Film & history buffs will enjoy this 10 minutes of Cecil B. DeMille explaining the story of the battle of New Orleans in his production of The Buccaneer, showing many scenes from the movie.
Seeing an ad in a Los Angeles newspaper that said Cecil B. DeMille was looking for Indians to be in his movie The Plainsman, Anthony Quinn (Mexican-Irish) lied that he was Cheyenne, and got the job.
He also pretended he didn't know English. In his first scene, he rode his horse up to a campfire in the forest, got off his horse, stood by the fire, looked around and ran behind a tree.
"Cut", yelled DeMille "Tell the boy to not walk out of the scene. In fact, this boy is not going to do the part. Get someone else."
Quinn tells the story:
"I suddenly got very mad. I said, 'Mr. De Mille, you're an idiot. You don't know what you're doing.'
'What? You speak English?'
'Yeah, I speak English. Listen, that's a white man's fire. What am I going to do? Stand around here in the daylight and let myself get killed?' I have to hide, so I can kill him.'
'I don't see the scene that way. I see you standing there like I told you.'
From off stage came a wonderful, quiet voice, 'Mr. DeMille. The boy's right.' It was Gary Cooper.
'All right. We'll change the scene,' De Mille said."
On the set, Quinn saw a beautiful girl. Not knowing how to approach a woman he didn't know, he told her. "If you want to get to know me, read Thomas Wolfe."
Quinn tells the story:
" She said, 'I never read him.' I thought, what kind of woman is this, she's never read the greatest writer in the world?
"The next day she came back on the set and said, 'I didn't like it.' I said, 'I'm going to teach you to like it. You're going to marry me.' 'Am I?' she said. I said, 'Yeah'. So I married her."
And that's how Anthony Quinn became Cecil B. DeMille's son-in-law and ended up directing DeMille's last production; The Buccaneer starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brenner.
Speaking of DeMille and Heston, this story came from Heston during the making of The 10 Commandments at Paramount Studios.
During the wild party scene, on the Mount Sinai set, DeMille was sitting on a camera crane giving instructions to the large group of actors, dancers, and extras via a microphone that he always used.
Two of the women extras were ignoring DeMille and chatting away. Finally, DeMille said into the mic, “If those two ladies have something so important to say, how about coming over here, take the mic and tell us all what you’re talking about?”
One of the women walked over, took the mic from DeMille, and said, “We were just wondering when this bald-headed, old son-of-a-bitch was going to call lunch.”
DeMille took the mic back and said, “That’s lunch.”
I don't recall ever seeing Yule Brenner with hair before. Both he and Quinn used their cultural backgrounds and ethnicity to portray exotic roles making their movies memorable. For Quinn, it was The Savage Innocents. That remarkable scene where Quinn is gleefully firing off his newly acquired rifle inside an igloo and discovers that he shot himself with a ricocheted bullet is priceless. As well as friendly wife sharing.
Ron