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And Montgomery breaks them...to the tune of $5000 a week
by Charles Hastings
Motion Picture Magazine
March 1947
Then he went on and told me some more about Lady in the Lake, the new picture which he directed in addition to playing the hero's role. As you've probably heard, this small-budget whodunit is one of the most interesting and revolutionary pictures made in Hollywood in years because it uses an entirely new camera technique. Montgomery is the star of the film, but you hardly see him at all. The whole thing was photographed as though he were inside the camera and you see only what the camera sees, catching glimpses of Bob only when his face is reflected in a mirror.
"I first got the idea of making a picture with a first-person, subjective camera," he explained, "back in 1938, when I wanted to do Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in that way. But MGM couldn't see it at the time.
"Last year, when MGM asked me if I wanted to play in Lady in the Lake, I said, 'Not if you do it just as a conventional picture.' So they let me direct it, using this new technique in which the audience sees only what the main character sees."
I asked him what he thought of the work of his leading lady, Audrey Totter, who plays her first big part in the film. He said, "It will make a star of her. I picked Audrey because she has played a lot of radio and is accustomed to acting with an inanimate object, a microphone, so I figured she wouldn't mind performing with a hero who was inside the camera.
"Audrey was born with tremendous talent and has the desire to learn more about her job. The better she gets, the more she wants to improve in her work. The only thing that I, as a director, ask of actors is that they work hard. I can't stand actors who look upon their profession as a sort of amusing avocation, something to do when they're not at cocktail parties, playing tennis and at the races."
But all the time Bob Montgomery was talking, he was looking at the package that had just come for him. Every once in a while he'd pick it up, weigh it speculatively in his hands, hold it up to his ear and shake it.
"I can't stand this any more," he said eventually. "If you'll excuse me for a moment, I'll open it."
With lively excitement, he cut the string, ripped away the paper and opened the box inside. "Oh, boy!" he exclaimed joyfully. "Viennese cookies!" Popping one into his mouth, he rolled his eyes in ecstacy and said, "Just like sugar, melts in your mouth. The mother of one of the performers in my show sent them to me. Try one."
As I watched him, I kept thinking what wonderful creatures actors are. Robert Montgomery, long-established star, war hero, father of two, president of the Screen Actor's Guild, who had just directed a picture and also a stage play, was being enchanted by a box of homemade cookies!
We were in Bob's suite at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston. I'd gone up to Boston from New York to interview him because the play, The Big Two, which he'd directed (and co-produced with Elliott Nugent), was playing a pre-Broadway engagement there.
While waiting for Bob at the theater, I'd seen part of The Big Two, which is loaded with Hollywood performers, including Claire Trevor, Philip Dorn, Felix Bressart and others.
"This looks like your big year," I said to Montgomery. "In directing, you're doing what half the big stars in Hollywood want to do. Are you going to quit acting?"
"Good God, no!" Bob told me. "I couldn't give that up. As soon as this play opens in New york, I'm going back to play in Upward to the Stars."
Now this is away out of the actor-who-wants-to-direct pattern. Always they mutter darkly of retiring permanently from the screen--where they are worth millions to their studios--to direct, a function where the value of their services adds up to a question mark until they have clicked. Usually the directing threat is a bullying device to get a big raise or the parts they want to play, and it is seldom that a big star becomes a director.
All of this makes Robert Montgomery an exception, though he insists there is nothing unusual about it. "Why should it be considered odd for an actor to advance in his profession?" he asks. "Writers start on newspapers and sometimes become important novelists and playwrights. Nothing is said about that--it's considered natural. Many of the top directors of today were originally actors--Robert Leonard, Jack Conway and Harry Beaumont were all motion picture actors before they were directors.
"I got my chance by accident. That's usually the way such thing happen. Two weeks before John Ford was to finish They Were Expendable, he broke his leg. The studio asked him if he wanted to wait until he was well enough to go on the set or get another director to wind it up, there being nothing but effects stuff left to shood. 'Let Montgomery do it,' he said. That's how I got my opportunity.
"Ford did 99 percent of the good work on that picture, I only 1 per cent, but that relationship between us, as director and actor, had been so perfect I knew just what he wanted. He's as good a director as there is in the business. He always talks the picture over with his players. That makes you want to do what he wants you to do."
"That was quite a thing you did in Lady in the Lake," I said, "I never thought I'd see a picture in which the star appears only for a few fleeting seconds on the screen, although it's his voice you hear all the time. Particularly when it was he who directed the picture."
Montgomery just gave me the grin that is his trademark. It's an interesting thing to watch, that grin. Bob first looks at you cautiously out of the corner of his eye, as though expecting you to stop him from doing or saying what's in his mind, then his mouth curls upward, his cheeks shine and he looks like the guy who ate his old man's prize pheasant.
Nobody in pictures has a grin quite like that. Bob was rich as a boy until he was 16, had been sent abroad from his home in Pawling, N.Y., to be educated. Then his father died and the family fortune evaporated. The golden spoon he'd been born with was yanked out of his mouth and Bob had to go to work in the machine shop of a railway, later going to sea.
That explains that apprehensive grin, I think. Somebody shot Santa Claus when he was a kid, and he's not quite sure that it won't happen again and he never can get out of the back of his mind that all of the good things that have happened to him since---his stage success, followed by stardom in Hollywood, and now becoming a stage and screen director--will turn out to be part of a wonderful drea, and he'll wake up to find himself once more a humble deckhand on an oil tanker.
Stars are born and stars are made, but the one person responsible for Robert Montgomery's long-maintained position as one of the top stars of the screen is Bob Montgomery himself. His own ingenuity, foresightedness and willingness to gamble on his future is all that has kept him up there in the big dough.
Most of Bob's early success on the screen was based on his expert characterization of a smoothie, a platinum-plated wise guy, a Park Avenue screwball, urbane, giddy and mischievious. He was typed as tightly as an actor can be when he saw the grim play called Night Must Fall, in London. Bob talked MGM into buying the screen rights. Big companies often do that to keep their stars happy. But MGM was reluctant to let Bob, the actor who had become a box-office attraction playing carefree playboys, appear as the sinister, conscienceless villian of that one.
In the end, after endless arguments, he had his way. Night Must Fall turned out to be one of the most mature and gripping melodramas ever filmed. Audiences were horrified at seeing thier favorite screen cutup as the murderious bellhop who carried the head of one of his victims around with him in a hatbox.
But the film started a trend in psychological murder stories that continues now, after ten years. Meanwhile, the screwball picture, in which Bob had excelled, was losing favor and he might have become just another star-that-used-to-be if he hadn't established himself with that picture as a performer of range and power and versatility.
Bob was one of the first of the big Hollywood stars, if not the very first, to go to war. In 1940, before America was in it, he took a leave of absence from his fabulously paid job of acting to drive an ambulance in France.
"Why did you do it?" I asked. "You had your family to think about. It wasn't yet our war."
"In 1939," he says, "I went to England to make a picture for MGM. I don't see how anyone could have been over there in those days and not know that a war was starting in which, sooner or later, we and the whole world would become involved. You couldn't help knowing what was going on.
"I didn't give my family a thought. My wife--she is Elizabeth Allen and had played with me on the stage--was swell about it. She moved into a smaller place, and later, while I was in the Navy, she and the children lived on the salary I got from Uncle Sam."
Bob worked at driving an ambulance until the Nazis took Paris. In July, 1941, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve, was first a liaison officer, then commanded a PT boat and also saw active service on a destroyer in the South Pacific. He got tropical fever, came home and was retired to inactive service, leaving the Navy as a full-fledged commander.
But between his ambulance driving in France and his enlistment, Montgomery made the hit of his career as the dumb prizefighter hero of Here Comes Mr. Jordan. That, too, started a trend, this time in fantasy on the screen.
"A Guy Named Joe followed that," he recalls, "and I notice that Frank Capra's latest picture, It's a Wonderful Life, is a film on the same order, in which the hero goes to heaven and comes back."
Bob doesnt' think he'll do any more acting in the pictures he directs. "It's too exhausting to do both jobs." he explains. "The only way to do it is to study your part so well before you begin that you know exactly what you want to do with the role before you start to direct yourself in it. Doing it that way, you don't get mixed up in your double function."
Making Lady in the Lake was like a dream come true for the technical crew. They had to devise an entirely new technique to cope with the problem of using the camera as though it were the hero, with breakaway sets and others that flew up in the air as the camera came through.
"The boys worked their hears out," says Montgomery, "broke their necks. I had the crack cameraman, Paul Vogel, working with me, which was a terrific break. Before starting the picture, I worked with miniature models for four weeks. It was time well spent. The picture had a forty-two-day schedule and we were able to finish it in thirty-eight, four under par. The toughest scene we had to make was the one in which the camera is hit by a heavy."
But Bob wasn't too inclined to talk about the magical technical secrets that made this unique picture possible. He didn't know whether it would start another trend and said he'd never make another ;picture with the first-person camera.
Bob is 41 now (sic), but the thing you feel as you talk with him is that he's very young, alive and growing as a human beigng all of the time. As he talks about his play, his picture, his farm at Pawling where he spends much of his time, there's the same bouncing joy and curiosity that he exhibited about the package of sugar cookies.
It's a liveliness that's contagious, but when you interview him he's not absorbed in putting out the charm. He has frank opinions, keeps saying thins that he trusts you not to print. He's a gentleman who can use the four-letter words effectively.
When I talked to him, he was disturbed at the animosity between stage and screen that has been growing ever since pictures put on long pants. "I can't understand it," he said, "There are certain stories that can be done better on the screen than on the stage. There are fine plays that can never be made into good pictures."
What troubles Bob is the apprehension all Hollywood people feel before bringing a play to Broadway. The critics usually lambaste them and their shows with cruel comments about the gilded, spoiled children from the never-never land soiling the temple that is the stage.
"I've worked on this play for months," he says. "It's costing me $5,000 a week just to sit here. Claire Trevor, Philip Dorn and Felix Bressart are making only a fraction of their Hollywood salaries in the play. If we didn't love the stage, would we be doing this?"
I said I didn't think so, but I'm afraid Bob would have bene more comforted if I were a New York critic. As I left him, I kept thinking how he'd looked when he explained what the $5,000 a week putting on the play was costing him in salary.
He'd grinned as though it were stage money he was talking about. His fame, his fabulous salary, you see, are things he's never taken too seriously. It's only the work that he takes seriously. What it brings in he's glad to get, considering it gravy, for he's an adventurer in show business who enjoys taking chances and trusting in his own skill and judgment.
It's carried him far, this adventuresome spirit, and although I'm no prophet, my guess is it will carry him a lot farther as time goes on. Bob is an ex-wise guy, but he won't be an ex-star ever while he carries his youthful spirit like a shield against bad breaks. He's at the top to stay for a long time.