Okay, I’d probably file Heller in Pink Tights (1960) under “interesting failure” too, but one worth a look, for its visual slyness as much as its garish beauty and theatrical playfulness. An anomaly for director George Cukor (his only western), it seems a bit harsh to trot this one out in the wee small hours of the morning, as part of the celebration of Sophia Loren as the Star of the Month on TCM tonight, 6/26 at 3:30AM EDT. Maybe this placement on the schedule was inevitable since the TCM programmer must have felt an undeniable urge to feature the less dramatically innovative but visually stunning Boy on a Dolphin (1957) earlier in the evening, especially since that production did provide a wondrous chink in the wall of the production code as the lady emerged from the sea, simply as God made her.

Think of the director George Cukor and verbally deft comedies along the lines of Adam’s Rib (1948) or the high romance of Camille (1936) or ensembles like The Women (1939) spring to mind, but a Western??

He was hardly a Henry Hathaway or John Ford or Howard Hawks sort of director, specializing in “men against the harsh elements” films. Mr. Cukor‘s natural world seemed to consist of the urbane drawing rooms of New York, Paris, and and occasional side trip to Reno, and most were filmed in the studio, mostly using the impeccably posh sets and costuming available at MGM.

Yet, in the mid to late fifties, he was still creative enough to try something new, and left the studio bound confines of his earlier work to experiment with open air filming in a variety of settings and to pursue fresh subject matter as well. The underrated The Marrying Kind (1952) with its quite moving, sober-edged, realistic look at a blue collar marriage consisting of Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray, was filmed partly and beautifully on the streets of New York, and should have alerted movie goers to Cukor‘s ability to experiment with techniques and dramatic styles associated with a younger generation.

Bhowani Junction (1956), one of Cukor‘s most visually beautiful films, swept us along into India at the end of the British Raj, (though hamfisted editing on the studio’s part broke his heart), and Wild Is the Wind (1957), filmed on a tension-filled location in Nevada, all proved that the old dog could pull some new tricks, when given the chance. Unfortunately, they were not particularly financially successful, though George Cukor‘s reputation was such that studios and actors longed to have their name associated with his movies.

Still, it must’ve shocked the management at Paramount a bit when Cukor chose a script based on an action-packed Louis L’Amour novel, Heller With a Gun for his next assignment there in the late ’50s. As the director later explained, in part because “I’m not expected to do a Western, but I do a Western—of a kind.” Seeing it primarily as a “romantic comedy” the director and his writers pushed the envelope as hard as other working filmmakers were at the end of the production code, but because the outcome was hard to define and categorize, like Sophia, American moviegoers weren’t always sure how to react to this odd, if very stylish movie.

Cukor was always a director with a strong affection for the knockabout as well tragicomic aspects of the pursuit of a theatrical life, from his earliest work in The Royal Family of Broadway, (co-directed with Cyril Gardner), Sylvia Scarlett, Zaza, A Double Life, The Actress, A Star is Born and Les Girls all dealt with the behind the scenes mischief that goes into the artifice of playacting. They also explored, to those aware of it, the greater part in life that we each take on in role-playing in everyday life. The script, by a dying Dudley Nichols and by the previously blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein, was full of playful touches, though Cukor seemed much more interested in the incidents surrounding the theatre than he did in presenting a sagebrush saga. The picaresque story was drawn from L’Amour‘s book, but also utilized a dramatic treatment from a script written by a down on his luck D.W. Griffith in the 1940s, when the former movie giant hoped to make a movie about Joseph Jefferson (1829-1905), a theatrical legend he had known. Jefferson, who had toured for decades in Rip Van Winkle , a part, that, (like James O’Neill‘s profitable trap in endless productions of The Count of Monte Cristo), the public would simply not let him retire, was a tragi-comic survivor, who is also credited with coining the famous phrase “There are no small parts, only small actors.”

This is evident in the dramatic relish lavished on the details of the wandering players’ life as the cheesy costumes and sad makeup that they wore, the petty feuds among them after traveling in close quarters for so long, and the well worn productions of dramatic warhorses such as Offenbach’s “La Belle Helene”, and best of all, the show-stopper in a 19th century favorite “Mazeppa”, which allowed Sophia Loren to cross dress and ride across the stage titillatingly strapped to a runaway horse! This  nice eye for the quaint and colorful details surrounding all the enormous effort to put on a show in the period add to this movie’s sometimes captivating quality.

In addition to the Joseph Jefferson background that colored the original screenplay, Cukor helped to create the Loren character when he and his screenwriters were inspired by the actual adventures of legendary real life actors of the period, Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868), who wowed ‘em in the cities and the provinces back then. Adah, (seen in all her daring glory at left), shared a curvaceous figure with Ms. Loren, (though standards of aesthetic beauty have changed considerably since Menken‘s era), was a particularly colorful lady, one heckuva publicity hound, as well as a poet, friend and confidante of the great and small, including Alexander Dumas, whom she seems to be buttering up below, at the right.

A few Westerns had previously touched on the role of the traveling players on the frontier. Walter Brennan‘s Judge Roy Bean earned an Oscar for his theatrical obsession with Lily Langtry in William Wyler’s The Westerner (1940), only to perish once he realizes his dream of meeting her in a theatrical setting. Alan Mowbray‘s dissolute theatrical character in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) recites a Shakespearean soliloquy atop a bar in Tombstone, (though Victor Mature has to finish for him). Mowbray‘s flamboyant acting enlivens another Ford Western, Wagon Master (1950) once more limning the helter skelter life of a thespian on the frontier,  (though this time as one who reforms). In 1840s Western New York, when that constituted the outer reaches of civilization, Chad Hanna (1940) explored the lure of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd offered by the circus to a young Henry Fonda, giving vivid glimpses of the “glamour” of the bareback riders, roustabouts lives as they wander. Perhaps the most effective previous explorations of the theatrical profession’s sojourns in the Old West on film may have been in Prince of Players (1955), a moderately effective attempt by Phillip Dunne to bring the life of Edwin Booth (played by a young Richard Burton) to the screen. This movie, which overemphasizes the romantic aspects of Booth’s first marriage, does a good job documenting the young Edward’s travails in the rambunctious mining camps and boom towns of the frontier with his gifted but dotty father, Junius Booth (Raymond Massey). This movie dramatized some of the pitfalls for the actors and the longing of the lonely men in these towns for a touch of civilization. It was particularly enlivened by the sturdy presence of character actor Charles Bickford as a theatrical manager steeled by his experiences in the Wild West.

What might have been a slight little Western became a film allowing George Cukor‘s to toy with his interests in theatrical history, role playing, sexual politics, the use of color effectively on screen, and, not least of all, his attempt to tailor Ms. Loren‘s gifts to his story. As Patrick McGilligan points out in his biography of the director, “In many of the director’s films, there were scenes—or memorable moments—that seemed to obsess Cukor. They were there in the script from the beginning, as something to goad him on and to revitalize his enthusiasm in a long preproduction. Sometimes it was an exchange of dialogue”…”or it might be an entire scene that was somehow symbolic of what was impelling the director.” Thus, Gaslight (1944) has the famous scene at the end when Ingrid Bergman turns the tables on her tormentor, Charles Boyer, (seen at left), and in Bhowani Junction (1956) there is a powerfully erotic sequence when diaphanous draped cloth blows across Ava Gardner‘s face, and then there was the moment when Judy Garland loses her composure before a mirror as she adjusts her makeup in A Star is Born (1954). In Heller, however, Cukor‘s inspiration was the riotous scene when the Sioux, in pursuit of the theatrical troupe, capture their trunkful of costumes and, pausing to wonder at the outlandish contents, try on the dresses, animal heads and hats and canter for one another. This memorable scene, more suggestive of true wildness than any of the sexual games and capering between the “civilized” actors is an example of the beautiful, sometimes intensely imaginative use of color throughout the film. Working with two long time associates and friends, the gifted George Hoyingen-Huene, an elegant photographer who worked as the color coordinator and technical advisor on several Cukor films, and Gene Allen, an art director who was also a tough looking ex-LA cop with a strongly developed aesthetic streak, the team’s real focus was the look and style of this sometimes overwhelmingly sensory time trip. The color, particularly the vivid reds and blacks, the wildly extravagant costumes of Loren (credited to Edith Head), and the costuming in some of the amusing theatrical scenes almost threatens to dominate the story–and, who knows, that may have been the director’s real motivation for tackling this unusual attempt to re-imagine the Western. I don’t think Cukor necessarily had foremost in his mind an intention to showcase Sophia Loren as a Mediterranean version of Marilyn Monroe, a mistake made by several filmmakers early in the American stage of her career. Defying easy categorization, Loren maintained her distinct individuality, and was learning to apply her growing intelligence as an actress and dignity as a person to her roles.

Yet, at this stage of her career, she was potential box office, and at the center of the film, sometimes to her detriment, she remains. Though Loren‘s physical beauty and seeming naturalism had already been on display in films for some time to good advantage prior to her breakthrough in American movies, especially in The Gold of Naples (1954), Sophia Loren was still what she described as “a performer.” After making Vittorio de Sica’s Two Women (1960)* immediately after Heller in Pink Tights, she would, with earned pride, say that “I was an actress.”

Recognizing that she still felt an apprentice as a movie performer, Sophia Loren, while later acknowledging the cult status of this film, (along with such other Cukor “failures” as Sylvia Scarlett & Travels With My Aunt), the fledgling actress felt that Cukor‘s techniques, making her “mimic his intonations, his gestures, his facial expressions, even his eye movements; every day on the set was a nightmare because I didn’t feel as if I belonged to myself any more, and felt that I had been forced to subjugate my identity…” According to the actress, Cukor “made [her] perform in a blond wig on the strings of a marionette.” While I do think that the blond wig borders on the absurdly sacrilegious on Loren, her performance is quite provocative, especially in the scenes when she first spies Steve Forrest, (which can be seen below in the clip of the theatrical trailer of this movie), though her lack of chemistry with the bombastic Anthony Quinn, in her third and last try at a screen partnership with him, is a major flaw in the film’s attempt to blend romance with comic adventure. Perhaps the missteps between Cukor and Loren and Quinn were unavoidable, since the actors seem to belong to a different generation of screen artists than the director. His generally acknowledged homosexuality, though it did not prevent him from eliciting fine performances from a virile actor such as Spencer Tracy on more than one occasion, may also have contributed to the distance between some of the cast and Cukor.


Quinn, according to several accounts, was constantly at odds with Cukor during their previous outing in the recent Wild Is the Wind, made under trying conditions with several temperamental performers, including Anna Magnani as well as Quinn, (it’s a real hamfest that nevertheless I enjoy, though don’t ask me to explain any rational reason why). Finally feeling confident in his acting abilities after his wondrous performance in La Strada, he may have felt frustrated by his return to American films and less challenging work. Quinn‘s role was also one of the least interesting of the fairly large cast and past conflicts with Cukor complicated matters. The director’s first choice for the part of the actor-manager had been a young Roger Moore, but he, alas, was not under contract to Paramount and proved unavailable.

One of the best roles went to Eileen Heckart as a trying, ambitious, yet protective theatrical mother of an ingenue trying to be cunning, played by an adult Margaret O’Brien. As Heckart’s son, Luke Yankee later reported in his memoir, Just Outside the Spotlight: Growing Up with Eileen Heckart, the tension on the set was sometimes laughably dramatic. Ms. Heckart, whose character was said to specialize in bird calls during her stage appearances, made the mistake of asking Cukor about this aspect of her character on a particularly overcast day in Arizona when he was sitting on the porch of the company’s lodge, brooding. Tentatively asking how she might handle the birdcalls, Cukor exploded with his own retort of “What do you want? We’re four days behind schedule because of the weather. Paramount is ready to crucify me!” Chastened and rebuffed, Heckart meekly went away from the distacted director, only to have an odd lady show up on location after the weather had cleared, who introduced herself as “the person who was there to teach her birdcalls.” Bustling past the bird call lady and the fine character actress, Cukor barked, almost affectionately, over his shoulder, “And they better be good, Heckart!” Ms. Heckart was delighted that he had taken the time to remember.

As was often the case with Cukor‘s films, he also cast two old friends from his Hollywood past, in part to help them financially, and to give them a higher profile at least one last time. Edmund Lowe, cast as an aging ham actor, (no stretch there, but a nice capper to his long career), and Ramon Novarro, the great star of the silent Ben-Hur (1925) and in early talkies, was given the role of a sly bad guy. An appreciative Novarro said at the time that “John Barrymore once told me that if I got a chance to appear in a film directed by George Cukor, it would be an experience I’d value, and I did greatly enjoy every moment working for Mr. Cukor.” Sadly, it was Novarro‘s last appearance in a feature film, though he would go on to make many television appearances before his tragic murder in that banner year for American mayhem, 1968.

To be frank, Heller in Pink Tights never completely jelled as a story–not in L’Amour’s original, straightforward oater, nor in the shooting script, which, according to scenarist Walter Bernstein was in a constant state of flux: “The situation [on Heller] was so hectic,” he recalled, “sometimes they would catch up to me, and I’d bring the pages in in the morning they were supposed to shoot. It was both a good and terrible position to be in–if you could bring them something they could shoot, you were a hero.” Though Louis L’Amour would cite this movie and Hondo (1953) as his favorite film adaptations of his work, it must have been a bit hard for him to recognize his original work, which was largely a male dominated read about the odd alliance between a tenderfoot Irish New York actor-manager, (the unhappy Anthony Quinn in the movie) and a hired gun (Steve Forrest, who’s a much more nuanced actor than usual here) with a bit of a conscience and an eye for one of the feminine members of the troupe, (guess who?). Nowhere in the book is there an exotic actress who exudes warmth, good humor and sensuality such as Sophia Loren, (on the page her character, an American, is subservient to the action in the book, and is extolled for “her quiet beauty and ladylike qualities”). A sea change took place on the way to the screen. It may not be entirely successful, and the results have even been characterized as slapdash, in an intriguing way, but it is rarely dull, and very colorful as Cukor’s imaginative troupe faces nature as best they can.

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*Interestingly, the original plan was to have Geoige Cukor direct Two Women for Paramount with Anna Magnani playing the mother and Sophia the daughter. Magnani balked, claiming that Loren was too tall to play her daughter, and the project was purchased by Carlo Ponti, who, fortunately, made the movie in Italy with his wife and Eleanora Brown as her child, under the sensitive direction of Vittorio De Sica.

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