The picture, eventually called
Corvette K-225
started shooting at Universal on February 4, and Hawks was there hovering over Ella Raines. “The first morning he was there with me in hairdressing,” Raines remembered. “He didn’t like what they were doing, so he took a hairbrush and brushed my hair
and said, ‘I want her to look natural.’ He helped me through all my scenes.” Hawks also consulted closely with the cinematographer, Tony Gaudio, about the lighting for Raines. Knowing very well that physical action, not directing actors, was Dick Rosson’s strong suit, Hawks was on the set to supervise all the shooting done on the sound stage. This was a mixed blessing as far as Universal was concerned,
since Hawks’s overcon-cern with rewrites and last-minute suggestions slowed the shooting down enormously and inflated the budget accordingly in a film whose appeal would depend much more on Rosson’s footage of real ships at sea.
Originally scheduled for six weeks of shooting in California before Rosson’s action unit would assemble in Canada, the picture dragged on for thirteen weeks and two days,
finally wrapping on May 7. Rosson left Los Angeles four days later for Nova Scotia, where he shot a convoy coming into harbor, and then traveled across the Atlantic to the British Isles, during which time he and cinematographers Harry Perry and Bert A. Eason captured exciting footage of corvettes and other ships in action. The crew
also shot at shipyards in Montreal and, briefly, back at Universal
before calling it quits in early July.
To Universal’s dismay, what had been intended as a modest war film with a $736,670 price tag (including 20 percent overhead) had spiraled 40 percent over budget to $1,031,630, more than many a major film with big stars. When it opened in September, it was received for what it was, a pretty routine entry with some unusually authentic oceangoing footage. Nor
did its box-office returns justify the additional expense, for by the time it played itself out,
Corvette K-225
had generated a thoroughly unremarkable $1,067,540 in rentals in the U.S. and Canada. Foreign business made possible by the end of the war enabled the picture to edge into profit by 1946, giving Hawks the most insignificant of returns on his percentage. As for Ella Raines, her role seemed
utterly incidental to the main action and hardly worthy of Hawks’s unstinting attention.
Shortly after
Corvette
was finished, Boyer and Hawks assigned rights to the actress to Universal, where she quickly won the leading role in Robert Siodmak’s
Phantom Lady
. Being peddled around by her sponsors made Raines feel “like a piece of horseflesh,” but it didn’t mean that she was out of the lives of
the men who had brought her to Hollywood. Hawks’s interest may have waned after a few months, but Feldman started an affair with her and grew so deeply involved that Raines became the straw that broke the back of his marriage. Like Slim, Jean Howard knew her husband strayed, but she tried to ignore it and believed that her position in his life was never truly threatened. This time was different,
however. Though by her own account she “had never been a wife to go in dresser drawers,” Howard was dismayed to come across a tie clip on Feldman’s dresser inscribed “‘For Keeps, E.R.’ And I thought, ‘Who in the hell is “E.R.?” ’ Well, it turned out to be Ella Raines.”
During this entire period, scarcely a week went by that Charles Feldman wasn’t approached by one studio or another for Hawks
to direct a major film. This would have required prying him out of his Warner Bros. contract, but Hawks seemed determined enough to do it under the right circumstances. RKO wanted him for a big adaptation of Pearl Buck’s
China Sky
, about a doctor fighting alongside the Chinese during the war, which finally went to Ray Enright. Hawks was enthusiastic about MacKinlay Kantor’s story
Happy Land
, about
a smalltown Iowa druggist coming to terms with the death of his son in the war and wanted to make it “on an unpretentious basis” for Universal, but Hawks’s only choice for the lead, the inevitable Gary Cooper, decided it wasn’t right for him, so Hawks backed off as
well. Hawks was also attracted by Joseph Shearing’s novel
Moss Rose
, a murder melodrama set in Victorian England, and maintained an
interest in the project for several years, bringing Jules Furthman in to rewrite the script, planning to film it in Britain, and even fixing a budget ($734,975) and a ten-week shooting schedule. Other projects took precedence, however, and Gregory Ratoff ended up directing it for Fox in 1947.
By the early 1940s, the Feldman-Blum Agency had become so successful that Charlie Feldman began pursuing
the next stage of his career, his true goal—producing. Antitrust laws prohibited big talent agencies such as MCA from producing films themselves, but Feldman got around this by agreeing not to take commissions from his own artists should they work in one of his productions. His first picture was the bruising melodrama
Pittsburgh
, a vehicle for two of his top stars, John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich,
who, as unlikely a prospect as it may have seemed, began an affair during the shoot. Feldman was so well liked by studio heads that he was constantly being invited to take important executive jobs, but he declined them all, preferring the freedom of remaining an independent producer. His agency was doing far too well for him to give it up to devote himself entirely to producing, but, virtually
alone among agents of the time, he possessed the creativity, will, and energy to do both.
In mid-1942, in a combined surge of imagination and patriotic enthusiasm, Feldman conceived a project which, had it come to pass, would have been by far the most ambitious and all-encompassing Hollywood feature to emerge from World War II. Designed as a United Nations–themed propaganda film for the Allied
cause, it dealt with virtually every front on which the war was being fought, from China and the Soviet Union to North Africa and the French underground. It would have run eighteen reels and cost $4 million. Had Feldman had his way, it also would have broken down the usual narrow-minded ways the studios, agencies, and labor unions did business, as he wanted the film to be a cooperative venture where
altruistic ideals, not profit, would have been the motivating force. The film got to the very brink of production, but even though it was never made, it is worth examining at length since it was the most gargantuan and, in many ways, most atypical project Howard Hawks ever attempted. It also could easily have landed Hawks, Feldman, William Faulkner, and others in hot water several years later
with the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Charlie Feldman had his brainstorm in the spring of 1942 during an evening at Jack Warner’s house. Among the films the mogul screened that night was a Paramount short that contained excerpts of a speech by Vice
President Henry Wallace stressing the importance of the “common man” in the worldwide “people’s war” against fascism. Stirred by this notion,
Feldman shortly conceived of an episodic film that would spotlight that fight as it was being carried on in several different parts of the world. To begin putting the pieces together, he enlisted the enthusiastic help of his client Edward Chodorov, and by summer’s end they had assembled an extraordinary team of writers, including Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Dalton Trumbo, Ben Hecht, Pearl
Buck, Edna Ferber, Maxwell Anderson, Leon Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Sidney Buchman, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and, for the music, Jerome Kern.
While Chodorov concentrated on coordinating the writers’ work, Feldman spent weeks twisting arms in a vain attempt to convince film industry leaders to get behind his desire to make
Common Man
on a noncommercial charity basis. In his view, the
war effort justified, even demanded, this one major exception to business as usual in Hollywood, and he tried to shame key organizations, notably the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and the Screen Actors Guild, into supporting him. The idea was that no one would be paid, no star would work more than twelve days, and all profits would go to a charitable war fund. Numerous Feldman
clients and friends, including Marlene Dietrich, Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott, Merle Oberon, Jean Arthur, and Margaret Sullavan, volunteered to participate, and directors Alexander Korda and Lewis Milestone both expressed an interest. But the MPPDA showed not the slightest inclination to help Feldman; Chodorov noted “We have met unbelievable opposition from high places in getting this project rolling,
not the least of which has been the recently passed ruling by the Actors’ Guild Board prohibiting its members from participating in ‘charity’ pictures.”
Though the industry at large would not support a film to benefit the war effort, several studios were interested. Because of the superior profit percentage he could obtain there, Feldman was initially inclined to place the picture at Universal,
but the price tag was out of its league. MGM and Fox entered the hunt, but by the beginning of 1943 the patriotic fervor of Jack Warner carried the day, with Louella Parsons trumpeting that “Jack is so sold on the idea the big budget didn’t phase him.” Under the terms of the deal, 50 percent of the net profits would go to United Nations Group charities and Warner Bros. would get the other half,
with 2½ percent of the world gross going to the Motion Picture Relief Fund.
After spending time negotiating with the War Production Board in Washington, D.C., and enlisting the
Time
magazine foreign correspondent
Stephen Laird and the radio writer Norman Corwin to help further with the script, Feldman officially announced the project at the beginning of 1943, with Dietrich, Charles Boyer, Claudette
Colbert, Leslie Howard, and Ingrid Bergman as only the first of the many stars who would appear. He could easily have decided to use as many directors as there would be episodes, but it was thought better to employ one director to oversee, shape, and give a consistent tone to the work of the many writers. When it was clear that
For Whom the Bell Tolls
wasn’t going to fall his client’s way, Feldman
immediately took the new project to Hawks.
Quite prepared to make this his major contribution to the war effort, stimulated by the prospect of working with so many outstanding writers, challenged by the staggering logistics, and sharing Feldman’s belief in the film’s commercial potential, Hawks agreed to sign on, as long as Warner, and not Hal Wallis, would oversee the production for the studio.
Nervous that the film would miss its historical moment, Feldman got the gears moving as fast as he could, prodding Hawks to settle on several particular stories and whip them into shape. The director immediately called on Faulkner to write two of the episodes and made overtures to Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and others for contributions. Joris Ivens, a celebrated Dutch documentary filmmaker, was
later engaged as technical adviser for his intimate experience of the war and conditions in other countries.
As work pressed ahead at a rapid pace through the spring, the filmmakers found a way to frame the diverse episodes. “Abraham Lincoln Comes Home,” a cantata with music by Earl Robinson and libretto by Millard Lampell, portrayed the funeral procession of the assassinated president in a way
that inspirationally conveyed the never-ending struggle for freedom; this would be wrapped around and threaded through the entire picture to lend it thematic continuity and growing resonance. Spinning off from this would be the numerous contemporary war stories: “The Diary of a Red Army Woman,” the story of a heroic Russian peasant girl who flies in bombing missions and loses her young husband
in the war, written by Violet Atkins and William A. Bacher, from a story suggestion by Isabel Donald; “Ma-Ma Mosquito,” from a 1940 story by Dean S. Jennings about a tough old Chinese grandmother recognized by Chiang Kai-Shek for leading resistance against Japanese occupation; “American Sequence,” with a story by Hawks and dialogue by Faulkner; the “English Episode,” about a young British pilot, by
John Rhodes Sturdy, the scenarist of
Corvette K-225;
“French Sequence” by Faulkner, in which a Frenchwoman, raped and prostituted by the Nazis, resists to help the Allies; “Greek Sequence,” by Hawks and
Faulkner, based on the story “The Weapon,” by Georges Carousso, about how the Athenians resisted the Axis by mocking them; and a Norwegian story for Ingrid Bergman, which was never written. While
retaining the basics of the original sources, Faulkner made at least three passes at the entire screenplay himself and, more than anyone, can be considered the main author of the overall work.
The picture, now titled
Battle Cry
, was to open with a prologue defining a “battle cry” as something that “rises out of man’s spirit when those things are threatened which he has lived by and held above
price,” something worth fighting for so that he and his family will “be not cast into slavery, which to a man who has once known freedom is worse than death.” A train whistle resembling the words “Free____dom! Free____dom!” turns into Paul Robeson’s voice chanting the same thing. Little black children scream, “Again, Uncle Paul! Go like a train again!” and he does. An old southern Negro explains
to the kids that Lincoln’s body wasn’t actually on the Freedom Train “because Lincoln was freedom, and freedom wasn’t dead. So Abraham Lincoln wasn’t on that train.” At the end of the prologue, Robeson’s face is superimposed over a head-on shot of the locomotive as he sings the “Freed____dom!” cantata.
The action opens in early 1942 at the Springfield, Illinois, railway station. Young Fonda,
who bears a certain resemblance to Abe Lincoln, is waiting to be transported off to a war he doesn’t understand. Grandpa explains that the nation has now got the same fight on its hands that Abe had—the fight for freedom and against slavery. The story then flashes back some seventy-seven years to when Grandpa, as a little boy, was standing at the same station watching Lincoln’s funeral train arrive.
Flashing forward, Fonda is now stuck in the African desert with a group of Americans, an English officer, and two prisoners, German and Italian officers. Among the Americans are a nineteen-year-old southerner named Akers; a paralyzed, stoical Negro soldier who goes by the name “Private America,” and a by-the-book army regular named Sergeant Reagan. The various episodes occur as stories told by
these characters, and throughout the philosophical discussions generated by the men in the desert concerning their reasons for fighting and the importance of freedom, the image of the Freedom Train reappears.