An RKO Story

 

There’s a surprisingly terrific documentary series THE RKO STORY. One episode deals with Howard Hughes’ period as studio head/owner (HH appears to have been the only individual ever to have sole ownership of a major studio, and he ran it as a personal fiefdom/seraglio), and it features a startling story from Brit movie star Stewart Granger (real name James Stewart, Jimmy to his friends). The following stuff is paraphrased from memory as I don’t have a copy of the thing, alas.

Jimmy was married to Jean Simmons, contracted to RKO. Mike Todd and Liz Taylor and Howard Hughes were all around at their place in the hills. Now read on:

“They’re both quite big girls, and Howard was standing around trying to see down their tops. We joked at him, ‘Which one do you want, Howard?’ and he said ‘Well, I haven’t quite made up my mind.’

“We thought we were, you know, gently teasing a rather gawky, unworldly sort of chap. We were provoking a RATTLESNAKE!”

(That’s not the startling bit, here it comes now

Hughes started in on his stalkerish behaviour, trailing the couple and moving in on Simmons whenever she was alone. Detectives trailed Granger, reporting on his every move.

“Finally it got so bad that I said to Jean, ‘We’ve got that steep drop at the back of our house. I’ll go out, and I know for a fact that as soon as I’m gone he’ll be round like a shot. Take him out the back, I’ll come home unexpectedly and shove the bastard over the edge. I’ll say he was attacking you, no court will ever convict me!”

The exciting Perfect Crime never happened, alas. (Well…it would’ve been kind of fun.)

A while back my friend Benjamin Halligan met Jean. He asked for suggestions for conversation, and I mentioned Hughes — “If things get dull,” I offered, “this might liven her up.”

Things DID get kind of dull, somehow, so he dropped HH’s name, and Simmons fondly reminisced about the nice long talks she’d have with HH in his car, etc. Her memory of the relationship seemed… quite different from her ex-husband’s.

Anyhow, I watched Otto Preminger and Howard Hughes’ ANGEL FACE and it made me think of this, on account of Jean’s sinister clifftop shenanigans.

Rocky Road

 

Those who know me — happy few! — will aver that in one thing I am something of an absolutist. I absolutely don’t like depressing Scottish realist films. My producer and friend Nigel Smith is even more adamantly of this opinion, and has dubbed the genre “miserabilism”, a term which has since CAUGHT ON and been used in no less an organ than Sight & Sound. Nigel further categorises these films as the “piss in a milk bottle and sling it at yer granny” school of filmmaking, quotes the Johnny Rotten line “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery,” and suggests that the ultimate message about the Scottish people promoted by miserabilism is “we are victims and we live in a terrible place.” While perhaps being more moderate in my views, I don’t strongly disagree with any of this pithy assessment. But then, maybe my moderation is due to the fact that unlike Nigel I generally avoid seeing any of these films if I possibly can.

But no more! Since my great good friends Colin McLaren and Morag McKinnon have embarked on their feature film debut ROUNDING UP DONKEYS (Morag actually has a no-budget feature to her name already, but she’s been keeping quiet about that), and since said extravaganza is a follow-up of sorts to the award-winning RED ROAD, and since RR seems to epitomise many of the attributes associated with miserabilism (unhappy working-class characters, tragic backstories, unpleasant sex scenes) … in short, since all of that, I feel I’m going to have to bloody watch RED ROAD.

I’m treating this as a kind of scientific experiment. Each day for a week I’m going to run a bit of the movie but if, after a bit, I can no longer stand the skull-crushing depression, I’ll stop it, watch something cheerful, and resume the next day. Now, I might actually become HOOKED and forget my aversion to this kind of entertainment and watch the whole thing at once — if so, I solemnly vow to let you know how it went down. On the other hand, the sheer Scottishness might be too much for me almost at once, but I figure that even if I can only manage fifteen minutes at a time I’ll have the thing well and truly watched inside of a week. And I can send despatches from the front line along the way.

If I do end up fragmenting the film thusly, I’d have to admit that’s not an ideal viewing experience of the kind the makers had in mind, so you can make allowances accordingly. On the other hand, I HAVE screened some films I respect and, in a sense, enjoy, in just that way. I found Bob Fosse’s STAR 80 so horrific, and Eric Roberts’ performance in it so skin-crawlingly unpleasant, that I had to keep stopping the tape every ten minutes so I could prance around the room clawing the imaginary ants from my body. Despite this, my admiration for the film is enormous, and not just because it’s the only film, to my knowledge, photographed by Sven Nykvist to begin with a close-up on a portrait of Telly Savalas.

So — I will begin my assault on the north face of RED ROAD immediately, and will be posting regular updates on my progress to its rugged and inaccessible summit.

Wish me luck.

Quote of the Day: “Broadvay? I must tell ze birds!”

 

Sotto voce: quietly, under one’s breath, in a whisper.

Otto voce: very very loudly, at the top of one’s lungs, screaming purple-faced with forehead veins standing out like an orgy of earthworms.

‘And I directed Margin for Error by Claire Booth Luce, which opened on November 3, 1939. I remember the date because a German actor called Rudolph Forster was to play a German count — he was a great star in Germany. (Much later he played a small part in THE CARDINAL.) One day I came to rehearsals and he wasn’t there. In the middle of rehearsals, just a week before we were to open out-of-town, he had left, writing a very funny note for me: “Dear Otto, I am leaving to rejoin Adolf. Love, Rudolf.”

‘… We couldn’t find anybody to play the part, so Claire Booth Luce suggested that I play it. She had watched me when I rehearsed the actors and she said I could very well play a nazi.’

~ from The Cinema of Otto Preminger, by Gerald Pratley.

I was initially puzzled that Otto would re-hire Forster after being left in the lurch like that, and for such a dubious reason! Then I reflected that a) Preminger was perhaps grateful for the incident that sparked his acting career, a useful sideline, and b) Preminger must have been aware that working for him was NO TREAT, and this was perhaps his oportunity at long last to scream his head off at Forster, twenty years after the original offense.

Anyhow, Otto’s nazi was well-received, even garnering praise from Albert Einstein (great physicist, but was he a good judge of theatre?).

The play later became a film, which Otto directed, relaunching his stalled film career, with uncredited script work by Sam Fuller, still in uniform at the time – it’s arguably the first film Otto really put his heart and soul into, and it’s NOW AVAILABLE.