HAL WALLIS: IN THE MOLD OF MOGULS

It was a bright, cold, wind-whipped May morning in 1971 and the “Mary Queen of Scots” company, a Hal B. Wallis Production, was deployed across some piebald and treeless hills in Northumberland, England.

As on many a location shoot, the making of the scenes was more interesting, certainly more amusing, than the scenes made. This morning, Vanessa Redgrave as Mary and Timothy Dalton as her husband, Lord Darnley, were to gallop toward each other across the hills, meet, pause and talk. This was the master shot and after the usual delays, the actors were waved into action and the horses took off.

Unfortunately, the actor’s horse refused to stop and went thundering past the waiting Mary, turning the dramatic moment into comic opera.

The producer was not entertained, but, having seen everything in a career that then already spanned nearly a half-century, he merely glowered, glanced at his watch and awaited the next take.

But Hal Wallis, who died earlier this week at the age of 88, had a glower of steel, and what was fascinating on that May morning was the dominating presence of Wallis as the producer. He was a monarch as absolute as any Henry, pacing the location hatless, wearing a sheepskin anorak against the chill and missing nothing. Charles Jarrott, a man Wallis respected and had used two years earlier on “Anne of the Thousand Days,” was directing. But no one, I think, had any doubts whose vision was being translated into film.

Wallis was one of that thin, diminished band of formative pioneers who helped to shape the studio production system in the early ‘20s and beyond.

But Wallis was also one of that cluster of creative producers--never a large group to begin with and an endangered species now--who were the chancellors and enforcers to the mogul kings, the next-to-the-top shapers of projects and careers, whose tastes, hunches, prejudices and crotchets flavored mainstream motion pictures during the time of their greatest glory. In our different day, the creative producers still leave their mark.

It seemed miraculous (and an item of scorn to academic elitists) that men born to poverty and blessed with little formal education should have acquired in Hollywood’s formative years such creative power, and made such a success of it.

But Wallis, like the brothers Warner for whom he worked for so long and like the other moguls and early producers, held on to the lessons of having been poor, even after the riches rolled in. It was, I suppose, the common touch, this instinct for mass taste, this comprehension of what you needed, what you wanted, what you aspired to do and be, recollected from the days when you walked to save carfare.

The tough beginnings made for survival in a tough and volatile young industry. Wallis was running Warners publicity at 23, and behind him even then were memories of riding unheated coaches through the Midwest winter to sell electric stoves.

His pursuit of the mass audience led to some of the screen’s classic popular melodramas, of which “Casablanca” will remain the principal item in the Wallis filmography. The pursuit also led to some production line potboilers, and some severe wrenchings-about with historical fact.

As Wallis admitted in his autobiography, “Starmaker,” the whole Catholic/Protestant schism that dominated the life and occasioned the death of Mary Queen of Scots seemed a bit too complicated for general audiences, so he had the writer leave it out.

And if, in historical fact, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary never met face to face, that seemed a dreadful dramatic lack, so Wallis had the writer, John Hale, arrange a forest confrontation for them (with Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth to Vanessa’s Mary), the dialogue based on their correspondence.

At the Royal Command Performance of “Mary Queen of Scots,” Wallis reported, Queen Elizabeth II whispered to him, “We’re learning about English history from your films.” If there was irony in the whisper, Wallis did not record it.

With its historical licenses and all, the movie Wallis was making that May morning in Northumberland epitomized a film-making era--the starry, spectacular, larger-than-life romantic melodrama, escapist and more than a little bit silly, the silliness a bother only if it verged on the boring.

It was an era that was ending, and among the other films of 1971 were “A Clockwork Orange” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Yet, Wallis, who had recruited Elvis Presley for the movies and overseen his films, was not a captive of the past. With “True Grit” and “Rooster Cogburn,” he showed that the audience’s appetite for the larger than life could be updated with an edge of self-mocking satire that did not, however, contradict the verities of heroism and true romance.

Present producers are said to be, too often, only deal-makers. Wallis was nothing if not a deal-maker, and he noted with amusement that he had had to pay Dooley Wilson $375 more a week ($3,500) than he paid Ingrid Bergman for “Casablanca.”

But after the deals came the production, and what made Wallis remarkable, as it does a handful of present producers, is the imposition of a personal vision on everything from script to ad campaign. The vision might falter, be challengeable, be too resolutely mass-culture. Then again the vision might, as it did, supply the furnishings for several generations’ worth of memory and dream.