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29 Ingrid Bergman and Joan of Arc The making of Fleming’s last picture, Joan of Arc, became one of those behind-the-scene sagas far more fascinating than the finished film, like the productions of Cleopatra or Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate. It would span a decade and a half of creative flirtations, turbulent love affairs, and discordant ambitions. In the end it would humble a renowned playwright, Maxwell Anderson; a towering director, Fleming ; and an adventurous producer, Walter Wanger. Even its presentation of Ingrid Bergman as an apple-cheeked warrior-saint—the ultimate tomboy heroine—backfired shortly after the film’s release, when the American public condemned her for deserting her husband, Dr. Petter Lindström, and their daughter, Pia, for the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Released in December 1948, Joan of Arc would bear the credit “A Victor Fleming Production.” But Anderson and Bergman were the catalysts for retelling the story of the peasant girl who was born in 1412 in the village of Domrémy, near the line dividing the provinces of Lorraine and Champagne. They were the ones committed, in contradictory ways, to celebrating her heroism (and martyrdom) when she responded to the voices of three angel-saints, rallied an army against the English, and crowned a king of France in the thick of the Hundred Years’ War. The fight to transform Anderson’s modernist 1946 play, Joan of Lorraine, into the church-pageant-like Joan of Arc became a battle royal. In 1934, Anderson was at the crest of his fame as a dramatist who could turn contemporary and historical subjects into blank verse and Broadway hits. So when the producer Pandro S. Berman wanted to commission a prestige writer to do a Joan of Arc screenplay for the director-star team of George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn, the Srag_9780375407482_3p_07_r2.z.qxp 10/13/08 10:37 AM Page 446 RKO-based filmmaker commanded representatives in New York to go after the playwright. But Anderson was busy, so they signed Thornton Wilder instead, for a work that never got past the treatment stage. In 1940, David O. Selznick took Wilder’s treatment out of mothballs only because he knew Joan was one of Ingrid Bergman’s dream roles. A shower of news items promised a Bergman Joan of Arc as Selznick’s epic follow-up to Gone With the Wind. His New York story editor, Kay Brown, proposed hiring Winifred Lenihan, a veteran of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, to assist Selznick’s Swedish star with her characterization of the French saint as well as her command of English (her third language, after Swedish and German). But Selznick had aesthetic qualms about trying to push through a Joan of Arc movie, even with his prize protégée and the expatriate Jean Renoir attached to direct. (Renoir was appreciated here—his Grand Illusion had been nominated for an American best picture Oscar, running against Test Pilot.) In his usual blizzard of memos, Selznick doubted the vitality of Joan as a film subject and feared adulterating “Ingrid’s natural talent” with stage technique. And he may have experienced the same qualms Victor Saville sensed at MGM when he was supposed to go back to England to direct Garbo in a Joan of Arc movie: “We never got around to it because the Allies invaded Normandy and I suppose they thought it was hardly the picture to make.” Whether Joan of Arc stuck in Anderson’s mind for a decade or changing times suddenly made her story more relevant, eleven years later he wrote the stage piece A Girl from Lorraine, which eventually became Joan of Lorraine. Although the play hasn’t worn well, it proved a commercial and critical comeback for Anderson. (He hadn’t had a hit since Key Largo in 1939.) Forsaking his usual blank verse for prose, he employed a playwithin -a-play format to dramatize the conflict between idealism and compromise, which stirred returning veterans as well as home-front idealists. Should Joan stick to her vision of uniting France under its Dauphin, even if the Dauphin she aims to make king is a self-loathing coward surrounded by opportunists? Can she reconcile her divine dream of expelling the English with the subterfuge and decadence of the French court? How can any higher faith endure an environment that prizes power and money? Reading Joan of Lorraine (it’s much easier to read than to perform), you can...

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