George Stevens’ Battle to Film Dreiser’s 'An American Tragedy'
George Stevens, the subject of my first biography, was a unique presence in Hollywood. Not only a gifted film director, he was a man of great integrity and empathy, to whom being a director carried with it a great responsibility: to his audiences and to the industry he represented. Each of his films was a huge personal commitment.
I share below one of my favorite stories about Stevens and his involvement with An American Tragedy’s rocky road to the screen. Taken from my biography, Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film, it displays the extent to which he “battled” Paramount Pictures in the late 1940s to film Theodore Dreiser’s great novel. Stevens wasn’t the only director to become enmeshed in the difficulties surrounding Dreiser’s novel, but his persistence paid off!
God, I hate this movie… God, I hate this movie… God, I love this movie!
—John Cassavetes
A Place in the Sun (1951), based on Theodore Dreiser‘s opus, An American Tragedy, was the first of George Stevens’ postwar films to reflect the transformation he underwent during his three years serving in World War II. It is Stevens’ darkest, most personal and most intellectually far-reaching film, expressing not only a darkening of the spirit that came over him in Europe but also the somber turn his art took after his return home.
During those three years in Europe, from February 1943 to March 1946, Stevens was a major in the U.S. Army Signal Corp. for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, filming activities as the Allied forces marched through Europe. Many of the men, including Stevens, became depressed while in Europe: traveling by Jeep from one bombed-out city to another - and often in relentlessly icy conditions. If that weren’t enough, Stevens and his unit’s last assignment took them to the Dachau concentration camp where they were the first Americans to enter the grounds immediately after liberation. The carnage they found there was not only overwhelming but traumatic enough to be life-changing. Stevens would later say, “After that, I don’t think I was ever too hilarious again.”
The first film Stevens directed after the war, I Remember Mama, was in a sense an emotional band aid, an adaptation of John Van Druten’s play (based on Kathryn Forbes’ novel, Mama’s Bank Account). It’s the story of a close-knit Danish immigrant family living in San Francisco. Shooting on location in San Francisco gave Stevens a much-needed visit to his hometown and his family’s roots so that he might bask in the safety and nostalgia of his youth while directing a story focused on the warmth of family.
But Stevens wanted something monumental. He set his sights on Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. He had always searched for his great “tragedy,” the film that would offset what he called his “women’s parlor dramas” of the 1940s, films such as Penny Serenade, Talk of the Town, Woman of the Year and The More the Merrier, stories masterfully displaying both humor and drama. Yet, with Dreiser and his tragic hero, Clyde Griffiths, spokesman for the disenfranchised, Stevens knew he’d found his serious, even masterful, tragedy. He had first read the novel when he was just out of his teens, in 1925, the year it was published. But now, after returning from war and with all that darkness in him, he read it again, this time with urgency. Stevens noted in the book’s margins his ideas for visual dissolves and dialogue he planned to use. He was readying himself to enter Dreiser’s world.
Dreiser based An American Tragedy on a 1908 murder trial that the critic F.O. Matthiessen described as “the favorite drama of the American people at the turn of the twentieth century.” All of America followed the story of a man named Chester Gillette, who drowned a girl named Grace Brown in Big Moose Lake, Herkimer County, New York on July 11, 1906.
Gillette was a poor-relation straw boss in his wealthy uncle’s skirt factory. Out of loneliness, Gillette began dating Brown, eventually getting her pregnant. He then fell in love with a wealthy socialite who encouraged his dream of rising through marriage to join the town’s upper set. But when Brown found out and threatened to go public about her pregnancy, Gillette took her boating, stunned her with a tennis racket, overturned the boat and allowed her to drown. Gillette was electrocuted for the crime on March 30, 1908.
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Dreiser began writing An American Tragedy in the summer of 1920 but a year later abandoned most of the manuscript. He returned to the book in 1923, and, with the help of his wife, Helen, and two editor-secretaries, Louise Campbell and Sally Kusellcastle, completed the massive work in 1925. Almost all of Tragedy was written in Hollywood and Glendale, California, two cities very close to each other that Dreiser and Helen particularly loved. They alternated between the two for the rest of Dreiser’s life.
What interested Dreiser about Gillette’s case, (Dreiser actually sat in on Chester Gillette’s trial), was not the crime itself but its detection; Dreiser saw the murder and execution as good source material for a documentary novel he had in the planning stages that would be a contemplation of American capitalistic society. He had been looking for a man such as Gillette, someone he imagined to be “insanely eager for all the pleasures which he imagined he saw swirling around him; his “none-too- discerning mind could so easily be convinced that the chief end of life was having and spending money. What better drama, what greater tragedy, than the fall of a man who will even kill to embrace a dream of money and social position that slips through his fingers even as he dreams it?” What Dreiser made of An American Tragedy became nothing less than a literary sensation at its publication. Dreiser was celebrated for having produced a literary masterpiece.
The novel’s success and commercial potential were not lost on Paramount Pictures, and the studio secured the film rights in 1925 for a then astronomical $150,000. Paramount boss Jesse Lasky offered it to several directors, including D.W. Griffith and Ernst Lubitsch. Both considered the subject matter and turned it down. Eventually, Lasky offered it to Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, a good candidate, since he had even entertained the politically like-minded Dreiser in his Moscow apartment in 1927. The script Eisenstein eventually produced, appropriately critical of American capitalism, pleased Dreiser but displeased Paramount general manager B.P. Schulberg (Budd Schulberg’s father), who, along with production chief David O Selznick, knew immediately that it would not go over with American audiences. Selznick thought it ”moving but positively torturing… When I had finished reading it, I was so depressed that I wanted to reach for the bourbon bottle. As entertainment, I don’t think it has one chance in a hundred.” He told Schulberg that it would be brave to make the script “purely for the advancement of art” but “braver still and kinder to the stockholders not to.”
Eisenstein was ousted from the project and An American Tragedy went to German director Josef von Sternberg, who co-wrote a new script with Samuel Hoffenstein. Again, Selznick was not pleased, thinking Steinberg the wrong man for Dreiser’s moral realism. “I don’t think he has the basic honesty of approach the subject absolutely requires,” he said…”or the sympathy, the tolerance, or the understanding that the story cries for.” For, while Eisenstein‘s script had retained Dreiser’s political underpinnings and his critique of American social and economic institutions, Sternberg’s screenplay excised nearly all of the novel’s political context, paring it down, in the opinion of many critics, to a melodramatic potboiler. Paramount nevertheless went ahead with the production, starring Sylvia Sydney, Francis Dee and Phillips Holmes.
Although Dreiser wrote most of Tragedy while living in Hollywood, he had little understanding of the actual workings and financial motivations of a Hollywood studio. He had offered to help write a screenplay after Eisenstein left the project, but that never materialized. After he saw a screening of Sternberg‘s finished film, he accused the studio of butchering the plot, not to mention the spirit, of his novel. He tried unsuccessfully to block the film's release, distributing a four-page pamphlet decrying the producers’ “utter misrepresentation of Clyde Griffiths and their destruction of the book’s theme.” He sued Paramount but lost the case.
Upon general release in 1931, the film took a critical beating. Variety’s film critic accused Sternberg of not liking the material of his own film. Alexander Bakshy wrote in The Nation, “If there’s anything tragic about the film version of An American Tragedy, it is the pathetic spectacle of its producers trying to crash the gate of the artistic heaven with the yellow ticket of their profligate trade.”
Twenty years later, when Stevens mounted a campaign to film a new version of An American Tragedy, he found little to like in the previous attempts. He disliked Eisenstein‘s ”hopeless” script as much as Sternberg‘s dismal adaptation. He later said, “Dreiser is the great observer and he has an ear for verisimilitude, for truth, and he knew the people…the Eisenstein script is something that should have been done by the Bolshoi Ballet in American clothing…it was a ridiculous presumption to take a tapestry of life that belongs to a certain milieu and turn it over to Eisenstein’s extraordinary technique and say, ‘Play Turkey in the Straw.’ ”Bolstered by the failure of his two predecessors to get under the skin of America’s great novelist, Stevens was ready to do the job himself.
Upon returning to Hollywood from the War, Stevens had joined William Wyler, Frank Capra and producer Sam Briskin to form an independent production company, Liberty Films. A contract was drawn up on January 1, 1946 and Liberty set up offices on the RKO Studios lot in Culver City. But the venture was short lived; only one film was released under the banner, Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and it was a financial failure. Capra and Briskin decided to sell Liberty Films to recoup their losses, but Wyler and Stevens balked. Eventually they acquiesced and the company was sold to Paramount Pictures in April 1947; Stevens, Wyler and Capra became Paramount contract directors. Stevens later confessed that the only reason he agreed to sell Liberty to Paramount was simple: He knew that Paramount owned the rights to An American Tragedy. Being at Paramount would give him easier access to obtaining Dreiser’s story.
Stevens’ resolve to film Dreiser’s novel pitted him against Paramount president Barney Balaban and production chief Henry Ginsburg, initiating what would become several years of animosity between them. It was the kind of struggle to obtain a property that Stevens had never known before. As a condition of the Liberty buyout, Stevens was legally bound to deliver four films and to begin principal photography on a fifth by July 31, 1951. Before he knew it he found himself embroiled in months of story meetings instead of an expected production schedule.
Stevens had first mentioned An American Tragedy in a memo to Ginsberg on December 3, 1948. “The studio does own one property whose greatness is so widely acknowledged that it would seem to provide a most likely and satisfactory basis for immediate agreement between us. I refer to The [sic] American Tragedy.” At first, Stevens thought they were agreeable to the idea, but then they reneged. Paramount had already produced a film of Dreiser’s book, Stevens was told, and it went badly.
Knowing that getting Dreiser’s novel would be an uphill battle, Stevens approached it in a roundabout way, first by suggesting to the studio other material he knew the executives would not want, from My Dear Secretary to The Hero, and then to an adaptation of his friend Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions. He also proposed Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory and received a negative response. After a few more weeks of useless negotiations, Stevens wrote the suits a memo: “I will state my professional reputation, which I have been called upon to do many times, on my judgment of this property.” Accustomed to answering mainly to himself – “There can be only one quarterback on the football team,” he liked to say – Stevens now found himself negotiating with men who, to his mind, behaved badly or, at the very least, ambiguously. (His frustration with the studio began with A Place in the Sun and let up only after he finished work on Shane in 1953, leaving Paramount for good.)
After a few more weeks of useless negotiations, Stevens wrote the suits a memo: “I will state my professional reputation, which I have been called upon to do many times, on my judgment of this property.” Stevens again met with the front office. He told them that his time was limited and that he couldn’t afford to let months slip by in covering the same basic ground as before. He told them that what constituted a good story for him was something not always possible to communicate all around…He also said that time was running out, and that sooner or later someone would have to pick up the check. He didn’t wait for a “great” story…all he wanted was that someone agree to let him go ahead and make a picture which he, himself, felt would have a reasonable chance of being worthwhile. He wasn’t waiting for the luxury of great stories.
Still Paramount would not commit. Frustrated, Stevens decided his only recourse was to sue the studio with the threat of two lawsuits, one as an employee of Liberty Films in which Paramount was “withholding to frustrate,” and another with Stevens as a stockholder accusing Paramount of “not knowing what they wanted,” and of being frivolous and incompetent. With the threat of two lawsuits hanging in the balance, Paramount at last gave Stevens his green light.
Now he had Dreiser’s book and a $2.5 million budget. What kind of film would emerge? Dreiser’s great book, a criticism of capitalist society, was now in the hands of a director whose films catered to the masses. But Stevens carried inside of him a great sadness from being in the war. Perhaps that fact might alter his mind’s eye. Stevens would have to find the right poetry to bring the two together.
Although he might not have realized it, the truth is that he already had that poetry within him. In the face of Dreiser’s great drama criticizing American capitalism, Stevens produced a love story featuring “the two most beautiful people in the world,” Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. And what gave the film its greatness, its soaring poetry, was the huge sadness that Stevens brought home from the war and that held his soul captive (and might always). With Dreiser’s great material and Stevens’ sense of tragedy, a great film was born. Always a man of his time, Stevens made a film that told American audiences, no less than himself, just how unreliable and unstable individual and cultural identity was and would remain after the experience of war.
When Paramount released A Place in the Sun in 1951, it earned respect, money and prestige, each of which ballooned as the years went by. George Stevens became maestro and mentor to other masterful directors who came after him, including Mike Nichols, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Warren Beatty and many more.