The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (200 page)

He was very good as a boozy aristocrat in
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End
(80, Steve Roberts);
The Sea Wolves
(80, Andrew V. McLaglen); as an Indian chief in
Windwalker
(80, Keith Merrill);
Light Years
(81, Alain Tanner); as a judge in
Gandhi
(82, Richard Attenborough); reunited with Celia Johnson in
Staying On
(82, Silvio Narizzano);
Inside the Third Reich
(82, Marvin J. Chomsky);
The Missionary
(82, Richard Loncraine);
Sword of the Valiant
(85, Stephen Weeks); very good in
Dust
(85, Marion Hansel);
Time After Time
(85, Bill Hays);
Christmas Eve
(86, Stuart Cooper);
Foreign Body
(86, Neame);
Peter the Great
(86, Chomsky and Lawrence Schiller);
White Mischief
(88, Michael Radford); and
The Dawning
(88, Robert Knights).

William K. Howard
(1899–1954), b. St. Marys, Ohio
1921:
What Love Will Do; Get Your Man
(codirected with George W. Hill);
Play Square
. 1922:
Extra! Extra!; Deserted at the Altar
(codirected with Al Kelley);
Lucky Dan; The Crusader; Captain Fly-by-Night; Trooper O’Neil
. 1923:
Danger Ahead; The Fourth Musketeer; Let’s Go
. 1924:
The Border Legion; East of Broadway
. 1925:
Code of the West; The Light of Western Stars; The Thundering Herd
. 1926:
Volcano; Red Dice; Bachelor Brides; Gigolo
. 1927:
White Gold; The Main Event
. 1928:
The River Pirate; A Ship Comes In
. 1929:
Christina; The Valiant; Love, Live and Laugh
. 1930:
Good Intentions; Scotland Yard
. 1931:
Don’t Bet on Women; Transatlantic; Surrender
. 1932:
The Trial of Vivienne Ware; The First Year; Sherlock Holmes
. 1933:
The Power and the Glory
. 1934:
The Cat and the Fiddle; This Side of Heaven; Evelyn Prentice
. 1935:
Vanessa; Rendezvous; Mary Burns, Fugitive
. 1936:
The Princess Comes Across
. 1937:
Fire Over England; The Squeaker
. 1939:
Back Door to Heaven
. 1940:
Money and the Woman
. 1941:
Bullets for O’Hara
. 1942:
Klondike Fury
. 1943:
Johnny Come Lately
. 1944:
When the Lights Go On Again
. 1945:
A Guy Could Change
.

After war service, Howard worked on the sales side for Vitagraph and Universal, and then became an assistant director. During the 1920s, he was with Fox, Paramount, De Mille, and Fox again. But in 1934 he joined MGM for a year. After a brief spell at Paramount he went to England to make the patriotic Tudor epic,
Fire Over England
, and an Edgar Wallace adaptation,
The Squeaker
. On returning to America, he found it hard to get back into first features. He moved from one studio to another and only
Johnny Come Lately
, with Cagney, was as important as his earlier work.

In fact, Howard made several good pictures, so that the decline is all the stranger. As a director of silents, he was generally confined to the athletic adventures of Richard Talmadge and Rod La Rocque. But with sound he became much more polished. Clive Brook made an authoritative Sherlock Holmes, while
The First Year
was a successful Janet Gaynor/Charles Farrell film.
The Power and the Glory
, from a Preston Sturges script, was an ambitious study of a tycoon, sometimes regarded as a forerunner of
Kane. Evelyn Prentice
and
Mary Burns, Fugitive
were both glossy melodramas, but
The Princess Comes Across
is his best, set on a liner, with Carole Lombard as a fake princess. A more elevated, but just as contrived view of royalty made
Fire Over England
a very entertaining picture.

Rock Hudson
(Roy Harold Scherer Jr.) (1925–85), b. Winnetka, Illinois
When he came out of the navy in 1946, Roy Scherer was taken up by talent scout Henry Willson and offered to David Selznick. Selznick saw only a truck-driver hunk with the unlikely new name of “Rock Hudson.” So Willson got the kid installed at Universal as prime potential movie meat, something like a sincere Victor Mature, a soft rock. We have to marvel now about who knew what when. Henry Willson was a known homosexual. And Hudson, for all his physique, was already possessed of comedic talent and more intelligence than his first films had time for.

Although he made his debut at Warners, in Raoul Walsh’s
Fighter Squadron
(48), he was really the product of Universal. He began with bit parts and supports:
Undertow
(49, William Castle); an Indian in Mann’s
Winchester 73
(50);
The Desert Hawk
(50, Frederick de Cordova); Fregonese’s
One Way Street
(50); in 1951—
Air Cadet
and
Iron Man
for Joseph Pevney and
Bright Victory
for Mark Robson. He grew into longer parts in a series of adventure and B pictures. In the space of three years, he worked as often as possible in Hollywood’s last great profusion of adventure excitement: 1952—
Bend of the River
(Mann);
Scarlet Angel
(Sidney Salkow);
Has Anybody Seen My Gal?
(Douglas Sirk); and
Horizons West
(Budd Boetticher); 1953—
Seminole
(Boetticher);
Sea Devils
(Walsh);
Back to God’s Country
(Pevney);
Gun Fury
(Walsh); and
Bengal Brigade
(Laslo Benedek); 1954–55—four films for his perceptive patron, Douglas Sirk:
Taza, Son of Cochise; Captain Lightfoot; Magnificent Obsession;
and
All That Heaven Allows
.

Sirk had seen that, despite so many escapades, Hudson was innately gentle and sympathetic. Thus he began a new career as a sustaining figure in women’s pictures. He surprised many people with his quiet authority in George Stevens’s
Giant
(56) and worked three more times for Sirk: in
Battle Hymn
(57) conventionally, but in
Written on the Wind
(56) and
The Tarnished Angels
(57) exceptionally. In the latter, the drunken reporter is one of his better performances and a sign of depths that were never fully explored.

After Richard Brooks’s worthy
Something of Value
(57) and a respectable Frederick Henry in the Selznick–Charles Vidor
A Farewell to Arms
(57), he became embroiled with Ross Hunter and usually Doris Day or Gina Lollobrigida in a number of comedies that bridged the gap between gaiety and permissiveness, largely through innuendo. They were uneasy films, but they were very successful, and at last Hudson was proved in comedy:
Pillow Talk
(59, Michael Gordon);
Come September
(61, Robert Mulligan);
Lover Come Back
(61, Delbert Mann);
Send Me No Flowers
(64, Norman Jewison);
Strange Bedfellows
(65, Panama/Frank); and
A Very Special Favor
(65, Gordon). Between times, he made a few offbeat failures:
The Last Sunset
(61) for Aldrich,
The Spiral Road
(62) for Mulligan, and
A Gathering of Eagles
(63) for Delbert Mann. His best comedy by far is Hawks’s
Man’s Favorite Sport?
(64), as memorably beset by Paula Prentiss as ever Grant was by Hepburn, and admirably clutching at the flawed calm of the angling authority who has never caught a fish.

After that, Hudson made no worthwhile films: he was uneasy as the hero in Frankenheimer’s pretentious
Seconds
(66); unable to do better than some slack war films and tame comedies:
Tobruk
(67, Arthur Hiller); John Sturges’s
Ice Station Zebra
(68);
The Undefeated
(69, Andrew V. McLaglen) with mustache and John Wayne; the dreadful
Darling Lili
(69) with Blake Edwards and darling Julie; Phil Karlson’s
Hornet’s Nest
(69); mustachioed and portly in Vadim’s
Pretty Maids All in a Row
(71), in which he seemed placidly amused at the chance of grappling with so many naked adolescents. In fact, Vadim neglected the comic potential of Hudson as a cool, campus Bluebeard.

At fifty (I felt in 1975), Hudson faced a crisis: without good comedies he might dwindle into such TV series as
MacMillan and Wife
. The crisis proved much greater.
MacMillan
was a hit on TV, and Hudson made few worthwhile films:
Showdown
(73, George Seaton);
Embryo
(76, Ralph Nelson);
Avalanche
(78, Corey Allen);
The Mirror Crack’d
(80, Guy Hamilton); as a movie director in
The Star Maker
(81, Lou Antonio) bedding all the starlets; as the President in
World War III
(82, David Greene);
The Ambassador
(84, J. Lee Thompson); and as a casino owner in
The Vegas Strip Wars
(84, George Englund).

Hudson was reluctant to admit that he had AIDS—who could blame him? Hollywood remains in conflict over any admission of homosexuality. But Hudson became the first famous victim of AIDS in movies, and everything he ever did became recast or reappraised in the light of the tragedy. Books said his marriage had been arranged to avert scandal. At the very least, the vaunted, rocklike masculinity of great male stars moved closer to the light. The rocks, sometimes, are cardboard shapes moved around by props people.

Howard Hughes
(1905–76), b. Houston, Texas
Picture people cannot get enough of Howard Hughes—no matter the nagging suggestion from factual accounts that there was not a lot there. But the little is so primed for legend, it leaves one feeling that the doleful, suspicious Hughes had some hygienic plan for missing life altogether and going straight into myth. So his associates wrote books about him—Robert Maheu and Noah Dietrich. There has been a life by Charles Higham, and the documented business history,
Empire
, by Donald Barlett and James Steele—to say nothing of Hughes’s viruslike recurrence in so much contemporary political history.

Then there is Jason Robards’s shaggy vagrant story in the desert in
Melvin and Howard
(80, Jonathan Demme), Dean Stockwell’s thoughtful cameo in
Tucker
(88, Francis Coppola), and the most complete screen portrait, brilliant and pathological, like an uncle for Gary Gilmore, by Tommy Lee Jones in
The Amazing Howard Hughes
(77, William A. Graham). Over all these has hung the chance that Warren Beatty will one day—when he is old enough?—play Howard Hughes. That prospect is itself legendary, or airborne, and it reminds us that Hughes came very close to contriving his own death in his favorite, infinite setting, the sky (Barlett and Steele establish that he was already a corpse when loaded on the plane at Acapulco). So he just missed Gregory Arkadin’s sublime demise in
Confidential Report
(55, Orson Welles). But that reminds us that Hughes had surely affected movie romance since the time of
Citizen Kane
.

My favorite piece of Hughes mythology is Joan Didion’s 1967 essay, a tribute to a haunted house forsaken by its ghost, “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38” (the title refers to the Hughes office in Los Angeles—still there, still closed). Didion could see even then that Hughes—in his wondrous, if not lyrical, absence—had become chiefly a subject for stories, a living fiction: “That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake … but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.”

As a hopeless Hughes admirer (who once horrified a future father-in-law by waxing suggestive on hapless Howard), I can testify to the wings of Didion’s soaring. And I think it’s plain why Hughes excites movie people: the daft wealth, the amazing fame,
and
the yearning to be nothing; the obsession with flying; the taste for hotels, Las Vegas, and bloodless food delivered in plastic bags—this is the little boy’s kingdom; the foolish resort to movies, to running studios, to brunettes, blondes, and breasts. He is the fan who walked in off the street, who made movies and bossed a studio, and who was crazy and hopeful enough to think of having Jean Harlow, Jane Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Ida Lupino, Jean Simmons, Janet Leigh, Faith Domergue, even Jean Peters (the one he married) and so on, into the night. Hughes did what every shy, lonely moviegoer dreams of doing. And he went as mad as a hatter, leaving the legend to Clifford Irving and the rest of us.

Some people mock his preoccupation with Jane Russell, as if sexual devotion were not a noble thing. Russell was a very amiable, amused woman; especially when young, she was extremely sexy in that same tongue-in-cheek manner, as if aware that there was only one way we were ever going to find out whether her breasts were real or not; the cinematography of breasts was thrust forward by
The Outlaw
, as was the medium’s creative teasing of prudery and censorship; Hughes’s record shows that he endorsed Russell’s blatant and honest reckoning of sexual pleasure, and at the same time looked on it as a joke; in that respect, as in others, Hughes’s intermittent association with Hawks shows in their style and attitudes; but, most interesting, it was the drollery of Russell as any boy’s erection kit that looked forward to the lyrical gilding of the pinup by American pop artists of the 1950s; and that anticipates the philosophically amused bisexual emphasis of Warhol’s films—which, in turn, reminds us that that mistreated vagrant,
The Outlaw
, was the first American film to suggest that homosexuality might be pleasant.