hour
(62, Wyler) and still couldn’t quite admit what it was about. A year later, her play
Toys in the Attic
(63, George Roy Hill) was filmed, scripted by James Poe, and costarring Wendy Hiller and Dean Martin.

Hellman’s adaptation of a Horton Foote play became
The Chase
(66, Arthur Penn). She reviled the film and said Sam Spiegel had ruined it. But it looks pretty good still to me. By then, however, Lillian Hellman was on her way to grand-old-ladyhood, which included being a witness in
Reds
, being seen on Warren Beatty’s arm, uttering the last word on Hammett, writing
Scoundrel Time
and
Pentimento
, watching herself turn into Jane Fonda in
Julia
(77, Fred Zinnemann), and then having to hear that its story was a fraud. For myself, I prefer the more chaotic, unreliable but heated Judy Davis.

Monte Hellman
, b. New York, 1932
1959:
The Beast from Haunted Cave
. 1964:
Back Door to Hell; Flight to Fury
. 1966:
The Shooting; Ride in the Whirlwind
. 1970:
Two-Lane Blacktop
. 1974:
Cockfighter
. 1978:
China 9, Liberty 37
. 1988:
Iguana
. 1989:
Silent Night, Deadly Night III—Better Watch Out
.

Hellman was an operator in fringe cinema who in one film—
The Shooting
—turned the uncompromising bones of a quickie Western into a movie about mythic identity and violent fate, without too much strain or pretentiousness.
The Shooting
, within moments, makes clear deeper meanings beneath its legitimate Western observation of figures in a landscape. But it is only gradually that one realizes how far the pessimism of the film is expressed in an elementary and withdrawn camera style. Both the sound and the visuals are rough—the film does not conceal its limited funds—but the imaginative conception is pure, philosophical, and esoteric. Although its tone is existentialist, its images of Millie Perkins, Warren Oates, and Jack Nicholson, increasingly worn down by the desert, seem more authentically Western than, say,
The Wild Bunch
.

It is characteristic of Hellman’s fringe career that
The Shooting
and
Ride in the Whirlwind
were made simultaneously, in the Utah desert, with a minimal crew, two cameras, and screenplays by Adrien Joyce and Jack Nicholson. Hellman has chosen to say of them that, “We thought they would be a couple more Roger Corman movies that would play on the second half of a double bill somewhere. So any thoughts about doing something different were for our own personal satisfaction. We never thought that anybody would ever notice.” In fact, their stark originality prevented either film from having a wide release in America, and contributed to making Hellman a cult figure.