The George Stevens Seminar – Part 14 – Conclusion.
What happened to George Stevens in the films that ended and exhausted his career?
Did something go wrong with him?
I think the progress of Stevens last work is towards a grandeur of social consciousness for which his instrument was not well suited and could not compass. Issues, not bigger than his talent, but of another sort, commanded him. His talent is poetic not polemic. From the last half of Giant on, he is engaged in what is Right, except that he is wrong for what is Right.
I wish it had not happened, but it probably had to happen, for he felt responsible for what he saw in Dachau. He was repulsed by the suffering – the dead and the dying and the decrepit and the diseased – and so he therefore took himself to be no different from the Nazis who had caused that suffering. It was in him too. He was just like them. He faced himself and he did not like what he saw. What he did not see was that the Nazis were not repulsed by the people they tortured and killed; they were not repulsed by suffering; they liked it. But Stevens, in his immediate lack of compassion for what he saw, did not recognize or know that repulsion to horror is a natural first response to it. He felt irresponsive and therefore irresponsible. And so, responsible.
Amends had to be made.
Except amends cannot be made.
But still the result was the deed of honesty of Giant Part 2, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. The preachment of the last half of Giant, about bigotry and the persecution of minorities, lead to a second persecution story, The Diary Of Anne Frank, also about the Jews, and then to the most famous persecution story of all, The Greatest Story Ever Told.
In this, it lead to subjects outside of American subjects –– and outside America which were his true and only realm and place. Holland? the Holy Land? and a movie shot in Paris? His films then also forsake simplicity for the simplistic. Stevens at best is a front porch type of director. He is a great director of comic or serious love stories. That is all, but it is enough to make him our great director because he does it so greatly. It is enough, also, because that was what his talent was most truly for.
What happened to George Stevens after the colossal collapse of The Greatest Story Ever Told is that he seems to have wandered. He seemed to want to make another film, and eventually he did so, but it was an odd choice. It was a job-of-work film, the story, considerably lacking in grandeur, of a gambler and a showgirl in Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra was set to do it, and Elizabeth Taylor then applied for the job, and when Sinatra dropped out and Warren Beatty was signed, naturally Elizabeth Taylor would have been wrong to play opposite Warren Beatty at any time, and by this time many years had gone by since Giant. Besides, Elizabeth Taylor was a trophy woman, not a showgirl. She never really could convincingly play someone who had a job. She was the show or she was nothing. She was too fat and too old and too short and too wrong for it. Besides, with her, the film had to be made in Europe so she could keep her eye on Richard Burton and make use of the tax haven they needed for their vast revenues. When she heard they were considering Julie Christie, she confronted Stevens, and, well, you know what Our Liz was like – there was no talking back to her. Besides, she had served Stevens well in the past. Everyone threw up their hands and said, “Okay, it’s all wrong but we’ll try it anyhow.” None of them had ever read Macbeth.
The Only Game In Town was the last of his three failures. I saw it when it came out. Everything that could be missing was missing, including Las Vegas.
If you look at Stevens’ story at this time, what occurs to you also is that he was defeated by the boundaries of Hollywood itself. He was limited by the choice of the sort of stories that came to Hollywood and the actors who worked there. His career was top-heavy. He was too successful.
Perhaps he didn’t realize that?
What else mightn’t he not have realized?
Now, George Stevens, by a sort of silent personal attrition, was the sort of person who could get anything he wanted. He was very strong. He knew, and everyone knew, what a film master he was. And people were perfectly willing to make movies with him even after failure. Because not only do Hollywood people know that movies are a crap shoot, they also attract people who like a crap shoot. What you see in a George Stevens’ film is consummate craft becoming great film art. Stevens knew he had this craft. He knew how to make films. He knew how to make them his way. He knew how to cut a script the night before. He knew how to prepare. He knew how to overshoot, and to use that footage to piece together in the cutting room the film he wanted. He understood audiences and trusted them. What he did not know, perhaps, was what was meant when you saw huge and ahead of the title when the credits came on: THE GEORGE STEVENS PRODUCTION OF. Maybe I am wrong about this.
When he was shooting The Diary Of Anne Frank and it was pointed out that it had no star, he said something like, “Well, I guess I’ll have to be the star.” But somehow I still don’t think he realized that, as with only a few other directors – Hitchcock, Kazan, Ford, Zinnemann – his name alone could open a picture. It did not seem to occur to him that his own skill and craft were sufficient: he did not need stars. But he was stuck with star-mentality. He used movie stars to cast his pictures and he sometimes cast them carelessly, and they are sometimes unnecessary. He also sometimes cast them incorrectly and oddly.
For instance, he wanted Montgomery Clift to play Shane. Clift was a huge star at that time, but a crazier idea cannot be imagined. He also wanted Katharine Hepburn to play the wife, which is equally nuts. Katharine Hepburn and William Holden as her husband meet Montgomery Clift as Shane. To contemplate it is enough to give one a stroke. In the end, when all that fell through, his casting was quite off-hand. He asked for the contract players roster at Paramount and – Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, and Jean Arthur – quickly and luckily checked off three names.
In taking on Shane, Stevens in his own mind was just taking on a job of work. He had a contract with the studio and he had to make a movie. Giant was another matter. He instigated it, and he was no longer under contract. The book was well known, and many actors vied for the leads. The problem in casting was the age range the leads went through, going to 50. Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly were not about to appear to be 50, nor did they have the technical know-how to do so. Elizabeth Taylor had to politic Stevens for the role. I suppose Stevens could not foretell that Elizabeth Taylor, although the most beautiful woman in the world, was not particularly vain, so being 50 was nothing to her – that wonderful anecdote about her saying to Stevens at the shoot in Marfa, “Oh, yes, George, but what happens when I am no longer Technicolor-pretty and Technicolor-young?” No one who is vain about their looks could make such a remark.
The casting of the male lead may have come first, and actors in the middle age range were considered, John Wayne, for instance, who would have been marvelous as Jordan Benedict ten years before, as would even better have been Joel McCrae. But with Taylor, aged 23, in the role they were looking for younger actors for Jett Rink than Robert Mitchum and for Benedict. Trouble was there was a scarcity of young straight leading actors. Rock Hudson was not one of them, either, and the film suffers from it. He was not straight but the role carried it because the role said he was, and Elizabeth Taylor carried it, because she was able to play her love for him as a swain and a husband.
Stevens, strong as he was, could not envision casting outside Hollywood’s limited casting possibilities. Besides, if you have Elizabeth Taylor you can’t have an unknown playing opposite her. And if you cast her first, you can’t cast Joel McCrae opposite her, even though it is the more important role and needs to be cast first.
Stars…if available…not always an advantage.
The Diary Of Anne Frank on the other hand had no stars in it. You could cast anybody as Anne. A big campaign to find an unknown went on. For funny-looking little 13 year-old Anne Frank, he cast a girl with no acting experience at all – but she was a cover girl! – on every fashion magazine in the world! What standard was seducing him here? Her presence is completely in conflict with Anne Frank and how everyone knew she looked. Well, he saw the movie, mistakenly, as a romance, while all it is, at most in that regard, is a crush. The movie failed badly. If you watch the excellent BBC version of “The Diary Of Anne Frank,” you see what the casting and playing of that part should have been. What was wrong with Stevens? Had he lost his casting sense?
The Greatest Story Ever Told is jammed with stars, and, with the exception of Sidney Poitier, none of them add a single thing to the story of Jesus, an unknown outsider wandering through the desert with a cortege of unknown outsiders. These are good actors, but what did he think Van Heflin or José Ferrer or Charlton Heston had to offer that would not overbalance the material, or Brooklynite Shelley Winters (one of the few Jewish people in it)? He casts Max Von Sydow, an Ingmar Bergman company member, as Jesus. Such blue eyes, too! Von Sydow is better than good in the part, but better-than-good does not mean right.
Finally, the mad admixture of Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty, both of them admirers of Stevens, but, opposite one another, miscast. Why? Because the picture, again, is a romance, but they were the sort of people who in love and sex both did the choosing — yet no comedy is made from that conflict.
In his days with the studios, Stevens’ films were perhaps cast for him. But as an independent producer, while he seems in firm mastery in all matters, he seems not so in the casting. This either means either that casting never was one of his strengths, or that he felt that the telling of the story, at which he was the greatest living master, was more consequential than the human beings called upon to enact the drama in the story. If so, in this he was wrong, and his, perhaps unconscious, laxity in or shunting aside of proper casting, I believe, confirmed the decline of the life of his work and leading to the ending of his career.
It may have also ended because by the time he finished The Greatest Story Ever Told (surely the worst title for a movie ever made), he would have been worn out. It was way over-budget; it was way over schedule. (His friends Jean Negulesco and David Lean towards the end had to shoot scenes for him.) It was the most expensive movie ever made in America. The public hadn’t come. His inspiration may have gone threadbare.
And his energy too. For film direction is a young man’s gig. It’s an enormous undertaking. Directing a film is pole vaulting over an Everest, and you may not, particularly after the failure of your touch with your last three films, have wanted to dare the daunting venture again.
Stevens was still much in demand as a director after The Only Game In Town, and various projects presented themselves. But nothing was started. He had worked on Giant for no salary, but his percentage of the profits must have been hearty. He probably did not have to work to pay the bills, and he certainly could fill the role of director emeritus marvelously. He died at 70 in 1975.
~ ~ ~
About the last part of his fine work I write with a regret he himself may not have felt. After all, he had a lot of successes under his belt, and those failures were not the first he had ever had.
For, of course, I write of him at all, not because of what might have been, but because of those vibrant masterpieces which still hold our love, awe, and delight. His work as a whole is a gift to us, and the central portion of his work is his great gift of that gift.
Woman Of The Year, Penny Serenade, The Talk Of The Town, The More The Merrier, I Remember Mama, A Place In The Sun, Shane, and the first half of Giant are why I write here.
I write because he is the film director whose work is still the most poetic of any American director, and, because it is, it speaks deeply to me. Beauty is the path in. Beauty is the sweet knife to the heart.
He is also the master of the American subject. He is the film poet of its possibility. No other director can touch him in this regard. When you walk down a street with George Stevens you awake to what you forgot was always there and nowhere else.
His films speak also to the outsider watching them.
Are all Americans outsiders?
In Europe countries are called states. But in The United States regions the size of European countries are called states, giving the sense that each state is a sovereign country, and so the inhabitants of each state become outsiders to all the other states, each one itself being sovereign, regionally particular, and hugely distant geographically. Are we all outsiders to one another? With our racial and religious distinctions, ethnic differences, heritage and nationality heterogeneity, are we not all outsiders?
As an outsider, as of the first generation of immigrants, I saw myself in his films about outsiders. By seeing them, I was allowed in. The poetry of them showed me the way into America. He opened up the America in me.
And I too could love as those who loved Elizabeth Taylor loved. I too was allowed that beauty in me to be.
His films also joined that love with palpable sexuality.
They awoke capacities in me dormant. I saw them as a young man, and they brought with those capacities, also out of that dormancy, a responsibility to them and to that love and for it.
~ ~ ~
When I play a piece of classical music for a friend, I always want them to feel in it just what I felt. For that’s what I play it for: the beauty it arose in me. It is a foolish ambition, since everyone will feel what they do. Nevertheless, I want them to be exactly like me at that moment.
I feel the same way about George Stevens work. That is why I write this. I want you to see his pictures; I want you to see his work. I want you to love it. But I also want you to love it exactly the way I loved it — pricelessly. I want you to see it and be thrilled as I was. And to find in it exactly the beauty I know is still there.
Yes, I know I am fool in wanting that.
But it is the only gift I have to offer.
And, fool as I am, it is why I have written all this for you.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~