4/30/24
Newsletter #592
The Crack of Dawn
In the final episode of the Netflix limited series, Selznick . . .
David O. Selznick’s next movie after Gone With the Wind was Rebecca (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Rebecca isn’t one of my favorite Hitchcock films, mainly because it’s a Selznick movie, not a Hitchcock film, but it’s still got some Hitchcock touches, and is a very handsome, well cast, beautifully photographed production. The film was nominated for absolutely every Oscar and surprisingly won the Best Picture Oscar over some stiff competition – The Grapes of Wrath, The Letter, The Great Dictator, The Philadelphia Story and Hitchcock’s own, Foreign Correspondent – because, seriously, GWTW was finally in wide release was doing such boffo business that Hollywood wanted to give David Selznick another Oscar in sheer gratitude.
David Selznick didn’t make a film for two years. He broke up with his wife, Irene Mayer Selznick, Louis Mayer’s daughter, and started an affair with Jennifer Jones. Selznick and Jones finally married 1949. Personally, I’ve never liked Jennifer Jones. I don’t find her attractive, and she seems legitimately untalented. I must admit, however, that she was perfect as the enchanted, starry eyed, though vacuous, young farm girl who miraculously sees Mother Mary at Lourdes in Song of Bernadette (1943), for which she received an Oscar. To me, that was more great casting than performance. Anyway, Selznick fell head over heels for Jennifer Jones. He then became kind of like Charles Foster Kane with his untalented opera singing wife, pushing her career. Selznick was now Jennifer Jones’s biggest promoter, always searching for big juicy parts for her. And the first one was pretty good.
Since You Went Away (1944) is about the women back home worrying while the men are off fighting World War II. It’s about a mother and two daughters, and I think the casting is perfect. Claudette Colbert as the mother, Jennifer Jones as the older sister and Shirley Temple as the younger sister. But it’s really nothing more than a perfectly okay drama, that kind of seems over-produced.
When David Selznick turned 40, he decided to show Hollywood that he could do Gone With the Wind any time he wanted to. Well, the truth is whether you happen to have produced Gone With the Wind or not, there is only one Gone With the Wind, and not only are you not going to repeat it; you’re not going to top it, equal it, or even get close. Life from here on out is all downhill. Nevertheless, Selznick was sure as hell was going to give it a try, except this is when every bit of rational thinking or common sense or wisdom from all of his previous experience now left him entirely.
He spent the next two years over-producing the hell out of Duel in the Sun (1946), a big, overblown, Technicolor, sex western, with Jennifer Jones playing a sex-starved Mexican girl? Honestly? It is perhaps the single worst piece of casting ever. Jennifer Jones, whose real name was Phylis Lee Isley, was a model from Tulsa, Oklahoma who had just gotten to Hollywood and had only done a couple of extra parts. She was cast as Bernadette because she was so young and innocent-looking, and a complete unknown. She had no acting training and gosh darn it, she just couldn’t act. Watching Jennifer Jones trying to be a sex-starved Mexican wench, in swarthy brown makeup, over-lit in Technicolor, is like getting to see an embarrassing x-ray of Selznick’s worst instincts. Young Gregory Peck in the lead appears to be having a pretty good time and is probably being paid more than he ever had before. The director, King Vidor, was one of the great silent and early sound directors, but was considered an old man by 1946. Lionel Barrymore, meanwhile, can’t walk and seems like he’s teetering on the edge of death, which apparently he was during the end of his career. Putting him on and taking him off his horse was killing him, but still Barrymore persisted. He also made It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) that same year.
Above and beyond everything else, David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun has the wonderfully unique credit, “Screenplay by the Executive Producer.” The big finale scene of Peck and Jones crawling toward each other, dying, was a total hoot in the movie theater.
And the film actually made money, even at a painful 134 minutes.
David O. Selznick had a few more good films in him. Two collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Spellbound (1945) and The Paradine Case (1947), as well as co-producing The Third Man (1949), which was actually produced by Alexander Korda in England.
Selznick made yet another showcase film for Jennifer Jones with Portrait of Jennie (1948), which is an odd picture. Jones plays a weird, otherworldly girl, with Joseph Cotton pursuing her, but never sure if she’s real. The film is interesting, and well made, but bordering on idolatry.
As the 1950s arrived, and even though David Selznick was merely in his forties, he slid into an uneasy retirement, always searching for the right “comeback” vehicle; the next Gone With the Wind. Never finding that vehicle, Selznick made one more film, the miserable, entirely unnecessary, 1957 remake of A Farewell to Arms with Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson. Ernest Hemingway particularly disliked this film and said so, and apparently so did the audience, who all stayed home. Although David Selznick lived until 1965, he died at the relatively young age of 63, outliving his brother Myron (who died in 1944) by 21 years. He was still married to Jennifer Jones and living in Beverley Hills, but he was truly a relic of Hollywood’s ancient past.
Pull back on the Beverley Hills estate, and so the series ends.