The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (456 page)

Breaking Away
was one of Yates’s most original and amiable concepts, though it had a tried and trusted climax. Still, he is at ease in such diverse efforts as Albert Finney doing Donald Wolfit in
The Dresser
or Cher doing heavy legal thinking in
Suspect
. In addition, there are atmospheric moments in the creaky
House on Carroll Street
when a past but sunnier New York is nicely captured.

Roommates
came from a Max Apple novel, and starred Peter Falk. The next two films showed a decline, but with
Don Quixote
(scripted by John Mortimer), Yates reaffirmed his storytelling and his likability, plus the ability to make the best of John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins as the Don and Sancho Panza.

Philip Yordan
(1913–2003), b. Chicago
Movie reference books have one essential level of data: the credits on pictures. Yet anyone who spends long contemplating the product, or listening to the stories told by men and women who have worked in film, knows that credits are not to be trusted. To take one example: yes, that
is
Ronald Colman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Mary Astor in the Selznick
A Prisoner of Zenda
, a picture credited to director John Cromwell, and to writers John L. Balderston and Wells Root. Yet there is unquestioned documentation that George Cukor and Woody Van Dyke shot some scenes, and that Sidney Howard did some rewriting. Then there is the legend of chronic Selznickian interference, of writers in and out of the office, giving a line here or there.

A movie script is many things, or versions, along the way. In the end, it is the transcript of the finished film that may involve structures only perceived in the editing room, as well as lines looped over resistant lips. The script is always changing, and there are people who have had busy and wellpaid lives assisting the changes with hardly a credit to show for it. Some writers are doctors; and nearly all writers feel sick sooner or later.

Philip Yordan is included here as a buoy to mark an area of whirlpool, crosscurrents, rocks, and wrecks. Yordan has his name all over the place—it
is
a very illustrious career. And no one has ever argued but that he was a superb entrepreneur, a deal-maker, a hustler, a money man. But did he write “his” scripts, or did he depend on anonymous blacklisted authors, willing kids, or even the comfort of strangers? Yordan
is
a real man, but he is far more than the collection of anecdotes and rumors. Some say he never wrote a word. Hardly a credit stands clear of dispute or doubt. He could have written nothing, or everything. The truth will never be known, and if Yordan is half the operator one suspects, then it is probably beyond remembering. The interested reader is referred to a long interview with Yordan, by Patrick McGilligan, in
Backstory 2
. It settles nothing, yet it gives a piercing account of what the underworld of filmmaking is like, and it makes an inadvertent explanation of why so many movies are about tough, solitary, depressive men who can’t stop acting.

He wrote a play,
Anna Lucasta
, which is a gloss on O’Neill’s
Anna Christie
. He got a law degree and, although he has denied it, some say he only hired a surrogate to attend classes for him. And then the good offices of William Dieterle got him to Hollywood. Yordan kept fascinating company: Dieterle was to be followed by the King Brothers (of Monogram), Sidney Harmon, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Bronston, and the actor Robert Shaw. The films he has a claim to are no less impressive—and it would not be hard to see a pattern of tough loners, dangerous situations, laconic women, and doomy finishes. In short, it sounds like movies:
All That Money Can Buy
(41, Dieterle);
Syncopation
(42, Dieterle);
The Unknown Guest
(43, Kurt Neumann);
Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
(44, Joe May);
When Strangers Marry
(44, William Castle);
Dillinger
(45, Max Nosseck), which got an Oscar nomination for original screenplay;
The Chase
(46, Arthur Ripley);
Whistle Stop
(46, Léonide Moguy);
Suspense
(46, Frank Tuttle);
Bad Men of Tombstone
(48, Neumann);
House of Strangers
(49, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)—on which Yordan wrote a story, Mankiewicz rewrote it as a script, and then dropped his name when the Writers’ Guild insisted on Yordan’s keeping some credit;
Anna Lucasta
(49, Irving Rapper);
Reign of Terror
(49, Mann);
Edge of Doom
(50, Mark Robson);
Detective Story
(51, William Wyler);
Drums in the Deep South
(51, William Cameron Menzies);
Mara Maru
(52, Gordon Douglas);
Mutiny
(52, Edward Dmytryk);
Houdini
(53, George Marshall);
Blowing Wild
(53, Hugo Fregonese);
Man Crazy
(53, Irving Lerner), which he also coproduced;
The Naked Jungle
(54, Byron Haskin);
Johnny Guitar
(54, Ray)—one of the most vexed credits;
Broken Lance
(54, Dmytryk)—which got the Oscar because it was a remake of
House of Strangers; Conquest of Space
(55, Haskin);
The Man from Laramie
(55, Mann);
The Last Frontier
(55, Mann);
The Big Combo
(55, Joseph H. Lewis);
The Harder They Fall
(56, Mark Robson), which he also produced;
Joe MacBeth
(56, Ken Hughes);
Four Boys and a Gun
(57, William Berke);
Men in War
(57, Mann)—on which it seems clear that Ben Maddow had a hand;
No Down Payment
(57, Martin Ritt);
Street of Sinners
(57, Berke);
The Bravados
(58, Henry King);
God’s Little Acre
(58, Mann);
Island Woman
(58, Berke);
The Fiend Who Walked the West
(58, Douglas);
Anna Lucasta
(58, Arnold Laven);
Day of the Outlaw
(59, André de Toth);
The Bramble Bush
(59, Daniel Petrie);
Studs Lonigan
(60, Lerner), which he produced;
King of Kings
(61, Ray);
El Cid
(61, Mann);
55 Days at Peking
(62, Ray);
The Day of the Triffids
(62, Steven Sekely);
The Fall of the Roman Empire
(64, Mann);
Battle of the Bulge
(64, Ken Annakin);
Circus World
(64, Henry Hathaway);
Custer of the West
(68, Robert Siodmak);
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
(69, Lerner); and
Captain Apache
(71, Alexander Singer).

After that, Yordan worked on religious pictures and made-for-video features. Thus, far from settling into distinguished retirement, he seems to pursue the nether regions of film production.

Susannah York
(Susannah Yolande Fletcher), b. London, 1941
Despite an inescapable British quota of misconceived and underrealized films, Susannah York is an English rose from a wilder garden than nurtured Madeleine Carroll or Virginia McKenna. There have always been hints of character and independence, as well as unusual literary ambition that few films have captured.

After a debut with Norman Wisdom in
There Was a Crooked Man
(60, Stuart Burge), she was clearly an atypical British ingenue as two tense teenagers, in
Tunes of Glory
(60, Ronald Neame) and
The Greengage Summer
(61, Lewis Gilbert).
Freud: The Secret Passion
(62, John Huston) was a great failure, but it was the first indication of her unusual enterprise. She was sadly left to herself as Sophie Western in
Tom Jones
(63, Tony Richardson), and in
The Seventh Dawn
(64, Gilbert), while two deliberate experiments only showed the stilted nature of such sports in England:
Scene Nun, Take One
(64, Maurice Hatton) and
Scruggs
(65, David Hart). She ventured forth demurely as a potential rape victim in
Sands of the Kalahari
(65, Cy Endfield), but was very funny in
Kaleidoscope
(66, Jack Smight). In
A Man for All Seasons
(67, Fred Zinnemann), as More’s daughter, she was no worse or better than a score of young English ladies might have been. But
Sebastian
(68, David Greene) once more showed a sense of humor.
Duffy
(68, Robert Parrish) was a ruined film,
Lock Up Your Daughters
(69, Peter Coe) a lazy one, but
The Killing of Sister George
(68, Robert Aldrich) alarmingly hysterical. Her professional uneasiness with the demands made on her by lesbian melodrama was touchingly candid, and the performance itself was the one human element in the film (if short of Eileen Atkins’s stage performance—York may have been wasted, but Atkins has been criminally ignored).

She had a bit in
Oh! What a Lovely War
(69, Richard Attenborough) and a piece in
The Battle of Britain
(69, Guy Hamilton) peripheral enough to write her off, even. But in
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
(69, Sydney Pollack) she was excellent as the English girl defiantly trying to break into sordid movies. There is a speculative flightiness about her in that film; especially in the breakdown scene in a shower cubicle, she seemed for the first time a human animal touched to the quick. Her
Jane Eyre
(71, Delbert Mann) was unadventurous, and other work shows a helpless attempt to be versatile:
Country Dance
(71, J. Lee Thompson);
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
(71, Mark Robson);
Zee & Co
. (72, Brian G. Hutton);
Gold
(74, Peter Hunt);
Images
(72, Robert Altman)—a failure, but one that only a worthwhile actress could have dreamed of.

Images
is very much about Susannah York, and one regrets that it settled for mystification. It is based upon a children’s book written by the actress, and perhaps on her own thoughts about obscure sexual identity. Wildly pretentious, it retains interest because of the actress’s resolute seriousness.

Waste and misuse now seem her lot:
The Maids
(74, Christopher Miles);
That Lucky Touch
(75, Miles);
Conduct Unbecoming
(75, Michael Anderson);
Sky Riders
(76, Douglas Hickox);
The Shout
(78, Jerzy Skolimowski);
The Silent Partner
(78, Daryl Duke); and
Superman
(78, Richard Donner).

She was in
The Golden Gate Murders
(79, Walter Grauman);
The Awakening
(80, Mike Newell);
Alice
(80, Jerry Gruza and Jacek Bromski);
Loophole
(80, John Quested);
Superman II
(80, Richard Lester);
Falling in Love Again
(81, Steven Paul);
Yellowbeard
(83, Mel Damski);
A Christmas Carol
(84, Clive Donner);
Prettykill
(87, George Kaczender);
Just Ask for Diamond
(88, Stephen Bayly);
A Summer Story
(88, Piers Haggard);
American Roulette
(88, Maurice Hatton); and
Melancholia
(89, Andi Engel).

She still works, though rarely at her own best levels:
The Man from the PRU
(89, Rob Rohrer);
En Håndfull Tid
(89, Martin Asphaug);
After the War
(89, John Glenister);
Fate
(90, Stuart Paul);
Trainer
(91, Tristan DeVere Cole);
Devices and
Desires
(91, John Davies);
Illusions
(92, Michael Houldey);
Piccolo Grande Amore
(93, Carlo Vanzina);
The Higher Mortals
(93, Colin Finbow);
Romance and Rejection
(96, Kevin W. Smith);
Loop
(97, Allan Niblo);
Dark Blue Perfume
(97, Sandy Johnson);
St. Patrick: The Irish Legend
(00, Robert Hughes);
Visitors
(03, Richard Franklin);
The Gigolos
(07, Richard Bracewell);
Franklyn
(08, Gerald McMorrow).

Gig Young
(Byron Elsworth Barr) (1913–78), b. St. Cloud, Minnesota
“Gig Young” was the name of the character Byron Barr played in
The Gay Sisters
(42, Irving Rapper), and so much can be concluded from that transition. “Gig Young” is hyperbolically cute and immediate—yet imagine a Gig Young at forty, or fifty? Won’t a giggle creep in among those watching? On the other hand, “Byron Barr” feels just as fabricated, but gentile romantic, raised to higher hopes than life ever comes close to making. “Byron Barr” could be the awful, mocking real name for the aghast MC in
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
(69, Sydney Pollack), a man who knows the better deal horses get.

It worked out for a while. Gig Young was kept busy as a fresh-faced friend or brother to more troubled men—in
Young at Heart
(54, Gordon Douglas), say, where Frank Sinatra is supposed to know and feel so much more. He even had his chance at something more interesting—as witness his supporting actor nomination for
Come Fill the Cup
(51, Douglas), where he is a drunken playboy. But then imagine getting that
Young at Heart
duty after
Come Fill the Cup
—and for the same director! That’s how hopelessness sets in.

He began in
Misbehaving Husbands
(40, William Beaudine);
Dive Bomber
(41, Michael Curtiz);
Sergeant York
(41, Howard Hawks);
The Male Animal
(42, Elliott Nugent);
Air Force
(43, Hawks), where he has a real part;
Old Acquaintance
(43, Vincent Sherman). Then, after service in the Coast Guard, he came back for
Escape Me Never
(47, Peter Godfrey);
The Woman in White
(48, Godfrey);
The Three Musketeers
(48, George Sidney);
Wake of the Red Witch
(49, Edward Ludwig);
Lust for Gold
(49, S. Sylvan Simon);
Hunt the Man Down
(49, George Archainbaud), where he is the lead;
Only the Valiant
(51, Douglas).