Variety (January 1951)

PICTURES It’s A Perfect Crime Vet Mystery Writer’s Major Concern Is : Does Crime Pay Enough? John Roc hurt Hardly, anything has been left unsaid about the murder story ad; diet— What reduced him to such beggarly appetite?— what secret! bang does he get — And why ; d o seemingly | good and sensible folk p re : fer ’’The Case ’ Of the Three; Legged Blond” • o V e r Thomas Wolfe? . B ii t hardly enough has been said of the murder story writer: ' the . mildish looking fellow in tweeds who totes up the week’s crop of cadavers, while spooning pablum into his infant daughter’s mouth. ' What makes a murder writer.? and why does he write what he does, as he does? Since self-analysis, like canasta, i.s, the intellectual fashion of our times, I decided to pursue the question to its grim result. I. asked a colleague of mine in the racket — a colleague famous as a “gimmick man” in those unsanctified areas where Boston Blacki.e meets ^ the Faicdn. His reply was terse and sorrowing. ‘T Wrote a great satirical play once, titled ^The Sea Gull,’ only to find that a joker named Chekhov had already written the same, story, and written it better. Talk about your coincidences, huh!” Were we rejected dramatists at the base, I wondered. Declassed because of the inexora’ole pressures of originality — ^now mixing potassium of cyanide with adverbs in the lowest depths, like any lost soul mixes drinks at Paddy’s? Was that the secret “vvhy” of the murder fictioneers? " . . I continued my canvass of opinion. A second colleague’s answer only proved that too many murder writ , By JOHN ROEBURT ing put of the neighborhood lock up. Wow! I rose from the couch arid crept home to counsel with my wife, my wise-guy wife. A I'especter of science, she. tempered the Doctor’s. Forty-fifth p^fHETY Anniversary dered and the dead; murders in effigy, murders by proxy. They stood before me, with accusing staires, and I tore the disguise from them, gave to. them the’r true identity. Omigosh!— They were old acquaintances I’d missed seeing around for ages. This ghost, a process server from the Automobile Finance Co.; that one: the Dapper Dan vvho’d cost me six sweethearts in a row; and that one — ^No! — riot Solly Gottlieb, the kid across the aisle in 6B! I was a wanton killer, God help me. in the jolting talk of a certain cigaret eomriiercial, it was PROOF POSITIVE. On the i'ide downtown to Head Wedncfiflay, January 3, 1951 By EZRA GOODMAN im giao >ou suDiimaie. youi nos thf» tilities the way you do, my wife said, contentedly. ‘T’d rather get slapped around in ‘The Affairs of Peter Salem’ than shovv the children a black eye at mornirig. breakfast.” . No comfort, there, no solace. The next hot-eyed bloride in one of my scripts would really get the business, 1 promised myself darkly; A.s a stew must, I steWed over the whole concept for a while, until it grew, and gresv, like a brooding sense of guilt. I wrote murder yarns Out of repressed hostility— But did I? I didn’t tunte murderv not really — -I committed it. : I took the concept indoors for dissection, into my locked room^ — • the room in which I schemed my schemes, plotted my crimes. There, with the blinds down and the shutter secure against J. Edgar Hoover, I played my flashlight on the assorted hundreds of murders I’d committed behind the cover of radio, book, and photoplay. Murders by pistol, strangulation, hex, r poison — I read the tow'cring pile of scripts, and re-read them, reread them, in a feyer of remem; bering, straining to recover out of ! poliee. driver, being ; Yorker either— he’d ,in the surrendering myself to the A. colorful cabbie was my just one week away from discovered by the New Magazine. And no dope, read Sigmund Freud ar dollar edition, and the Book Sec Karen Horney in tion of the Times. Freudian Hackie ■ The cabbie couris.eled, “Bud, you ain’t no psychopathic pefsbriality— ' not on your life! .\ 11 you do is get rid of tension, like everybody else. ■And you’re in a sweet racket for I doing it. F’rinstance, take me. I I got a gripe: a passenger skunked I me, or I get a flat out in the ; Canar.sie mud, or a horse named : Uncle Miltie sent me to the cleaners: I’m feeling hostile— -some. body’s got to .suffer because I’m I suffering. So 1 ram niy . load into ,a brandnew Lincoln Cosmopolitan. I’m over my hostility, but now the fleet owner's hostile. I draw a iO-day susperision— Great!” The cabbie conlinued,”Now take you. You’re mad, you’re boiling over. An editor’s just turned down the i a script. So what do you do? Blow forgotten emotions of yesteryear in a total recall. What were my true inner hostilities over a. decade of writing? Whom had I actually bludgeoned, gashed, gas.sed, shot, exploded, de; composed in lime? This script;,' this radio script dated January, | 1942, titled ‘‘indeed Dead” — the • villain knifed, sliced into filet mig1 nons, for our 6,000,000 hungry raij dio listeners in a sock stanza of ■ ers think alike book writer this one; the first my s tery writer to provide a turbanned swami as the dauntless solver ot crimes. *‘I wrote a teiTific novel of social significance once,” this writer wept. “I titled it ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ if I remember Correctly. that brought standing A distinguished , eveTa®is? Fd You do'^ae murder, but ... mvs. ‘he , U^v|r ^ahas^^ 14 assigned ^the , ^ was he really?— ^Who! Who was: my pef hate, in January, 1942? And the others, from January to December, 1943, 4. 5, 6, 7, 8. 9, 50 — who were these face But every publisher nixed it. It .less people whose death rattles had, vour heart into it. seems a hack named Stcingrift— or is it Steinwasser— had already done the same story. A coincidence, I ask you!” About all I’d established so far was that murder writers sometimes make too good a thing of coincidence. A third, writer came right to the points — his own point. ‘‘Murder’s big stuff in America, It sells newspapers, pocketbooks. Alfred Hitchcock, and Bromo Seltzer. Why am 1 in it? to buy white-walls for my Cadillac, .sonny!” An elite member of the clan, this lucky one, since the greater mass of my fellow guilclsmen despair that: Crime Docs Not PayEnough. i took my canva.'Js out of the trade. I look it to the very next Saturday Night Social. .And when the foregathered had uUerly disposed, of Dienetics. Salvador Dali, . and the Scotch i W.hi.skey), ! exposed my queslioh. Not so much to the; group, but to one oracular fellow been, heard across the land, even as Republican Presidential candidates over the same period? I kept re-reading my stuff, pulling the stuffings out of my psyche in a pitiless self-search. And soon memory, sense memory that is, \vas wholly restored. Yesteryear’s emotions came out of hiding^victims ; a for fellow-'' who gets .$25. li.stening, let. alone t I PETE SMITH ; your top, can him a pinhead and ; get marked lousy for life? Or sw’ap ! punches and wind up eating your '’ expensive bridgework? Or start : hating the Albanians twice as much l as' necessary? Naw. You just go home. You write a script. In the story, you axe the editor, you split his skull ddw-n the middle. And then^ if you still haven’t calmed down enough, you set fire to the corpse. You’re over your hostility. You can eat without gagging, you can sleep w'ithout special music for friends, polite to your wufe, and a wage-earner to your kids; Are you in a sweet. racket— Mister!” “Even better than, that,” the cabbie hammered his point. *‘This script you sell. ‘It’s -go«d. You Catharsis then? — A godsend of .self-therapy? — Was that it? Was that the true motive behind a man’s neurotic notion to write his time away on mayhem? Since, not unlike half of America, I utterly believe in the infinite I wisdom of cabdrivers, I took this analysis of it as the final word. I trouped before me like a parade | tipped him a buck— the lowest fee of Inner Sanctum ghosts. The mur on record for psychiatry. pin an lioiir talk. .. Why is' a riiurdcr w“iter, I asked. The repl.v was as trauirialic as Bogart ’.s .right cross t.o the jaw in any picture, you name. The Doc. tor-'s .suramevry .guess about pie and’ ni y. ■ ilk. w‘ as: t h e m \’s t cry in u r dei* hack i.s a • PCepliig' Tom. .an. idiot child of I'antas'.y. a feudist living in a psy cho-litcf ary A I cat raz. ' an Al. Capone mounting a lvj)e\v)'itcr' instead of a. maclime gun. The nUirdcr liack, argued this Docvtor, is motivcffcd by' ah unconscious aggression against the grocer, the Internal Revenue Bureau, landlords. Senator Owen Brewster, and his oWn Father f or Mother, according to the .sexual disarrangements of the Oedipus Complex). Whew! More diagnosis on the cuff:. The atrocious assault by inariuscript, • ^ , • . . , , with atrocious words doing the lob ' o • ““hth con.sccutive year oxhibitors have ju.st voted Pete Smith Specialties the most popular live action movie, shorts in the ".Motion Picof bullets, IS a shoddy ‘ Operation . l„v.. l b-,-,,ui.l.'..iyfl3” national doII. And tor the sovonUi GoiisccuU™ year Alibi,” a Wily maneuver for keep in the. ••Shuwincp’.s Trade Preview” poll. Holly w'ood. In the course of roaming around the plaster city ori behalf of the Los Angeles Daily News, I get to earsdrop on quite a few verbal gems that drop, like the proverbial Los Angeles dew or smog, from the mouths of the filrii folk. I never cease to be amazed at some of the things I hear. I have , just been skimming over my records for the past year, and I would like to pass along to you some of these memorable remarks. Producer Leonard Goldstein , a man who has an affinity for screen escapism, told me in the course of an interview: ‘‘When a writer says to me: ‘Let’s not do it this way. It’s been done 900 ti hies before,’ that proves to me it’s good. After all, $12,000,000 worth of popcorn was sold in movie theaters last year. People must like corn.” That same respect for tradition was articulated by. John Ford. I asked . Ford whether his latest western, something called (at the time) “Rio Bravo,” would differ in any wise from his previous horse operas. “No,” replied Ford. “I hope not. Those others did very well,” ,. Bill Pine, co-producer of “‘The Lawless,” a superior picture about mob violence, said that he realized how good the movie was not from the reviews or audience reaction, but from the response of his wife. ‘‘My wife went, to a sneak preview of ‘The Lawless’,” said Pine, “and afterwards she said: ‘This one I liked.’ i said to .myself: ‘Gee, this is the answer.’ Bill Thomas and I had made oveiy 60 pictures and she'd never said that before.” Janet Leigh confided to me on the set of “Jet Pilot”: ”1 played a Russian jet pilot in this picture, but I don’t have a Russian accent. I don’t really need one. : I had a Russian accent in ‘Red Danube,’ in which I was a Russian, ballerina, but that was a serious picture. I don’t need an accent in this movie becau.se it is an adventure melodrama. It doesn’t have a moral. Nobody will believe it anyway:” Joe Mankiewicz is a mail who can always be relied upon to speak his piece. AVhile he was shooting ‘‘All About Eve,” he . got this broadside off his chest: ‘‘Moviemakers should make the pictures they want to make just as .writers should write books they want to write. You can only please yourself. To approach the job of making a movie with the attitude of what someone wants to buy is silly. Film is not a can of tomatoc.s or a Cadillac. Film is the creative work of two or three people— and. it is up to iis to keep movies from being a commodity.” Before leaving 20th Century-Fox for Paramount, producer William PeiTberg and George Seaton announced that most of their movies at the latter studio would be comedies. “Of course,” said Scalon, “we could scare the hell out of Paramount and say (hat we will make art pictures with significance, things with no sets or professiorial actors that we will shoot in 35nim, reduce (o 16mm, and then blow up to 35mm.” Filmakers, the Ida Lupi noCollier Young-Malvin Wald outfit, works fast and economically. 1 was on the set of ‘‘Mother of a Champion,” when a background light went on the blink, holding up production for several .seconds. ‘‘Hell,” said Young, who was stancling on the sidcliries, ‘.‘now wcTc 15 frames behind schedule!” ! 'Typed I Ronald Reagan, actor and president of the Screen, Actors Guild; asserted: ‘‘An actor gets typed so easily out here. My Mork in the Screen Actors’ Guild arid in the Motion Picture Industry Council has affected me as an actor,. cl;nrimit. I’ve had; a . su.spicion lately I’d like to play villains arid j-oughneck parts. Before the war • I did. But I have had a job convincing them r can play something beside t he president of the Screen Actors’ Guild.” Walter Hart, Ayhd directs “The Rise of the Goldbcrg.s” on TV, came’ to Hollywood to direct ‘‘The Goldbergs” on celluloid for Paramount. Between camera setups, Hart unburdened bim.self of these, observations anent movies and* Video: “Television can show Hollywood how to .shorten shooting schedules and chop co.sts. Television and n/ovics. should get together. Movies can be shown in homes via TV and collect several million dollars in one night. Television can save the movies.’* George MelfOrd, who once directed Rudolph Valentino in “The Sheik” and oth^r hits, appeared in Edward Small’s production of “Valentino”— ^in a bit role as a movie producer’s friend. Melford told me he worked on the picture four days. “They just put me in for a little publicity,” he observed philosophiGally. “It’s all right with irie.” Rather typically for Hollywood, nobody asked Melford, who is quite an authority on Valentino, for the slightest bit of advice about the profile’s life and times. “I didn’t everi get to read the script,” said Melford. At their initial press conference in Hollywood to announce the formation of their new setup at RKO, Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna rattled off innumerable names, ranging from Rodgers & Hammerstein to John Hustori, who, they said, wete coming into the oi> gaiiization to workwith them. This bit of dialog .from the press conference is quoted verbatim: Wald: “We’ve talked “o' John Huston, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Danny Kaye, Katharine Hepburn arid Cary Grant.” Krasna: “Yeah, and some of them even answered us.” Pen and prose artist Bill Mauldlin is appearing as an actor in John Huston’.s picturization of Stephen Crane's Civil War cla.ssic, “The Red Badge of Courage,” at M-G-M. Meanwhile, UniversalInternational is filming Mauldin’s World War II tome, “Up Front With Mauldin.” Mauldin doesn’t think much of Hollywood war pictures and he even has his doubts about “Up Front With Mauldin.” “As a matter of fact,” Mauldin told me, “if ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ tums out as we hope, it may be the best picture about World War II ever made!” Phil Silvers: “To get anywhere at RKO, you’ve got to be a propeller.” Harry Drucker, barber extraordinary to the movie mighty, lives in Beverly Hills and drives a ' big car, but he docs riot have a swimming pool, “If word ever got around that a barber in Los Angeles had a swimming pool.” says Drucker. ‘■'every barber in the world would put his chair on back and rush here. T can vvithoiit a swimming pool.” Gloria G.rahamc, a liighly ented actress, unaccountably assigned to a trivial role “IMacao’’ by RKO. When I asked Miss Grahame what she played in the picture, she replied as follows: “I’m in front of the camera, but I don’t play anything/ I eat grapes. I don’t know how to describe this part. I play nothing. I do an awful lot of nothing. The only good thing about this assignment is that they u.sually don’t release their pictures for several years.’^ Alex Gottlieb, producer of “iMacao,” a drama with Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum, had this to ..say. about the picture: “This nio\'ic has no message. The only message this picture has is: ‘For God.sakos,. go to the movies!” Robert Piro.sh, Oscar winning scripter Of “Battleground,” has been elevated to the position of director with ‘'Go lor Broke.” While .shooting his first fiiiri, Piro.sh tried to explain why he liked being a director: “I’ve learned that the only \\:a.y to ;get an office ^^')th a private bathroom is to bo a director,” he said. his live lalwas in Beil G oetz in From Europe, Their H’wood Ben Goetz, head Of Metro’s s(udio operations in Britain, left for the Coast over (he Aveekencr after arriving in New York Thursday • 28) on the America. Henry lleriigson, • unit manager for the company's . recently completed .“Quo yadis,” also came in on the .same ship enroute to Hollywood. Goetz is expected to corifer with iMetro’s top bra.ss in regard to the studio's projected film Version of Sir Walter Scott’.s “Ivarihoc.” Picture is to be made in Britain next spring, with Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons tentatively set for starring role.s. While on the Coast, Goetz will also visit his son/ Hayes, Metro producer.