The Road to Glory
represented a unique challenge in Hawks’s career; tackling someone else’s jigsaw puzzle and making it his own. The story is
The Dawn Patrol
set in the trenches instead of the air, an epic war film nearly as claustrophobic, intimate, and abstract as
Ceiling Zero
, a look at professionals doing their jobs within the much grander context of a cyclical view
of warfare and history. It is also static and rather dull, recycling many of the ideas already stated in
The Dawn Patrol
and
Today We Live
but providing no new ones.
The jigsaw puzzle consisted of pieces of a French film with which Hawks and his collaborators attempted to interlock their own narrative. The new Hollywood company 20th Century–Fox was related in name only to the company for which
Hawks had made all his silent films. Fox, which had fallen into bankruptcy, was merged in 1935 with Twentieth Century Pictures, which Joseph Schenck had created in 1933 with Darryl F. Zanuck after the latter left Warner Bros. With much fanfare, the new company set up shop at Movietone City, an expansive lot on Los Angeles’s West Side between MGM and Westwood. Adjacent to the soundstages and executive
offices was an enormous parcel of open space that for twenty-five years would serve as a superb back lot where scenes representing everything from World War I France to a Western street could be filmed. In the early 1960s, the increasingly valuable real estate was sold off and grew into Century City.
Zanuck was in charge of production for the new company, and one of his early moves was to purchase
the American rights to a French film called
Les Croix de Bois
(
Wooden Crosses
), directed by Raymond Bernard and based on Roland Dorgeles’s novel of the same name. The Pathé-Nathan production was a major attraction in Europe, as it featured a cast consisting largely of veterans intent upon revealing the war in all its unvarnished horror, and had its world premiere at the Geneva Disarmament Conference
early in 1932.
An attempt by the French to make their own
All Quiet on the Western Front
, the film serves up its theme in the opening sequence, which hinges upon a dissolve from a division of soldiers standing at attention to an enormous field of crosses. Then, as everyone cheers the warriors enthusiastically mobilizing for the front, a victim is solemnly carried by. The picture, which is powerfully
directed to bring its motivating messages home, stresses the endless periods of waiting the soldiers have to endure before becoming cannon fodder in a sustained battle that lasts for days. The story doesn’t adhere very closely to specific individuals so much as it concentrates on the horrendous spectacle and sense of waste, useless carnage, and destruction. Like so many World War I stories,
the film intended to describe a generation essentially wiped out by a pointless war, and it certainly succeeded in making its argument clearly.
Zanuck had no intention of releasing the French-language film in the United States but bought it instead for its spectacular and highly realistic battle footage, which would have been nearly impossible, and very expensive, to duplicate in Hollywood. Having
worked well with him at Warner Bros., Zanuck then called in Hawks, who agreed that the French picture had “some fabulous film in it—marvelous scenes of great masses of people moving up to the front and through trenches—wonderful night stuff.” Crafting characters and relationships that bore no relation to the French film, Hawks didn’t strain himself thinking up a story. He merely took the cyclical
premise of
The Dawn Patrol
, Irvin Cobb’s anecdote of one officer replacing another in the job of sending out young soldiers to die, and brought front and center the love rivalry that he had pushed into the background in the earlier film, the one inspired by a World War I veteran and Princeton graduate. “He was completely shell-shocked and he’d been living on brandy and aspirin. He told us about
a little girl who seemed to be patriotically influenced into living with him and taking care of him. I told Faulkner about this guy and we copied the idea,” Hawks admitted. Hawks also cavalierly lifted from
Today We Live
the blindness motif and joint suicidal ending, where a sighted man and a blind one die together.
Hawks’s enlistment for
The Road to Glory
kept the director working at an incredible
pace, which, in addition to helping him cover his expenses and debts, kept him out of the house and at a distance from his problems with Athole. By late 1935, Athole was pregnant again, with the child expected the following May. Without a pause, Hawks went straight from Warner Bros. in late November to the Westwood lot, where he began sketching out a story for the war film with Joel Sayre,
a young writer known for
the college novel
Ricketay-Rax
. Just as they were starting, Hawks heard the horrible news from Mississippi: Faulkner’s brother Dean had been killed while giving a flying lesson in the Waco aircraft Bill had sold him. Better than anyone, Hawks knew how this tragedy would affect his friend, having lived through the same thing five years before. Like Hawks, Faulkner had to
identify the body, but he then went much further than that, working with the mortician all night in an attempt to make Dean’s horribly disfigured face presentable for the sake of the widow.
On top of that, in early December Faulkner’s financially strapped publishers were obliged to call in a loan they had made to him. The novelist was deeply into work on
Absalom, Absalom!
at that point, but his
bank account was now depleted, forcing him to look again to Hollywood for some quick earnings. Although Zanuck was less than enthusiastic about hiring Faulkner, about whom the legends of epic drinking and preference for working “at home” were already growing, Hawks enjoyed sufficient sway to get his friend hired at a thousand dollars a week, on condition that he work with Sayre. This was fine with
both Hawks and Faulkner, and the writer reported to the studio on December 16.
Although Faulkner would work closely with Hawks on this picture just as he had at MGM, this was not a “Howard Hawks production,” as most of his previous pictures had been. Zanuck’s designated associate producer on
The Road to Glory
was the elegant, well-educated Georgian Nunnally Johnson, a former journalist primarily
known as a screenwriter. He and Faulkner hit it off immediately; they shared a pint at their first meeting, at which Faulkner poured out the story of his brother’s death, then proceeded to get plastered together that night. Faulkner also got on well with the gregarious Sayre.
For the sake of his friend’s continued employability more than that of the picture, Hawks admonished Faulkner not to go
on one of his drunks until the script was finished. But still having nightmares about his brother’s plane crash, bedeviled by the as-yet-unfinished
Absalom, Absalom!
, and frustrated by his domestic situation back in Oxford, Faulkner couldn’t help himself. He was also stunned and unnerved by the woman he met in Hawks’s outer office when he reported for work. Although Meta Carpenter had begun working
as Hawks’s secretary on
Sutter’s Gold
, she had started after Faulkner had finished his own work on the project and so met him for the first time now. A lovely, intelligent honey blonde with a sweet Mississippi accent that made Faulkner feel right at home, she was impressed by the writer, who was cordial with her. Two days later, however, he turned up in
the office drunk and badgering her to have
dinner with him. Panicked, she retreated into Hawks’s inner sanctum and begged her boss to inform his friend that she, as a well-raised southern girl, had no intention of going out with a married man.
Although Faulkner was back on good behavior while he and Carpenter worked together—she trying to decipher his tiny handwriting in order to type his script pages—he continued to invite her to dinner.
Even after she finally accepted and began seeing him every night, his courtship remained slow and cautious. Well before they actually started a physical affair, Faulkner intuitively sensed that Carpenter, who had been raised just fifty-five miles from Oxford, offered the promise of an emotional outlet for him, a salvation from the oppressiveness of his life while in Hollywood, and later a way
for him to express his pent-up passion after two years of not sleeping with his wife.
Hawks, who was always very correct with his attractive secretary, watched all this from a bemused distance, even though the affair involved two of the people most closely involved in his daily life. It certainly didn’t hurt Faulkner’s productivity, as he turned out as many as thirty-five script pages a day when
five was considered the industry norm. Working right through to New Year’s Eve, Faulkner and Sayre delivered a 170-page first-draft screenplay. Drawing on the Verdun veteran Hawks had met years before, the script opened with Captain Paul Laroche keeping company with the lovely nurse Monique and subsisting on a diet of aspirin and brandy due to the horrible pressure of his job: half of his company
of the Thirty-ninth Infantry gets killed every time it goes to the front. Repeating the gambit from
The Dawn Patrol
, his new young lieutenant, Michel Denet, ridicules this record. Denet also begins an affair with Monique, which further places the men at odds. After numerous reckonings and battles, Laroche is blinded. Just as in
Today We Live
Robert Young’s Claude considers himself useless to Joan
Crawford’s Diana once he’s lost his sight and clears the path for Gary Cooper’s Bogard, so does Laroche yield to Denet once he’s blinded, by undertaking a suicidal mission with his father, in this case, rather than with his best friend.
The script went through four more drafts—all credited to Sayre and Nunnally Johnson, although the film itself would credit Sayre and Faulkner. Faulkner had left
the picture “temporarily due to illness” on January 7 after having finished
Absalom, Absalom!
and going on the bender Hawks had warned against. Some of the significant plot points can rather easily be traced to Faulkner through his work on
Today We Live
and the unfilmed
War Birds
,
as well as through aspects of his fiction. It is also conceivable that Carpenter’s relationship with Faulkner may
have influenced Denet’s initial attempted seduction of Monique, which he undertakes while playing “Liebestraum” on the piano. Faulkner was entirely immune to the emotional power of music—“It’s unnatural,” he told screenwriter Harold Jack Bloom years later. “The only real music is birds singing.”—but Carpenter was a trained classical musician whose passionate love for it was plain to her man. Captain
Laroche’s unusual attachment to his (unseen) sister harks back to
Scarface
, while it was Zanuck who suggested the rosary as a prop that passes among Laroche, Monique, and Denet. Nunnally Johnson claimed that the nearly entirely rewritten dialogue that appears in the script’s fifth draft, delivered on January 27, just as the film was entering production, was all his, and it might well have been.
All the same, Faulkner returned to the studio in late February and helped Hawks collate all the material from the various drafts into what he wanted for the film.
Not only was the material less than fresh, but the casting kept
The Road to Glory
from catching fire as well. Fredric March and Warner Baxter both belonged to Fox’s stable of stars and were assigned to the picture by Zanuck. While competent
and convincing as Denet and Laroche, respectively, they were also cold and uninvolving personalities unable, on their own, to bring the script to life. Then there was June Lang. Hawks’s burgeoning reputation as a star maker took a hit this time. As Hawks said, “I was making tests one Sunday of about ten girls, and this girl appeared.… And she was so bad I said to the cameraman, ‘My God, we’ve
got to stay here a little while longer—this girl is so bad—it’ll ruin her completely if we print this.’ So I worked and worked and worked with her and turned out a scene, and Zanuck, Schenck and everybody went absolutely crazy about this girl. They took her on, and I was stuck with her.”
Unfortunately, Lang’s awkwardness is immediately apparent in the first scene with Baxter, where her high-school-drama-class
stiffness helps get the picture off to a poor start. Her pencil-thin eyebrows and perfectly coiffed bangs do little to improve her credibility as a wartime nurse, but there is no denying her modelish beauty. In the end, Hawks felt that “she didn’t annoy you” but “she was just a child and she thought like a child. It was terribly hard to do an adult picture with her.” In story terms,
he didn’t believe that Monique was supposed to be in love with Captain Laroche, but “you really couldn’t tell much from the picture because June Lang couldn’t act, and it was pretty hard to get across an emotion of any kind.” Hawks made the best of it, but admitted, “We’d have got more if we’d had a more experienced
actress.” One of the actresses he liked when he tested her that Sunday was twenty-year-old
Clara Lou Sheridan, who had already done bits of no consequence in more than a dozen pictures. Her heavy Texas accent ruled her out as a French girl, but Hawks recommended her to Jack Warner, who signed her and changed her name to Ann Sheridan. She and Hawks had a fling some time thereafter, and more than a decade later he cast her in
I Was a Male War Bride
.
The filming was arduous. Even though
the company was shooting only on the back lot, and not on some distant location, the long February and March nights were bitterly cold and difficult. Tempers grew short as the technical and logistical demands of the period war film made progress slow, and relations among the cast and crew became strained. Working with Hawks for the first time, the cinematographer Gregg Toland didn’t achieve the
sort of startling nighttime effects he created a few years later on
The Long Voyage Home
, but he expertly matched his style to the existing French battle footage and launched a strong friendship with Hawks in the process. Other compensations for the director included working with Lionel Barrymore, who gave a very good performance as Laroche’s father, who slips into the company as the oldest private
in the army and accompanies his son on the fateful final mission, and finally working with his friend the irrepressible Gregory Ratoff, to supply the nominal comic relief.