We live not as we wish, but as we can.
—Menander, 300 B.C.
Wilder had written a news story about Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic back in 1927 for a Berlin paper, when he was a freelance reporter. He could not afford to go to France to cover Lucky Lindy’s landing in Paris. Nevertheless, he never forgot this thrilling event, and his having covered it for a Berlin daily was one of the contributing factors in his directing The Spirit of St. Louis nearly thirty years later. “You cannot imagine now what the name of Lindbergh meant to us in Europe in 1927,” he said.1
Ernest Lehman told me in 1976 that Wilder made the picture in part because he suspected that around Hollywood he was still thought of as a European. “Unlike many of his fellow emigrants,” says Volker Schlöndorff, “Wilder never felt as if he was in exile in Hollywood. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the American popular culture, pulp, sports, and radio.” The Spirit of St. Louis was an American subject, and “he wanted to take the most American of subjects and make it his own.”2
Lindbergh published his autobiographical account of his celebrated flight in 1953 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Leland Hayward, a former Hollywood agent, was now a producer at Warner Bros. (Mr. Roberts, 1955). Hayward brought the project to Wilder, who agreed to direct the picture, coauthor the screenplay, and coproduce the film.
Charles “Slim” Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902, in Detroit, Michigan, of Swedish stock, and grew up in Little Falls, Minnesota. In 1926, while serving as an airmail pilot between St. Louis and Chicago, Lindbergh decided to compete for the $25,000 prize offered by French-born Raymond Orteig, a New York hotel proprietor, for a nonstop flight from New York to Paris in May 1927. “Think of being able to leap over the earth,” Lindbergh mused.3
At 7:52 on the morning of May 20, 1927, Lindbergh roared aloft from Roosevelt Field, Long Island; he landed at Le Bourget Airport at 10:24 on the evening of May 21. With the completion of his thirty-three-and-a-half-hour nonstop solo flight in a tiny monoplane, Lindbergh’s daring thrilled the world. President Coolidge awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross and commissioned him as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve.
In the years ahead, however, there would be some dark days. In 1932 his two-year-old son was abducted and murdered by a kidnapper. After the outbreak of the war in Europe, Lindbergh gave speeches in 1940 and 1941 endorsing America’s neutrality, insisting that Britain be left to fight Nazi Germany alone. Indeed, in his public addresses he “soft-pedaled Nazi Germany’s obvious menace.”4
Wilder subscribed to a statement issued by Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, who declared that, when her husband realized how wrong he had been in his judgment of the Nazis, “he completely reversed himself and entered the U.S. war effort” to make “a considerable contribution.” In the wake of the Nazi V-2 rockets and the blitzkrieg of London, Lindbergh lamented, “I have seen the aircraft I loved destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.”5 He ultimately flew fifty combat missions against the Japanese in the South Pacific theater.6 At all events, Wilder’s movie would end with Lindbergh’s triumphant homecoming parade in New York City in 1927 and would not touch on later events in his life.
Film historian Scott Eyman notes that the first star of talking pictures was not Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (which premiered on October 6, 1927); it was Charles Lindbergh! The first sound film in wide distribution was a newsreel of Lindbergh taking off for Paris from Roosevelt Field “with a motor that sounds like a lawn mower.” More impressive was the newsreel shortly thereafter that recorded Lindbergh’s brief speech on the reviewing stand as part of the homecoming celebration in Manhattan. Film executive A. C. Lyles remembers, “That scene excited Hollywood tremendously. It made the possibility of sound movies so much more immediate.”7
It was no secret that James Stewart was lobbying for the role of Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis. Stewart had been a fan of Lindbergh’s since he was in his teens. Lindbergh’s flight to Paris had begun on Stewart’s nineteenth birthday. At the time Stewart had hand carved a wooden model of the Spirit and stuck it on a map of the North Atlantic, which he proudly displayed in the window of his father’s hardware store.8 When Lindbergh subsequently landed on an airfield near Stewart’s home in Indiana, Pennsylvania, as part of his personal appearance tour, Stewart attempted unsuccessfully to get his autograph. Still, he never forgot the event. Lindbergh inspired him to become a pilot himself, and during World War II Stewart flew twenty missions over Germany as a bomber pilot.9
Withal, Stewart was acutely aware that Jack Warner considered the forty-seven-year-old actor too old to play the twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh. “I need a star,” Warner told Wilder and Hayward when they discussed the matter, “but not one that’s pushing fifty.”10 After interviewing several other actors, though, Wilder and Hayward ultimately came back to Stewart. The tall, lanky actor resembled Slim Lindbergh; with a pilot’s cap and goggles, Stewart might just get by as an aviator half his age. Wilder and Hayward agreed on casting Stewart, so Warner finally relented. They signed Stewart to play Lindbergh on March 22, 1955, with filming to commence in September 1955.11
Stewart got the opportunity to meet Lindbergh shortly after he signed for the movie. He was so awestruck at meeting his idol that “I suddenly realized I had no questions to ask him” about how to play him in the movie.12 “I still wanted his autograph, but I was too shy to ask him for it.” Finally Stewart said, “I hope I can do a good job for you.” Lindbergh replied, “I hope so too.”13
Wilder, of course, was searching for a co-screenwriter after George Axelrod’s return to Broadway. His choice fell on Wendell Mayes, who had written a teleplay about a midwestern family that TV critic John Crosby had favorably reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. Wilder convinced Hayward that they should hire Mayes at a salary of one thousand dollars a week. As a neophyte screenwriter, the easygoing Mayes enjoyed working with Wilder. He did not take umbrage at Wilder’s sassy wisecracks; he thought Wilder was very witty. The writing partners committed themselves to spending the entire summer on composing the first draft of the screenplay.
Lindbergh occasionally sat in on Wilder and Mayes’s script conferences when he was in town. They met in Wilder’s home because the reclusive Lindbergh would not go near the studio. Wilder found it frustrating to work with the shy, taciturn Swede; he thought Lindbergh “standoffish” and “not easy to get through to.” As time went on, Wilder continued, “I found that I was beating my head against a cement wall, because I could not write into the script a single personal scene with him; only what was in the book.”14
Lindbergh, Wilder, and Hayward went to Washington so Lucky Lindy could show them the original Spirit of St. Louis, which is on permanent display, suspended from the ceiling, at the Smithsonian Institution. The museum officials erected a platform alongside the plane so that Lindbergh’s guests could see the interior of the aircraft at close range. It was a revelation for Wilder to see how crude the single-engine monoplane really was: a little bit of metal, canvas, and wood. The original Spirit cost $13,000, whereas the three replicas used in the movie cost a total of $1.3 million.
During their story conferences, Wilder and Mayes were confronted with the dilemma of how to get away from the monotony of the thirty-three and a half hours that Lindbergh spent alone in the cockpit in the course of his solo flight. They ultimately decided to fill the time between takeoff and landing with periodic flashbacks to Lindbergh’s early life, accompanied by Stewart’s narration in voice-over on the sound track. For example, Wilder shows Lindbergh as a barnstorming aviator performing stunts at air carnivals. Wilder also wanted to introduce a companion for Lindbergh to chat with during the flight. So he, with Lindbergh’s permission, invented a fly that stows away in the monoplane, attracted to the cockpit by the sandwiches Lindbergh has brought along. Lindbergh, who sees the fly as a fellow flyer, says, “You’re good luck, because nobody has ever seen a fly crash!” That line is one of the few flashes of the Wilder wit in the screenplay. Wilder joked that he had the animation department at Warner Bros. pencil the fly into the scenes it was in, because the live fly he hired refused to follow the script.
Wilder recalled the scene in Hold Back the Dawn in which Charles Boyer absolutely refused to address a cockroach. By contrast, James Stewart was willing to converse with an insect. “After all, they don’t talk back,” he explained. “Mr. Stewart did not object to talking to insects,” Wilder opined, because “he had had to deal all his life with agents and producers.”15 During the shooting period, however, as time wore on, Stewart said, “I recall getting a little annoyed with the fly and asked Wilder to get rid of the bug.” So Wilder had the insect fly out the window when the plane is over Newfoundland.16 Thinking of the thousands of miles that still lie ahead for the Spirit, Lindbergh quips, “I don’t blame you.”
Wilder turned in the preliminary draft of the screenplay to Jack Warner in August 1955. Warner advised him that Stewart was committed to filming Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) until the end of August; shooting on the Lindbergh film was scheduled to begin in September. Stewart prepared for the role of Lindbergh by spending any spare time he had studying old newsreels of Lindbergh, the better to impersonate him in the picture. He also practiced piloting one of the three replicas of the Spirit built for the movie from the original plans.17
Meanwhile, with preproduction in full swing, Wilder and Hayward put together a crack production team, including cinematographers Peverell Marley (The Greatest Show on Earth, 1952) and Robert Burks, who was shooting The Man Who Knew Too Much. Editor Arthur Schmidt was cutting his fourth Wilder movie, and composer Franz Waxman was scoring his fourth Wilder picture.
Hayward and Wilder agreed that “it would add immeasurably to the impact and authenticity of the film to shoot as much of the flight as possible on or near the original locations,” writes Arthur Rowan in the most informative article about the making of the movie. In August 1955, before principal photography was scheduled to commence, Wilder decided to get a jump on the shooting period by gathering a small production crew to film aerial footage of the first leg of Lindbergh’s flight, starting at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, where the journey began.18
Wilder and his film unit shot footage along the route that Lindbergh had taken out of New York and went on to film above the mountains of Nova Scotia and over St. John’s, Newfoundland. The crew comprised aerial cameraman Thomas Tutweiler, supervising editor and associate producer Doane Harrison, and Leland Hayward. Having completed the filming of this preliminary portion of Lindbergh’s flight plan, Wilder and his team proceeded to Paris, where Wilder established a temporary production office at the Ritz Hotel.
Principal photography got under way on Friday, September 2, 1955, with the filming of Lindbergh’s landing at Paris’s Le Bourget Airport. Wilder shot the movie’s final scene first because the weather was still mild, approximating what it was on May 21, 1927. Wilder was barred from using the real Paris airport, so he substituted Aérodrome de Guyancourt near Versailles. Wilder said, “Since it was night, who could tell?” Three thousand extras were instructed to break through the barricades near the landing strip and rush hysterically out to the plane, giving Lucky Lindy a tumultuous welcome.
Hayward reported to Jack Warner in a letter dated September 9 that he and Wilder had banked on good weather that night—until it started to drizzle. “I have to tell you, you could have bought the picture for a quarter when it started to rain, with this airport covered with these goddamed French extras. But luckily it stopped, and we got some terrific shots.”19 They finished filming at five o’clock in the morning.
Hitchcock had completed shooting The Man Who Knew Too Much behind schedule, with the result that Stewart could not show up in Paris for the Spirit of St. Louis shoot until mid-September. He had gone straight from one picture to the other, so he insisted that he be allowed to go back to Los Angeles and rest for a week or so before beginning work in earnest on the Lindbergh picture. Weighing on Stewart’s mind was the inescapable fact that Lindbergh was nearly half Stewart’s age when he made his transatlantic flight. Stewart was afraid that, if he began shooting The Spirit of St. Louis right away, his haggard appearance would show him to be every bit of his forty-seven years.20
Be that as it may, Wilder had counted on Stewart’s traveling with him and his camera crew so they could photograph Stewart actually flying the replica of the Spirit over various locations on the itinerary of Lindbergh’s flight, including the Irish coast, the English Channel, and Paris itself. Wilder and Hayward took Stewart to lunch to hash out their disagreement. “Jimmy,” Wilder pleaded, “for God’s sake, trust me and let me get these shots of Lindbergh flying over authentic European locations!” But Stewart was implacable; he abruptly jumped up from the table, saying, “I’ve got to go!”21 He went directly to his hotel, packed his bags, and caught the evening flight to Los Angeles.
After Stewart’s departure, Wilder, Hayward, and the film unit continued to shoot along the flight path that Lindbergh had followed on the second leg of his journey. They filmed in the air over Ireland’s Dingle Bay and the coast of Cornwall, proceeded past Land’s End, crossed the Channel, and finally followed the Seine River to the outskirts of Paris. “We had unbelievable technical problems,” Wilder remembered. “We had another plane in the air to film the plane we were shooting. God, it was horrendous. The weather would change from one minute to the next.” If sunshine turned to clouds, the color of the sky would not match that of the earlier shots, and the camera crew would have to wrap for the rest of the day. Hayward wrote to Jack Warner on September 25, “There is no escaping the fact that this is probably the most difficult picture that anyone has tried to make—logistically, technically, and every other way it is a bitch.”22
Wilder and the entire unit were back at Warner Bros. in Hollywood by the end of September. Wilder and his producer partner had a powwow with Warner in which they agreed that filming should not resume until the shooting script was finished. Mayes had continued working on the final draft while Wilder was supervising aerial photography in Europe, but they needed to make a joint effort to finish up. Wilder particularly favored this plan because of the dreadful experience he had had endeavoring to work on the shooting script of Sabrina at night while directing the picture during the day. Warner accordingly shut down production for the rest of October.
Wilder was pleased with the final draft. Although Mayes never collaborated with Wilder again, Wilder later recommended him to Otto Preminger to compose the screenplay for Anatomy of a Murder (1959), one of Preminger’s best movies.
Filming on The Spirit of St. Louis resumed in November. The close shots of Lindbergh piloting his plane were filmed on a soundstage in the studio, utilizing process photography. Wilder employed the technique known as rear-screen projection, whereby an actor performs in front of a screen on which images of exterior locations (in this case panoramic shots of cloudscapes) are projected from behind. Wilder had used rear-screen projection on Sunset Boulevard and other films. In this instance he filmed Stewart in midflight while he was seated in a mock-up of a cockpit on a soundstage. It was a pity that Wilder did not have shots of Stewart actually flying the replica of the Spirit over various European locations, as he had hoped. The process shots would have to suffice for the flying sequences of Lindy at the controls of his plane.
The aerial sequences in the movie encompassed flashbacks to Lindbergh’s days as an airmail pilot and as a barnstorming aviator in air carnivals. They were time-consuming and expensive to shoot. Production designer Art Loel established a large location site near Santa Maria on the California coast, complete with airfield and hangars, to film them. These sequences had to be filmed in the air from another plane. Paul Mantz, a veteran pilot of camera planes for aerial photography, piloted the plane in which Tutweiler had mounted his camera.23
Lindbergh came on location only once during the shooting period. Wilder was doing retakes of the Spirit touching down at Le Bourget on May 21, 1927. “Lindbergh turned up unannounced one day,” Stewart recalled, to watch the pilot, Stan Reaver, land the plane. Just before Reaver took off, Lindbergh told him, “Don’t forget to slip in for a three-point landing. Remember, I’m supposed to be flying the plane.”24
Wilder was scheduled to finish principal photography in March 1956, but he fell behind schedule. As a result, the original 64-day shooting schedule expanded to 115 days. In the course of the grueling seven-month shoot, Wilder shot more than two hundred thousand feet of film, much of it devoted to the aerial sequences, which Schmidt, in consultation with Harrison and Wilder, had to trim to twelve thousand feet during postproduction.25 This is the only film for which Wilder shot a huge surplus of footage. Consequently, postproduction took longer on The Spirit of St. Louis than on any of Wilder’s previous pictures. Wilder and his editing team did not complete the edit until June 1956; it clocked in at two hours and fifteen minutes. The movie’s price tag eventually climbed from $2 million to $6 million.26
Jack Warner decided to have the world premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York on February 21, 1957, hoping that the batch of early reviews would be favorable. When the film was unveiled, it began with one of Wilder’s typical printed prologues: “A young man alone in a single engine airplane flew non-stop from Roosevelt Field in New York across the entire North Atlantic Ocean to Le Bourget Field in Paris, a distance of 3,610 miles. In this triumph of mind, body, and spirit, Charles A. Lindbergh influenced the lives of everyone on earth; for in the 33 hours and 30 minutes of his flight the Air Age became a reality. This is the story of that flight.”
The takeoff in the rain from Roosevelt Field on Long Island is a virtuoso set piece. Wilder wanted the plane, with its heavy load of gasoline, to just barely clear the tops of the trees at the end of the runway. “I want a vivid shot of just how the treetops looked to Lindbergh as he skimmed over them on take-off,” said Wilder. The sequence is superbly edited by Schmidt: “Quick cuts of the rear of the plane, then a close-up of Lindbergh, a long shot of the Spirit, followed by a shot of the spectators, a subjective tracking shot of the muddy runway which puts the viewer in the cockpit; and the majestic finale,” as the Spirit clears the clump of trees.27 As the Spirit lifts and soars, so do the strings of Waxman’s rhapsodic background score.
One scene called for Lindbergh to perform a wing-walking stunt, with a stunt man doubling for Stewart. “Hell,” Wilder bragged, “I could perform that simple feat myself.” Stewart bet Wilder one hundred dollars that he would not have the nerve to do it. “Maybe he wanted a new director,” Wilder mused. Wilder boarded the vintage World War I monoplane that Harlan Gurney was piloting; he was strapped in a harness “and flew, standing on the top wing with his arms outstretched,” for a ten-minute ride at eight hundred feet.28
In still another flashback, Lindbergh recalls a priest, Father Hussman, who took flying lessons from him. Hussman gives him a St. Christopher medal, explaining, “St. Christopher helps wayfarers to cross bridgeless waters.” Lucky Lindy replies that he trusts not in God but in his instrument panel and his compass. Nevertheless, a friend of his hides the medal in Lindbergh’s sandwich sack just before the Spirit taxis down the runway for takeoff. Lindbergh discovers it in midflight, when he opens the sandwich bag, and hangs the medal on the instrument panel. Later, when he reaches Cherbourg on his way to Paris, Lindbergh realizes that he is running out of fuel. Fatigued and bewildered, Lindbergh pushes himself to the limits of endurance to reach Le Bourget. Gazing at the St. Christopher medal dangling from the control panel, he blurts out, “Oh, God help me!”
“Lindbergh finally accepts what the medal represents: a belief in a higher power whose existence he had previously doubted,” Bernard Dick writes. Lindbergh then spies the brightly lit Paris, shown in breathtaking long shot; he flies over the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, proceeds along the Seine River, and on to Le Bourget. As the mass of well-wishers cheers him, “Wilder cuts back to the medal, enabling it to share in the applause.”29 Some reviewers were incredulous at finding an expression of faith in a Wilder film. But the director who began every script with “Cum Deo” was not averse to portraying a religious incident in a film, especially since it came from the script’s source. Waxman’s score throughout the sequence is marked by brass, celesta, and shimmering strings. This unearthly music spirals upward, suggesting the heights of human endeavor.
The movie concludes with the authentic newsreel footage of the frenetic ticker-tape parade filmed on the occasion of the real Lindbergh’s official welcome in New York City. Some film historians call Ace in the Hole Wilder’s “virulent hate letter to America,” according to Neil Sinyard and Adrian Turner; “The Spirit of St. Louis is perhaps the nearest Wilder has ever come to writing a love letter to the country of his adoption.”30
The Spirit of St. Louis collected a sheaf of largely positive notices when it premiered at Radio City Music Hall. “Under veteran director Billy Wilder, Spirit comes off as Class A picture-making,” Variety declared. But the reviewer added a caution: “Considering that Lindbergh is today little more than Mr. Anonymous to youngsters, the spontaneous box office appeal” will perhaps not be “commensurate with the scope of the production.”31 Indeed, Warner’s marketing researchers discovered that hardly anyone under forty knew who Lindbergh was.
Inevitably, more than one reviewer jeered at Stewart playing the youthful Lindbergh with a toupee, describing “a geriatric James Stewart in a henna hairpiece.”32 Other critics noted that the picture’s 135-minute running time was likely to make viewers fidget at times, instead of drawing them into the story.
The movie ultimately took in only $2.6 million domestically—not even half of the production cost. It was an expensive and conspicuous flop. Jack Warner writes in his autobiography that the picture was “the most disastrous failure we ever had. Every studio has them from time to time, but this was one of the worst. I have never been able to figure out why it flopped.”33 Wilder said, “I felt sorry for Jack Warner. I thought of offering him his money back; but then I thought he might take it.”34
Stewart attributed the movie’s disappointing audience response in some degree to Lindbergh’s failure to assist in promoting the picture. Lindbergh did not help matters, said Stewart, by refusing all requests for personal appearances; he would not even talk to the press. Lindbergh was not, after all, familiar to the younger generation of moviegoers, the major ticket buyers. Still, Stewart remained a champion of the Lindbergh film, calling it one of the best movies of his career. “I thought I got right into Slim’s character; I guess he thought so too.” In fact, Lindbergh pronounced a favorable verdict: the movie “captured the spirit of his journey.”35 Historian Joseph Roquemore declares that, except for the pesky fly in the cockpit, “Wilder’s absorbing adaptation of Lindbergh’s memoirs remains perfectly faithful to history . . . and beautifully staged all the way.”36
In addition, Wilder drew skillful performances from the supporting characters who populate the flashbacks, most notably Father Hussman (Marc Connelly) and Bud Gurney (Murray Hamilton), Lindbergh’s sidekick from his air circus days. Wilder tackled difficult subject matter with a sense of humanity and honesty; the result is moving and ultimately hopeful. Nonetheless, the movie’s excessive length makes one wish that Wilder had made a more compressed film.
Looking back on The Spirit of St. Louis, Wilder confessed, “I’ve never done an outdoor picture before or since; I’m not an outdoors man.” He explained that his idea of an outdoor scene was “a balcony of the Paris Ritz built by Alexander Trauner in the studio.”37 Actually, for Wilder’s next film, a picture derived from Claude Anet’s 1920 French novel Ariane, Trauner would create the interior of Paris’s Ritz Hotel in the studio.
Since at this point Wilder was still absorbed with The Spirit of St. Louis, he cast about for yet another promising screenwriter who could get started on the screenplay of Ariane. He had recently met a young writer named I. A. L. Diamond at a Writers Guild dinner. Diamond had written a hilarious sketch for the occasion about two benighted screenwriters fresh out of ideas. Wilder met with him afterward and found him a clever, bright young writer. He had no trouble obtaining Diamond’s services, since Diamond was freelancing and was interested in adapting Anet’s novel for film. With a cowriter in hand, Wilder negotiated a sweetheart contract for himself with the Mirisch brothers at Allied Artists to finance and distribute the picture with a budget of $2.1 million. Wilder would receive $250,000 for directing the picture and $100,000 for coauthoring the script, plus a 10 percent share of the gross profits.38
Diamond was, like Wilder, Jewish and European. He was born Itek Dommnici in Ungheni, Romania, in 1920. When he was nine, he and his family relocated to Brooklyn, New York. He attended Boys High School in Brooklyn, where he was known as Isadore Diamond (which sounded more “American” to his parents) and was nicknamed “Iz.” He became a mathematics wizard in high school but majored in journalism at Columbia University. In college he called himself I. A. L. Diamond; the initials stood for “Interscholastic Algebra League,” of which he had been the champion in high school.
After graduating from college in 1941, Diamond went to Hollywood, aiming to be a screenwriter. He worked on pedestrian pictures like Two Guys from Milwaukee (1946); the only screenplay of consequence that he collaborated on during this period was Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952), which he cowrote with Ben Hecht.
Wilder had failed to find a long-term replacement for Charles Brackett—until Diamond appeared on the horizon. Personality-wise, he was a diamond in the rough: a tall, taciturn, remote individual who reminded Wilder of Slim Lindbergh. Iz Diamond’s withdrawn, introverted personality “proved to be the perfect balance for Wilder’s extroverted nature,” writes Joanne Yeck.39 “My husband had absolute confidence in his own ability,” Barbara Diamond pointed out; consequently, he was not intimidated by Wilder’s caustic manner or sarcasm.40
For one thing, Diamond admired Wilder because Wilder was first and foremost a screenwriter. Both of them, Diamond explained, firmly believed that “eighty per-cent of the creation of any movie lies in the writing. The other twenty per-cent is in the execution”: in putting the camera in the right place and in directing the actors.41
Wilder was prompted to make the present movie by his recollection of a German film version of Ariane (1931), which Paul Czinner directed when Wilder was a screenwriter at Ufa. The movie starred Elisabeth Bergner, whom Czinner married in 1933. The film was also released in an English version, The Loves of Ariane. Wilder remembered the movie as funny and touching.
Wilder updated the time frame of his remake from the 1920s to the present; Diamond came up with a new title, Love in the Afternoon. Wilder left Diamond to continue working on Love in the Afternoon while he went off to Europe to shoot The Spirit of St. Louis. In due course Diamond composed a detailed screen treatment for the script, which he mailed to Wilder overseas. Wilder cabled him that he heartily approved it and authorized Diamond to set to work on the first draft of the script. When Wilder returned to Hollywood to complete the Lindbergh picture, he spent as much time as he could spare collaborating with Diamond on the screenplay of Love in the Afternoon. By the time Wilder delivered his director’s cut of The Spirit of St. Louis to Warner Bros. in June 1956, Love in the Afternoon was ready to go into preproduction.
Most of Wilder’s dealings with Allied Artists were with the Mirisch brothers—Walter, Harold, and Marvin—who gave him a fairly free hand in making the movie. Nevertheless, they always kept Steve Broidy, the head of the studio, posted about their projects. So they set up a meeting in Broidy’s office with Wilder and Diamond.
Wilder said that Broidy began by asking him, “What are we going to do about the title? It’s terrible!” Diamond had suggested the title because it implied love in the afternoon of life—that is, a mature man romancing a young girl—an implication totally lost on Broidy. Wilder responded to Broidy, “Tell me the best title you’ve ever heard of.” Broidy hesitated, then said, “Wichita—because it suggests the Wild West.” Allied Artists had released a Western with that title in 1955, which was well received. “Granted, Wichita is a good title; so is Oklahoma!” Wilder wisecracked. “Why not call our picture Meanwhile, Back at the Ritz?” Wilder added abrasively, “We have a title for this picture, and that’s the way it’s going to be!” Broidy said sheepishly, “Can’t you take a joke?” Wilder did not answer but said to Diamond abruptly, “Let’s go!”42
In adapting Anet’s novel to the screen, Wilder retained only the kernel of its plot. Ariane, a student at a music conservatory, falls in love with a charming roué. She plays the cello; he plays the field. The lothario whom Ariane is smitten with is much more sophisticated and worldly-wise than she is. She cannot bear to admit to him that she is a virgin; instead, she boasts that she is as much a cosmopolitan lover as he is. Wilder also kept the novel’s ending, in which the lovers, after multiple misunderstandings, are reunited at a train depot.
Wilder and Diamond invented the rest of the plotline. For example, they created the character of Ariane’s father. In addition, they modeled Frank Flannagan, the aging playboy in their script, after Howard Hughes, the rich tycoon who was often seen in the company of Hollywood actresses during the period in which he owned RKO Studios in the 1950s.
Wilder said that he and Diamond were instantly compatible. There were never bitter quarrels between them, as there had been between Brackett and Wilder. If Wilder and Diamond did not agree on a line of dialogue, “we just went on to find something we were both nuts about.”43 Unfortunately, Diamond had already committed himself to write the script for a Danny Kaye vehicle at MGM, Merry Andrew (1958), before he got involved in Love in the Afternoon. But he promised Wilder to come back to work with him immediately afterward. When Diamond returned later on to work on Some Like It Hot, he became Wilder’s permanent writing partner.
By the end of July 1956, Wilder decamped for Paris; he took up residence in the Hotel Raphael for the duration of the shoot. He planned to film exteriors in and around Paris and interiors at the Studios de Boulogne, just west of the heart of the city. The cameras were set to roll on September 1.
Wilder had brought together an impressive cast and production crew. To begin with, Audrey Hepburn had jumped at the chance to appear in another Wilder movie after the enormous success of Sabrina. She was to play Ariane, who is in her late teens in the novel; although Hepburn was twenty-seven, she could easily pass for a girl who had just turned nineteen.
Wilder had offered the role of Frank Flannagan, the graying libertine, to Cary Grant. But Grant refused the role for the same reason that he had rejected the part of Linus Larrabee in Sabrina. He felt uncomfortable romancing Hepburn, who was half his age and looked even younger. Wilder was keenly disappointed that Grant had turned him down yet again. To Wilder, Grant was “the best of the light comedians; . . . and I never made a picture with him—spilt milk!” What was the use of crying about it?44
Wilder turned to Gary Cooper, who accepted the part, although there was a disparity of more than twenty-five years between Cooper and Hepburn. Cooper’s screen image in recent years had been that of a strong, silent man of integrity and honor. Nevertheless, Wilder was aware that Cooper was a lot more like Frank Flannagan in real life than he was like the upright heroes he usually played. Cooper was a confirmed womanizer; he had had affairs with several of his leading ladies, from Marlene Dietrich to Ingrid Bergman. Indeed, Cooper was “known throughout Hollywood as the actor who talked softly and carried a big prick.”45 Cooper, at this point in his career, liked to think of himself as playing “the fellow next door.” Wilder laughed at that notion; “Hell, if I want to see the guy next door, I go next door.”46 Wilder well knew that during the 1930s and 1940s Cooper had become one of the great romantic leads in films like Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and Ball of Fire, both cowritten by Wilder. So Wilder was confident that Cooper could play high romantic comedy. Incidentally, the beautiful brunette who plays Flannagan’s date in the Paris opera sequence is none other than Wilder’s wife, Audrey.
To play Ariane’s father, Claude Chavasse, a character not in the novel, Wilder chose sixty-eight-year-old Maurice Chevalier. Claude is a private detective specializing in cases of marital infidelity; he spends his time “popping flashbulbs in hotels,” as the saying goes. The suave, debonair Chevalier had starred in romantic comedies in Hollywood in the early sound era, including no fewer than five pictures directed by Ernst Lubitsch, among them The Merry Widow (1934). Wilder was interested in making a picture at last with a star who had worked so much with Lubitsch.
Chevalier’s career had been endangered during World War II by suspicions that he was collaborating with the Nazi forces when he remained to entertain in occupied France. But after some months, he went into retirement until the end of the war, and his name was eventually cleared. Nevertheless, Chevalier had not appeared in a Hollywood film since before the war. He was particularly pleased to be costarring with Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon. He dispatched a telegram to her, stating, “How proud I would be, and full of love I would be, if I really had a daughter like you.”47 Chevalier continued to appear in American films after Love in the Afternoon, including Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi (1958).
Behind the camera, Wilder had gathered a first-rate production crew. The director of photography was William Mellor, who had earned an Academy Award for photographing George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951). Production designer Alexander Trauner was working on his first Wilder movie, but it would not be his last. Like Wilder, Trauner was a Viennese Jew, but he had worked primarily in France. During the Nazi occupation, he had gone into hiding but continued to work undercover, designing sets for such noteworthy pictures as Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945). As an in-joke, Wilder has Trauner appear in the opening credits, posting a photo on an outdoor display board. Finally, Franz Waxman, who had scored Mauvaise graine, as well as many other Wilder films, was providing the music for another Wilder picture being filmed in France.
When principal photography commenced on September 1, 1956, Wilder was concerned about Chevalier’s expression of joie de vivre; he had the twinkling, roguish eyes and lubricous swagger of a romantic rascal. Jeanette MacDonald, who costarred with Chevalier in The Merry Widow and other films, called Chevalier “the biggest bottom pincher I have ever come across.” For her part, Hepburn admired Chevalier professionally, but she did not appreciate “his brand of flirtatiousness.”48
The cast and crew customarily gathered for drinks at the end of the shooting day, but Chevalier was never present. Hepburn assumed that Wilder had excluded him, just as he had done to Bogart during Sabrina. Actually, these cocktail hours were hosted by the French crew, who let it be known that they had not forgiven Chevalier’s willingness to entertain during the wartime occupation. Chevalier simply ignored the snub and never mentioned it.49
Before filming began, Wilder was confident that, with the proper makeup and lighting, Cooper’s real age could be soft-pedaled on the screen. But when he was on camera, Cooper’s gaunt, lined features made him look even older than his fifty-six years. Alexander Walter assumed that Cooper’s haggard face suggested that “his propensity for philandering . . . in his declining years was taking a physical toll.”50 But that was not entirely the case. What was known to only a few of Cooper’s intimates was that he had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. This was certainly a contributing factor to his appearing to be a man over sixty on the screen. As a matter of fact, he had only a few years left to live.51 In any case, Wilder instructed Mellor to photograph Cooper in close-up in soft focus and shrouded in shadows, to disguise the wrinkles on his face. Cameron Crowe defends Cooper’s performance: “His is an underrated and selfless performance, always serving Audrey Hepburn, who dazzles from beginning to end.”52
Principal photography wrapped in December 1956, and Wilder moved on to postproduction. He had two composers working on the score: Waxman was to create the incidental music, and Matty Malneck was to write the title song for the movie, “Love in the Afternoon.” Wilder had met Malneck in 1926 when the latter was a member of Paul Whiteman’s orchestra.53 Malneck, who served as musical adviser on the movie, said Wilder’s knowledge of hit songs of the 1920s and 1930s was encyclopedic; moreover, he knew how to integrate a song into the action, so that it heightened a moment. One such song was “Fascination,” one of Wilder’s favorite songs from his student days in Vienna. Walter Mirisch writes in his memoirs that one day Wilder said to him, “Come back to the office. I want you to listen to a record; it’s very old and scratchy, but I think it would be wonderful” in the film. Mirisch continues, “This was the first time I heard ‘Fascination.’ It was incredible. The song was used in the film and is now always identified with it.”54 Wilder had Waxman work this haunting waltz into the background music for the love scenes between Ariane and Frank.
Wilder prepared the final edit of the movie with film editor Leonid Azar and supervising editor Doane Harrison. After he submitted it to the industry censor, he was notified that Geoffrey Shurlock found the film’s ending unacceptable. Shurlock insisted that, instead of the lovers’ merely “galloping off into the sunset,” it should be made clear that they are headed for the altar.55 The Legion of Decency, with which Wilder had had a run-in over The Seven Year Itch, objected to the ending on the same grounds and threatened to classify the movie in its category of condemned films. Allied Artists worried that the legion’s denunciation would earn the film an unjustified reputation with the public at large as a salacious movie. The studio prevailed on Wilder to insert a brief declaration at film’s end, stating firmly that Frank and Ariane were soon married. So Wilder commandeered Chevalier to record a bit of voice-over narration for the U.S. prints of the movie. Chevalier remarks that the happy couple “are now serving a life sentence in New York.”
Shurlock was satisfied with this resolution of the problem, but Wilder’s concession only partially mollified the Legion of Decency. The legion merely raised its rating of Love in the Afternoon from condemned to its still disapproving objectionable category, “films that can be a moral danger to spectators,” explaining that the film “tends to ridicule the virtue of purity by reason of undue emphasis on illicit love.” Wilder was livid when he got the news: “I do not have the reputation of ever having been connected with pictures of a lascivious character.”56
Chevalier’s voice-over at the end of the movie bookends his narration during the movie’s prologue. Wilder later told an interviewer that the opening narration was voiced by Louis Jourdan, but Wilder’s memory played him false—the voice speaking the opening and closing narration in the movie is clearly Chevalier’s. As Dick points out, when the prologue ends, Chevalier’s voice as the narrator “meshes with that of the character he is playing, Claude Chevasse.”57 (Jourdan, a French actor who appeared in Hollywood pictures like Gigi [1958], does narrate the prologue of Wilder’s film Irma la Douce [1963].)
The prologue of Love in the Afternoon is a brisk tour of Paris, punctuated by Claude’s rakish commentary as he presents lovers embracing passionately all over town: “In Paris,” he proclaims, “people make love—well perhaps not better than anywhere else—but certainly more often.” There follows a montage of kissing couples. “They do it on the Left Bank, and on the Right Bank; they do it anytime, anywhere: the butcher, the baker, and the friendly undertaker. Even poodles do it”—a shot of two dogs smooching is perhaps a reference to the amorous canines in The Emperor Waltz. “There is married love,” Claude concludes, “and illicit love; that is where I come in.” He is a private eye specializing in tracking down straying spouses.
Donald Spoto notes that “Wilder’s stated intention with Love in the Afternoon was to honor his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch,” by making a soufflélight picture, suffused with Lubitsch’s sophisticated Continental grace and wit.58 In Love in the Afternoon Cooper plays a part similar to his role in Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, that of a much-married, wealthy cad who carries on a never-ending series of love affairs with mostly married women. Frank is an executive with the Pepsi-Cola Company; a rendezvous with him is sometimes described as “the pause that refreshes” (which was actually Coca-Cola’s motto).
One scene that is certainly touched by the spirit of Lubitsch occurs when Claude has Frank’s hotel suite under surveillance at the behest of a woman’s jealous husband. Claude observes a stream of waiters pushing carts laden with food and drink into the suite. The waiters are followed by the gypsy quartet that Frank always has on hand to establish the mood for his seductions. Impeccably clad in tuxedos, they serenade the couple with “Fascination.” Soon the waiters file out of the suite, pushing the empty carts, with the gypsy musicians close behind them. The last musician shuts the door and hangs the “Do not disturb” sign on the doorknob. Wilder here employs one of Lubitsch’s favorite tricks to get around the censors: he suggests that Frank and his lady of the moment are indulging beyond the closed doors in outrageous behavior, which is never shown. “If Lubitsch was an inspired ‘director of doors,’ ” Kevin Brownlow says, “then Wilder paid him homage in this scene.”59
While Ariane is ostensibly dusting her father’s office, she surreptitiously dips into his confidential files. She comes across a file full of newspaper clippings documenting Frank’s escapades. She becomes intrigued with the aging Don Juan and contrives to visit him at his hotel. When Ariane crosses the threshold into Frank’s suite, the innocent ingenue is entering the adult world of an infamous philanderer, with all its secrets and lies. Ariane does not reveal her name to Frank but masquerades as a mystery woman with a notorious past. She soon falls under the lothario’s spell and thus begins a series of afternoon tête-à-têtes with him. Ariane insists on seeing him in the afternoon so she can tell her father she is rehearsing with the orchestra of which she is a member.
Ariane says that Frank has an American face like a cowboy’s—a reference to Cooper’s sagebrush movies. Having never dated a slick American playboy before, the sheltered Ariane endeavors to fathom the personality of Frank Flannagan and his ilk. She tells a friend, “They’re strange people, Americans. When they’re young, they have their teeth straightened, their tonsils taken out, and gallons of vitamins pumped into them. Something happens to their insides; they become mechanized, dehumanized.” She concludes, “ ‘I’m not even sure whether he has a heart,” since Frank maintains that all love affairs should be transitory.
Wilder himself has spoken of Americans, including himself, in an uncomplimentary fashion: “We are the most hard-boiled, undisciplined people in the world. First our heroes smack their girl’s face with a grapefruit,” as James Cagney does in Public Enemy (1931), “and then they kick mothers in wheelchairs downstairs,” as Richard Widmark does in Kiss of Death (1947). “How much farther can we go?”60 How far will Frank go to hold on to Ariane?
That Frank is growing jealous of Ariane’s roster of former lovers is evident when he notices the ankle bracelet she is wearing. She claims that it is a gift from a former lover, when actually it is a key chain. He abruptly tears it from her ankle because he did not give it to her. Ariane’s anklet recalls the provocative ankle bracelet worn by Phyllis in Double Indemnity.
Tormented by this nameless female’s exotic tales of her former lovers, Frank goes so far as to hire Claude Chevasse to uncover her true identity. Claude soon learns that the woman he is investigating is his own daughter. To his chagrin, Claude, “the record keeper of affairs of indiscretion,” realizes that his daughter has become a “candidate for one of her father’s file cards.”61 Claude implores Frank to forget her. “Give her a chance,” he pleads. “She’s such a little fish; throw her back in the water.” Frank accordingly tells Ariane that he has bought a train ticket for a holiday on the Riviera—without her. He reminds her of his cynical motto: “He who loves and runs away lives to love another day.” Ariane nevertheless accompanies Frank to the depot to bid him adieu.
The following sequence begins with “a view of a smoking, chugging locomotive in a splendid vaulted railway station.”62 This is one of the very few scenes in his film that Wilder borrowed from Czinner’s movie. Frank has boarded the train; it begins to move. Ariane rushes along the platform, assuring Frank through her tears that she will continue her promiscuous life after he is gone. Ariane explains the tears by saying, “It’s the soot; it always happens to me at railroad stations.” This is a reference to David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), in which Laura, the heroine, gets a cinder in her eye while standing on the station platform, and Alec, the handsome hero, removes it for her.
Frank now realizes that his emotions have been genuinely touched by this disarming girl. At the last moment, “as the train picks up speed, Frank lifts her aboard and carries her to a seat in the back,” writes Dick, who has done the best analysis of this film in English. “Be quiet, Ariane,” says Frank. He calls Ariane—once his anonymous lover—by her name for the first time.63
Claude, who has shadowed Ariane and Frank to the train station, remains standing on the platform, along with the four gypsy musicians. They saw away with gusto at “Fascination” for the last time; since the quartet was associated with Frank’s seductions, they have been left behind for good.
Wilder did not like Claude’s final voice-over, assuring the audience that Frank and Ariane would soon wed. When Frank sweeps Ariane up in his arms and takes her to his compartment, “that is the real ending,” said Wilder.64 In any case, at the fade-out, the strains of “Fascination” swell sublimely to a peak as Waxman marshals the full orchestra for the film’s finale.
Love in the Afternoon was released in June 1957. Most critics welcomed it as “a sheer delight,” “a cascade of bubbles and belly laughs,” and—most significant for Wilder—”the type of sophisticated fare Lubitsch would have undertaken with delight.”65 As Brownlow notes, “If Lubitsch had lived, he’d have made just such a picture.”66 Audrey Hepburn was captivating as the wistful Ariane; her wide-eyed wonder and innocence “rang as true as a small silver bell.”67 Yet Maurice Chevalier, more than one critic noted, nearly stole the picture with his winning performance as the quirky, mischievous private eye specializing in cases of amour.
One reservation about the movie was that the aging Gary Cooper “frankly has a much longer count on the calendar” than the wispy, effervescent Audrey Hepburn. Cooper seemed to lack conviction and hence was disappointing as the protagonist. Barson quips that in Love in the Afternoon, “Coop sometimes looks as though he’d like to doff his tux, don his buckskin gear and ride off to hunt buffalo.”68
Some other reviewers complained that 130 minutes was an excessive running time for a lighter-than-air love story; more decisive editing by Azar and Harrison would have provided better pacing.
François Truffaut, speaking for the young, feisty film critics at Cahiers du cinema, was disappointed in Love in the Afternoon. Truffaut griped that it was a sentimental, old-fashioned movie; he preferred the rash, somewhat cruder Seven Year Itch. Wilder, wrote Truffaut, had become “a lecherous old balladeer out of touch with the world.”69 But Truffaut’s panning of the film did not represent the generally good notices the movie garnered throughout Europe.
Indeed, the movie made a better showing at the box office in Europe, but Allied Artists had sold the rights to the European distribution of the film to finance the making of the picture in the first place. Love in the Afternoon was not a moneymaker for Allied Artists. To make matters worse for the studio, William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion also failed to become a smash hit in America. Thus neither of Allied Artists’ first two prestige pictures propelled it into the big time, as it had hoped.
When Allied Artists was forced to cut back on its ambitious plans to become a major Hollywood studio, the Mirisch brothers decided to desert it. In July 1957, only a month after the premiere of Love in the Afternoon, Walter, Harold, and Marvin Mirisch established the Mirisch Company, their own independent production company, with a view to releasing their pictures through United Artists (UA).
In 1919 UA had been formed by Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. to distribute the pictures they made. When they inaugurated UA, one Hollywood executive joked, “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”70 But UA was still operating nearly four decades later. It did not make movies but financed and distributed films made by independent producers, who were multiplying in Hollywood as the studio system fell into decline. In the 1950s, UA, now headed by Arthur Krim, had released such successful pictures as The African Queen and High Noon. With Walter Mirisch as production chief, the Mirisch brothers arranged with Krim to base their production unit at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood, where UA had its headquarters. The Mirisches leased studio space on the Goldwyn lot to make their pictures.
For his part, Wilder was pleased to be working with independent production companies and no longer associated with major studios like Paramount, Twentieth Century–Fox, and Warner Bros. He put a birdcage in his office at the Goldwyn Studios, with a stuffed bird perched on top. He explained, “The bird sitting atop the cage is symbolic of my final freedom from my imprisonment by the majors: the bird has escaped the cage. I call the neighborhood where the major studios are in Hollywood the Bermuda Triangle.”71
Edward Small, whose independent production company also released films through UA, had acquired the film rights to Agatha Christie’s hit play Witness for the Prosecution. Small planned to produce the picture in partnership with Arthur Hornblow Jr., who had produced Wilder’s first Hollywood picture, The Major and the Minor. They signed Wilder to cowrite the screenplay and to direct Witness for the Prosecution, to be made at the Goldwyn Studios for UA release. Wilder said that he was glad to be making another movie in Hollywood; filming abroad was overrated. “It’s much easier technically to shoot a picture in Hollywood,” because the studio facilities were second to none. “If you’re going to perform a delicate operation, why not do it in the best hospital?” Moreover, France, where Love in the Afternoon was shot, “is a place where the money falls apart in your hand, and you can’t tear the toilet paper.”72