Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film

3 The Women: The Early Forties

3 The Women The Early Forties He was like the best cup of coffiee you ever had. —Jean Arthur At the USA Film Festival in 1971 Stevens was asked to comment on his prewar reputation as a “woman’s director,” working in the 1930s and 1940s with Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Jean Arthur. “I didn’t come by that activity by training,” he said. “My interests had been in other areas—outdoor films and outside stuff where you could travel somewhere and see some things other than shoot over a chaise lounge in a boudoir at the handsome lady reclining there as she read beautiful dialogue.”1 Stevens was happiest outdoors, shooting the western landscape, meeting people with histories, much like his own, that were rooted in that landscape. But at RKO he hitched his career to sophisticated stories about women and kept riding with it even after he left the studio. Studio publicity shots of the late 1930s and 1940s show a relaxed, easygoing Stevens, his shy demeanor of Alice Adams days replaced by a smiling, pipe-smoking man about town flanked by Tracy and Hepburn, or mugging with Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea on the set of The More 68 the Merrier, looking as if a chaise lounge were not an unfamiliar prop. By the mid-1930s he had gained a reputation as a master of the sophisticated light comedy, and his finesse with the screwball comedy (a term he never liked using with own films) was about to bring him even greater popularity with audiences—and Columbia’s front office. Hollywood consensus was that he had the magic touch with comedy, so much in fact that some of his colleagues—Hepburn most famously—could hardly understand or forgive his leaving those forms for larger, more serious subjects after the war. Stevens looked to be in his element shooting in “boudoirs” among the chaises and, most of all, manipulating the “beautiful dialogue” of strong actresses Hepburn, Arthur, and Irene Dunne. After a successful decade at RKO, he was more settled artistically at the beginning of the 1940s, more in control of his craft in what would ironically prove to be the most tumultuous decade in his personal life. In the span of the next three years he would direct four commercially and critically successful “women’s” films, then toss his career aside to go to Europe to photograph American soldiers in combat. When he returned from the war he sought out larger fictional landscapes than the interior of a boudoir. He would again go looking for the “outside stuff,” as if his very being as an artist depended on it. The 1940s began for Stevens on a less than positive note; in 1940 RKO released the expensive Vigil in the Night to box office disinterest. When contract problems arose there and he left, he went to freelance, but quickly landed at Columbia Pictures where Sam Briskin, then assistant to studio head Harry Cohn, worked out a satisfactory deal with Charlie Feldman for Stevens’s services. The deal appeared noncombative on paper, and it proved financially and artistically rewarding. At Columbia he produced and directed Penny Serenade, The Talk of the Town, and The More the Merrier, all highly successful films that reached massivewartimeaudiences ,especiallywomen,andespeciallywhentheyplayed at New York City’s Music Hall Theatre, one of Stevens’s favorite venues where films had long runs and the auditorium seated up to four thousand. Even during this time of urbane, witty women’s stories, however, Stevens never lost sight of the early Western days shooting Rex the Wonder Horse, but instead held them at bay. He told Screen and The Women 69 • Radio Weekly right after Gunga Din was released that all he ever looked for was a good story: “They all look alike to me. Motion picture stories, I mean. Not wishing to take any bows for so-called versatility, I’ll qualify by saying that it doesn’t make any difference to me what sort of story I’m called upon to direct, always providing the story has something to say. I look only for the basic idea. If in the situations the emotions are honest and the reactions natural, it doesn’t make any difference whether the story is drama or comedy, slapstick or tragedy, musical or western, cops and robbers, or Indians and cowboys!”2 It...