17

Ivy

Sam Wood had several properties in the queue to follow Address Unknown. In addition to The Land Is Bright, which was still earmarked for his daughter, there was Jubal Troop, a western from the novel by Paul Wellman, and Tatiana, an original by Mayerling author Irmgard von Cube. Wood thought the Wellman book a good fit for Gary Cooper, and Menzies was making plans to produce and stage the film as Wood went off to direct Cooper in Casanova Brown. In February, the annual Academy Awards ritual brought a particularly egregious slight in the nominations of Hans Dreier and Haldane Douglas for color art direction on For Whom the Bell Tolls, their principal contribution to the picture being the cave interior that enabled the company to return from Sonora.

With the New York opening of Address Unknown, hopes ran high that the new Wood-Menzies partnership would deliver a hit. The reviews were gratifying, but the film faced a moviegoing public sated with stories of wartime Europe and eager for escapism. Where only two months earlier None Shall Escape had done more than $1 million in domestic rentals, Address Unknown managed scarcely half that amount—despite sterling notices and the Academy Award–winning presence of Paul Lukas. Wood’s relationship with Harry Cohn cooled, and Jubal Troop was put on ice. Eight months after the finish of Casanova Brown, Wood signed on as director of Guest Wife, a romantic comedy for producer Jack H. Skirball. The following month, after almost a year of inactivity, Menzies, at the behest of David Hempstead, accepted the offer of a one-year contract at RKO.

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Throughout the 1940s, David O. Selznick made repeated entreaties in his drive to lure Bill Menzies back into the fold. As early as January 1940, a one-picture deal had been worked out, a guarantee of six weeks with options, but Selznick’s quarry eluded him, unwilling to submit to the 24/7 bombardment to which DOS subjected all of his charges. In March 1941, Sam Goldwyn was eager to borrow Menzies if only Selznick could sign him to a contract. In May of that year, Selznick anxiously inquired about Menzies when he heard Kings Row had been delayed. In November, he was told Menzies was “simply dying” to do The Keys of the Kingdom, which he had set up for Gregory Peck at Fox. Nothing worked out, and in October of 1943 Reeves Espy of the Myron Selznick office assured the producer they would be “delighted” to talk about Menzies whenever he was available, but that he had nearly a year to run on his existing contract. “Please bear in mind,” cautioned Espy, “that Bill contemplates freelancing and is not interested in a term deal.”

With Wood having committed to Casanova Brown, Selznick told Daniel O’Shea he doubted that Wood would take Menzies with him to International Pictures. “The difference in our operation working without Menzies is so tremendous that I wonder if we shouldn’t make another stab at getting him.” Then came the commercial failure of Address Unknown, and Selznick’s ardor momentarily cooled. Over the summer, he immersed himself in the shooting of Spellbound, a psychological thriller under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. As with most Selznick productions, the film was subjected to a lot of second-guessing, and in October the producer expressed dissatisfaction with its stylistic centerpiece, a dream sequence as set forth in the screenplay by Ben Hecht.

Impressed by a birthday portrait Salvador Dalí painted of Jack Warner’s wife, Hitchcock had asked that the artist be commissioned to create four gray-tone paintings, each to serve as a Surrealist dreamscape for the repressed experiences of one John Ballyntine, who has come to Green Manors in the persona of Dr. Anthony Edwardes, a distinguished psychologist—and may, in fact, be guilty of the real Dr. Edwardes’ murder. Said Hitchcock, “What I was after was … the vividness of dreams.… All Dalí’s work is very solid and very sharp, with very long perspectives and black shadows.… All dreams in the movies are blurred. It isn’t true. Dalí was the best man for me to do the dreams because that is what dreams should be.”

The material was filmed, but Selznick was never completely satisfied with the results. “The more I look at the dream sequence in Spellbound,” he wrote, “the worse I feel it to be. It is not Dalí’s fault, for his work is much finer and much better for the purpose than I ever thought it would be. It is the photography, setups, lighting, et cetera, all of which are completely lacking in imagination and all of which are about what you would expect from Monogram. I think we need a whole new shake on this sequence, and I would like to get Bill Menzies to come over and lay it out and shoot it.”

Dalí, by then in New York, expressed the desire that his work in American pictures be accessible to all. “Il y a three,” he said of the number of settings. “And every people understand dese dream.” Menzies considered Dalí a bit of a crackpot. Although under contract to RKO, he came to the studio at Selznick’s urgent request, and the two men had a conversation Selznick described as “very exciting.” Menzies ran the picture, then spent two days in discussions with art director James Basevi. The overall intent was to honor Dalí’s unsettling atmosphere while providing a clearer progression of the dreamed events. Mac Johnson was put to work on the drawings, photographic copies of which were shipped east for Dalí’s approval. “We are not changing anything on any of his paintings,” an accompanying note stressed. “We are introducing transitional elements to relate one painting to another painting in relation to [Gregory] Peck’s dialogue.… Throughout the entire dialogue, the camera is moving forward.”

Menzies then directed four days of retakes, specifically a gambling room sequence with actor Norman Lloyd, a rooftop miniature, and some smoke effects. Now officially on loan, there were days, Selznick observed, “on which he just comes over for an hour or two, and has to rush back to his other job.” Work on the sequence was completed in March 1945, but the finished picture, scored by Miklós Rózsa, wasn’t released until December of that year. Menzies declined credit for his work on Spellbound, which, according to studio records, amounted to a total of thirteen days.

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The new picture on Menzies’ schedule was The Greatest Gift, a story by Philip Van Doren Stern that had come to Cary Grant by way of a twenty-four-page pamphlet serving as the author’s 1943 Christmas card. Grant took the story to RKO, the studio for which he was about to make None but the Lonely Heart. The purchase was finalized in March 1944, and soon playwright Marc Connelly was at work on the story of one George Pratt, suicidal, stuck in a “mudhole for life, doing the same dull work day after day” and wishing he’d never been born. Connelly expanded it, making it the Jekyll-and-Hyde tale of a bad George allowed to exist in the absence of the good George—the one who had never been born. By year’s end, when Menzies came onto the project, Connelly was gone, Clifford Odets (Grant’s director on None but the Lonely Heart) was drafting his own version of the seemingly unlickable screenplay, and George Pratt had become George Bailey.

The Greatest Gift got as far as continuity sketches for its arresting opening, in which little Zuzu Bailey encounters her dead grandfather in a “music conservatory” that turns out to be heaven. Eschewing the Hollywood cliché of clouds and choirs, Odets’ first shot called for “a pleasant, neat street, lined with old-fashioned trees and several comfortable residence houses about.” As the four-year-old approaches the camera, Menzies illustrated a world eerily disproportionate to conventional reality, the trees oversized, the girl tiny in comparison, the conservatory gigantic, its doors and stairs dwarfing the solitary figure of the child who, back on earth, is lying near death, and whose appearance alerts the grandfather to a “great peril” in the life of his son.

Development of The Greatest Gift (known as “Project 1838” in the RKO files) continued into the spring of 1945. According to screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who did some uncredited work on the script, the film was put on hold after its producer—presumably Hempstead—went on an “alcoholic binge.”* In May, Menzies was shifted to Deadline at Dawn, working with first-time director Harold Clurman, a founder of New York’s famed Group Theatre and a genuine snob when it came to moviemaking.

“Daddy did an awful lot on that,” said Suzanne Menzies. “He may have had his name taken off it because he hated Harold Clurman.” It’s easy to see Menzies’ compositional hand in the look of the film, starting with its noirish Kings Row–style opening that takes place behind the titles. Yet the experience could not have been a happy one. “Just who IS directing RKO’s Deadline at Dawn—Harold Clurman or William Cameron Menzies?” Reed Porter pointedly asked in his Hollywood Review column of June 11. Clurman himself described the picture in his autobiography as “run of the mill” and dismissed it as being of no importance. “My almost casual attitude toward the job met with resentment,” he wrote, “perhaps because I finished the film on time and it proved moderately profitable.”

When Menzies finished with Deadline at Dawn, it was announced he would direct Ferenc Molnár’s 1929 comedy The Lawyer for producer Val Lewton. It was Lewton’s notion to turn the play about an urbane jewel thief and his best friend and attorney into a musical. “It is, to date, the most fascinating job I’ve attempted,” Menzies said at the time. “We are really throwing the book at it. I think it will be a complete departure in musicals and, in a great many ways, in all pictures. I hope and think it will be an important milestone in my long and bumpy career. It is also a very pleasant situation to make my own drawings for myself!”

With The Lawyer in active development, Menzies’ services were once again requested by Selznick, this time for the producer’s gigantic Technicolor western, Duel in the Sun. Frustrated in his efforts to land Menzies as the film’s production designer, Selznick had instead engaged Josef von Sternberg to advise on “angles and lighting” but found that von Sternberg lacked the preparatory skills that made Menzies so valuable. “He came in at the very tail-end—that dance, that big dance,” director King Vidor said of Menzies’ participation. “I guess that’s what you call the barbecue scene. Yeah, the big dance in the patio of the house.… It was typically Selznick to bring him on for just one scene, bring somebody on.”

Menzies spent five days on the picture in early August 1945, designing the only major sequence left to be done. “The crane shot that we did for the last day’s shooting was more or less all laid out by Menzies,” recalled Lee Garmes (who had replaced Hal Rosson as principal cameraman on the film). “Vidor was there in a supervisory capacity, and Menzies more or less did the scene.… It was really Menzies that initiated the whole idea and the whole concept. We followed his sketches, and when we came up [at the end of a long dolly shot], we ended up with the kids in the tree.” Menzies’ traveling camera opened on a fire pit, a side of beef turning on an open spit, the cooks at work, then trundled through the smoke, past the carvers, catching casual snatches of dialogue, past the revelers, the solitary guest wiping his mouth on a tablecloth, Butterfly McQueen, in fancy serving dress and lace apron (“when I’m married I’m going to have lots and lots of parties … ”), then moving up to an overlooking tree branch, coming to rest on a black boy and a white boy lazily trading fishing stories against a background of celebratory chaos.

Lewton protégé Nathaniel Curtis had been put to work on the script for The Lawyer, and in September Lewton and Menzies were far enough along to consider casting in a memo to production executive William Dozier. At the time, they favored Angela Lansbury, Virginia Mayo (“we are rather enthusiastic about this girl”), and Laraine Day, whose singing voice, it was noted, they were prepared to dub. Eventually, contract starlet Marian Carr was selected to star opposite Bob Cummings, with filming set to begin in December. Late in November, however, the start date was pushed back. A few weeks later, an item in Variety indicated the picture had been called off altogether due to litigation over the rights to the play. A separate item noted that Menzies had checked off the RKO lot, having, with the cancellation of The Lawyer, nothing left to do. “Understood RKO is looking for another vehicle to call him back to produce and direct it,” the paper added.

Meanwhile, The Greatest Gift had been resurrected as the first project in four years for Frank Capra, who had spent the war in uniform. Acquired by Capra’s new production partnership, Liberty Films, the property was passed to the husband-wife writing team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who were charged with developing a screenplay that paid off the title It’s a Wonderful Life. Since the completion of Meet John Doe, Capra had made just one commercial feature, the compact Arsenic and Old Lace, filmed at Warner Bros. in 1941 but held from release until 1944. It’s a Wonderful Life, despite its small town setting, promised greater scope, and again Capra, as with Meet John Doe before it, engaged Menzies to take all the “eggs” out of the heaven sequence and the events leading up to the moment on the iron bridge when George Bailey stares morosely into the icy black water and contemplates ending it all. Jimmy Vance had relocated to Kansas City when he received a call from Menzies to come back to work: “We started right on it. My first memory is that we did some studies for Heaven. He asked me, ‘What’s Heaven look like?’ And we tried to figure out without being corny. I remember the bridge. I don’t remember doing anything inside the house or the bank—anything like that. He took me out to the RKO ranch once, and there was a huge snow scene.”

Little Zuzu Bailey is dwarfed by her heavenly surroundings in the opening moments of RKO’s The Greatest Gift. Menzies stayed with the project when it was acquired by Liberty Films and director Frank Capra, sketching at least one alternate opening in which Benjamin Franklin was portrayed as the head angel, flying his trademark kite while considering the earthly trials of George Bailey. Recast with James Stewart in the lead and released as It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the film’s actual opening wasn’t nearly as cinematic.

When the picture went into production in April 1946, Menzies was on the set, primarily to hold the veteran director’s hand. By his own admission, Capra was nervous at the prospect of directing a $1.5 million production after such a lengthy hiatus. “It’s frightening to go back to Hollywood after four years,” he told Thomas Pryor of The New York Times, “wondering whether you’ve gone rusty or lost your touch. I keep telling myself how wonderful it would be just to sneak out somewhere and make a couple of quickie Westerns—just to get the feel of things again.” Suzie Menzies could remember her father going over to Beverly Hills High School at night to shoot the ballroom scene, the first major sequence to be filmed. “And I remember his drawings. The scene turned out pretty much as I remembered it. He worked on a lot of that movie.” Yet Menzies’ name appears on none of the surviving production records, nor does the work he did on the movie appear to have been budgeted—raising the possibility his weekly salary was covered out of Capra’s own pocket.

Menzies appears to have stayed with It’s a Wonderful Life through the completion of winter exteriors, for Vance recalled starting work on Arch of Triumph almost immediately upon finishing with Capra. “The studios were so busy then that I had to work in the washroom of our house in Beverly Hills. Bill would come by every day, sometimes in the morning but always at night. I did both those movies in my house.” Based on a book by Erich Maria Remarque and starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Charles Laughton, Arch of Triumph would be a major production for Enterprise Studios, a new entity formed by David Loew (who, in partnership with Albert Lewin, had made So Ends Our Night) and former Warner Bros. publicity chief Charles Einfeld. Its producer, David Lewis, had previously worked with Menzies on Kings Row. The film would also mark Menzies’ fifth and final pairing with Lewis Milestone.

To Jimmy Vance, Menzies during this period was an avuncular, almost fatherly figure, wryly showing him the ropes in a profession still largely undefined. Once, his mentor took him to a revival theater on Vine Street to see Our Town, pointing out the ideas he thought worked well in the film and the reasoning behind them. “He was always so nice and trying to offer advice,” said Vance. “One time he said, ‘Jim, someday you’ll be an art director, and when you are, sometimes you’ll get stuck and won’t know what to do. If I were you, I’d start on the smallest object I could think of and then expand.’ I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He said, ‘Maybe it’s an ashtray. Or a lamp or something. Then work out from it, instead of trying to put everything in a box. Do it in reverse.’ I also remember talking to Bill one time about color. He said, ‘I’d like to do a scene that’s all black-and-white with just one patch of color somewhere.’ ”

A ponderous tale of love and revenge, Arch of Triumph offered few opportunities to break new ground. Overwritten and miscast, it lumbered through four months of principal photography. Yet during its making a long-anticipated reunion between Menzies and Sam Wood took shape, its basis a tentative agreement between the two men to film a specific property should Menzies secure an option. The Story of Ivy was by the prolific English novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes, whose 1913 thriller The Lodger had been the basis of Alfred Hitchcock’s first great movie success. With a deal to make pictures for International, Wood set up a company, Inter-Wood Productions, Inc., and acquired the rights to Ivy for $25,000. In June, the property was placed in the hands of screenwriter Charles Bennett, whose work with Hitchcock during the latter’s prime British period made him an ideal choice to adapt to the screen a minor classic of betrayal and murder.

Inter-Wood established offices on the Universal lot, and in September signed Menzies to a five-year contract, effectively picking up the partnership where it had left off at Columbia two years earlier. As before, Menzies’ deal called for him to produce the films Wood directed and vice versa. The Story of Ivy would be Wood’s picture, leaving Menzies to direct the company’s next production, a thriller titled Purgatory Street. Late in July, as Universal and International announced their plans to merge, Olivia de Havilland tentatively agreed to star in Ivy, giving the project momentum and a year-end start date. Other cast members added in the run-up to filming: Richard Ney, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Patric Knowles (borrowed from Paramount), and on December 11, 1946—the day filming commenced—Herbert Marshall.

Ultimately, de Havilland spurned the title role when she discovered her agent had a financial interest in the new company, and a last-minute switch landed de Havilland’s younger sister, Joan Fontaine, in the part. Extravagantly budgeted at $1,759,500 and comfortably scheduled for seventy-two camera days, Ivy moved smoothly through the production process, even as Fontaine struggled with Wood’s technique as a director. “Wood had … Menzies draw every set-up,” said Charles Bennett. “There was nothing for Sam Wood to do. He was an allegedly great director, but I remember Fontaine coming up to me on the set and saying, ‘Charles, I don’t understand what Sam wants me to do. He can’t explain what he wants. He talks and I don’t understand what he’s saying.’ That was his problem. There was nothing you could do about Sam. He was completely unverbal.”

Menzies found himself in almost total control of the picture, while not having to deal with the actors in any significant way. (“Actors were on one side of the camera,” said Joan Fontaine, “while the filmmakers were on the other. They seldom met.”) He invested Ivy with a morbid elegance, suggestively ornate, while keeping the principal sets small and evocative. The approach required the thoughtful use of props—what he liked to call his “inanimate actors”—and kept two full-time set dressers busy. The most expensive interior in a film that required just fourteen interiors was the Lextons’ four-room apartment, which covered roughly five hundred square feet of stage space. Menzies kept the camera in close, even for scenes that were not essentially close-ups, maintaining that close work amplified slight emotions and sustained a greater overall effect on the audience. “The audience,” he said, “is so close to the action that it virtually breathes the same air as the actors.”

Menzies began the picture with Ivy’s visit to a fortune-teller, but then worried the film’s first minutes were too soft. “You can afford a little footage at the beginning for exposition,” he later said, “but, if possible, I would handle it as melodramatically as possible. A violent and dynamic shove-off is a great help. In fact, one of the things wrong with Ivy is that the first real right hand wallop isn’t until the end of the second reel.” That wallop was the revelation of Ivy’s affair with Dr. Roger Gretorex, the details of their secret assignations, and Gretorex’s vow never to give her up. Staged in a pavilion outside the swirl of an elegant dance, the scene gains in intensity as the guests gather to watch a spectacular fireworks display, the furious commotion in the sky paralleling the intimate commotion between Ivy and her lover just out of the crowd’s earshot. Given the heat of their exchange, the details are almost of no consequence; the scene generates its own emotional energy entirely apart from the conflict between its characters.

Wanting to devote more time to his painting, Jim Vance declined the opportunity to work on Ivy, putting Menzies together instead with production illustrator Ted Haworth. “I knew Ted’s work,” said Vance, “and knew that he and Menzies would get along great.” Having worked principally with art directors, Haworth started the picture with little knowledge of production design. “[Menzies] could take the most ordinary thing in a picture,” marveled Haworth, “and make it so cinematically fascinating. He had a way of dividing the motion picture screen, taking big patterns and using those patterns for foreground and background. In the simplest of close-ups, you had the longest of long shots combined. Bill Menzies’ philosophy was that if you were going to show a close-up, make it closer than any close-up has ever been. If you are going to make a long shot, make it a longer long shot than anyone else has ever done. Nobody could do what he did, just nobody.”

Told there would be a great change in her life—a change for the better—once she breaks with this other man, Ivy determines that she must poison her husband to be free for the attentions of the wealthy—but inconveniently scrupulous—Miles Rushworth. Stressing visual irony, Menzies went for the extreme tonal contrasts he achieved on Kings Row, specifying pure white for most of the gowns worn by Joan Fontaine and framing her against violent patterns of light and dark. When it came time to design the opening titles, Menzies employed for the background a garden urn entwined with what was called “painted” or variegated ivy. As the lettering clears and Sam Wood’s credit fades from the screen, the urn and the ivy begin to darken. About two feet into a four-foot dissolve, the urn changes into the stark image of a death’s head, the ivy surrounding it having turned completely to black. The image then fades into the complementary composition of the first shot, in which Ivy, in white, approaches the shadowy house where the old woman, Mrs. Thrawn, will look into her future and see “Misfortune … terrible misfortune.”

As happy as he was with Ivy, and as faithful as it was to his vision, Menzies still spoke of the “worries of production” and the demands placed upon him as both producer and production designer. “Life is so tediously violent,” he rued. Required, along with the crew, to be on the set at 8:30 each morning, Menzies typically worked an eleven- or twelve-hour day, arriving home no earlier than nine at night. “He didn’t always drive,” his daughter Suzie remembered, “and I was picking him up one day at Universal. He disappeared for about half an hour, and he came back just bombed to the eyeballs. And I had to practically carry him across to the car. Sam Wood came along and said, ‘Can I help?’ and I said, very tightly, ‘No … thank you …’ He didn’t say a word on the way home, but boy was I mad. ‘How dare you do this to me, your daughter?’ That sort of thing. I didn’t say anything, but I was furious. It was so humiliating. Everybody on the set was looking. ‘There goes Bill again.’ It was terribly embarrassing.”

Menzies wound up Ivy with a terrific shock, sending the title character plummeting down an elevator shaft as the police close in on her. Charles Bennett thought Wood a “strange director” and didn’t think his work on the movie very good. “I will never forget the horrible ending to Ivy—where the girl falls down the thing and boom!” he said some forty years after the film’s release. “I remember my son watching it one day on the telly and saying, ‘Oh, that’s a sudden end.’ I said, ‘That’s not the way I wrote it.’ The ending, as far as I was concerned at least, was Sir Cedric Hardwicke, as the detective, giving some sort of reasoning for what had happened. But no, not a bit of it. Boom! Desperately sudden.”

Ivy closed on February 18, 1947, fourteen days ahead of schedule and $97,000 under budget. In many ways, it was Menzies’ purest work of design since Kings Row, a picture in which, in the words of Richard Sylbert, there wasn’t one frame you couldn’t see him drawing. “We had a very good preview with Ivy at Pomona, which is a mixed audience—farmers and college students,” Menzies reported in an April letter to Laurence Irving. “It’s a good show, I think, of its type, quite morbid but with what I’ve always tried to do, get box office and art on the same film, because art is no good unless there is someone in there to see it.”

As he oversaw the cutting, dubbing, and scoring of Ivy, Menzies was also on the lookout for new properties to be made under the Inter-Wood arrangement with Universal-International. A bid was reportedly made for The Emperor’s Physician, a story of Christ’s early years by Reverend J. R. Perkins, and in late January the trades carried news of Menzies’ purchase of The Marble Arch, an unpublished mystery yarn in which he proposed to cast actress Jane Wyatt and Ivy’s Richard Ney. Most of his time, though, was given over to Purgatory Street, a novel published as part of Simon and Schuster’s Inner Sanctum series by the American mystery writer Roman McDougald. Menzies put Howard Emmett Rogers to work on a screenplay, the two men plumbing for graphic opportunities in the story of a combat pilot so altered by plastic surgery his own wife thinks him an imposter. Sam Wood proposed casting Robert Donat in the lead, having directed the actor in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Menzies suggested Joan Fontaine for the wife. Then in June, Ivy opened to mixed reviews and pallid box office, and Wood’s relationship with the studio soured, just as it had with Columbia following the release of Address Unknown.

The picture was previewed for the trades and the general press on Friday, June 6, at the Academy theater in Beverly Hills. “Ivy,” wrote James Agee in The Nation, “is an unusually ornate melodrama about an Edwardian murderess; it stars Joan Fontaine, who pops her eyes, coarsens her jaw, and wears her elegant clothes very effectively. The real star is whoever was chiefly responsible for the dressing, setting, lighting, and shooting, and that, I infer from past performance, is the producer, William Cameron Menzies.” The film got a lot of promotional breaks; Ivy was Life magazine’s Movie of the Week and Menzies himself appeared on an ABC interview show called Bride and Groom to hype the picture. It opened at five theaters in greater Los Angeles, but was bettered by a number of recent U-I releases—The Egg and I, The Dark Mirror, The Killers, Canyon Passage, Song of Scheherazade. Even Smash Up, which was considered a weak performer, did marginally better.

Then, as if to compound Menzies’ battered commercial reputation, The Green Cockatoo was given a limited American release in July—a full decade after its completion. The Film Daily rated Menzies’ work on the film “mediocre” and suggested the picture “shows its age.” The Motion Picture Daily was only moderately kinder: “Cinemagraphically below par and for the most part slowly paced, the film does have, however, some scattered moments of taut suspense, notably when [John] Mills and another underworld character engage in a knife fight in the recesses of a blitzed tenement.” In New York, Jesse Zunser of Cue dismissed it in just three sentences: “For those who needed it, the Rialto’s Green Cockatoo is additional proof that the British can make just as bad pictures as anyone else. This third-rate gangster melodrama … was filmed six years ago [sic] and forgotten until this week. Let’s just imagine it never happened.”

As the anemic returns for Ivy became evident, Menzies’ name disappeared from column items concerning Purgatory Street. The film’s September 1 starting date got set back to December due to “casting difficulties.” In early September, Charles Bennett was reported as working on the script, but then Sam Wood told Hedda Hopper he was looking for an unknown for the lead, and interest in the project fell off precipitously.

Nineteen forty-seven, which had started out so hopefully, became a year in which Menzies’ drinking began to impact his ability to earn a living. Sam Goldwyn refused to hire him again after the debacle of The North Star, and now he had likely damaged his relationship with Sam Wood, who neither smoked nor drank. (“Daddy did some wild things,” his daughter Suzie admitted. “He drove home one night from a bar with somebody’s car hooked to the back bumper.”) In 1942, Menzies’ daughter Jean had married Lowell Lauesen, a music major at UCLA, and in December 1944, while Lowell, a navy technician, was stationed in San Diego, she presented her father with a grandchild, Pamela Mignon. Now, in June, a grandson, Barry Cameron, was added to the family. Menzies turned fifty-one on July 29, and seventeen days later, on August 15, 1947, he took the pledge, giving up booze for the sake of his home life as well as his career. Wrote Mignon, “When he finally went on the wagon … he became a soapbox orator on ‘the evils of liquor’ and wondered why he hadn’t come to his senses sooner—and how I wish he had.”

Soon, Sam Wood was making more news in politics than in pictures, having founded the anticommunist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. “If my father had never met William Randolph Hearst,” mused Jeane Wood, “I think he might have been a good Democrat.” Both Jeane and her sister, Gloria, were loyal Democrats, a fact that eventually drove a wedge between them and their father. “They adored the man,” said actor Jack Harris, a close family friend, “but detested his politics. He accused them of being communists, and that made matters worse.” In October, as Purgatory Street was foundering, Wood traveled east to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify on communist efforts to gain control of the Screen Directors Guild. “I definitely feel these people should be labeled as agents of a foreign country,” he testified. “If you drop their rompers, you’ll find the hammer and sickle on their rear end.”

According to Suzie, Menzies cringed at Wood’s stridency and his growing intolerance of other viewpoints: “The only thing Sam Wood ever said to me was ‘Where’s Bill?’ Daddy bitched about him a lot—I think about politics. Daddy was a little to the left, but he certainly wasn’t a communist.… He didn’t agree with Sam’s politics, and I think Sam had sense enough not to talk it up too much in front of Daddy. He didn’t want to lose him. Besides, Daddy was the most un-political person I ever knew in my life. I don’t think he even voted. He threatened to vote for Henry Wallace if we voted for Dewey, but I don’t think he actually voted for anyone.” On December 2, Sam Wood announced that he had called off Purgatory Street and would instead be dusting off The Land Is Bright as his next picture. Eleven days later, he closed down Inter-Wood, indicating it would “cease to function in its association with Universal-International.” He did, however, retain the rights to Purgatory Street and Jubal Troop, and said that he would seek to line up with another studio as a producer-director. “There has been talk that independent activities might abate under economic pressure,” Edwin Schallert commented in the Los Angeles Times, “and this is one of the first tangible evidences affecting an important film maker.” It is said that an amicable ending of their association was reached between William Goetz of U.I. and Wood. “Casting problems,” he added, “are many for the independents.”

* Hempstead later resurfaced as associate producer on Portrait of Jennie (1949).