“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) began as a short story called “The Greatest Gift.” Pennsylvania-born writer Philip Van Doren Stern, who said that the heartwarming tale had come to him in a dream, was unable to sell it to a publisher, so he sent the story out as a long Christmas card to friends. His agent subsequently sold the fable to RKO pictures, where it went through several transformations.

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In one version a losing political candidate contemplated suicide, only to have an angel convince him to stick around and do good works. Finally it fell into the hands of director Frank Capra, who said it was the story he had been looking for all his life. He purchased it to be the first project for his new venture, Liberty Films (started by Capra in 1945 along with Producer Samuel J. Briskin, and directors William Wyler and George Stevens). With movie attendance booming during the Second World War II, a new independent film company for big name directors seemed like a can’t-miss idea.

Capra had long been an admirer of Amadeo Pietro Giannini, the founder of the Bank of Italy in 1904, renamed the Bank of America in 1928. Giannini earned a reputation for lending money to people other financial institutions had considered bad risks, including immigrants whose property had been destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A.P. only required a handshake and was proud to say later that he was always paid back. Giannini also believed strongly in the hopes and dreams of some of the street merchants who gravitated into the fledgling film industry, and put his bank’s money behind their ventures.

Based on Giannini, Capra’s 1932 drama, “American Madness,” told the story of a bank president (Walter Huston) who makes lending decisions based more on character than collateral, which causes his board of directors to try and ruin him. The money man is bailed by his less well-to-do friends,who personally benefited from his past generosity. A movie about a bank run had proved too topical to be a big hit in 1932; now, fourteen years later, “It’s a Wonderful Life” would allow Capra to once again tackle a similar theme.

To play the unassuming savings and loan clerk in “Wonderful Life,” Capra wanted Jimmy Stewart, who had previously worked with him in “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938) and “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” (1939). Coming back from World War II, the 37-year-old Stewart was no longer the easy going man-about-town he had been in the thirties. The former Academy Award winner for “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) had led a thousand men on bombing missions in the European theater in hard-to-maneuver B-24s. The loud plane engines damaged Jim’s hearing; in later years when people would greet him in public he would sometimes fail to respond. Some would mistake his partial deafness for a cold personality.

Stewart had displayed a great sense of humor when he’d first been inducted into the army; his salary had dropped from the hefty $1,500 a week he was being paid by MGM Studios to twenty-one dollars a month, and he earned his keep as a Buck Private whose duties included peeling potatoes. Upon receiving his first payment Jim immediately sent a check for $2.10 to his agent.

The actor was uncertain after five years away from the screen whether he still wanted to be in the movies; his life in the military at times made him feel like his old profession was insignificant. In 1943, when Stewart had tried to stay in one the best hotels in Madrid, he was turned away because he was an actor. Jim returned back to the military base, changed into his Lieutenant Colonel’s uniform, returned to the resort and was allowed to stay.

“Frank called me one day and said, ‘I have an idea for a movie, why don’t you come over and I’ll tell you?’ So I went over and we sat down and he said, ‘This picture starts in heaven’. That shook me.” James Stewart

When he returned to Southern California in 1945, Stewart took things easily. He refused to re-sign with MGM, despite tearful requests to do so from Metro’s hammy head honcho Louis B. Mayer. Like many World War II veterans, Jim had trouble sleeping and would instinctively duck down whenever a plane would fly overhead. He was content to spend time flying kites, building model planes and going bobcat hunting with Henry Fonda. Fonda had also been up for the George Bailey role; the two war veterans remained lifelong friends despite political differences which had once caused a fistfight between them in 1947. The liberal Fonda and conservative Stewart had promised, and kept their word, never to discuss politics again.

When Frank Capra made his pitch Stewart looked bored, out of it, which caused the director to lose confidence. “Well Jim, it’s about a savings and loan clerk who wants to commit suicide. There’s an angel named Clarence who shows him what life would have been like without him… aw forget it, it’s a stupid idea.” Capra was turning to leave when Stewart put his hand on his shoulder. “Frank, if you want me, I’m your man.” At least that’s how the film’s publicists told it.

“I can remember when nobody believed an actor and didn’t care what he believed.” –Lionel Barrymore

In Part 2 (which publishes tomorrow), we learn why “It’s a Wonderful Life” star Jimmy Stewart fought a bad case of nerves while shooting the film and how director Frank Capra got along with his dictatorial studio boss.

Since 9-11, Hollywood filmmakers have had, within free-market parameters, the choice to make any type of picture they wish. No one in government prohibited director Steven Spielberg, in the 2005 drama “Munich,” from implying, in the minds of some critics, that Mossad agents and Palestinian terrorists were morally equivalent and that both sides were equally responsible with their shared intransigence for the Twin Towers coming down (Gabriel Schoenfeld, in the February 2006 issue of Commentary Magazine stated that Munich,” deserves an Oscar in one category only: most hypocritical film of the year.”)

Spielberg, who previously produced “An American Tail” (1986), which depicted Jewish immigrants as mice, seemed to be conflicted with the whole notion of Israelis fighting back against those who wished them not to exist. “”I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine,” Spielberg told Time Magazine. “There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end? How can it end?”

Another post-9/11 cinema trait was that Muslim villains became mostly taboo on the screen. The 2002 thriller “The Sum of All Fears,” adapted from the Tom Clancy novel of same name, featured Aryan villains trying to bomb Baltimore rather than the Arab destroyers depicted in the book. Director Phil Alden Robinson claimed the ethnic change was because Middle East terrorists would not be able to accomplish the mayhem that took place in the story, not mentioning that he had been lobbied hard by CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) not to show Muslims in a bad light.Writer Clancy later jokingly referred to himself as “the author of the book Phil Robinson ignored.”

The political correctness which was already present in the film industry, and that just seemed to grow after the World Trade Center was struck down, was a stark contrast to events following America’s entry into World War II. Shortly after December 7, 1941, Washington’s Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMI) made their objectives clear: every director, producer and writer needed to ask whether their current picture would help win the war. The implication by the Roosevelt administration was clear; if the major studios failed to cooperate, their industry would be nationalized.

For the most part, such threats were not needed.

With Stalin’s Russia and the United States on the same side against the Nazis, an uneasy alliance formed in Hollywood between the more traditional patriotic right and the Communist-leaning left. Up until 1942, the Hollywood Studios, similar to today, largely depended on foreign markets. When Greer Garson accepted the title role in the drama “Mrs. Miniver” (1942) in late 1941, she felt the German soldier that menaced her in the movie was too sympathetic.

With her country under attack, the thirty-three-year-old Londoner wanted to give up Hollywood stardom, return home, and drive
ambulances. The only reason Greer agreed to do the picture was that the British government felt that it would be great propaganda; however, the nice Nazi would undermine any hawkish message. Garson’s cautious bosses at MGM pointed out that America was neutral; they couldn’t take sides. Their attitude changed when Germany declared war on the US in December; Greer’s on-screen antagonist was allowed to become evil. Years later, Garson lamented that Mrs. Miniver trapped her into being typecast as sacrificing British mothers. But her Oscar winning performance in Miniver helped convince many Americans to support England’s war effort.

An obvious difference between the World War II and contemporary Hollywood is that in the 1940’s there were no twenty-four-hour cable TV news cycles. Despite being well-received by critics, “United 93″ (2006), a mostly factual account of the fatal San Francisco-bound flight that was hijacked by four al–Qaeda terrorists and ended up crashing into a field in Pennsylvania after some of the heroic passengers tried to retake control of the plane, grossed a paltry (by Hollywood standards) $31.4 million in the United States.

Whether modern movie goers distrusted liberal Hollywood to do the subject justice, were too burned out by the news to be sufficiently entertained, or were mostly just too young to appreciate a heavy realistic drama without comic book superheroes in it was hard to say; whatever the reason, “United” did not appeal as escapist fare.

In contrast, audiences during World War II, with far less access to information, often enjoyed movies with real life elements. One factor that helped cinema attendance was that female factory workers, often lonely on the home front, and having disposable income for the first time in years, became rabid filmgoers; unlike other products at that time, movies were not rationed. Also, servicemen stationed in many American cities with no hotel vacancies were welcomed to stay the night and sleep in movie theaters.

And sometimes a little light-hearted fantasy mixed with realism didn’t hurt; in “Tarzan Triumphs” (1943), Tarzan and Cheetah teamed up to help win World War II on the screen. After the Ape Man dispatched some very dangerous Nazis in the jungle, his furry pal got on the radio and broadcasted a message to Berlin. The soldiers on the receiving end mistook the chimp’s chattering for Hitler and saluted their imagined Fuhrer while goose-stepping.

Many modern Hollywood stars, including Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Jack Black, Mark Wahlberg, Scarlett Johansson, and most notably Gary Sinise, have done their country proud by entertaining US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in USO shows, but it would be hard to match the overall patriotism displayed by the movie industry during World War II. Amongst the public spirited leading ladies, there was Bette Davis dancing with servicemen at the famed Hollywood Canteen, Ingrid Bergman joyously grabbing a random soldier and kissing him hard on the mouth in France right after Germany surrendered, Carole Lombard feverishly selling war bonds on the last day of her life just before she embarked on a military transport plane that would fatally crash near Las Vegas, and Ginger Rogers, who told of a letter she received from an American soldier who had been incarcerated in a Japanese POW camp. His guards had screened Rogers’ romantic comedy “Tom, Dick and Harry” (1941) and were so enthralled by it that he was able to escape.

With today’s volunteer army, no one really expects stars like Justin Timberlake or Matt Damon to give up the fame and fortune of
Hollywood for military service, yet that is exactly what happened during the Second World War with a number of prominent leading
men. The icons of the past could have easily used their connections to be exempt from service; many people, including General Dwight Eisenhower, felt that the best thing the Hollywood leading men could do for soldiers often bored and in need of entertainment between battles, was to make more movies.

Victor Mature, Tyrone Power, James Stewart, Clark Gable and Henry Fonda were some of the better-known celebrities who were willing to go fight the enemy in an arena where there is no one around to yell, ”cut!” Conversely, actors with ailments such as Gregory Peck, saddled with a bad back, or Van Johnson, who after a near fatal car accident ended up with a metal plate in his head, were able to stay behind and fill the onscreen void.

One possibly apocryphal story while the war was still raging involved an agent who had a meeting with a mogul about a potential new
discovery. “You’ll love him! He’s handsome, he’s talented, and best of all, he has a double hernia!”

Correction: Shortly after this article went to press I was contacted by Phil Robinson who informed me that the ethnicity of the terrorists in his film “The Sum of All Fears” was changed a year before he came on the project; it was not his decision. Robinson’s only contact with CAIR came through a fax he received a month before the shoot asking that “Sum’s” villains not be Arab, the director assured CAIR’s representative that was already the case. I apologize for the error and thank Mr. Robinson for being an absolute gentleman when he informed me of my mistake.

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.

The artistic pinnacle of his work in Hong Kong are his collaborations with John Woo filmed between 1986 and 1992. Those of us who equate the modern action movie to elder tales of heroic bloodshed such as The Iliad and the Norse sagas find these films to be sources of endless delight, and much of the credit for this feeling must go to Chow. In John Woo: The Films, author Kenneth E. Hall makes a trenchant point when he writes that, “Not much is usually said, in connection with Woo, about Chow’s contributions to character studies, but his efforts in A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled have created at least three memorable and distinct characters who are yet all of a piece, men of an essential integrity and heroism who rediscover or reaffirm their humanity in struggles with evil.”

This thematic tableau is red meat to conservative film lovers, the same stuff I was talking about when I wrote a piece on Taken here at Big Hollywood last year. But even to give Chow Yun-fat credit for all of this is selling him short — unlike many more muscle-bound action heroes, those Woo classics by no means delineate the limits of his talent or appeal.  Bey Logan, the HK film fanatic who authored the entertaining volume Hong Kong Action Cinema, insists that, in the wake of his collaborations with Woo, Chow became not just Hong Kong’s greatest action star but its greatest acting star. “Chow was the first Hong Kong thespian,” he notes, “to attain boffo box-office with vehicles as disparate as the tragi-comic Autumn’s Tale, the action-packed A Better Tomorrow and the slapstick Eighth Happiness. Chinese audiences just adore Chow Yun-fat in any of his many guises.”

As do many Americans.

Poverty is a theme running through the lives of both John Woo and Chow Yun-fat. Chow was born on Lamma Island, a blip in the ocean near Hong Kong, in 1955. He quit high school to get whatever work he could find to help support his family, and ended up auditioning for a place in the acting academy of TVB (Television Broadcasts Limited, a popular Hong Kong TV station). They ran a facility that performed the same task that the old studio system did in Hollywood: find new talent, whip them into shape, and put them under draconian contracts.

Chow’s contract made him an indentured servant of the studio for fifteen years, but it allowed him to build a following on TV in various soap operas and made-for-TV movies. A migration to feature films was inevitable, but like American stars like Tom Selleck, the movies didn’t quite know what to do with him, even after a performance in Hong Kong 1941 (1982) won him Best Actor at Taiwan’s version of the Oscars, the Golden Horse Awards. His even did a film with John Woo during these years, but as Woo was tied down to a formula their future magic failed to manifest itself.

But Chow’s screen presence stuck in Woo’s mind, and when Tsui Hark finally gave him the chance to follow his muse and make A Better Tomorrow, he fought hard to include Chow in a supporting role. His reasoning was simple: “Chow represents everything I value in a person: morality, friendship, honor, love. He is like an ancient Chinese hero who really cares about people.” This would seem to be a strange type of person to cast in the role of a death-dealing gangster, but Woo was working on a whole different level that the average action director. Samurai codes of honor, Christian elements of forgiveness and faith, and chivalric notions of brotherhood and honor were the coin of this realm, and as Chow puts it: “John Woo wanted someone who looks like a typical family man, but can really do all these things when he must. Not the typical kung-fu hero.”

Of course, turning the ordinary-looking Chow into a leaping, twirling, operatic knight-errant took some work. He didn’t possess the impressive acrobatics of a Jackie Chan or the kung-fu mastery of a Jet Li, but he did have a presence and a grace of movement, almost like John Wayne’s, that Woo could amplify with his unique editing style. Soon Woo discovered he was giving Chow a breathtaking dance of death all his own, and the effect was wonderful. Seeing the kind of film that A Better Tomorrow was becoming, Chow tore into the script and gave the part every bit of the emotion and passion Woo was striving for. “[Woo is a] very romantic and sensual director,” Chow says, “who puts a lot of himself in his films: love, human dignity, but also anger about the loss of tradition in the cities.” So just as John Wayne became John Ford’s mythical archetype and James Stewart became Frank Capra’s, so too did Chow Yun-fat allow himself to be molded into Woo’s image of a hero for the ages. As the director warmed to Chow’s portrayal, his part in the film grew exponentially until it had become a star-making turn to rival Wayne in Stagecoach and Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

A Better Tomorrow hit theaters as more than a movie — it was a grand coming-out party for a long-hidden talent that was destined to dominate the industry. Film Comment magazine put it best in a review that commented on Chow’s on-screen introduction in the film:

No scene exemplifies. . . star power more eloquently than A Better Tomorrow, when, simply by his way of eating street food, Chow tells us all we need to know about his character — we see this crook’s warmth, his cocksure humor, and the careless joie de vivre that will get him in the dutch later on. It’s a brilliant piece of screen acting — the kind that people emulate when they walk onto the streets after the movie.

Emulate they did — young men all over Hong Kong took to wearing Chow’s long Armani duster jacket, his dark sunglasses, and his suave mannerisms (the whole lighting-your-cigarette-with-a-$100-bill thing, strangely enough, failed to catch on in the same fashion). At the 1987 Hong Kong Film Awards Chow stood on the podium to accept the award for Best Actor, and the thirty-one-year old was soon in ferocious demand. He was now a bonafide superstar — but a Hong Kong one, not a Hollywood one. There’s a big difference between the two, as Chow discovered:

We don’t have very large budgets for the production, so the studio won’t pay a lot of money for hiring the star. So everybody wants to work hard for more money before 1997. Sometimes I’m so jealous that the stars here [in the USA] can take two, three years [between] movies. In Hong Kong, if you take three, four years [off], you die. You cannot survive like that. It’s tough, but it is the way that we treat ourselves to be a star. Sometimes everyone is proud of themselves when they make twelve films in a year, but on the other hand, there is a sadness, I feel shame that we have been working like a dog.

He had become, in his words, an “acting machine.” Hong Kong director King Hu remembers the frenzy that surrounded Chow in those years: “I was trying to get film financing from the Taiwanese distributors. All they wanted to know was: ‘Is there a part in your film for Chow Yun-fat?’ When I said there wasn’t, they asked: “Can you write in a role for Chow Yun-fat?’” In the wake of A Better Tomorrow, Chow made an insane ten films a year in an attempt to capitalize on his success. “My record was three days working without sleep,” he said at the time. “I know if I don’t slow down I’ll die.” It got so bad that, as Bey Logan tells it, “During his heyday, there was a joke that Chow was in demand by so many producers that, when he arrived at the studio, a crew from one film would shoot his face, another his hands, another his back. . . all for different movies!”

On the bright side, Chow was able to expand his artistic reach far beyond his breakthrough role in A Better Tomorrow. He experimented with a wide variety of genres, and found to his relief that audiences liked him in all of them. Chow’s Hong Kong box office during those years was nearly double what Jackie Chan earned in the same period, and in any given year he had no less than three films sitting in the Top Ten. A part of me wishes that we could get back to the same work ethic in modern-day Hollywood, with actors shooting far more movies but on lower budgets, where more artistic chances could be taken, and hence more movies like Hard Boiled could manifest themselves.

During these years of high-octane production and overwhelming success, Chow continued to make the films that would serve as anchor-points for his career — his collaborations with John Woo. The first order of business was a sequel to A Better Tomorrow. Chow’s character perished in the original, and yet it was unthinkable to forge ahead with a sequel without him. Woo solved the problem by making Chow’s new character the twin brother of the former hero. In 1989’s The Killer, Chow was back as another criminal with a code of honor and a heart of steel-tipped gold, in a film with a tragic and elegiac tone underlying the mind-boggling action set-pieces. “Intrinsic to the creation of this mood,” writes Michael Bliss in Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo, “is the acting of Chow Yun-fat, whose calm demeanor and soulful looks convince us that John has emotional depths that go beyond what is suggested by the film’s dialogue.”

It took their last team-up together, Hard Boiled, for Chow to finally appear on the right side of the law in a John Woo film, but even then his previous expressions of deeply conflicted morality were still in play. According to Kenneth Hall, Chow’s role as the rogue cop Tequila combines “basic integrity and compassion masked by a show of indifferent callousness,” as well as “a soulfulness expressed in his love of jazz music; an easy rapport with his fellow officers, making him especially popular with his subordinates. . . and, contrastingly, a kind of calculated but heated, almost out-of-control viciousness.” This is the stuff of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taken and other American classics of the genre.

“Tequila suffers guilt and fear throughout the film,” Hall notes. “Like ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan or Wes Block, the Eastwood cop in Tightrope, Tequila is in danger of becoming his own worst enemy, of turning into the worst of what he pursues.” This subtext feels thoroughly American, which is perhaps one of the reasons that the later Woo-Chow films were far more successful in the States than in Hong Kong itself. “It’s the violence,” Chow maintains. “A lot of the [Hong Kong] audience can’t stand it. I, myself, don’t like violence. I don’t like gunfire. John Woo does. He loves the sound of the bullets. On the set, he never wears earplugs.”

Unlike so many other high-profile collaborations in the ego-drenched movie industry, the one between Woo and Chow developed into a warm relationship filled with mutual admiration. As Hard Boiled was wrapping up principal photography, both men were planning on making the jump to Hollywood, and so the picture was taking on the emotional resonance of their last hurrah in Hong Kong. Emotions were high, and Chow tried to think of a way to thank his friend for changing his life in so dramatic a fashion. He decided that the most fitting way to immortalize their sense of brotherhood was to recreate it on film.

“While working on Hard Boiled I never intended to appear in it,” says John Woo. “Chow Yun-fat is a very good friend of mine. On the last day of shooting he came to me with the idea that I do a cameo appearance. He wanted to create a scene between he and I that showed our true friendship to the audience. We made up dialogue and a character for me.” Woo was to portray a grizzled ex-cop turned bartender who, Obi-Wan Kenobi style, would offer advice and support to Chow’s Tequila. Woo says that “Chow Yun-fat wanted to show his respect so we made my character his mentor, someone who cared about him and gave him direction.”

Hard Boiled marked the end of the fruitful collaboration between the two men. As with most American director/actor teams you care to name, neither has been nearly as good alone as they were together. In Hollywood, Chow’s The Replacement Killers did OK, as did Anna and the King. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a major hit, making over $200 million, and he had a part in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film. Yet other films failed to make much impact. In one now-legendary near-miss, he was even close to signing onto the first Matrix in the Laurence Fishburne role, a perfect match given the influence of A Better Tomorrow on the film’s look. But he bowed out, and thus let a major coup slip through his fingers.

It’s been almost twenty years since Chow Yun-fat and John Woo have worked together in the old style. These days, they aren’t the hot new thing in Hong Kong anymore, they are aging Hollywood players who get together at their homes in the suburbs of Los Angeles with their wives and families, where they quietly barbecue together and remember good times. “Many of my favorite of my own films are not popular in the West,” Chow laments, but he is loathe to complain too much. At least he no longer has to make ten movies a year and work like a dog to survive. And he always has those magical years between 1986-1992 to look back on fondly, even if he does often wince at the violence his characters deal out on screen.

Next week, the production of Hard Boiled, and the innovative techniques that immortalized it as one of the greatest action movies of all time.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Chow Yun-fat receives the AZN Lifetime Achievement Award: American stars like Quentin Tarantino offer an overview of his career, and Chow gives a nice acceptance speech in English:

A 1993 Interview with Chow Yun-fat: A bit stilted in English (although his accent is surprisingly good), but contains a lot of interesting information that I hadn’t heard anywhere else:

A few more books on the films of John Woo and Chow Yun-fat. Here’s a pair of titles that contributed to the material in this installment. Both contain profound looks at the thematic subtext of what many might see as outrageous yet shallow action movies:

John Woo: The Films by Kenneth E. Hall

Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo by Michael Bliss

Even though I have lived in the D.C. area for a little less than three years, I recently watched  “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” for the first time. The movie revolves around an appointed Senator who brings his hopefulness and his integrity to Washington D.C. James Stewart plays Mr. Smith, the head of a boy’s organization, who is surprisingly given a chance to serve his country in the United States Senate. He is a Governor’s political appointee who some believe will cave to political pressure and make his voting decisions on the advice of a corrupt but highly-respected Senate colleague. Mr. Smith refuses to accommodate that fellow Senator and the demands of the political machine in his state that fights against him and he eventually loses confidence in the entire political system.

When Smith recognizes how blatantly corrupt some politicians are, he heads to the Lincoln Memorial planning to leave the nation’s capital after the media and his fellow Senators have disgraced his name. His secretary, Clarissa Saunders, meets him there and she notes the following about Senator Paine and Jim Taylor, two of Smith’s high-profile critics:

Your friend Mr. Lincoln had his Taylors and Paines. So did every other man who ever tried to lift his thought up off the ground. Odds against them did not stop those men. They were fools that way. All the good that ever came into this world came from fools with faith like that. 

After that part of the movie, Mr. Smith is given a choice. He can return to his home state and try to repair the damage to his reputation that was caused by the accusations lobbed at him or he can return to the Senate and fight for his honor. Mr. Smith decides to return to the Senate, where he mounts a filibuster to get his message out to the people of his state.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Smith, an icon of idealism and integrity, has become a paradigm that politicians enjoy being compared to. Several months ago, Liza Mundy from the Washington Post, wrote a piece about the film and noted the importance of the movie. “Its influence,” she wrote, “is rooted in the idea that a virtuous innocent can take on a rotten political system — and win.” Mundy later wrote that  “perhaps at no time has the film been invoked as often as during the 2008 presidential election, a race in which everybody was trying to claim the outsider status that Smith embodies.” Bundy noted in her piece that depending on your political persuasion, both President Obama and former Governor Sarah Palin can and have been compared to Mr. Smith.

If you took a broader perspective today of Mr. Smith and viewed him as an advocate for the people over the forces of politics as usual, you would see how such “fools” are necessary in the nation’s capital these days and how critics often go after such “fools.” In Washington D.C., the amount of money given to a state or a district in earmarks can be seen as a major political plus while people who are fiscally conservative can be criticized for not soliciting or accepting more money from the federal government. Is it a “fool” who wants to fight for fiscal responsibility when our deficit is so high? On the matter of health care, is it foolish for our elected leaders to take their time and meticulously debate reform that will affect millions of Americans, like some elected leaders like Senator McConnell want to do. Is it a “fool” who wants health-care reform to be debated and discussed thoroughly while others want to push through the legislation quickly? On the same subject, is it “foolish” to ask our public officials to read this important piece of legislation before they push it through? Is it “foolish” to want to know what is actually in this massive health care bill before it becomes law?

With such questions about “foolishness,” some would likely ask the obvious question: do we have Mr. Smiths in Washington today? I believe that we do have such people in our capital. We have Mr. Smiths in Washington who fight for accountability and transparency and who fight for their ideals and their values over their party’s principles.

For one, I am reminded of Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. In 2000, Democratic Senator Lieberman represented his party as nominee for vice president but six years later, he lost the primary in his own state. Believing that the voters of both parties and many independents would support him, Lieberman ran and won as an independent and he has deserved that title in the Senate. Although he still supports the Democrats on a lot of issues, Lieberman supported John McCain in last year’s election much to his own detriment, and he has recently opposed parts of liberal health care reform, once again facing critics from within his own party. Some may consider Lieberman a “fool” for standing with Republicans on issues like health care or national security issues but others, like myself, consider him a leader willing to stand up for his principles.

If you have not seen “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” I highly recommend it as a classic film about maintaining integrity in the midst of harsh criticism. We do have a couple Mr. Smiths in Washington today but this country could always use more such leaders in our nation’s capital today.

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.

Let’s start with the cast:  James Stewart.  George C. Scott.  Lee Remick.  Eve Arden.  Ben Gazzara.  Even Big Hollywood’s own Orson Bean in a supporting part as a doctor who plays a key role in the story.  If you love movies, you only needed to get to the word “George” before you were adding it to your NetFlix queue.

The plot is simple.  Small-town lawyer Paul Biegler (Stewart), who is more concerned with fishing than his practice, is talked into meeting Army lieutenant Fred Manion, who is sitting in jail for the murder of the man the soldier claims raped his wife Laura (The hotter-than-hot Remick).  Beigler takes the case, and faces off with Claude Dancer (Scott), the ace prosecutor sent in from the big city to chalk up yet another conviction.   There is much more to the story – the movie is a brisk two hours forty minutes long – but there’s no sense in going into the details here.  You just need to know this:  Jimmy Stewart goes up against George C. Scott in court.  Case closed.

The sparks fly in the courtroom under the direction of Otto Preminger, the enfant terrible of 50s and 60s Tinseltown, but the interesting part (at least for a lawyer) is that the film covers all aspects of the trial, in and out of the courtroom.  Cases are often won not in front of the jury but hunched over a dusty book of old cases (or, today, in front of a computer screen looking at precedent online), and Anatomy doesn’t hesitate to show the hard work involved in putting up a defense. 

That sounds dull as dirt, but Anatomy is anything but.  Stewart is helped by his burned out, alcoholic mentor Parnell, played perfectly by Arthur O’Connell.  His character is funny, irascible, sad and, in the end, redeemed.  O’Connell even manages to steal scenes from Jimmy Stewart while snagging a best Supporting Actor nomination for himself (Stewart and Scott both earned Oscar nominations as well).

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Preminger was known for the pushing boundaries, and he does it again here.  This was 1959, and audiences must have been in for a shock not only hearing a frank discussion of topics like sexual climax and seminal fluid on the big screen but hearing it come from the mouth of George Bailey himself.  But it’s not exploitation – it’s reality, and there is nothing wrong with adults viewing adult subject matter.  If only films today were brave enough to put forward an ambiguous character like Laura Manion – perhaps a rape victim, but perhaps something else.  They’d be picketed by bitter, snarling feminists furious over the movie’s rejection of easy archetypes and easier answers.  And almost no studio today would risk the ending either – an ending that is a perfect fit for what comes before. 

The beauty of Anatomy is how it never treats its audience like children.  Its characters are fallible – sometimes they drink to excess, smoke, have questionable morals and lie, but the movie expects the audience to understand that human beings are not purely black and white.  That audience had come through three terrible wars and the Great Depression.  They knew something about real life even if most of what Hollywood was putting out was sanitized and saccharine.

If Anatomy was being remade today, those twit studio suits would probably try to push Josh Hartnett as Beigler, Scarlett Johansson as Laura, and some kid from a CW TV series about vampires as the accused.  It’s sad that there are so many mediocrities out there today, and sadder that the suits don’t even realize it.  No matter how hard she tried, the pretty but vacant Johansson could never get anywhere as close to down and dirty as Lee Remick does here.   And there’s no comparison in life experience – Stewart flew B-24s over Dusseldorf; Harnett looks like he bursts into tears when he runs out of his Axe body spray. 

The only problem with Anatomy in my book is the music.  It’s jazz, and aficionados of that art form hail Duke Ellington’s soundtrack as a masterpiece.  But if you feel that jazz is like a colonoscopy for your ears, the musical interludes can be downright painful.

It’s been a summer of sequels to lumbering blockbusters that should have never been made in the first place, twee romances between self-consciously awkward 20-something nerds, and big screen adaptations of “graphic novels” that demonstrate why generations of parents past declared comic books a pernicious waste of time.  Now give  Anatomy of a Murder a look – it is a reminder that not all films are aimed squarely at the half-wit demographic.

Noon PST – Anatomy Of A Murder (1959) – A small-town lawyer gets the case of a lifetime when a military man avenges an attack on his wife. Cast: James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Arthur O’Connell Dir: Otto Preminger BW-161 mins, TV-PG

Mature, very well-acted, classic courtroom drama, painstakingly directed by Otto Preminger and just as watchable a second time because knowing the outcome of a great film, even one that climaxes with a verdict, takes nothing away from well-crafted characters, top-notch dialogue, and individual scenes that become living things all on their own.

The real standout is George C. Scott, who’s much less an actor here and much more of a reactor as his prosecuting attorney tries to figure out how to handle Jimmy Stewart’s aw-shucks chess moves with his own. Scott’s cross examinations are especially good; a mixture of intensity, manipulation, and oily, calculating, intelligent charm.

Preminger’s genius is in making the audience a member of the jury and co-conspirator in wanting to see Lt. Manion (Ben Gazzara) set free for killing the man who raped his wife (a captivating Lee Remick). Stewart’s “temporary insanity” defense is never all that convincing, but we sure want to be convinced.

Be sure to tune in just past the two hour mark when Big Hollywood’s own Orson Bean arrives as Army Psychiatrist Dr. Matthew Smith. His memorable scene with Arthur O’Connell upon arriving at the train station exemplifies the charming character moments that makes “Anatomy” so timeless. So good is the scene that in 1981, Sidney Lumet would “borrow” from it for “The Verdict” when Jack Warden is similarly surprised and worried to discover an important witness (also a doctor) doesn’t exactly look like everyone had hoped.