Continuing the overview of Stevens’ career from my initial post…
After the success of
Alice Adams George Stevens directed another seven films for RKO over the next four years:
Annie Oakley (1935),
Swing Time (1936),
Quality Street (1937),
A Damsel in Distress (1937),
Vivacious Lady (1938),
Gunga Din (1939) and
Vigil in the Night (1940). His star rose quickly during this period, and he soon came to be considered one of RKO’s top directors. He worked quickly, (up until
Gunga Din) within budget, and developed a reputation for being an excellent and sympathetic women’s director. However, Stevens felt that the studio worked him too hard, and although he did manage to renegotiate his contract toward the end of his stint at RKO, he was tired of arguing with the studio brass, and eventually left after the completion of
Vigil in the Night for Columbia Pictures of all places.
Annie Oakley appears to have been designed as a project to introduce Barbara Stanwyck to RKO audiences as their hot new star. It is unclear to me to what extent Stevens had much input on the choice of the material itself, but to all intents and purposes it was in line with his interests in Americana, which had also been the background for the early films he worked on with Rex the Wonderhorse, and which he would always cite as some of the happiest experiences in his career. If Stevens did not have a lot of choice in the material, he did have a tremendous amount of input on the script, although he received no formal credit. When shooting began, apparently only four pages of the script were finished, so Stevens commenced to work with the authors of the biography upon which the film was based to write the script alongside the actual shooting of the film. Stevens also took to researching Annie’s life, had her set of guns shipped to the studio (although they were never actually used in the film), and even went so far as to track down living family members of Annie’s, eventually locating and briefly corresponding with her only surviving brother in Ohio.
To me, at first glance, the film has all the trimmings of a solid studio picture, but may not be so immediately recognizable as a Stevens production. Although there is a lot of comedy in the film, the central love story between Annie and fellow sharpshooter Toby Walker (Preston Foster) is fairly straightforward melodrama, and most of the fun derives from the large set of eccentric characters that people the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, as well as the small backwoods community that Annie hails from. This humor is also more gag-oriented than in Stevens’ more famous comedies. What is consistent with many of Stevens’ other films of this period is of course the focus on a strong female character, and I suppose
vivahawks’ concern about casting would also extend to Preston Foster as Toby Walker. Surely, the character, and/or Foster as an actor, hardly comes off as strong enough to make the romance with Annie altogether believable.
Knowing the background of the production, I also think that the meticulous research that Stevens undertook is visible on screen. Certainly, there is a nice sense of authenticity and detail on display in the scenes revolving around the Wild West circus, and in the scenes taking place in Annie’s hometown. There are many little touches that add color to the story by painting in the background of the times, as in one scene when all of the folks in Annie’s town are gathered for a photograph, and Stevens shows the laborious nature of the photographic process at the time. Or, early on, when Annie learns about the Wild West Show from a poster being pasted onto a fence next to the town store, and the congregation of old geezers, who are sitting on the porch of the store, gossiping in their drawling backwoods dialects.
Next, Stevens was handed the incomplete script of
Swing Time, and assigned the task of directing Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in their sixth film together for RKO. In later years, Stevens would look back on the RKO years with rosier spectacles, and comment that at the time of directing
Swing Time he was convinced that he could do any kind of picture. The reality probably was that he felt less confident going into the project – several different people came and went in working with him to finish the script, and he simultaneously battled RKO for a salary increase, which he received at the intervention of his agent.
Swing Time would be the only musical that Stevens directed in his career, but he somehow managed to create one of the most memorable Ginger and Fred movies. He was well served by Jerome Kern’s music, Dorothy Field’s lyrics, and Hermes Pan’s choreography of the dance numbers, but his own comedic ability also shines through in many scenes. Scenes that are given time to develop in the manner that Stevens felt most comfortable and happy with. The final result is a film that is very light and elegant, and it was another film that was unanimously lauded, and made great business for RKO.
Following this string of successful films, Stevens actually directed two films that were not so successful. The first was another film with Katharine Hepburn entitled
Quality Street, and the second was
A Damsel in Distress with Fred Astaire and George Burns. However, due to the hectic schedule on which Stevens was working, his next picture
Vivacious Lady was already completed by the time the other films opened, and it in turn was a big success at the box office. By the time of writing this, I have not yet been able to see the former two films, although they have seen release in Spain/Italy (anyone care to comment on these?)
Vivacious Lady was already discussed in several posts above. Interestingly, it may well have been Stevens’ most successful film at RKO. Apparently, the newspapers positively raved upon its release, and it is cited in Moss’ book as one of the Studio’s “strongest releases of the decade.â€
As Stevens became more and more confident of his own worth to RKO, he increasingly clashed with the studio on the same grounds that he had clashed with Roach a decade earlier. He wanted to direct more serious films, and in 1938 he devoted considerable time to convincing RKO to acquire the rights to Humphrey Cobb’s novel
Paths of Glory (later filmed by Stanley Kubrick); he began work on a screenplay, but was informed that the film could not be made. First, the studio explained that with the mounting unrest in Europe, the timing for such a dark anti-war film was not right. Upon Stevens’ continued insistence, he was told that France would not stand for the film, and would ban it (and, any other RKO films) from being screened in the country.
Instead, Stevens’ next film for RKO became
Gunga Din. Apparently Rudyard Kipling’s poem about a brave Indian water boy had been batted around at RKO for years, with several screenplays having been written, and a number of different directors attached to the project at various times. Howard Hawks was already assigned to direct the film, but RKO was becoming antsy over Hawks’ slow progress on
Bringing Up Baby, and decided to hand over the project to Stevens, who was now considered to be not only the studio’s most valuable director, but also a director known for being on time and on budget.
Stevens accepted the project on the condition that he could take it on location. This decision alone doubled the budget of the film, but RKO agreed, and Stevens soon settled on the area around Lone Pine in California as the location for the film. As usual, filming began without a completed script, because Stevens insisted on writing his own screenplay for the film; as it happened the screenplay was written on the installment plan throughout the production of the film, and the shoot itself has been described as one long series of improvisations, with no one in the crew or cast knowing what the next week of the shoot would bring.
As a result of this, the schedule and budget of the film ballooned. Originally, the shoot had been planned to take 64 days (already a long shoot for a film at the time), but actual shooting only wrapped after 104 days. Furthermore, the film, which had originally been budgeted at the standard of $250k, and then doubled to accommodate location shooting, eventually cost just short of $2 million to produce, and became by far the most expensive film in RKO’s history.
It has been a while since I viewed
Gunga Din. What I am stuck with is of course the scale of the story, and particularly the battle scenes, as well as the great fun with which the whole story is infused. It surely was one of the great, epic adventure films of the studio-sound era. In thinking about it now, however, I am fascinated that Stevens, who had only months before bitterly fought to make a deeply serious and tragic film about war, and who would in just a few years himself depart for the war in Europe, and eventually return utterly shaken and marked for life by his experiences, could turn around in 1938 and make such a light-hearted entertainment with so much battle and blood-letting.*
The great success of
Gunga Din at the box office notwithstanding, the film did not immediately make a profit, and it did nothing to improve the strain that had been growing between Stevens and RKO. Right after the premiere of
Gunga Din, Stevens proposed two projects to the studio – Katherine Kressman Taylor’s
Address Unknown and Phyllis Bottome’s
The Mortal Storm (later filmed by Frank Borzage), both of which were turned down for their political content by the studio after lengthy correspondence back and forth. Instead the studio proposed the novel
Sisters by A.J. Cronin, and it eventually became Stevens final film for RKO –
Vigil In the Night.
Vigil In the Night is to my knowledge completely unavailable on DVD. The film starred Carole Lombard cast against type in a serious role, and it sounds like a film that would be interesting, since it fulfilled Stevens' ambition to direct serious films. In any event, it failed rather miserably at the box office, but by the time of its premiere, Stevens had already left RKO as a result of the many clashes over the preceding couple of years.
To be continued…
* After writing the above, I found the following comments made by Stevens in 1973 in an interview with the American Film Institute, which answered some of my questions relative to
Gunga Din:
... I made [Gunga Din] just in time. Another year later and I'd have been too smart to do it, because the film is delightfully evil in the fascist sense. It celebrates the rumble of the drums and the waving of the flags. No one in modern times has done it as well or as with as much grace as the British with their uniforms and stiff salutes and all of that. I really got that film done just before it would have been too late. It wasn't a film of any great presumptions either. It wasn't after the Adolph Zukor gold bowl or any of those awards, but it did extremely well with the critics.
