Arts/Entertainment

256

As the name implies, the book, "FILMS FAMOUS, FANCIFUL, FROLICSOME & FANTASTIC: Classic Movies from Cinema's Golden Age" hosted by John Howard Reid, covers a wide range of classic cinema from "Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone" through "Maria Candelaria" and "Mister Wong, Detective" to "Young Bill Hickok".

As in other books in this series, the films are arranged alphabetically for easy reference. In addition to complete cast and credit details, release information and background notes, each film carries extensive comments and reviews.

Excerpt
A Man For All Movies

The films of FRED ZINNEMANN
by John Howard Reid

“I think the best thing that ever happened to me,” Fred Zinnemann recalled, “was my contract to make shorts at Metro. That’s where I really learned my business. We had to make a fast, good-looking picture on a limited budget, in a limited time, and in a definite number of feet (960). There was quite a group of us: Jules Dassin, George Sidney, Jack Tourneur, David Miller, Roy Rowland; and it was marvelous training. It taught us to be quick and, above all, economical. I don’t mean just with money. Working within the limits of a single reel, we had to invent really filmic ways to get our points across swiftly and effectively. That was the best school a director could have. And especially my kind of director.”
Born in Vienna, Austria, on 29 April 1907, Fred Zinnemann is the son of Dr Oskar and Anna Zinnemann. He first thought of music as a career and at an early age began to study the violin, but when he realised his talents were insufficient to make him a great concert artist, he turned to law, enrolling at Vienna University. Whilst a student at this institution, he saw Von Stoheim’s Greed and King Vidor’s The Big Parade, which so impressed him that he decided to become a motion picture director. He left Austria to take courses for a year at the Ecole Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie in Paris, where he learned the fundamentals of optics, photochemistry, developing and printing. After working as an assistant cameraman in Paris and Berlin, — one of his German credits is on Robert Siodmak’s People on Sunday (1929) — he set out for Hollywood in the early part of 1929 to study the new sound techniques.
Like Raymond Griffith, Zinnemann appeared as a Nazi extra in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). It was Zinnemann’s first Hollywood job and his only appearance in front of the cameras. By the end of the year, he had become assistant cameraman and film cutter to Berthold Viertel, a European director then working in the U.S. Then Zinnemann travelled to Berlin with the father of American documentary, the late Robert Flaherty, who had gone there to arrange a film on the life of a little-known nomadic tribe in the USSR. Flaherty and Zinnemann spent six months designing the movie, but as they were not permitted by the Soviet authorities to make the kind of picture they had in mind, the project was dropped. “They wanted propaganda,” says Zinnemann, “and we didn’t!”
Back in Hollywood in ’31, Fred took out his citizenship papers and secured employment as a script clerk. From this dead-end of tedium he was rescued by the noted cameraman and producer, Paul Strand, who had been contracted by the Mexican government to make a documentary about fishermen plying from the coast near Vera Cruz. The film was called The Wave, and Strand chose Zinnemann as his director. Thus was the seal set on his subsequent career. For he and the crew lived for a year among their fishermen subjects, and built their film entirely with non-professional actors. The director’s personal involvement with his theme, his equation of his own attitude with that of his material, were at once a credo and a challenge. Zinnemann is one of the few directors who have consistently resisted the blandishments of a purely commercial assignment. He has never directed a film in which he has not been personally interested.
Although The Wave was both an artistic and a commercial success, Fred had to wait a year and a half before being offered another ‘break’. In 1937, M-G-M hired him to direct short subjects. The first of these was Friend Indeed (1937), a Peter Smith Specialty about seeing-eye dogs; the second, The Story of Doctor Carver (1938), also for Smith, was a remarkably fluent account, using cut-ins from stock footage with fascinating skill and precision, of the famous Negro scientist who labored among the cotton fields of the Old South. Besides its technical perfection of deft inter-cutting and fluidity of pace, the most striking thing about the film is its warmth and humanity. The leading player is not presented either as the familiar Negro stereotype, nor as the equally familiar and reprehensible caricature posed by the Hollywood scientist. He is quietly yet insistently shown as a human being whose dignity transcends race and colour, having its roots in a common charity. For all his renown, the scientist is modest and unassuming; yet, at the same time, his bearing indicates hidden reserves of strength, of power, of resourcefulness, which he regrets: “I am a man, just as other men,” he would say. “It is not my business to use my intelligence to triumph over them, nor to amass wealth, but to improve the conditions of their servitude, living among them as less than an equal, partaking my rightful, lesser share of the dignity of the soil.” If we remember that this complex theme is induced so emphatically, so memorably, within the limited space of a single reel, a single quarter-hour, the ingenuity of the director becomes not merely a matter for our admiration, but our profound respect — a respect which is increased even more when we recall that the film was made under great difficulties, in the teeth of a spirited opposition by the head of the studio, Louis B. Mayer, whose objections to the presentation of Negro sympathy on the screen would have disheartened anyone of less immutable principles than Fred Zinnemann.
For his next film, Fred won his first Academy Award. This was That Mothers Might Live (1938), a pictorial account of the work of Dr Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweiss, the Hungarian physician who pioneered the use of antiseptic methods in obstetrics. It was written by Herman Boxer from Ryland R. Madison’s research material and narrated by John Nesbitt. In the same year, it was followed by They Live Again, which has the same credits. Finally, to round off ’38, Fred directed Weather Wizards for Pete Smith.
In ’39, Fred graduated to the two-reel Crime Does Not Pay series, directing While America Sleeps and Help Wanted! as well as two of Nesbitt’s Passing Parade subjects: One Against the World and Forgotten Victory. In 1940, he directed The Old South (using cut-outs from Gone With the Wind), Stuffie (a Pete Smith Specialty), A Way in the Wilderness (Passing Parade), and The Great Meddler (a Carey Wilson Miniature). In 1941: Forbidden Passage (Crime Does Not Pay) and Your Last Act (Passing Parade).
At the beginning of 1942, Zinnemann was assigned to his first feature: Kid Glove Killer, a superior B-grader in which author John C. Higgins switches the customary angle of the crime film from bashings and daredevil chases to the quieter haunts of the police laboratories. Thanks to Hathaway and de Rochemont, this angle is not unfamiliar to us today; but in 1942 it was a real trail-blazer. Zinnemann’s approach is assured yet unobtrusive, and he draws skillful performances from Van Heflin and Marsha Hunt.
Fred then directed an odd little short subject for Carey Wilson: The Lady or the Tiger? (1942), screenplayed by Herman Boxer from Frank R. Stockton’s story about star-crossed young lovers (one of them the king’s daughter) in an ancient, semi-barbaric land.
A four-reel crime drama, Eyes in the Night (1942) followed. This was much less successful than Kid Glove Killer. The trouble is that here Fred’s unobtrusive approach is not attuned to the material, which is all about Nazi spies foiled by a blind detective. Baynard Kendrick’s book is not a bad melodrama of its kind, but Fred’s realistic, documentary approach makes it all appear silly and absurd. What was needed was a virtuoso, extravagant handling with tilted angles, criss-crossed lighting and subjective camerawork. Instead, the story is left to support itself. The performances, too, Edward Arnold as the blind detective, Ann Harding as the heroine, are out of tune with the required mood. In all its directional aspects — camera movement, acting, editing — Eyes in the Night was a disastrous mistake. By it, Zinnemann was able to profit in his next film, The Seventh Cross (1944). Here again we have a melodrama about Nazis, this time an anti-Nazi who escapes from a concentration camp in ’36 and attempts to get out of Germany. Spencer Tracy, Signe Hasso and Hume Cronyn give bravura portrayals, and Zinnemann has realised the melodrama inherent in the chase mechanism of the plot, imbuing it with both pace and atmosphere — a remarkable achievement in view of the film’s length (112 minutes).
Despite the success of The Seventh Cross, Fred’s next assignment was a B-grade Butch Jenkins vehicle, Little Mister Jim (1946). A domestic tear-jerker, co-starring James Craig and Frances Gifford, it was impressed with great subtlety and charm. Zinnemann regarded the direction of the child actor as a challenge, and he succeeded so well in winning the boy’s confidence, he found himself holding the reins of My Brother Talks to Horses (1946). Although this was an A-grader, on a budget four times the size of Little Mister Jim, it was not even a quarter as good. Zinnemann was unhappy from the start, not knowing whether he had been pressured into the film by Metro or his own conscience, and feeling that it was a purely commercial vehicle into which he was unable to work up any great interest. Morton Thompson (the author of Not As a Stranger) wrote the screenplay from his own story. It was a verbose and over-long fantasy about a small boy who asks race horses if they’re going to win — a brilliant comic idea, but Morton was unable to find any humour in it beyond the obvious “talking mule” variety. Repetitious way beyond the limits of boredom to a point such as to cause the audience to wake up and exit from the theatre in a mass stampede, with pedestrian direction and lethargic acting by Peter Lawford and Edward Arnold, who walk through their scenes like dispirited somnambulists, My Brother Talks to Horses was the worst film with which Zinnemann was ever associated.
Once again, Zinnemann was rescued by an idealistic producer: Lazar Wechsler had come to M-G-M with an original screenplay by Richard Schweizer, depicting the plight of the displaced children of Europe and telling how a Czech boy, aided by UNNRA, is re-united with his mother. Mayer suggested that Zinnemann was the right man to handle the young boy, and soon Fred was on location among the ruins and rubble of Germany, and in the offices and depots of the United Nations Organization.
A great deal has been written about The Search (1948), almost all of it in terms of the highest praise. I have all this before me as I write and it is a great temptation to quote a couple of these raves and let the film go at that. Because I have been taken to task by some of the readers of my previous monographs for doing precisely this, I will try to give an individual impression. I don’t wish to be dogmatic, and I must emphasize that it is a personal impression in which I am out of step with the greater majority of my colleagues.
I have never liked The Search and I think its failure to come across to me is due to that quality of unobtrusive under-statement so admired by critics and intelligent Anglo-Saxons. Too much power, too much responsibility, perhaps, has been placed on the director, who is saddled with a less than competent photographer and sound recordist, a nondescript score, and an inexperienced editor. Normally, these gentlemen offer a director their creative assistance (whether it is accepted or not, and to what degree, depends, of course, on the director concerned). Here, they proved to be a burden which the director was obliged to carry, presumably at the expense of his own duties. To give but one example: Zinnemann rightly felt that the labored commentary in the first reel established an aggravating dichotomy between sound and image, but when he wished to remove it, he found himself unable to do so, because, with a display of incompetence and sheer lack of technical know-how that is surely without parallel in film history, the sound recordist had mixed the tracks in such a way they could not be separated!
Another jarring element is provided by the realistic playing of Montgomery Clift, Wendell Corey and Aline MacMahon, whose brash Americanisms seem oddly out of place, especially when their accents are contrasted with the English-dubbed voice of the boy (Ivan Jandl) and his mother (Jarmila Novotna).
Yet another defect the director has deliberately not wished to overcome, is the inherent staleness of the material itself. For what, I ask, is the film all about? What’s the plot? It can be expressed in the title of a Bing Crosby tear-jerker, Little Boy Lost, but the idea itself was done to death long before the turn of this century. And why the unimaginative representation of this cliché-ridden story should excite so much contemporary acclaim is as baffling to me as I hope it is to you. The Search isn’t even a good weepie for the females, because it has no production values.
Nonetheless, Zinnemann was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Direction.
Oddly enough, Zinnemann’s next film for M-G-M, Act of Violence (1948) received little critical attention. Yet it is the first film which reveals its maker as a master craftsman, who has put the tentative and sometimes unsuccessful experimentation of his earlier features behind him, and has emerged in confident, assured command of film technique.
In Act of Violence, Zinnemann has arrestingly blended the varying styles of the semi-documentary and the psychological thriller. The bizarre prologue with its startling introduction of the limping man motif, is a masterful amalgam of outré Wilder (see the credits for Double Indemnity) and Fritz Lang. What greater contrast could possibly be offered to this than the scene with which the film proper commences. The setting is a small town in California, two years after the war. A young engineer, ex-G.I. Captain Van Heflin, is discovered with his wife, Janet Leigh, at the opening ceremony of a block of houses for which he has been mainly responsible. Notice how economically Zinnemann captures the atmosphere, the feeling of small town mores; how he has profited by his mistake on The Search by drawing upon the creative talents of his art director (Cedric Gibbons), his photographer (Robert L. Surtees, who later worked with him on Oklahoma), and his composer (Bronislau Kaper). The work of the costume department is especially noteworthy: Heflin, bare-headed wearing an alpaca suit, Miss Leigh in a cloche hat and a drab suit with a wide collar, an official with a boater and a striped shirt, an elderly woman in a flowered print. One has the feeling that one really is in a small town, not on the sound stage of a Hollywood studio. That night, Miss Leigh is awakened by the sound of limping footfalls prowling round the house. Heflin tells her that the stranger is Joe Parkson, who bears a grudge since they were in prison camp together. Parkson turns out to be Robert Ryan, who, despite the pleas of his fiancée, Phyllis Thaxter, persists in his vendetta against Heflin who had betrayed an escape plot to the Nazi commandant. Heflin flees to an industry convention where he becomes involved with a prostitute (a wonderfully natural performance by Mary Astor) and a vicious thug (Berry Kroeger) who arranges to murder Ryan at a lonely railway station. Here the folly of both empty vengeance and moral cowardice is played out in a tragic climax.
The bizarre elements of the film are the more effective for being contrasted with the ordinary domesticity of Heflin’s home; and the melodrama of the screenplay Robert L. Richards (who was later to collaborate on Winchester ’73) worked up from a story by Collier Young, has been brilliantly channeled into a sensitive exposition of human conflict.
With Montgomery Clift, Zinnemann now fled to Israel on a tour of the young nation’s battlefronts to gather material for a film. This project, however, was shelved on his return to Hollywood, when Stanley Kramer asked him to direct Marlon Brando’s initial screen appearance, The Men (1950). Brando gives a characteristically powerful impersonation of a paraplegic veteran of the war who is condemned to spend the rest of his life in a wheel-chair. Despite the film’s undeniable excellence as a documentary record, a script by Carl Foreman, and adequate support by Teresa Wright, Everett Sloane and Jack Webb, the whole is about as entertaining as Benjy (1951), which Zinnemann made to aid the fund-raising campaign of the Los Angeles Orthopedic Hospital, and which Paramount never dared to release. Despite this lack of confidence, Benjy gained Zinnemann his second Academy Award.
In the meantime, he had directed Teresa (1951) back at M-G-M. Stewart Stern’s screenplay tells how the dependence of an immature G.I. (John Ericson) upon his over-possessive mother (Patricia Collinge) almost wrecks his marriage to an immature Italian girl (Pier Angeli). I cannot imagine a less sympathetic story, and, off-hand, I don’t think even Sam Katzman could have assembled a more unsympathetic cast. Added to the flimsy talents of an unknown photographer and composer, one finds that Zinnemann has repeated exactly the same mistake that ruined The Search.
Again, however, he was to retrieve himself. His next film is not only his masterpiece, but the greatest western since Stagecoach. I refer, of course, to High Noon (1952), for which Fred won a Quarterly Award from the Screen Directors’ Guild, and the annual award of the New York Film Critics, who also named the film Best Motion Picture. High Noon also topped the Film Daily’s Annual Poll, and won four Academy Awards, all of which were well-deserved: Best Actor (Gary Cooper), Best Scoring (Dimitri Tiomkin), Best Song, and Best Editing (Elmo Williams assisted by Harry Gerstad).
Zinnemann was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Direction, but yielded to John Ford, The Quiet Man.
The original idea was Zinnemann’s own: A flat terrain, beneath unclouded sun, empty of everything except the single railroad upon which the noon train will come, bearing the paroled killer whom the marshal had sent to jail. “We were very careful to omit all clouds in our outdoor shots,” Fred recalls. “In most westerns, beautiful cloud formations are considered de rigeur. But we wanted to emphasize the flatness and emptiness of the land, and inertia of everybody and everything. To contrast all that with the movements of the marshal, we dressed Gary Cooper all in black, so that when his lonely figure issued forth into the stark, bright stillness, his destiny seemed even more poignant.” Obviously, an expert cinematographer was essential; and producer Stanley Kramer is to be firmly congratulated on his choice of Floyd Crosby, whose use of sharp contrast and close focus is a constant joy to watch.
Mindful of his previous errors, Zinnemann is the first to acknowledge his debt to Tiomkin and Williams. It is a sad reflection that while Tiomkin has been uniformly successful to date, Williams is virtually forgotten. A disciple of Merrill G. White, Elmo followed up his triumph on High Noon by directing and editing an interesting but minor Lloyd Bridges western, The Tall Texan. He then produced a documentary on The Cowboy, edited 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, directed the 2nd unit and edited The Vikings. One shudders to think what "High Noon" would have been like without his supervision. The rapid cross-cutting of the opening credits is typical of his creative ingenuity, as also is his direct cutting of sound and image to eliminate all transitional devices such as wipes and fades. This helps to reinforce the classic simplicity of the story, underlining the Greek unities of time, place, and action.
Not the least of the engrossing qualities of "High Noon" are the superlative performances Zinnemann has drawn from his cast: Cooper as the faltering marshal, Grace Kelly, prim and frigid as his wife, Katy Jurado, his fiery ex-mistress, Bridges, his deputy, courageous but embittered with jealousy. Thomas Mitchell, a querulous official; Lon Chaney, the former marshal, who preaches a philosophy of despair; Howland Chamberlain, the cynical hotel clerk, who openly espouses the corruption and disorder secretly desired by the whole town who see it as a means of gratifying their greed; and the bandits themselves: Lee Van Cleef, all snarling brutality, James Millican, resigned to his animalism, Sheb Woolley, drowning his conscience in alcohol, and Ian MacDonald, the cool, professional killer.
Zinnemann’s dexterity in conveying a similitude of realism through his perceptive integration of detail and background, his sensitivity to character delineation, and his sharp awareness of mood derived from camera placement, impress themselves through almost every frame of the film’s taut 84 minutes. Particularly memorable are the close-up shots of carriage wheels, swirling in the dust, and the long take near the climax where the camera, tracking with Cooper, begins to draw away from him and rises to show the deserted street, the whole town apparently empty, as Cooper strides, friendless and alone, towards the railroad depot at Nigh Noon.
Almost all critics agree that Zinnemann’s next film, The Member of the Wedding (1953), is a courageous failure. And this time the blame cannot be laid wholly upon the director. The first mistake was that the Anhalts based their script upon the Broadway play rather than the novel. This had the effect of confining the greater part of the action to a single set, — a kitchen so cramped as to force Zinnemann to use close-ups to a degree where they lose all dramatic impact. In turn, these forced close-ups draw attention to a mechanical error: The cook, played by Ethel Waters, is supposed to be blind in one eye, yet it can be plainly seen from her numerous close-ups that she is not! Again, Julie Harris is obviously more than twelve years of age! Also, the atmosphere of a small Southern town is missing.
Fred was unpleasantly surprised by all this criticism, although he stated that, if Kramer had allowed it, he would have preferred an adaptation based on the novel. He went on to make the point: “Kramer is a creative personality. He is not like those producers who know nothing of how a picture is made but nevertheless tell you what to do. Kramer has ideas, good ones. And so do I, and...”
Zinnemann’s following assignment was an unquestioned triumph. From Here to Eternity (1953) won for the director his third Academy Award, as well as giving Oscars to Buddy Adler (Best Production), Frank Sinatra (Best Supporting Actor), Donna Reed (Best Supporting Actress), Daniel Taradash (Best Screenplay), Burnett Guffey (Best Cinematography, Black and White), William Lyon (Best Film Editing), and John P. Livadary (Best Sound Recording). Zinnemann also won the annual Screen Directors’ Guild award for the Most Outstanding Directorial Achievement, the New York Film Critics’ Award for Best Direction, and the Global Award of the Hollywood Foreign Correspondents’ Association. Daniel Taradash also won the Screen Writers’ Branch award for the Best Written American Drama. Burt Lancaster was accorded the New York Film Critics’ citation for the Best Male Performance. These same critics voted From Here to Eternity the Best Motion Picture of the year. It also topped The Film Daily’s Annual Poll.
Zinnemann himself persuaded Montgomery Clift to undertake the pivotal role of Prewitt, ex-bugler, ex-boxer and professional soldier. He has been transferred to Schofield Barracks, Honolulu, where he refuses to join his company’s boxing team, despite Captain Philip Ober’s determination to win the regimental championship. Ober orders Sergeant Burt Lancaster to give Clift “the treatment”. Prewitt’s spirit is sustained partly by his buddy, Frank Sinatra, who is beaten to death by a sadistic sergeant, Ernest Borgnine. Even this does not break Prewitt, whose girl, a prostitute from the New Congress Club, (played by Donna Reed), cannot understand his loyalty. “What’d the army ever do for you, except treat you like dirt?” she asks bitterly, as he prepares to return to his company after the Pearl Harbor attack. To which Prewitt replies very simply: “What do I want to go back to the army for? I’m a soldier.”
The screenplay retains all the violence and pace of the novel, whilst eliminating much of its vulgarity and a little of its sex. Taradash has enormously improved the narrative structure, giving it a compactness and a polish that is lacking in James Jones’s sprawling original. To it, Zinnemann has added his own refined craftsmanship. He has drawn superlative portrayals from his cast (Deborah Kerr’s performance is possibly the best of her career), taut images from his wide-screen camera, and has effectively re-employed the editing devices of High Noon.
Seeking a change of pace, Fred accepted a commission to direct the Todd-AO musical, Oklahoma! (1955). Unfortunately he soon found he did not have a flair for his material, and the result was a heavy-handed disappointment to all concerned. In thinking that his talents could be readily adapted to the format of the musical extravaganza, Zinnemann is the first to admit that he made a mistake. Nonetheless, he gained valuable experience.
Buddy Adler then invited the director to 20th Century-Fox to handle A Hatful of Rain (1957). Both men hoped to recapture the plaudits they had gained, under different auspices, with From Here to Eternity. They hoped in vain.
The fault is not Zinnemann’s but the script’s: an impossibly sordid, specious account of drug addiction without the entertainment qualities of The Man with the Golden Arm. Gazzo’s play is absurd enough to be laughable, and was indeed treated as a comedy in an off-Broadway production. Unfortunately, the screen version was taken seriously. Most of the comic dialogue was lost in the adaptation, and what little remains seems remarkably incongruous. And the acting is awful. Larded with heavily theatrical posturings and larger-than-life gestures accentuated by a static, CinemaScope camera grinding away in an extended take, it gives one an uncomfortable impression of parody. One begins to wonder who is kidding who? and expects any moment to see Lloyd Nolan fall down the stairs, or Don Murray crash into a lamp-post. After all, Gazzo seems to be hinting, a drunk is often a source of amusement, so why not a junkie?
From the depths of this disaster, Fred was to bounce back once more to the top. He formed his own company, contracted with Warners for finance and distribution, took off for the Belgian Congo, and returned with The Nun’s Story (1958), a masterpiece, and one of the few motion pictures to which the word “religious” can be rightly applied. Webster defines “religious” as: “Of or pertaining to religion: concerned with religion; teaching, or setting forth, religion; set apart to religion.” The Nun’s Story fulfills all these qualifications. (Entertaining though they may be, Bing Crosby’s priest and Cecil De Mille’s sexodus do not.) Based on an article by Emmet McLaughlin in People’s Padre, Kathryn C. Hulme’s novel tells the true story of Gabrielle Van Der Mal, the daughter of a distinguished Belgian surgeon (Dean Jagger), who enters a convent in order to become a nursing nun in the Congo. In Zinnemann’s own words, he was moved by this subject because “it was a whole new world to me. I had always thought of nuns and the whole institution as being medieval, a remnant from the Middle Ages that was dying and had no vitality left. I also thought of it as a refuge for people who didn’t have strength enough to stay in the world. Only after I had read the book did I realize the amount of vitality and force and future this whole institution has. After a thousand years, it is as strong and alive as though it were contemporary. This was something new to me. Suddenly I realized there were tens of thousands of people who live this way under our noses, unbeknown to us. This made it very exciting, because it became a voyage of discovery, not primarily geographic at all: you could open the door of a convent and be in a new world — if you were permitted to open the door, of course!”
Zinnemann was permitted. But The Nun’s Story is more than just a visualisation of external ritual. It seeks and probes into the conscience: it draws its dramatic strength more from a conflict of character than the flow of incident.
Once again, Zinnemann was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Direction.
It is rather odd that a film of such uncompromising sincerity was financed by Warner Brothers, especially when we recall The Old Man of the Sea debacle. In the spring of 1956, Zinnemann began shooting Peter Viertel’s adaptation of Hemingway’s classic for Warner producer Leland Hayward. In May, Floyd Crosby accompanied Zinnemann and the crew to Cuba to photograph fish. By the first of July, they had exposed ten minutes of potential film. At this stage, Zinnemann and Crosby withdrew from the production.
Obviously, after this experience, Warners did show some anxiety to safeguard their investment: they placed Henry Blanke, a former colleague of the late Ernst Lubitsch and long-time producer of Warner product (since 1931), in charge of The Nun’s Story. Blanke did not interfere with Zinnemann during the actual shooting, but insisted on the excision of 30 minutes after the film was previewed. This deleted footage consists of a luncheon scene between Jagger and Hepburn and a dreary, repetitive sequence of postulant self-questioning, all of which was well left on the cutting-room floor. Even Zinnemann is now reconciled to its loss. “We found, simply, that the earlier part of the film was too long, and that we were losing the audience!”
The Nun’s Story is the emotional experience of a lifetime. Zinnemann’s supreme artistry is nowhere more apparent than in the scene where the massive door to the hidden interior of the convent is unlocked, swings open, and we step inside! The following hour or so, covering the girls’ instruction, their acceptance into the Congregation of Postulants and their taking of the final vows, is one of the most moving and engrossing hours in the contemporary cinema. The renunciation of self, the emphasis on humility and obedience, the constant flagellation of the will, find outward manifestation in the denial of personal attachments, unquestioning submission to authority and the public confession of faults. In the episode where the postulants make their final vows, a lesser director would have made more use of Gabrielle’s family, watching from the barricade, tears running down their cheeks and soggy handkerchiefs to the fore! It could have been terrible.