Genius still undocumented

In the 1930s and ‘40s, the Golden Age of studio moviemaking, there were by common historical consent three great geniuses of the Hollywood system: Irving Thalberg, Darryl F. Zanuck and David O. Selznick. They are the figures around whom legends have accreted, about whom weighty biographies have been written. To their number, Hal B. Wallis should long ago have been added, since he produced more terrific movies (including “Casablanca”) than any of them -- a large number of which, from “The Adventures of Robin Hood” to “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” to “True Grit,” we can resort to this very night, if we so choose, with great pleasure and without condescension.

All of these men were, at one point or another, studio production chiefs. All, save Thalberg (who was heading in that direction when he died prematurely), became independent producers, though none went as far as Samuel Goldwyn (also a legend, but of a different sort). All of them were notorious fussbudgets with an infinite capacity for detail; there was not a ruffle on a costume or an ill-fitting wig that escaped their avid eyes.

More important, they were all capable of reediting a picture late into the night. Or of ordering expensive retakes when they were yet more deeply displeased. It is, of course, impossible to say whether, on balance, their ministrations always improved the “products” that went out over their or their studios’ names, but they all put their stamp more firmly on the films they supervised than most of their directors did. They could, of course, turn out pictures in any genre the ever-shifting market demanded, but each had stylistic hallmarks: Thalberg’s curiously bland sense of luxe and literacy, Zanuck’s tense and driving social awareness, Selznick’s almost hysterical desire to inflate his material. Wallis, too, had a trademark -- a noirish romanticism, often coupled with a lamplit historicism that, to my taste anyway, has worn better than his competitors’ predilections.

Wallis has long deserved a serious, critically acute, psychologically sensitive biography. Instead, what he has gotten is this book by Bernard F. Dick -- ill organized, wretchedly written and grandly misconceived. Our interest in Wallis is not that he was, as Dick’s subtitle would have it, “producer to the stars.” As a discoverer and nurturer of talent, he was neither better nor worse than any of the other moguls. Like them, he had his successes (Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and, yes, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis) and his failures (Lizabeth Scott, Dolores Hart and, lest we forget, Douglas Dick -- no kin of the author).

What should, but does not, interest his biographer is Wallis’ taste in material and his passion for shaping it into pleasing movie narratives; Dick can parrot a plot, but he cannot place a film firmly in its social or commercial context, let alone understand it in an interesting or even mildly perceptive critical manner.

I’m not sure Wallis could have done that himself. He was not a man much given to profound reflection. Like most of the other moguls, he was an autodidact, up out of the ghetto (in his case, Chicago) and a broken home. With something less than a high school education, he broke into the movies as a publicist and succeeded to Zanuck’s chair as head of production at Warner Bros. in 1933. He inherited from his predecessor a raft of stars (James Cagney, Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson among them) and a need to change the studio’s image. Under Zanuck, Warner had specialized in smart-mouthed comedies and “ripped from the headlines” stories of crime and social injustice.

In their unpretentious ways they were marvelous little films. But times were changing; the public seemed to want something a little more somber, more intricately developed and infinitely more romantic. Wallis responded by softening Cagney (not a great idea, though it pleased a star yearning for respectability) and turning Davis into an oft-victimized, but always high-spirited, heroine of weepies (a great idea, since she’d never appeared comfortable in Zanuck’s more down-and-dirty offerings). He also turned the studio toward biopics and historical epics, featuring Errol Flynn’s deliciously cheeky gallantry. To put the point simply, Wallis accomplished a complete overhaul of the studio’s style, which is well and publicly documented in Rudy Behlmer’s wonderful book, “Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951),” a compilation of studio memos he quarried from its archives.

These memos -- and there must be more of them than Behlmer was able to print -- is a source Dick almost completely and mysteriously ignores, perhaps because it interferes with his portrait of Wallis as a cool fish (he met Wallis once, got nothing but monosyllables out of him and apparently disliked him). What Behlmer’s memos reveal is quite a different sort of character: passionate, hands-on, often angry as he rode herd on his frequently recalcitrant directors and producers, while fending off his frequently nutsy (but sometimes funny) boss, Jack L. Warner. They also reveal him as a consummate, remote-control filmmaker. For instance, at the end of “The Roaring Twenties” -- which portrayed Cagney as a tragic gangster -- the star lies dead on the snow-covered steps of a church while his mistress delivers an immortal epitaph to a passing cop. (“He used to be a big shot.”) There follows a pullback, long and dark, with the music swelling gorgeously beneath it. I always assumed this was director Raoul Walsh’s invention, though it was not typical of his more bang-on manner. Not so, the memos reveal. It was Wallis, doing what good producers do, acting as a film’s first practical critic, ordering a retake that produced this great tragic shot.

To ignore material of this kind, while devoting dithering pages to his negotiations with half-forgotten actors, is to completely miss the point of Wallis. Similarly, Dick misunderstands Wallis’ later career as an independent producer. He left Warner Bros. shortly after Jack Warner almost literally elbowed him aside to grab the best picture Oscar for “Casablanca” (which is, incidentally, a perfect compendium of the Wallis style), moving on first to Paramount, then to Universal. Dick gets all sniffy about Wallis’ long, profitable associations with Martin and Lewis and Elvis Presley, forgetting that a producer’s first obligation is to profitability. He also ignores the fact that some of their pictures weren’t half-bad in their humble little ways (anyone here remember “That’s My Boy” or “Roustabout”?). He also underrates Wallis’ films noir, a genre he pioneered, and makes heavy going of stodgy epics like “Becket” and “Anne of the Thousand Days.”

Again, an essential point is missed. Wallis made the transition from the classic studio system to the new, postwar age of independent production more gracefully than any of his aging peers precisely because he was more flexible, more eclectic in his tastes, than any of them. He embraced the future in the same spirit in which he had mastered the past. He was, as I discovered when I interviewed him a few years before Dick, a phlegmatic, not to say gnomic, presence. But I liked him. He was a man who understood that power often derives from mystery, and I thought I perceived in him an ironist in a golf sweater, a man who took his work seriously but also understood that he was engaged in a great game, which, secretly smiling, he played as well as anyone ever has. *