9/14/22
Newsletter97
The Crack of Dawn
In 1934 the world-famous Austrian theater director, Max Reinhardt (real name, Maximilian Goldmann), staged an extravaganza production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl. The two stand-out performances were by the unknown actress, Olivia DeHavilland, and 14-year-old Mickey Rooney (real name, Joseph Yule Jr.). Mickey Rooney had already starred in a series of short films, but was unknown. This play launched his career, but it was the subsequent, 1935 film version that truly got him going. However, between the play and the movie, Mickey broke his arm. In the film his broken arm is hidden in every scene.
This same issue occurred when Janet Leigh showed up with a broken arm in a cast for the shooting of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil in 1958. From the astounding opening shot, Janet Leigh has a sweater draped over her arm to hide the cast.
The wonderful British Actor, Herbert Marshall, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930), lost one of his legs during WWI. He functioned very well with a wooden leg, although he couldn’t take more than a few steps. In William Wyler’s brilliant, The Little Foxes (1941), the key scene of the movie is the sickly Herbert Marshall dropping his bottle of medicine and breaking it. His scheming wife, Bette Davis (who is incredible in the film), just sits there as Herbert Marshall crawls up the stairs for more medicine. It’s a beautiful shot with Bette in the foreground, and Herbert Marshall crawling in the background. But Herbert Marshall, with only one leg, couldn’t crawl up the stairs. So, as he crawls to the head of the stairs he leaves frame for a second, then reenters except that now it’s a stunt man who performs the dramatic crawl and death scene on the stairs.
And now for a dash of historical context. One of my heroes is Harry Truman. Harry served as Vice President to Franklin Roosevelt for 82 days before FDR’s death. Upon being sworn in as president, Harry was informed that the U.S. had a thing called an “Atomic Bomb” that was almost finished, but could possibly be used to end the war with Japan. Truman went to Potsdam, Germany, and met with Churchill and Stalin. As he was returning home on a military ship, President Truman was informed that the American Navy ship, the U.S.S. Indianapolis, which was on its way back from the island of Tinian where it had just delivered the uranium for the completion of the atomic bomb which was being assembled there, had been torpedoed by the Japanese. This is the basis of Quint’s great monologue in Jaws, delivered and co-written by the magnificent Robert Shaw:
“Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We'd just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail . . . Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes . . . I’ll never wear a life-preserver again. But we delivered the bomb.”
The U.S.S. Indianapolis sank in twelve minutes. 1,195 men went into the water; 316 men survived. But they had delivered the final key component to complete the first atomic bomb, “Little Boy.” Presented with these facts, Harry Truman — (and I just told someone this fact and they scoffed at me) who had read every book in the Independence, Missouri, Library by the time he was fourteen — decided to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. When asked what he did next, Truman replied, “I went to sleep.” Among his many other accomplishments in his life, Harry Truman was known for the ability to fall asleep in sixty seconds, which is why he never drank any form of stimulant. Harry was an artillery capatin during WWI and could sleep through artillery barrages.
Instead of the lazy-ass sun, I now use 6:00 AM as the Crack of Dawn.