Born in 1904, he was the product of a family of actors, and grew up in San Francisco helping his parents learn lines, doing backstage work, and even acting when the occasion demanded. “I was fascinated by all of it,” Stevens said. “The sounds of the theater and the audience, their rapture when a play took over and moved them and held them quietly. . . When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves.”

In 1921 his parents moved the family to Los Angeles to find work in the silent movie industry, and for Stevens it was a wonderful change. He leveraged a job his cousin had at Hal Roach studios to begin visiting the lot.

“I was really a kid at the time,” Stevens said, “and I had been interested in photography as a kid, as a hobby. . . I was on a picture for four or five days, had an opportunity to be on a set, and the assistant cameraman kept showing me things. One day I climbed the fence, knowing they needed an assistant cameraman. A couple of days later I was one. The first day or two it was pretty disastrous, but I knew something about photography, and I caught on quick.”

Soon Stevens quit high school — at sixteen, he was a full-time Hollywood cameraman.

Most of the early films he shot were westerns, and he quickly developed an affinity for the genre and the cowboys who brought it to life on screen. “The old western boys were pretty fine fellows,” he said. “It wasn’t that they didn’t kiss the girl and only kissed their horse and didn’t smoke: they were good men and the tradition was such that they wanted to be rugged, responsible. They had an integrity.”

He dreamed of soon directing a western of his own, putting all of these feelings onto the screen, but it was not to be:

Nothing is more pleasant for me than to be on location in the country that I love, in any of our western land­scapes, being out there with a camp outfit and a film company. I had done some work when I was starting in with photography on westerns, and photographing them was the greatest pleasure I had. If I was ever qualified for anything, it would have had to do with making westerns. But as I started working on pictures with people like Katharine Hepburn, I got further away from the thing I really liked to do.

As he developed his skills and through the 1920s and ’30s, slowly graduating from assistant cameraman to cameraman proper and then to director, he found that the western work of his apprenticeship gave way to another genre immensely popular and ubiquitous at the time: comedies. He worked on Laurel and Hardy pictures, and eventually an assortment of (for the most part) rather lighthearted dramas starring the likes of Fred Astaire, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers.

It was a successful career in terms of fame and box office, but it came at a hidden artistic cost that he would only fathom decades later. “I remember a whole period in my life where everything was a gag,” is how he summed up the essential dilemma later in life. “We found ourselves always wanting to play out everything as a joke — a very dangerous thing to do, because we looked at everything frivolously.” What, he wondered, had happened to that sense of communion he had felt when watching audiences under the spell of the plays put on by his parents?

When America finally found itself dragged into the maelstrom of World War II, Stevens’ long, idyllic Hollywood party was over. “I quit the film business to go into the army,” he explained. “I wanted to be in the war — I really didn’t want to make films at that time. . . My agent Charles Feldman told me, ‘You go in this war, it’ll last seven years, and you’re finished as far as films are concerned, if nothing worse happens to you.’ Well, I went in the latter part of 1942. . . ”

The war would become the defining event of his life, utterly changing the way he looked at his art. He commanded a troupe of cameramen who filmed in color throughout Africa and Europe, culminating in the nightmare world they found upon reaching Dachau at the close of the war.

“Beyond descrip­tion,” he said with a shiver later. “Like wandering around in one of Dante’s infernal visions. . . everybody’s pleading for water and laying there, three guys in a bunk, dying. . . we went to the woodpile outside the crematorium, and the woodpile was people.” The George Stevens who once filmed clever comedies in between behind-the-scenes flings with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers was no more. “It causes a most profound adjustment in your thinking,” he said. “I don’t suppose I was ever too hilarious again.”

Back in America, the desire to direct again came slowly, and the films became more serious, the work of a auteur surrounded by the ghosts of his past. “I kept feeling I should do a picture about the war — all the other guys had done or were doing pictures about their war experiences, Ford, Huston, Wyler, and so on. And here I was avoiding the subject. Until I found Shane — it was a western, but it was really my war picture. The cattlemen against the ranchers, the gunfighter, the wide-eyed little boy, it was pretty clear to me what it was about.”

Ever since the war, he had become acutely aware of the depiction of violence on screen, and the gaping difference between Hollywood violence and what he had seen at Dachau. “At the time we made this picture there was a great vogue of kids with cowboy hats and cap pistols going bang, bang, bang. . . In the popular movies we saw western guys with guitars, not six-shooters.” Stevens now knew better. “A gunshot. . . is a holocaust. It’s not a gesture of bravado, it’s death.”

So that was the guy who decided to film Shane: a man whose long-standing admiration for America’s popular conception of the mythic west was now haunted by war. It would be his first (and, as it turned out, his only) western as a director, and he was determined to do the job right, infusing the audience with deep emotions reminiscent of those quiet moments of communion achieved long ago in his parents’ theater.

“What I wanted this film to do,” Stevens said, “was catch something of how people looked and lived, their home ways, their manners and ways of doing things, and most importantly the violent character of the six-shooter. . . I wanted to show that a .45, if you pull directly in a man’s direction, you destroy an upright figure. I wanted to make that one point.” How he went about doing all of that — the directorial decisions, the editing, the clever cinematic tricks — would change the way westerns were made forever after.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Two books about George Stevens. Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film by Marilyn Ann Moss and George Stevens: Interviews edited by Paul Cronin (the same guy who did that great book Herzog on Herzog, which I referenced in our Grizzly Man series) are both worthwhile. Unlike guys like John Ford, Stevens enjoyed articulating the decisions underlying his art, and these books are chock full of his thoughts on his films, Hollywood, and much else.

George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey. This excellent, illuminating documentary was produced, directed and narrated by Stevens’ own son, George Jr. You can Netflix it, or purchase it at the usual places. Well worth your time.

Martin Scorsese on George Stevens. The renowned director of our time explains what he admires about one of the greats of the Golden Age of filmmaking in this article written for TCM.

Set in New York during the busy shopping season, Lee Leander (Stanwyck) might be the best dressed shoplifter you’ll ever meet when she’s busted by the cops and tossed in jail. A three-time loser, Lee is facing some real prison time and it’s the job of prosecutor John Sargent (MacMurray) to see to it she serves it. But in a crazy contrivance only a writer as brilliant as Sturges could sell, Sargent is convinced to let Lee out of jail and then offers to drop her off at her family home in Indiana for the Christmas holidays.

Besides being famous for putting his protagonists in oddball romantic circumstances, Sturges was also uniquely gifted when it came to changing the tone of his films in such a sly way you barely notice. Not soon after the story hits the road, what was light and airy turns pretty dark during an unforgettable scene where John watches Lee attempt to come home to her cold-hearted mother (Georgia Caine) who’s not at all interested in a reunion.

With no real choice and out of pity, John agrees to takes Lee to his own childhood home, and the contrast — courtesy of a warm cast of characters anchored by his understanding mother (the great Beulah Bondi) — could not be sharper. As her faith in the human species is restored, Lee and John fall in love but the reality of the trial they must both face always looms…

Clever, understated, emotionally satisfying, realistic but still uplifting, “Remember the Night” is the rare secular Christmas film from this classic studio era, but due to the faith Sturges holds for the ability in each of us to reform others with our own humanity, none of the emotional or seasonal impact is lost. Or as Sturges himself said:

“Love reformed her and corrupted him.” And the movie “had quite a lot of schmaltz, a good dose of schmerz and just enough schmutz to make it box office.”

If you can’t bring yourself to appreciate this hard-to-find gem for any other reason, keep in mind that this is the first time Sturges and Stanwyck worked together, and had they not he might not have slipped her the script for his next project — one he was set to direct. 

Can you imagine a world where Barbara Stanwyck doesn’t star in “The Lady Eve?”   

I don’t even want to try….

For some reason Serling presents that twist as though it’s a bad thing. I don’t know, sounds like a plan to me, and  if there’s one movie-world on this list that I would want to transport myself into it would be “Christmas in Connecticut.”

This 1945 Warner Brothers’ charmer is as light as the souffle Barbara Stanwyck’s magazine writer, Elizabeth Lane, pretends she can cook for thousands of magazine readers and now will have to in reality if she’s to keep her job. Using recipes from her Uncle Feliz (the terrific S.Z. Sakall), Lane has crafted an identity for her readers and employers that doesn’t exist. Everyone believes she’s a Connecticut housewife with a newborn baby living on a storybook farm when in reality she’s single, childless, can’t boil an egg, and living in a cramped New York City apartment. As expected, topsy soon goes turvy and for the Christmas holidays her boss (an absolutely delightful Sydney Greenstreet) decides to offer a returning soldier (Dennis Morgan) a Christmas weekend with Lane on her storybook farm. Oh, yes, and the boss would like to join them.

You can see how the story will unspool from here but it doesn’t really matter because the fun is in watching these immortal players bounce around the effortless plot complications and somehow work it all out in the end.

But at the center of it all is the stunning Stanwyck, whose screen presence was a trifecta of perfection: Brains and incredible sex appeal without ever losing that girl-next-door quality — though that’s not the only reason I would like to live in this movie.

What a wonderful place to visit: America in 1945, the war all but won, in Manhattan and the countryside with a splendid group of character actors … and my only competition Dennis Morgan, who I’m pretty sure I could eliminate as competition for the luminous Stanwyck with a frying pan from behind.

Oscar season approaches, which means that once again it’s time for the annual cry of … There-Are-No-Good-Roles-For-Women! Maybe “cry” isn’t the best word. ”Whine” is more suitable — from a self-inflicted wound. Here’s a taste of this year’s first-whine from a Hollywood Reporter story titled: Shallow Pool for Oscar’s Actress Contenders:

How shallow is the pool? Some are talking about performances such as Sandra Bullock’s in the feel-good film “The Blind Side

The lack of depth has led to a slew of awards-season chatter, from the expected downplaying — all categories are cyclical — to blanket explanations about studios making fewer awards movies in general. …

But it also highlights that, for all the strides made by the women behind the camera, the women in front of them can still be subject to the old prejudices. Indeed, the more cynical in town — including at least one actress awards-contender — say that the director and actress trends are hardly a coincidence. Many female directors, they argue, can feel pressure to cast a preponderance of strong male leads to negate the perception that theirs is a female-oriented film.

The article is simply wrong on one very important point. These aren’t “old prejudices,” these are new prejudices.

Back in the bad old studio days when a handful of Republican men ran everything, women ruled. Well, maybe not “ruled,” but they were a steady force at the box office because those Republican men spent millions grooming girls into movie stars and building A-pictures around them. (And for a while, Rita Hayworth did rule Columbia.)

At one time or another, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia De Havilland, Jean Harlow, Mae West, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Janet Gaynor, Mae West, Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers, Myrna Loy, Alice Faye, Judy Garland, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Grable, Esther Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and many, many others worked as regularly and earned nearly as much success (and sometimes more) as their male counterparts in all kinds of films, including big-budget prestige pictures that put many butts in many seats. At one time or another, each was was a stand-alone movie star and many enjoyed long legendary careers.

Did a paternalistic and sometimes sexist system force these women to fight for decent roles in-between casting couch wrestling sessions? Of course, but anyone who wants to argue something’s changed should drop me an email inquiring about a bridge for sale.

But the real story is just how many of those fights were won allowing these immortals to leave behind a wealth of films loaded with strong, dignified, feminine performances that will live for as long as there’s civilization. And what won those sometimes historic battles wasn’t some sense of entitlement over ”fairness.” These women were as tough as they were talented. 

So what changed?

Well, you tell me.

Forty years ago the left started their takeover of the film industry. Now that they own it fully there are more women in executive positions than ever before, and yet most every year you can hear the scrape of a barrel bottom when Oscar nominations are announced.

Sounds to me like some sensitivity training is in order.

But it’s really about the free market. Women don’t draw like they once did and you can trace the reason for that to the roles and the actresses themselves. Somewhere along the line, ”acting like men” became confused with strength, and nudity and sex with romance. Other than a natural charisma and a dab of talent, the secret to stardom is retaining enough sense of mystery to allow audiences to project what they want on you, and nothing breaks that spell quicker than the literal and figurative baring of the ass. 

On the big screen, as in real life, it’s hard to respect someone you’ve just seen tramp around cussing like R. Lee Ermey in “Full Metal Jacket.” For the men in the audience, the illusion is shattered (lust fades, love lasts forever) … for the women, they can no longer relate. Offscreen, no one likes a loudmouth trashing who you are and what you believe in. You can sum the whole problem up in a word … ”class.”

But in the true spirit of socialism, present-day Hollywood’s solution is not an attempt to rebuild the female movie star but to foster equality through the dragging down of the male star.

The death of the movie star is no longer just a “woman’s problem.” Narcissism is an equal-opportunity affliction and without those sexist, paternalistic conservative studio bosses to look out for their shared interests, both male and female stars have worked overtime to deconstruct themselves in the eyes of the public. And so…

…today the chickens and roosters are coming home to roost.

After all, why wouldn’t any man (straight or gay) imitate Cary Grant’s walk up the stairs to save Ingrid Bergman at the end of Hitchcock’s “Notorious?”

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And why wouldn’t any honest woman try to talk and look like Barbara Stanwyck? 

I was at a pool party in the Hollywood Hills once where agressive supermodels were trying to seduce fake producers. That entire pack of semi-nude nymphs had less seductive power than the play of the anklet on Barbara Stanwyck left leg in Wilders’ “Double Indemnity.” 

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Watching these 40s movies has made me realize the real power of movie stars and their supercharged sexual energy. Those men and women really capitalized on consenting sadomasochistic aspect of the artist-audience relationship. And they did it without being perverse or even showing sex at all, but instead with class, elegance, and silence. 

The stars of the 40s seduce you, and you like it, because they make you feel comfortable. You believe they know what they are doing. 

Does this mean they were better lovers in real life?  Was, for instance, Clark Gable a better lover than Matt Damon? Was Barbara Stanwyck better in bed than, let’s say, Jessica Alba?

Absolutely.

(Unless, of course, Jessica Alba wants to prove me wrong.)

I know it is far-fetched and improvable, but I am convinced that they were better lovers than most of the celebrities today. 

The 40’s stars knew how to make love. They also knew how to fight, and this I can prove. 

Watch Laurence Olivier as King Henry V, calling his men to arms. Forget his forceful posture and piercing look; just close your eyes and listen to his voice. He sounds like thousands of exuberant angelic trumpets unleashing their powerful sound from the heights of heaven onto the depths of hell. His voice moves you from within; it makes you want to join the war. It makes you believe that one man can rally multitudes to their death just by intensity of character expressed through vibration of voice. Is it not mere acting, even great acting. There is something frighteningly real in Olivier’s voice. 

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Now, could Laurence Olivier rally troops in real life? Could he rally troops better than, let’s say, Brad Pitt or Colin Farrell? Yes, he could. He actually did. 

After William Wyler turned down directing “Henry V,” Laurence Olivier, who was serving in the Fleet Air Army, was released to star in and direct this war propaganda movie. Olivier was actually fighting in the real war as he was portraying a warrior in the movie. His force was real. This is why his call to arms was not merely good acting. It was a real call to arms, and it seriously moved me before I even knew about Olivier’s real-life service. 

The excuse that the introduction of color stripped movie stars of their charisma is also irrelevant in this case. “Henry V” is a color movie. In fact, it is made in the exquisite colors of medieval miniature paintings. It borrows colors and naïve perspectives from the medieval “Book of Seasons.” (A similar rendition of period paintings onto screen was later used by Stanley Kubrick in “Barry Lyndon.”) 

Color also did not diminish Nikolai Cherkasov’s intensity as Ivan the Terrible in Eisenstein’s two-part masterpiece. Black and white through most of the film, Eisenstein suddenly inserts a colored scene, which demonstrates the ferocity of the ruthless Russian Czar with more oomph and in a more “colorful” way. On the contrary, George Clooney is as believable in the overly crisp black and white “Good German” as Obama’s dethroned “green czar” Van Jones was in denying that he’s a 9/11 truther. 

Misuse of colors can wreck any movie, but it cannot take away what is truly there or add something that is not. What makes Olivier’s Henry V believable is the same dynamic that makes Jimmy Stewart’s moral courage so believable in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  Jimmy Stewart was a distinguished war hero serving as a bomber pilot in WWII. 

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 It is the same connection to reality that makes one believe that Clark Gable could carry Scarlet O’Hara through the fire of Atlanta (filmed in Technicolor) because when his real wife Carol Lombard died in a plane crash on a USO tour, a devastated Clark Gable took up arms and joined the war in Europe. 

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Brad Pitt may kill many Nazis in Tarantino’s movie and its inevitable sequels and prequels. He can conquer Troy on a tax-friendly location in Romania or some other, currently, more capitalistically inclined state than that of California. But he could never convince me as a warrior. It is not even because he is not courageous by nature. I don’t know. He may be. But he was never tested in such ways and that shows on screen. 

Can he still play a convincing warrior without fighting in any real war? Maybe. 

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Will he be able to move us like Laurence Olivier? No way.

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Needless to say, acting is a craft and great actors can embody qualities without having the real-life experiences of what is being portrayed. Otherwise, how is one going to play an alien (unless, of course, one is Tom Cruise)? 

Good actors can play real-life characters more expressively than the characters depicted are in real life. And yet, there are certain qualities that one cannot embody unless one possesses them off-screen. These are qualities that can be imitated only poorly unless experienced fully. 

Those qualities are real courage, real intelligence, and the greatest of all, love (or its secular equivalent, sexiness). These are qualities that most of our stars lack today and the great actors of the 40s had in abundance.

Do you have a little time to sit back and examine a classic movie that will absolutely shock you when seen through the prism of now? This is not my typical short article or essay. This is my own argument that what occurs in the 1941 picture “Meet John Doe” is exactly what has come to pass in America today with the Democratic Congress and their Presidential puppet. All the players and plays are clearly represented here and I was lucky enough to find the entire movie available on YouTube in small 7-10 minute scenes. I have selected only the scenes that I feel you must watch. But please, by all means, Netflix this movie before someone bans it.

“Meet John Doe” was released in 1941, written by Robert Riskin and based upon a treatment titled “The Life and Death of John Doe,” written by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell.  The film was directed by Frank Capra. The plot of the movie clearly shows how a media conspiracy could get a President elected and use him to “turn out the lights on freedom.” The similarity between the movie’s plot and today’s political situation is surreal. Add in the fact that Gary Cooper’s “John Doe” is modeled after Jesus Christ and you’ll be even more chilled at how a power hungry, ruthless political party figures out how to use a fake version of Him for their own gain. The claim by liberals that this is the practice of the religious right will be shattered once you’ve watched all the clips posted here.

So let’s go ahead and take a look at the opening sequence where you will see a sign being changed on a newspapers building. The old stone letters “FREE PRESS” are jackhammered away and replaced with a shiny new metal sign boasting a “new era of streamlined news.” It’s important to keep in mind that the movie takes place near the end of the great depression, with layoffs and widespread hardship everywhere, including this fictional newspaper. So in a desperate attempt to save her job, ambitious female reporter Anne Mitchell (played by Barbara Stanwyck), who has been given the pink slip, fakes a sensational news story as her last submission and convinces her boss to run it in order to sell more papers.

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So just to recap some important highlights, so far we’ve learned that D.B. Norton, an oil tycoon with political ambitions buys a struggling newspaper. An ambitious reporter in a desperate attempt to save her job fakes a sensational story and convinces her boss to run it. Once the John Doe story runs it catches fire and the editor of the newspaper doesn’t learn that the letter was a fake until the end of this sequence.

I wonder if his reaction and Miss Mitchell’s (Stanwyck) sales pitch to keep up the gag for profits’ sake is similar to how things go down in some real world newsrooms?

Pass that Capra-corn please…

The next sequence is the continuation of the opening. The reason I added it is because the process by which they look for just the right fellow to play the part of their imaginary, yet highly relatable “John Doe” is similar to the passive aggressive casting process that happens in the left-leaning media world today. I’ve heard and read arguments that this movie promotes communism and I use scenes like this to counter it. What Long John Willoughby (Cooper) really needed at the time was lower taxes and less government in his life. That way he could have already had and paid for the surgery he needed to fix his throwing arm instead of allowing a newspaper to use him to lie to the public as his best option. The New Deal was a bum deal and today we conservatives know it.

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Next we’ll jump way ahead because like most of the movies made during Hollywood’s golden era this one is rich with scenes and characters unlike anything the current crop of filmmakers are capable of producing. John Doe has become nothing short of a media sensation with the public being inspired and gripped by his story of pending self-sacrifice in a cruel and unjust world. John Doe represents the common man and now has a weekly article in the newspaper (written by Stanwyck’s character) that has set off a legion of dedicated supporters.

“John Doe” clubs are popping up all across the nation in response to the fake John Doe’s plea for more decency and care for one another. In return for playing the part, the newspaper keeps this formally homeless man in a nice hotel with room service and pressed clothes as they groom him for even more exposure so they can ride this fake story all the way to the bank. His only true friend, still in his hobo outfit, sees through the entire sham from the start and is always tugging at John’s sleeve to break away from the “helots” before they really do him in. Now he’s slated for his first live national radio address which has been timed to coincide with the political convention that will nominate a candidate for president.

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There are two stunning revelations in the scene you just watched. While John Doe reads the speech that was written for him, Henry Connell, the newspaper editor-in-chief, realizes the potential misuse of the John Doe movement while at the same time powerful oil tycoon and newspaper owner D.B. Norton takes a sneak peek at his butlers and maids glued to the radio in their kitchen. Without either actor saying a word, Capra shows how two men in the same situation realize the same exact thing and then go in totally different directions from there. D.B. Norton realizes the power of John Doe for evil purposes, while Connell realizes that he’s allowed a sales gimmick to go to far.

Norton is cunning and realizes that he can form a coalition of votes to win by controlling the “John Doe vote” through mainstream media manipulation, the labor vote through paid off union bosses, and various other voting blocs with the promise of top political jobs. What comes next is one of the single greatest pro-America scenes in all of movies. It’s also where John learns the awful truth about his role in an evil political movement and thinks there’s something he can do about it. Boy is he wrong.

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“Lighthouses in a foggy world.” Indeed.

With the ugly truth now revealed to him, John decides to confront Norton personally and what he finds waiting for him parallels where millions of Americans are finding themselves these days; helpless, manipulated and learning the shocking truth about the sinister relationship between the nations ruling political party and the mainstream media.

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The final clip is the cliffhanger, because even with everything posted here you can still watch this movie as if you’ve never seen it. Anything more that this would ruin it for you.

Meet John Doe is a conservative film made by conservative filmmakers. Mr. Capra and Mr. Cooper were both Republicans who made this movie at the start of the New Deal. Mr. Cooper openly opposed FDR serving three terms, calling it “un-American.”  This is the kind of movie conservative Hollywood used to make. According to Wiki, Edward Arnold, who played D.B. Norton, became involved in Republican politics in the 1940’s and was mentioned as a possible GOP. candidate for the United States Senate. He lost a closely contested election for Alderman and said at the time that perhaps actors were not suited to run for political office. A staunch Conservative, he later took a strong stand against alleged communists in Hollywood while trying to protect actors from the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was also the co-founder of the “I Am An American Foundation.”