John Wayne: The Life and Legend (45 page)

The prospective McCarey deal ultimately fell apart, but Wayne signed contracts with similarly efficient veteran A list directors—John Farrow and William Wellman, the legendary “Wild Bill” who had made
Wings, Public Enemy
, the original
A Star Is Born
, and
The Story of G.I. Joe,
among many others.

During 1953 alone, Wayne-Fellows shot and completed
Island in the Sky, Hondo, Ring of Fear,
and
The High and the Mighty.
Wayne’s grim childhood had shaped an adult who would always be hustling, a man who was far more comfortable working than relaxing. In May 1953, Wayne wrote Jack Warner’s assistant Bill Schaefer that he and Bob Fellows wanted to lease a vacant lot the studio owned in Mexico City and build a car wash on it. He offered 800 pesos a month, or about $88, plus 2 percent of the profits. Schaefer noted at the bottom of the letter that the property was worth 2,500 pesos, or about $275 a month. A Mexico City car wash was not going to be the difference between a comfortable or impoverished retirement, but that was irrelevant. Wayne was always in search of income.

The new contract with Warners made Wayne-Fellows the talk of the industry. Wayne gave an interview explaining that “I’ve profited by the mistakes that friends of mine—stars, directors, and producers—have made with their own companies. Other companies have failed because they haven’t been able to buck the big companies. They make deals that look swell on paper. But when they finish up they’re taken for all kinds of hidden charges. You just can’t make a go of it unless you can keep the companies from piling up the costs on you.” The grim experiences of John Ford’s Argosy Productions and Howard Hawks’s Monterey Productions were obviously on Wayne’s mind, but he and his partner would also eventually be victimized by the core problem of independent producers.

Island in the Sky
, the first film made under the eight-picture deal with Warners, cost $962,000, earned $2.4 million in world rentals, and was more or less unseen for fifty years because it reverted to Wayne, after which Wayne and his son Mike sat on it. It’s one of William Wellman’s finest films, far outstripping the more commercially successful
The High and the Mighty
.

“I never had a more difficult location in my life,” said actor James Lydon. “There were five actors working in fourteen feet of snow in Donner Pass and Donner Lake. And the only way everybody could get from the hotel five miles away to the location was a Greyhound bus. We parked on the side of the road and then a Snowcat that held about twenty-five people took us to the location. Cast, crew, electricians, everybody. They would drop us off in the snow about a quarter to eight in the morning and pick us up about five or 5:15 in the afternoon, when the light would start to fade.

“We didn’t even have chairs, because where are you going to put chairs in fourteen feet of snow? So mostly we stood up for a dozen hours. For meals, the Snowcat would take us back to the Greyhound bus, where we ate.”

The valley, which was six miles from Truckee in the Sierra Nevadas, served as an airplane runway during the summer, stretched out flat for six thousand feet, and was surrounded by pine trees similar to those in Labrador, where the picture was set. But they were shooting in February, and it was miserable.

“Duke was a love, as usual,” said Lydon. “Wild Bill Wellman was no cinch to work for, and when things would get tough, Duke would say, ‘Now, now, come on, everything’s fine . . . ’ He was a peacemaker. He never put on his boss hat. He was a very kind gentleman.”

The appalling conditions forced Wellman to ramrod the shoot in an even more ruthless fashion than usual. He did 114 setups on location; seventy-three of them were done in one take, and only five location shots needed more than two takes. The picture started shooting on February 1 and finished on February 25, nine days ahead of schedule. Interestingly, Robert Fellows was never on location and was not a presence on the interiors either. Wayne functioned as the line producer as well as the star, and Lydon said he was “a very competent, quiet, easygoing boss.”

Lydon was accustomed to martinets, but
Island in the Sky
was his first and only go-round with Wellman.

John Ford on the set did exactly what he said he did in interviews. He said, “Come in the scene, say your words and get out. I don’t want fancy shots and sunspots and zooms. I want that camera to be unnoticeable to the audience. If I need a close-up I’ll punch it in, but I leave the camera alone.” He was a master at playing a scene in masters or full shots.

But Ford did not keep it all to himself. Ford would chew on his handkerchief and mull things over. Sometimes he’d spend half an hour just thinking, and everyone would wait. Ford was not a shouter; he would just say something and we’d do it.

Wellman . . . Wellman was

. He had his day’s work in his mind when he walked on the set in the morning. He would talk to the cameraman, they lit it. Everything was preplanned, and there was no room for discussion whatever. He didn’t do a lot of takes, you did it his way and that was it. He knew what he wanted and he would go and get it.

I had a scene where I was supposed to break down and cry in front of the other men. I wanted my character to be silent in the interior of the plane, but Wellman said he wanted me to scream it out. In the rehearsal I did it my way, but he made me scream it out anyway.

Neither Ford nor Wellman was a cinch to work for, but I can only tip my hat to Duke. He wasn’t like what he was on the screen. On-screen, he was a strong, strong American leading man, [but] I always remember him sitting at Oliver Hardy’s feet, in awe of a star that he didn’t consider himself to be on the same level with.

Given the speed with which Wellman and Wayne made
Island in the Sky
, the picture couldn’t help but be profitable, but Jack Warner wasn’t prepared for its quality. “Ran
Island in the Sky
last night with Wellman Bob [Fellows] and boys,” he wired Wayne on April 29, 1953. “This is one of the most important pictures have seen in long time. Believe will have as much impact as
Dawn Patrol
and
Wings
.” A couple of months later, Warner’s opinion was confirmed by a preview and he again wired Wayne: “Had wonderful preview
Island in the Sky
last night. You and all concerned are to be congratulated. If you were here you would have been as proud as we were.” Charlie Feldman also chimed in, writing it was “a wonderful, wonderful film. It still lingers in my mind, after these many days.”

But praise from the studio boss was not about to nudge Wayne into a supplicating posture. On September 18, 1953, he wrote a letter to Jack Warner grousing about the fact that he and Bob Fellows had personally spent $3,000 for a party after the premiere, with plenty of TV and still cameras and reporters present, only to find that Warner Bros. had already opened the picture in some areas of the country before the news about its quality could get out.

“I was under the impression that when you have a class picture, it is a good idea to get the publicity in the people’s minds before it is released for grind runs. I know it doesn’t have the news value or the selling possibilities of something like
The Robe
, but . . . when you have the critics on your side, it would be a good idea to play the picture for a week or so in one place and let the news travel before it goes into the grind.”

On one level,
Island in the Sky
is old-home week; showing up in small parts are Bob Steele, Andy Devine, Harry Carey Jr., and Paul Fix. On another level it’s a very personal story for both its director and its star—an essay on their idea of courage. The story is simple—a transport plane goes down in Labrador in uncharted territory. The film cross-cuts between the five-man crew struggling to survive and the men who are searching for it. Wellman narrates the film himself, quietly, intently, from the inside of a pilot’s sensibility, and mixes in a stream-of-consciousness voice-over from Wayne’s character, so the audience knows his uncertainty and fear—things he can’t afford to show to his men.

This terse minor masterpiece is directed and played with precision and force.

By the time
Island in the Sky
was in previews, Wayne was in Mexico wrestling with
Hondo
, a heat wave, and an intransigent 3-D camera.
Hondo
derives from a Louis L’Amour story that is quite different from the film. The bulk of the original story involves Ches Lane, who searches for a young wife named Angie on the Texas plains to tell her that her husband was killed while trying to protect a stranger in a saloon fight. Ches is captured by Apaches and fights his way to their respect. The Apaches deliver him to Angie, suggesting that he is strong and brave and will be good for her.

Jimmy Grant improved the story in innumerable ways. He made Angie’s husband a skulking brute who is himself killed by Hondo, thereby creating suspense as to how she’ll react when she finds out the brave stranger with whom she’s falling in love killed her husband. Grant gave Hondo and the Indian chief Vittorio a relationship of grudging mutual respect, and he gave Hondo a dog who mirrors his owner’s self-reliance and lack of need for others. In many respects, it’s a model creative adaptation—everything Grant did sharpens the conflicts and strengthens the characters.

But making a movie with a largely untried technology on a distant and primitive location is a recipe for trouble, especially when your camera is malfunctioning.
Hondo
was shot in the summer of 1953 in Camargo, Mexico, five hundred miles south of El Paso, a hundred miles from Chihuahua. It was the biggest thing ever to hit Camargo’s seventeen thousand inhabitants, but for everyone else it was concentrated hell.

The temperature never went below a hundred, and occasionally went twenty degrees past that. Sam, Hondo’s scruffy dog, was actually played by Lassie, covered with Fuller’s earth to make him look bedraggled. Since the ground was too hot to walk on, Lassie was outfitted with leather booties to wear between shots. Some of the enterprising Camargo locals kidnapped the dog and held him for ransom; after the ransom was paid, he was returned unharmed.

Adding to the difficulties was the fact that the film was being photographed in 3-D by what Warners was calling their “all media” camera, a five-hundred-pound behemoth mounted on a special truck with an elevator platform that could rise thirty feet and could shoot film simultaneously in 2-D, 3-D, flat, or in the widescreen ratio of 1:85. “We had a wonderful first day,” Wayne wrote Jack Warner, “if that monster got what we pointed it at.”

In that era, 3-D was photographed on two separate 35mm negatives by two cameras that approximated the angle and distance between two human eyes. When projected with Polaroid filters mounted in front of two 35mm projectors running in precise synchronization onto a silver screen, the effect on the audience—also outfitted with Polaroid glasses—was stereoscopic imagery. It was hard enough to shoot in the studio, but on a dusty location it was particularly stressful.

On June 17, Wayne wrote Jack Warner complaining that it took an hour and a half to get a simple two-shot because of the huge camera. What they needed, he told Warner, was the just-off-the-assembly line new 3-D camera that made setting up shots much easier. “We are throwing away what we think are values in composition because of the cameraman’s worries from the talks he’s had with the front office,” wrote Wayne. “He’s worried about his reputation.”

Wayne begged for the second camera so that they could save what he estimated would be about three hours of production time a day. Wayne wrote that at this rate
Hondo
would take forty-five days to make, about a third longer than the original estimate, all because of the difficulties they were having with the camera.

On June 18, Jack Warner wired Wayne that the new 3-D camera would be on its way in a week and he could keep it and the old one for a week to ten days.

Then Warner moved on to the matter of the rushes. “Saw three reels second group dailies tonight. Everything very good except director is not moving you and Geraldine [Page] close enough to camera. Everything seems to be too far away. Must have usual over shoulders close shots individuals and tight twos in three dimensional pictures so we can see people’s expressions and everything else. . . . All of this fundamental in making a picture which am sure Farrow you cameraman know. Best wishes . . .”