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Released in December of 1948, Joan of Arc was Fleming’s last film. Since his contract with MGM had expired, Fleming made the movie independently, and it was produced by Walter Wanger. The movie was loosely based on playwright Maxwell Anderson’s successful Broadway play Joan of Lorraine, and Anderson himself adapted it for the screen. Even so, he and Fleming rewrote much of the script. This chapter also discusses the life of Ingrid Bergman and her many infidelities. She and Fleming had an intense affair that was kept private—even on set—except within their families. Joan of Arc fell short of box office predictions, and Fleming viewed it as the worst project he had ever undertaken.

Chapter 1 interrogates the traditional view of nuns as paragons of agape which opens The Bells of St. Mary's. “In the eyes of the world very few even take notice of us, but earthly honors and rewards are not for you.” It considers the representational problem this statement posed – how attractive actresses were to play self-effacing nuns – by tracing Ingrid Bergman's evolving portraits of dedicated service to others in Casablanca, The Bell's of St. Mary's, and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. It argues that Bergman deployed an ardent film persona fusing erotic energy and spiritual incandescence to flesh out the full humanity of her women/ religious characters.

This chapter treats Milestone’s life and work from 1945 to 1949. The highly publicized failure of the expensive feature Arch of Triumph, produced by new Enterprise Studios, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in an adaptation of Remarque’s novel about refugees in Paris before the Nazi invasion, damaged Milestone’s artistic reputation. This coincided with Milestone being named by the HUAC as one of The Hollywood Nineteen and accused of pro-Communist sympathies. Although not called to testify, he supported those who were and attended HUAC hearings. A discussion of No Minor Vices and The Red Pony, another Steinbeck adaption starring Robert Mitchum and Copland’s score, concludes the chapter.

Under Capricorn proved to be a disaster on several fronts. Hitchcock had never dealt well with costume melodramas, saying that he couldn’t imagine how people of bygone days could manage bathroom trips. He had purchased the property with Ingrid Bergman, one of the most popular female stars of the day, in mind for the lead. But Bergman proved to be a drawback: shortly after filming ended, she outraged the American public by abandoning her husband and daughter for Italian director Roberto Rossellini. The Production Code office spent more time worrying about the morality of the star than the morals of the movie, and Joe Breen wrote a letter to Bergman, later made public, asking her to reconsider her choice or risk losing her career. Bergman’s fall from grace, poor casting choices, a lackluster script, and Hitchcock’s decision to continue the experimentation with long takes he had begun with Rope all contributed to the failure of the movie, which lost over $1 million and marked the end of Transatlantic films as an independent producer.

Still in Ingrid Bergman’s thrall, Hitchcock made one of his most romantic pictures for her, Notorious (1946), in which she and Cary Grant work out many of the contrasts and tensions in their screen personas. Hitchcock was stymied by casting decisions not his own on The Paradine Case (1947), which was the last film he made for producer David O. Selznick, and then he foundered on miscasting again when James Stewart was given the central role of a queer academic in Rope (1948), his first color picture. Hitchcock made Under Capricorn (1949) as a valentine to Ingrid Bergman, allowing her to dominate an eight minute and forty-seven second take where her character confesses to a crime, a rare instance of acting for its own sake in Hitchcock’s work. Though Marlene Dietrich was superficially in the mode of the liberated women that Hitchcock enjoyed like Carole Lombard and Tallulah Bankhead, the Master was mainly bemused by Dietrich’s demands for special lighting in Stage Fright (1950), and so he lets her have her way as he lets Charles Laughton dominate Jamaica Inn.

Though Fleming started his first long-term contract with MGM at the beginning of 1940, progress on his project The Yearling stalled after his attempts at preparation. In its place, the studio gave him control over the adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the same time, actor Lee Bowman married Fleming’s stepdaughter, to Fleming’s frustration. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, released in 1941, starred Spencer Tracy and introduced Fleming to the emerging starlet Ingrid Bergman. This chapter gives a detailed summary of the film’s plot and the backstage actions of Fleming and his cast. Though Fleming did not immediately fall for Bergman, she became infatuated with her director by the end of filming.

The chapter is a comprehensive overview of Casablanca (1942), with a specific focus on Curtiz’s contributions to the most enduringly popular American film. It provides a historical perspective on who does and doesn’t deserve credit from a long line of supplicants over the years.From Hal Wallis’s acquisition of the play Everyone Comes to Rick’s to the development of the screenplay by seven different writers, the movie evolved into Hollywood’s symbol of the Allied cause during World War II.The production became nerve-racking,as the screenplay was a work in progress up to the last day of shooting.This unsettled atmosphere is juxtaposed against Curtiz’s mentoring relationship with Bergman and a much tenser one with Bogart.In the end, Casablanca is a testament to the studio system at its apex; the film spawned a cottage industry of remakes, spin-offs, and tie-ins that would influence future generations.

Notorious is one of the few Hitchcock films that were actually improved by the involvement of the Production code. Code censors objected to the original plot, in which a woman of loose reputation is hired by the FBI to use her wiles to infiltrate a group of ex-Nazis hiding out in Rio de Janeiro. Code officials suggested that the woman, played by Ingrid Bergman, be someone who lived by her wits, rather than someone with loose morals, and who is recruited because the head of the exiled Nazi ring, played by Claude Rains, was once in love with her. These suggestions greatly improved the film, making both Bergman and Rains more sympathetic characters. Notorious contains a kissing scene between Bergman and Cary Grant that Hitchcock concocted specifically to get around the supposed ‘three-second rule,’ according to which lips locked for more than three seconds were considered unduly lustful. Grant and Bergman remain in each other’s arms for nearly three minutes as they travel through her Rio apartment exchanging at least twenty kisses, none of which exceed three seconds. Hitchcock also had to contend with close scrutiny from the FBI as a result of the use of uranium as a plot point in pre’atom bomb days. The film has gone on to become one of Hitchcock’s most venerated masterpieces, partially because of the Production Code insights that improved the plot and gave Hitchcock the impetus for a memorable romantic sequence.

Saboteur (1942) was one of Hitchcock’s weakest films because of its substandard cast, but Shadow of a Doubt was one of his best due mainly to strong work from all of its actors, from Joseph Cotten’s villainous Uncle Charlie to the unforgettable Janet Shaw, who plays an avaricious waitress at a seedy bar called Til Two. Hitchcock allowed Tallulah Bankhead to dominate Lifeboat (1944) with the contrast of her campy, expressive basso voice and her poker face, and then he fell madly in love with Ingrid Bergman’s extravagantly expressive yet often mysterious face in Spellbound (1945).

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya talks about her tour to Paris in October 1961 when she was invited by the Paris Opera with partner Nikolai Fadeyechev to dance three productions of Swan Lake under the choreography of Vladimir Burmeister. Burmeister first did Swan Lake on the stage of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater in Moscow in April 1953 before moving it to Paris in 1960. Maya's Swan Lake in Paris was a rousing success. One of her spectators was Ingrid Bergman. Maya followed it up with performances of Maurice Béjart's Isadora, Leda, and Bolero, Roland Petit's ballets, Serge Lifar's Phèdre, and her own Anna Karenina, Lady with the Dog, and Carmen Suite, along with concert pieces. Over her many trips to France, Maya must have spent a hundred hours of her life with Lifar, a French ballet dancer and choreographer.

In one of the earliest films to depict the budding field of psychoanalysis, Alfred Hitchcock dealt with oversight from David O. Selznick’s personal psychiatrist as well as the Production Code. Both the psychiatrist and the censors found an abundance of erotic symbolism in the dream sequence created by Salvador Dal’, which was cut significantly in the final film. The Production Code office was also concerned about the suggestion of an illicit affair between psychiatrist Ingrid Bergman and her patient Gregory Peck, the new head of the asylum where much of the story takes place. The film did well at the box office, but its simplistic view of psychoanalysis has caused it to age poorly.

Cary Grant and Betsy Drake’s marriage limped forward for two years after his affair with Sophia Loren. In the midst of this, Loren arrived in Hollywood and Grant began pursuing her again, asking her to marry him. He was finishing Kiss Them for Me (1957) at the time. Producer Jerry Wald had been trying to film this Second World War story for years, but it was only when Grant signed to star in it that the project got the green light. Grant enjoyed working with the film’s director, Stanley Donen, but he was ill-suited to play a soldier having weekend leave in San Francisco. The film was one of the very few flops in his later career. He then made Houseboat (1958). Drake had written the original screenplay thinking that she and Grant might star in the film together. At Grant’s request, the studio assigned other writers to rewrite it as a vehicle for Sophia Loren. The comedy, about an Italian nanny falling in love with her boss, culminates in their marriage. This was a difficult scene for the stars to film after Loren refused Grant’s own proposal. Indiscreet (1958), directed by Stanley Donen and co-starring Ingrid Bergman, was a happier production. This delightfully sophisticated romantic comedy benefits from Donen’s imaginative direction and from location shooting that captures the glamour of the London setting.

Hitchcock’s last four films do not contain much in the way of acting excellence, alas. But in his last appearance at the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in his honor in 1979, the Master did “nothing” for the camera until Ingrid Bergman came down to his table and embraced him, at which point their mutual emotion was clear as a white-haired Cary Grant looked on and smiled and lied to the camera. This was a final Hitchcockian image with two key collaborators that perfectly expresses what the camera can see and what it cannot.

The immediate post-war years saw Cary Grant’s box-office drawing power stronger than ever before. Jack Warner had bought out his contract with Columbia so that Grant could play the songwriter Cole Porter in the musical biopic Night and Day (1946). His first Technicolor film, Night and Day is bright and breezy, and it is filled with popular songs. The production, however, was troubled. Grant and director Michael Curtiz were in constant conflict. Grant was much happier working with Alfred Hitchcock and co-star Ingrid Bergman on the next film, Notorious (1946). These three became lifelong friends while making this wonderfully dark, gothic, spy story. Hitchcock was so keen on the darker side of the Cary Grant star persona that he proposed making a film of Hamlet with him, but legal complications prevented this. Grant then had a hiatus from filmmaking that allowed him to travel to Bristol for the first time since 1939. There, he saw his mother and also the terrible damage the city suffered during the blitz. He returned to make one of his most frivolous films, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), with Myrna Loy and the child-star turned teenager Shirley Temple. This light-as-a-feather screwball comedy continued his box-office winning streak.

Detailed production files about the musical score for Spellbound reveal an intense and fraught collaboration among music editor Audray Granville, director Alfred Hitchcock, composer Miklós Rózsa, and, producer David O. Selznick. In contrast to Rebecca, for which Hitchcock assumed a back seat in the scoring, his music directions for Spellbound are more specific—and contrary to Selznick’s. Granville, whose influence stretches from the preview score to the final dubbing of Rózsa’s theremin-infused score, sought to reconcile these differences. Her editing is deftly effective—not only maintaining the motivic integrity of Rózsa’s score but also shifting the score’s emotional weight from its misogynist villains toward the beleaguered heroine (Ingrid Bergman). Ultimately, the collaborative tensions of Spellbound proved unsustainable: the final result disappointed all four players. Nevertheless, the score’s popular reception—abetted by another music-based publicity campaign and soundtrack album—made it one of the best-known scores of the studio era.

Amid Casablanca’s many justly celebrated aspects is its soundtrack—the subject of much of this chapter. Surprisingly, Steiner hated the 1931 song “As Time Goes By,” which producer Hal Wallis insisted be featured in the underscoring (Max wanted to pen an original tune for Bogart and Bergman). But Steiner’s consummate professionalism is demonstrated by the ingenious ways he adapted Herman Hupfeld’s melody into one of the movies’ greatest love themes, in a score with many other musical highlights. This chapter also examines the ways in which Steiner’s music became part of Hollywood’s propaganda efforts during World War II, from the controversial, pro-Russia Mission to Moscow (which required the personal approval of Josef Stalin), to the sublime Americana of The Adventures of Mark Twain, one of Steiner’s most underappreciated scores.

No Steiner project would be more difficult or emotionally draining than Gone with the Wind. This chapter explores how the composer wrote and/or supervised more than three hours of orchestral music in less than two and a half months (while concurrently writing three other film scores), amid constant and often contradictory direction from Selznick. The producer was more combatant than collaborator: “the whole thing had a nightmare quality,” recalled one participant. Due to a near-impossible deadline, Steiner was forced to have members of his team compose several GWTW music cues. These collaborators always worked under Max’s direction, using Steiner-composed leitmotivs. The chapter uses multiple examples of these cues to draw the distinction between the kind of “ghost writing” by uncredited composers that was common in Hollywood, and GWTW, a case in which Steiner remained the primary creative force behind this, his best-loved score.