During the second week of shooting, Hawks received a memo from Wallis gently
insisting that he speed up his work pace, the sort of missive that had become irritatingly familiar to him during
Ceiling Zero
. With the picture a week behind schedule after only two weeks of filming, a meeting was held to weigh solutions. The main problem was that the script was composed of many short scenes requiring a great deal of set-up time, but for economy’s sake it was decided to eliminate
two major sequences from the end of the picture—a big wedding scene and the spectacle of York’s reception in New York City.
Hawks’s rapport with his cast and crew was excellent, and the director was very happy with the way things were proceeding, except for the front-office
pressure. He objected to the fact that the picture was still officially listed as being six days behind schedule when, in
fact, the studio had agreed to Lasky’s request for an extended schedule. Furthermore, certain factors were out of his control. Joan Leslie, for instance, was forbidden to work past 6
P.M
. because of her age. On more than one occasion, work at the Warners’ ranch had been scheduled, but heavy rains had forced last-minute rescheduling onto interior sets that were not entirely ready. Uncooperative
dogs and mules held up filming of certain scenes: while Hawks was getting what he needed for most shoots with an average of between one and three takes, what should have been a simple dialogue exchange between Cooper and Erville Alderson became a twelve-take farce when a mule, which was supposed to stand still, kept moving around. Finally, the scene had to be re-staged so that the animal’s newly
bound front feet couldn’t be seen by the camera.
At the same time, it didn’t escape the attention of Stacey, the unit manager and Wallis that Hawks was up to his old trick of writing new dialogue on the spur of the moment. As Stacey told his boss in explanation of a very late start one day, “I noticed both the actors had yellow pages and the dialogue had been rewritten.”
As usual, Warner and
Wallis were not welcome on the set, but Hawks was not about to banish his old mentor Jesse Lasky from the stage. All the same, the director wasn’t afraid to let his producer know when his presence was unhelpful. When Hawks was trying to figure out how to stage a scene of York plowing the field, Lasky was standing right behind him with a guest. Dick Moore recalled that Lasky whispered something to
his companion, whereupon Hawks announced to the room, “They called for quiet on the stage.” Lasky promptly turned and left the set with his guest.
The fourth week of shooting started out to be notably difficult. Hawks came down with a very bad cold and requested that the scheduled exterior location work be postponed so he could stay indoors. This put his less-than-ideal relationship with the
art director, Hughes, on the spot; feeling that the indoor-for-outdoor sets on which Cooper was to be seen plowing looked phony, Hawks demanded that they be changed and announced that he wanted to play the scene at night, with the “character silhouetted in a night sky and with no trees.” He also had words with Wallis’s spy Stacey, who instantly reported to his boss that “Mr. Hawks made a very sarcastic
crack—something about shooting a schedule and not making any picture.”
Hawks suffered through the week. He had Lasky, Huston, and Koch come on the set one day to rewrite the scene in which the mountain men
register for the draft. The following day, he patiently waited as bit player Frank Orth kept blowing his few lines, requiring sixteen takes of one shot and thirteen of another. The last day
of the week, however, proved the most productive of the entire shoot to date; having averaged fewer than two pages of script per day up to that point, Hawks sped right through four and a half pages of dialogue in Pastor Pile’s store, ending the week with a burst of enthusiasm.
The following week, Hawks was feeling better, but the cinematographer, Sol Polito, fell ill and was replaced, mainly
for the big meeting-hall sequence in which York “gets religion,” by Arthur Edeson, who had shot
Ceiling Zero
for Hawks and would soon handle the camera on the outdoor war scenes. That week, after constant pressure from Lasky, Warners finally upped the production from a forty-eight to a seventy-two-day shoot, or more than double the average for an A picture at the studio. “Physical construction”
problems were officially blamed for the previous delays, but this didn’t stop Wallis from continuing to complain to Hawks, not only about what he considered the director’s slack working methods but also about the pacing of the scenes, which he felt was on the dull, slow side.
At the same time, Wallis and Warner secretly began planning to assign a second-unit director to simultaneously shoot all
the war footage, feeling that it would take Hawks forever to get around to it and another eternity to finish it. Hawks knew, of course, that some second-unit material would be used, but he was upset when the studio suddenly announced that stunt, action, and B-movie director B. Reeves Eason, nicknamed “Breezy” for his quick—some would say slipshod—shooting style, had been personally chosen by Lasky
to direct the second unit. Hawks told his old boss, “I think we are making a great mistake to put a man on the second-unit work who is not a dramatic director,” but he had little choice but to acquiesce.
At about the same time, in early March, an importrant budget meeting among the principals was called by the studio. Tired of being blamed for all the overages, Hawks told Warner and Wallis that
he had sometimes been made to wait on the set for Lasky to deliver new pages of the script to him; he also insisted that the screenplay contained more material than could ever be used in the finished film. Lasky maintained that everything included was necessary. On March 10–11, Hawks astonished the studio by knocking out an uncustomary forty-four setups in making the turkey-shoot sequence; at the
end of the second day, he had a tête-à-tête with Wallis in the director’s station wagon and received permission to keep Huston and Koch on to rewrite the final portion of the script, which still bothered him.
Work proceeded efficiently through the rest of March, and when the scenarists finally finished their rewrites, Lasky felt compelled to send a note to Wallis: “I do not want to let the
occasion pass without expressing to you my feelings about these two splendid boys. In spite of pressure, they maintained an enthusiasm for the work that I am sure will be reflected on the screen.” Wallis kept any comments about Hawks to himself from this point on, and as of April, only the weather could be blamed for the mounting delays. Breezy Eason no sooner arrived on location in the Santa Susanna
Mountains, where two miles of trenches had been dug, than he was greeted with more than a week of torrential rain. Several of Hawks’s scenes, including the fox hunt, had already been switched from exteriors to interiors because of both his illness and inclement weather, resulting in a more studio-enclosed picture than he originally intended, but Eason had no alternative but to wait it out. Showing
Breezy up, Hawks even completed the long sequence in the G Company barracks in two, rather than the allotted three, days, although he was then tripped up when Cooper couldn’t shoot for several days because of health problems.
With a June release planned, Wallis personally took charge of the fine cutting of the first seven to eight thousand feet of the picture, up through the training-camp sequences.
Hawks finally moved out of the studio onto San Fernando Valley locations at the Warner Ranch and Sherwood Forest, where the first thing he did was to have a shooting range set up so he and Cooper could indulge in target practice every day at lunch. Hawks put himself back on schedule with the grand accomplishment of finishing the firing-range scene, a seven-page sequence featuring Cooper and
seventy-eight extras, in one day, which prompted the skeptical Stacey to tell Wallis, “Hawks is very consistent in making good speed on long sequences … after he has gotten the whole thing worked out.” In fact, Wallis’s concern was shifting to Eason; he complained, “I can’t seem to make much out of Eason’s dailies,” and, deciding that Eason’s scenes lacked scope, he attempted to solve the problem
by sending him 250 more extras.
Although stars of his magnitude normally were not required to take orders from second-unit directors, Cooper worked for about three days with Eason, mainly in long shots during battle while surrounded by dozens of extras at a time when Hawks was doing scenes set in the German headquarters. On April 26 and 28 the two units merged, with Hawks taking over and restaging
aspects of the battle. With this done but the picture not yet entirely finished, Hawks announced that he was leaving on May 1 to attend the Kentucky Derby. Given no notice at all, Warner called in the contract
director Vincent Sherman to cover the final sequences. On April 30, Hawks rehearsed them in Sherman’s presence, with particular attention to the scene in which York is decorated, and Sherman
executed them according to Hawks’s plan the following day. Sherman recalled that Hawks instructed him, “‘Feature the people who are doing the decorating. We’ve seen enough of Coop.’ Seeing the picture later, he was right. He had an uncanny sense of story, of what was important in a scene.” Eason shot two more days of the trenches and the German machine-gun nests, and filming of
Sergeant York
finally
wrapped on Saturday, May 3, after seventy days of actual shooting, two days under the final allotted schedule. Weather had limited Eason to twenty days of filming on a thirty-three-day schedule. The studio also announced that Cooper had appeared before the cameras for fifty-four straight days, excepting Sundays and sick days, a record for any star. The final budget, including a 39 percent studio
overhead, came to $1.6 million.
With Hawks out of town and the premiere less than two months away, Wallis continued to supervise the cutting and scoring of the picture with the film’s editor, William Holmes, and composer, Max Steiner, just as the publicity department geared up for a media onslaught of mammoth proportions. The first public preview, in a 150-minute cut without any war montages,
was held on June 16, and York was duly wired that it had been a great success. After one more preview, the final print, running 134 minutes, was sped to New York in time for the July 1 world premiere. The day before, York was met at Penn Station by Cooper and numerous dignitaries, and a marching band accompanied them in a parade up Fifth Avenue to 82nd Division headquarters, where a motorcade awaited
to transport them to a reception at City Hall with Mayor La Guardia. Making no secret of its enthusiasm for the picture’s combat-ready attitude, the government sent a special train from the nation’s capital carrying Mrs. Roosevelt, General Pershing, Wendell Wilkie, and several senators and congressmen. York and Cooper attended the invitational debut along with members of the 82nd “All-American”
Division and Generals Pershing, Hugh Drum, and Lewis B. Hershey. York made a dozen patriotic speeches, which were picked up by the national wire services, and Broadway was blacked out for thirty seconds at midnight on June 30–July 1 to dramatize the illumination of the
Sergeant York
sign at the Astor Theater, where the film opened with a top ticket price of $2.20 on a two show per-day road-show
basis, with more shows added due to the demand. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale enthusiastically endorsed the picture, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek requested and received a print to show to his troops in China. To top off the dream come
true of any publicity department, FDR himself saw the film, said he was “thrilled” by it, and invited York to the White House.
The critical reaction to
Sergeant
York
was so unanimous that it is difficult to find a single negative or even lukewarm review from the time of its release. Sensitive to the film’s manipulative, propagandistic nature or not, all the critics commented upon its remarkable timeliness and generally greeted it as a new American classic, the most important film to have come out since
Gone with the Wind
nearly two years before. Everyone
rhapsodized about Cooper, and Lasky’s name was often mentioned in the context of a magnificent comeback and career capper.
Despite his prominent billing, however, only seldom was Hawks given much credit for the picture’s success, other than to say that he did a fine or highly professional job. By contrast, when Frank Capra had taken
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
to the capital for its premiere
in 1939, the director was the center of attention.
Sergeant York
’s director, however, was nowhere to be found at its opening. On the eve of the greatest critical and popular success of his career, Hawks was back home in Beverly Hills, sporting with Slim, housebreaking the two eighty-five-pound English mastiff pups he had just bought, and preparing to start
Ball of Fire
in a month’s time.
Warner
Bros. played off
Sergeant York
very slowly, milking its extraordinary timeliness for all it was worth. After playing in exclusive runs at inflated prices in major cities past Labor Day, the picture gradually spread into other markets until it entrenched itself as the number-one film in the country throughout the fall, breaking box-office records in many markets. The film was a phenomenon of staggering
proportions, and its reputation was enhanced even further by the role it played in helping to quell the braying of some virulently right-wing politicians in Washington. Incensed by what they viewed as Hollywood’s role as self-appointed cheerleader for joining the war, isolationists and America Firsters in the Senate launched some loudly publicized hearings before an interstate commerce subcommittee
on September 9. The subject was the allegedly insidious content of Hollywood movies, particularly the “warmongering” dramas that dared to suggest that the Nazis represented a threat, that Americans ought to extend a helping hand to Britain and perhaps prepare the join in the battle themselves. As always, attacking the film industry made for headlines, but when
Sergeant York
began building in popularity,
editorial writers all over the nation began using the film as a club to demolish the Capitol Hill reactionaries, stating that the filmed biography of a religious pacifist’s conversion to a war’s righteousness represented “the full and
complete answer” to the senators’ rants. By late October, the hearings fizzled out.