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"WILD BILL": WILLIAM A. WELLMAN
Interview by
SCOTT EYMAN
a Film Comment online exclusive
Left: Track of the Cat
This interview, originally published in 1978, appeared in issue #29 of Focus
on Film. Many thanks to Scott Eyman for letting us reprint it.
William Wellman was the stuff of which legends are made. Wildly iconoclastic, with a reputation for real-life roistering every bit the equal of the cinematic escapades of Wayne, McLaglen and Co., Wellman is a man spoken of with sly smiles, libellous if loving reminiscences and unprintable anecdotes by his friends and coworkers.
What the beloved Hollywood legend of "Wild Bill" wilfully obscures is that under the carefully cultivated roughhouse exterior lay a serious, sensitive film-maker, addicted not to political charades or paeans to conformism but to oblique, level-headed sociological essays and-as Andrew MeLaglen, who served his directonal apprenticeship under Wellman, told me-"common sense adventure."
In his stories, character relationships and film-making technique, "common sense" is the watchword. Wellman's characters may occasionally do crazy, irresponsible things, but they do them for very good reasons. Even when dabbling in the sentimental cynicism of screwball comedy, Wellman's characters act out of real and even desperate needs: Nothing Sacred's Carole Lombard believing she is dying, Roxie Hart's Ginger Rogers on trial for murder, etc.
On the rare occasions when Wellman let himself be seduced away from the gritty realism of his character's inner emotions and outward actions, disaster struck - as in the eminently silly, foolish and almost unwatchable The Next Voice You Hear in which the voice of God, for no discernibly obvious reason, speaks via radio to the People as represented by shirt-sleeved working stiff James Whitmore and tells them of the errors of their ways-off-screen, of course, for what does the voice of God sound like? C. B. DeMille? Charlton Heston? I don't know and obviously neither Wellman nor Dore Schary, whose misguidedly reverent production it was, did either. Being such a pretentious exception to the rule, the gauche and naive The Next Voice You Hear can probably be safely attributed to Schary's passion for preaching to the proletariat. To their everlasting credit, the proletariat didn't seem nearly as interested in listening as Schary was in talking.
Then there's the question of Wellman's supposedly "grotesque," antique style. Along with Chaplin, Wellman was probably the only director of his generation to really appreciate the dramatic value and pictorial possibilities of the medium long-shot. Only when faced with the essentially claustrophobic occurrences of The Ox-Bow Incident(neatly emphasised by the use of tightly-enclosed studio sets-much of the compact punch of the film would be irrevocably gone had Wellman resorted to the easy alternative of shooting it in Monument Valley) - only then would Wellman resort to the convenient option of filling his frame with faces.
One of the best things about William Wellman was that he never took himself that seriously when he was making movies and he certainly didn't in his old age. Unlike the name-dropping of a Bogdanovich, with his endless recitatives of what he said to Orson and Marlene and what they said to him, or the bucolic deprecations of a Ford, Wellman was keenly aware of both his good and bad films. Full of neither false ego nor phoney modesty, Wellman was replete with blistering contempt for the venal money men who run the industry and full of passionate, unstated love for the medium itself.
Probably no other director of comparable talent has been ignored and downgraded for so long. In a modern critical environment where the only universal characteristic is gross exaggeration, the neglect is all the more mystifying.
Critics in recent years have been stumbling over themselves trying to find objects of veneration in the rubble of American programme films, stopping the sifting to occasionally throw a stone at a genuinely monumental structure - the vicious and irresponsible downgrading of Chaplin, for instance - to make amiable lightweights like Dwan, Sirk, Leisen, and others too ordinary to even mention, seem larger by comparison - all this while mentioning Wellman in terms of his energy (called "crude") or his intentions (patronised as "good").
Yet, when viewed as a whole, Wellman's career maintains an astonishingly high standard - from the film that singlehandedly created a genre, the grandiloquent and immensely moving Wings, to Lafayette Escadrille, that romantic, aborted, mistitled epic, the most bluntly autobiographical film ever made by an American director and the movie that closed his career.
Wellman's main concerns were with men much like himself, men bristling with kinetic energy and violent enthusiasms, men inclined to trample opposition or interference. What keeps his characters, and indeed himself, from being merely legendary bullies is an abiding sense of vulnerability underneath the crust; Wellman's men are eminently tameable by women of like guts and courage.
It is indeed ironic that his self-imposed retirement was the result of a producer tampering with Lafayette Escadrille-interference he could not surmount, dealing with a subject with which he was too close to settle for half-truths - his own youth.
Like many final works often do, Lafayette Escadrille reveals much about the man who made it. Narrated in a surpassingly gentle and perceptive tone by Wellman himself, it reveals the essential duality of a man who can appreciate both a not-so-good-natured fistfight and a passive moment of contemplative innocence. In one of the most touching and elegiac moments in all of Wellman's work, the camera slowly tracks over rows of young men sleeping in a barracks somewhere in France as Wellman's voice softly describes the tragic fate that lies waiting for most of them, marked for destruction by the juggernaut of war.
In essence, Wellman's was a profoundly American personality, full of drive and energy, while at the same time being fully capable of comprehending and pondering the inescapability of death and dissolution: a quintessential combination of pagan and poet.
Wellman died on December 9, 1975, of Ieukaemia, at his home in Brentwood where this interview was conducted. He was seventy-nine and remained vital and feisty to the end. Respecting his wishes, Wellman was cremated and his ashes scattered from an airplane into the clouds and sky that he always loved.
You were born in New England?
Yeah, in Brookline, Massachusetts. My father was a stockbroker, although not a particularly successful one. And my mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman. She was a little bitty gal named Cecilia McCarthy; she was from Ireland. She had two sons, my brother and myself. When she died she was within two months of being ninety-eight years old and sharp as a tack!
When I was a kid, I was a crazy bastard. I was a good athlete; quarterback on the football team, shortstop on the baseball team, and rover-the fastest and dirtiest player of them all - on the ice hockey team - in those days, there were seven men on ice hockey teams.
When my father had some money, my mother became the probation officer for Newton Highlands, outside of Boston. She always called the delinquents "wayward boys"; she absolutely refused to let anybody call them anything else. So, when I got kicked out of high school, I had to report to the probation officer of the city of Newton for six months - who was my own mother.
What did you do to get kicked out?
I dropped a stink bomb on the principal's bald head. A direct hit. My mother was such a successful probation officer that she was asked to speak to Congress about juvenile delinquency. She told them that of all the thousands of boys she'd worked with, the only one she couldn't control was her own son!
So you had a turbulent, middle class upbringing?
I think it was a little above middle class. But I had a beautiful boyhood, with a wonderful mother. My dad had a little drinking problem, but my mother was in love with him and there was never anyone else. My brother and I had a hell of a boyhood. I used to borrow cars at night and take them out for a ride. But we always brought them back.
After you got booted out of high school, did you go directly into the Lafayette Flying Corps?
No, I tried various things. I tried being a candy salesman, but I never sold a pound of candy. I tried being a cotton belting salesman but I never sold a foot of that. Then my brother, who was in the wool business, got me into Coffin and Gilmour, a Philadelphia wool firm, as a salesman. I never sold any of whatever the hell you sell wool by, pound or whatever. So then I went to work in a lumberyard, and I was a hell of a success.
I started in Waltham, Massachusetts, in the middle of the winter with great big freight cars full of South Carolina flooring. I started out as a lumper and then a piler and I did those things so well that they made me a truckdriver. Then I lost control of the truck one day in Roxbury, Massachusetts and drove through a barn. They fired me, so I decided to get the hell out of there. I'd always wanted to learn to fly, so one of my father's brothers, Francis Wellman, got me in the Flying Corps.
Just because you wanted to learn to fly?
That simple.
Didn't the prospect of getting killed enter your mind?
I was nineteen years old, a crazy bastard. It never occurred to me until I got into it. When I got out there, I thought to myself, "What the hell are you doing here?" Then I wished I'd never gotten into it.
How close did you come to getting killed?
I had a crack-up caused by the most useless things in the entire war: anti-aircraft guns. I and an Englishman are the only ones I know of who got shot down by those things. It didn't hurt me, but it blew my tail off so I had no control over the thing at all. Greatest goddamm acrobatics you ever saw in your life.
The courage it must have taken to go up in those flimsy crates . . .
It wasn't courage: we all wanted to learn to fly and that was the quickest way. We only had four instruments, none of which worked, and no parachutes. It was wonderful!
Are you scared of dying?
I hate to think about it. Certainly I am. I don't want to die now and I didn't want to then. I just didn't think about it as much then as I do now. I'm funny that way; I'm an Episcopalian, supposedly. I'm supposed to think there's a God. I say my prayers every night because my mother always taught me to.
Nowadays, lots of people look on World War One with nostalgia, as the last of the "noble" wars.
Balls. In that movie The Blue Max and others, these guys would come back to these beautifully dressed dames and champagne. Goddamn! At Lunéville, where I was stationed, there was one fairly good-looking girl and her mother. One. All the menfolk had been killed and she and her mother took in laundry. She wore wooden shoes, and your reputation was based on whether you were a no shoe man, a one shoe man or a two shoe man. If, during sex, you could shake both her shoes off, you were a hell of a lay.
She took everybody on?
Not everybody. She confined it mostly to flyers. But, hell, there was no one else.
How many pilots were left after the war?
Out of 222, eighty-seven were killed. I flew with Tom Hitchcock, the great polo player. Tom and I were in the "Black Cat" group.
What happened after the war?
During the last six months of the war, I joined the American Air Corps because I was broke and they were trying to get us in. They made me an officer and sent me down to Rockwell Field in San Diego. I taught combat. I used to fly up and land on Doug Fairbanks' polo fields and spend the weekend with him; he had met me when I was playing hockey up in Boston and he was playing at the Colonial Theatre in a thing called "Hawthorne of the U.S.A." He used to come up and watch us play at the Boston Arena on Sundays. For some reason or another, he liked me and asked me to come backstage at the Colonial; that was the start of a very wonderful relationship.
So one day he told me that, after the war was over, he'd have a job for me. So when it was all over, he made me an actor. I was the juvenile in Knickerbocker Buckaroo and then I played a sub-lieutenant in Evangeline.
Eventually, I had guts enough to go look at myself and it made me so sick . . . I ran out of the theatre, went to Doug and said, "I don't mean any disrespect, but I'm no actor." Jesus, the guys from the Lafayette Flying Corps that were still alive were sending me the most insulting letters!
So Doug said, "What do you want to be?" So I pointed to Albert Parker, who was the director of occasion, and said, "Well, what does he make?" So Doug told me and I said "That's what I want to be." It was purely financial. So I finally got a job as a messenger boy, as an assistant cutter, an assistant property man, a property man, an assistant director, second unit director, and eventually I became a director.
What were those early westerns, your first directorial jobs, like?
Oh, we had stories. Bad ones. That was when I made two of the worst pictures I've ever made in my life. One was with Dustin Farnum called The Twins of Suffering Creek [actually released as The Man Who Won]--now, you can just tell what a hell of a picture that had to be. Then I made one with Buck Jones, who was a western star, called Cupid's Fireman. Great, great pictures!
If you look through my whole record, I made a lot of lousy pictures (never intentionally), a lot in the middle, and a few I puff my head out about. I think that's true of everybody. Even Jack Ford, as much as I admire him, went overboard on the Civil War. I got so sick of all those Civil War pictures; he used to have books under his pillow about the Civil War.
Tell me about Wings.
God, I made it in 1927, it's silent, the whole method of making pictures is different, the tempo is different, even the frame size is different. I look at some of those scenes today and say "Jesus, I couldn't have made that." But Clara Bow is magnificent; she holds the thing up. And Coop is good.
The battle sequences are still magnificent.
Oh yeah. All done with hand-cranked cameras. And those air battles - Arlen and Rogers had to go up and do it.
There's even a zoom lens effect in one shot: Rogers crashes and jumps in a shellhole; then the enemy plane dives in on him, shooting. As the bullets splash around him, the camera zooms in; how'd you get that effect?
You really want to know the answer? I don't know; I can't remember. Honest and truly, I'd tell you in a minute but I can't
remember. I think I did it with a hand-held, battery-run Eyemo. I think. We didn't have zooms, I know that.
In the air battles, how did you get the effect of the planes being on fire after they were hit?
Well, we didn't set them on fire. Almost. We had incendiary torches that the guys would release from the cockpit on signal. We hoped that they wouldn't set the planes on fire and they didn't. We had a great bunch of guys on that film - all those crazy flyers, crazy as I am. We got along fine. They'd do anything I asked.
