Hawks never actually met York, but he sent him dozens of questions and received the answers on Dictaphone recordings. Overall he remained concerned about making such an extraordinary story—the only ostensibly biographical one he would ever attempt—believable to audiences. Alvin Cullom York was one of eleven children in a family of farmers in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. A blacksmith,
hell-raiser, and acknowledged great shot, York was hired as a young man by Rosier Pile, the pastor of the Church of Christ and Christian Union and, after he “got religion,” became an active church leader. At age twenty-eight, he fell in love with a fifteen-year-old neighbor, Gracie Williams, but her parents vigorously disapproved of the match. Two years later, York, along with every other available
young man, was drafted into the army. Though he objected on the basis of his religious convictions, he finally had little choice but to report to Camp Gordon in Georgia. During basic training, Captain C. E. B. Danforth, impressed with York’s sincerity, allowed him to go home for two weeks to decide whether or not he could fight, and York actually did spend a day and a night on a mountain wrestling
with his dilemma. Returning to Georgia, York was assigned to Company G of the Second Battalion, 328th Infantry, a part of the 82nd Division, which was dubbed the “All-American Division” due to its thorough mixture of men from all parts of the country. The company became part of the first American army offensive, the St. Michel drive. With York now a corporal, it moved to the Argonne Forest, where
it was under fire for a record twenty-six days.
The incident that made York famous took place near Chatel-Chehery on October 8, 1918. York’s battalion, on its way toward a railroad behind
German lines, suddenly found itself in the midst of machine-gun cross fire in a shallow valley. Sergeant Bernard Early and sixteen men managed to capture one group of German gunners, but an intense barrage from
guns on an adjacent ridge killed six soldiers and seriously wounded three more, including Early. The others scrambled for cover, but York, finding himself exposed, used his sharpshooting talents to kill some twenty-five German gunners. A German major, evidently fearing that his entire force would be destroyed, whistled his surrender, whereupon York and seven other soldiers guided their prisoners
through two German lines, collecting additional prisoners as they went. When it was all over, 132 German prisoners, including several officers, had been captured, and the action succeeded in the objective of taking the railroad.
After being decorated by France and Italy, York received the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor and was received as a conquering hero. When he returned to Tennessee, however,
he found that his fame made no difference to Gracie’s parents, but he married the girl anyway. The only fees he accepted came from appearances on the lecture circuit, and he poured all the money into aiding an impoverished local school.
A nation’s need for heroes and the government’s propaganda machine may have been responsible for exaggerating York’s role somewhat and creating the impression
that he had done it all singlehandedly; the man’s awareness of this, as well as his innate modesty, was undoubtedly responsible for his shunning the spotlight at the time. Nevertheless, there were those who persisted in questioning, and even denying, York’s heroism. In his memo to Wallis, Abem Finkel cautioned Warner Bros. against using Corporal William S. Cutting as a possible technical director
on the film. “Cutting is the guy who claims York hogged all the credit unjustifiably.… He also insists that it was he, not York, that brought the prisoners back and that York pulled a fast one on him by bringing in these prisoners while Cutting was asleep in a shell hole.” York, Finkel pointed out, always admitted that he hadn’t done it alone.
As it happened, Cutting had already written to Lasky
claiming that he and five other men had played a major part in the exploit and that York’s role had always been vastly overemphasized. Warners paid Cutting off with $250, but this started a ball rolling that threatened not to stop. The studio discovered that to tell the tale properly, some thirty-five to forty individuals would have to be paid to sign releases agreeing to their depiction in the
film. The size of these payments proved to be highly inconsistent. Some men were satisfied with as little as five dollars, but Captain C. E. B. Danforth,
for one, demanded and received fifteen hundred dollars. The inequity of the sums eventually made its way into the press, as did further attacks on York’s character. For example, an unsigned letter printed in the
Boston Globe
at the time of the
picture’s release, written by a man who claimed to have been in York’s unit, maintained that York was “yellow.… We recall one morning as we were to go ‘over the top,’ York went stark mad with fear. He jumped up on top of the parapet and started to holler, ‘I want to go home. For God’s sake why isn’t this war over.’ Sgt. Early said, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll blow your brains out.’”
Whatever
the truth, Hawks was mainly interested in making it all palatable dramatically. He began by coming up with the idea of the Tennessee turkey shoot and reapplying the motif in the battlefield when York picks off the German gunners. Searching for turkeys, York would gobble, a bird would stick its head up, and York would shoot it. “So in the war,” Hawks said, “he was looking down a line of German trenches—the
Germans were all hidden—and we had him gobble, and they’d stick their heads out, and he’d shoot one of them. Well, the audience was amused by that and didn’t take it too seriously. So he got eighty prisoners that way and marched along and when he came to a bunch of Americans he wanted to get rid of them, but they didn’t want to take them, so he had to keep on going. That way we really had
fun with it and the illogical quality was overlooked.” Hawks also claimed that he and Cooper came up with the idea of York’s licking his finger and wetting the rifle sight before taking aim, which became another well-remembered bit of business from the film.
Huston operated under the conviction that the film’s version of York’s heroics was very close to the truth. He was also taken with the notion
of York as a reformed drunk who rationalized killing by convincing himself that his actions saved lives on balance. “I spoke with York on numerous occasions and he told me—and this is the fascinating part—that he was convinced that if he did it, he would save hundreds of human lives. He said, ‘If I destroy this machine gun, I’ll save thousands of people.’ He thoroughly believed it when we spoke
about it.
“York was a very amusing fellow, and I tried to put this across in the film,” Huston testified. “I tried to show his comic side. And dramatically, he was a terrific character. I don’t believe that the film delivers a terribly profound and relevant message.… We weren’t trying to make
All Quiet on the Western Front
. That was a film which set out to show the First World War in all its
horror, all the better to shock the viewer so that he won’t repeat it.… We chose to tell the story of a man, a particular case. It’s completely
infantile and absurd to want to try to find an overall moral in it. I believe that Hawks, who is a great director, is a reactionary man, at least in his life. But you don’t feel this in the films he makes, nor when you work with him.”
Certainly, levity
ended up being more important to the finished film than any commentary about the futility of war, a distinct contrast to Hawks’s previous World War I films,
The Dawn Patrol, Today We Live
, and
The Road to Glory
. With the need to take up arms again becoming increasingly apparent, the mood had changed since Hawks made those pictures, and the patriotic impulse that had originally engaged Lasky and
the brothers Warner easily prevailed over Hawks’s own pessimism and the liberal-left politics of both Huston and Koch.
With one exception, the casting fell nicely into place. Walter Brennan, also on loan from Goldwyn, was a natural choice for Pastor Pile, although shortly after shooting began, Wallis demanded that the actor’s makeup be changed because his huge, bushy black eyebrows made him look
“very much like Groucho Marx.” Brennan had been with the 101st Field Artillery in World War I and had seen action near the site of York’s exploit.
Margaret Wycherly, whom Hawks found “a superb actress,” played the important part of York’s mother but ultimately found herself with hardly any lines to say. “As we were rehearsing,” Hawks remembered, “I told her to cut out a line. ‘Oh, that’s one
of my best,’ she said. Well, we played the scene and I told her to cut out a couple
more
lines and pretty soon she said, ‘I’m not going to have
any
thing to say.’ I said, ‘That’s a good idea—let’s just play it without your saying anything.’ And it made a much better scene. As he went away, his sister says, ‘Why is he going, Mom?’ and the mother says, ‘I don’t rightly know.’ They
didn’t
know, and
he
didn’t know. They were going off to war, and I thought it was best not to take sides in the argument.” The fifteen-year-old actor Dick Moore, who played York’s younger brother George, remembered things rather differently. “Margaret Wycherly was a pain in the ass,” he said. “She had a superior New York theater attitude. She was kind of a joke on the set. She was very grand.”
The only role that
posed any casting problems was that of York’s sweetheart, Gracie Williams. When Hawks and Howard Hughes parted ways on
The Outlaw
, Hawks had relinquished any financial participation in the picture, with the proviso that he could borrow Jane Russell anytime he wanted. Having liked Russell a great deal but not gotten to work with her, Hawks tested her for Gracie the first week of January, and both
he and Lasky were
happy with the result. Wallis, who was leaving for Washington, D.C., to attend FDR’s third inauguration, wasn’t convinced. “I agree with you that Jane Russell is very attractive, but I hardly think she is the type for
Sergeant York
. She doesn’t look like the simple, backwoods country girl to me.” Familiar with Hawks’s taste for provocative, knowingly sexy young women, Wallis
was troubled by the director’s inclinations in casting this part and warned him that “any attempt to try to make her a sultry, sexy, wild creature that might be played by Paulette Goddard will, I am sure, meet with violent objections from the Yorks.” Wallis added that Jack Warner had voiced similar concerns. Wallis then argued in favor of another young actress Hawks tested, Suzanne Carnahan, but finally
Hawks tried out an attractive, coquettish sixteen-year-old, Joan Leslie, and cast her just before shooting began. June Lockhart, a year younger than Leslie (and twenty-five years younger than Cooper), won the role of York’s sister.
With an initial budget of $1 million and a shooting schedule of forty-eight days,
Sergeant York
began production on February 3. That morning, Cooper received telegrams
from York, General John J. Pershing, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who had been the congressman from York’s district in Tennessee and was being portrayed in the picture by Charles Trowbridge; Lasky informed Wallis that these wires “pepped Gary up enormously.” At the end of the day, unit manager Eric Stacey, the studio’s watch-dog on the production, related to management that the star had
been a half hour late in showing up in the morning, “which is nothing unusual for Cooper, I can assure you.” He also reminded Wallis of Hawks’s leisurely work habits, which had always annoyed the production chief. “Mr. Hawks has been in the habit of providing tea and cake for his staff every day. This was done today, and much appreciated, and I can honestly say that no time was lost by so doing.”
Hawks would later claim, “We had no trouble at all—we just
sailed
through the picture.” From his point of view this was undoubtedly true, but the studio, at the time, saw things differently. Hawks spent the first five days filming on the Blind Tiger Café set and at the end of the first six-day work week was already four days behind schedule. As usual, Hawks was taking his time, letting the actors
get a feel for their roles and ease into the picture.
Dick Moore, who played York’s younger brother, had appeared in more than one hundred pictures since he was eleven years old, but he still felt insecure as an actor. In the café scene, in which he comes to take a drunken Alvin home to their mother, Moore felt stiff and uptight standing
there patiently with his rifle. “Hawks sense of how to
get the best out of me, and to make me comfortable, was uncanny,” Moore said. “At one point in the scene, I smiled, accidentally. He said, ‘Very good, we’ll try another one.’ But he took me aside and said, ‘Everything you’re doing is good, but at no time in this entire picture does George have to smile. Don’t think you have to. Only when you feel like it.’ So I totally relaxed. How he sensed that
I’ll never know.” With
Sergeant York
, Moore’s whole attitude about acting changed. “The thing I admired about Hawks was the sense of freedom he instilled in me.… He was a very subtle director, he would just give suggestions. He was courtly, gracious, and treated his actors with respect, even diffidence.” Gary Cooper took the teenager under his wing, teaching him how to throw a knife and talking
Moore’s mother into buying him his first rifle. “I became an outdoors person because of my experiences on that picture,” Moore said.
The following Monday, Lasky went to see Warner and Wallis to request a ten-week shooting schedule. While filming was getting under way, the art director, John Hughes, was supervising construction of the 123 sets required for the picture, including an enormous farmland
and mountain set on a revolving merry-go-round base (to allow for different perspectives), with a two-hundred-foot stream and 121 trees. Because of the high ratio of settings to the number of sound stages available, throughout the shoot the art department was forced to wait for the company to finish with one set before demolishing it and quickly building the next; both the rewriting and the
scene construction on
Sergeant York
barely kept up with the pace of shooting during the initial weeks. This merely contributed to an enormous squeeze at the studio as a whole; by March, production at Warner Bros. reached an all-time high, with 5,030 people on the payroll working on eight pictures on twenty-two stages.