PREAMBLE

More than once as a youngster in the 1950s I watched Oral Roberts laboring in prayer on the little television screen, inside his giant tent that could seat thousands. I had seen such a tent only once before, when in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) the Ringling Bros. circus filled the big top. The word that Roberts used most emphatically—his language was peppered with “Lord”s and “Jesus”s and “prayer”s and “Come up, my daughter”—was: heal. He summoned divine agency to bring remedy to one destitute soul after another, quivering, quaking, palsied, lame, blind, mute, the whole gamut. And one at a time, like guests in some odd talk show (or the sufferers marching to the springs in Fellini's 8 ½ [1963]), they would head to the platform and allow him to lay hands upon them. He would open his fingers upon a trembling head, look up to the heavens (that is, the top of the tent), clamp his eyes shut, and scream, “Heal!!! Heal this ailing man!!! Heal this woman!!!! Heal!!!!!!” While I watched him, stunned but entirely uninformed, I did not know that, along with Jay Silverheels, who was Tonto in my weekly episodes of The Lone Ranger, I was seeing in Roberts one of the very earliest Native Americans of my experience, and certainly an indigenous pioneer to the mass media. He was Choctaw American. Perhaps he had the power of a shaman. In screen truth, however, in snowy black and white, while he screamed and while his hands shook with the force that causes hands to shake when one is devout in prayer, he looked white to me. White, white, and blistering white. White thunder. White lightning. In Richard Brooks's Elmer Gantry (1960), Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons) copies this routine again and again, once with a deaf penitent (Max Showalter) calling the fire of Heaven to descend through her fingers.

Roberts founded his Pentecostal Ministry in 1947, by which time Sinclair Lewis's satirical novel had been in print for twenty years, and revivalists like Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Billy Graham were heating up the environment with fervor. These folk, but Graham especially, were models for the film, writes Burt Lancaster's biographer Kate Buford, although this was “carefully denied by the director and star”:

When at 10.20 p.m., May 29, 1942, he died at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in the company of his brother Lionel, his lifelong friend Gene Fowler, John Decker, and the actor Alan Mowbray, John Barrymore was only sixty years old. His liver and kidneys ravaged by alcoholism, he had been partially comatose for seventy-two hours. The Los Angeles Times saw fit to mount him to its topmost headline, “John Barrymore Taken by Death,” an elevation that allowed him posthumously to supersede George Marshall's planned invasion of France. That he was imagined to have been “taken by Death” rather than, less Olympically, dying as mortals do, signals the monumental quality of the regard in which he was held by those who admired him. This was not merely a “great performer,” not merely an onstage and onscreen presence shining with all the brilliance of astute training and preparation for an august craft; it was an almost superhuman being who, in the end, had to be reached out for and seized away, so tenaciously did his spirit and courage hold on to his wounded living force. In “taking” Barrymore, Death was stealing from us all.

He picked up the nickname “The Great Profile” (around the time of Beau Brummel), a tag with resonance. After all, any part of a body might gain prominence in imagery: Georgia O'Keefe's hands in the photography of Alfred Stieglitz; Fred Astaire's feet. And, as to faces, any screen actor might choose to suggest or request that the cameraman bias his view to one side: no one's face has two identical sides, and it is to the actor's career benefit that he take steps to ensure, as much as possible, an appealing view for potential ticket buyers’ ongoing fascination. But other actors, turning only one side to the camera (a celebrated case was Claudette Colbert), did not (and do not) get named a “great profile,” they are merely seen in profile, and to better effect. Barrymore was being coined. In the deep thoughts of his viewers, he was receiving the respect and adoration that had also bathed the identity of the Roman emperors, and that for Barrymore was iconized even while he lived on coinage of his own country. Barrymore, of course, lived far from Rome, to be categorically correct in Benedict Canyon, that is, Beverly Hills, not Hollywood.

The Career

Hollywood's conversion to a sound cinema drew many of Broadway's brighter creative talents to filmmaking as the industry made the radical readjustment to producing a much more complex product. Pictures that talked were inherently more theatrical, requiring the mastery of a different set of skills on the part of performers and directors, who now had to work with something very similar to a play script. Among this distinguished company of New York City émigrés, none enjoyed a more consistently successful career in the new industrial art than George Cukor, who was twenty-nine years old when recruited by Paramount Pictures in 1928. Desperate for experienced help in this time of profound para¬digm shift, the studio even sent Cukor a plane ticket to the west coast because they were too impatient to await the young man's arrival in the more accepted fashion, by train. Paramount was certainly taking a chance on offering a direc¬tor's chair to someone barely acquainted with the inner workings of the new medium, no matter how successful he had been in his work for the commercial theater. And he had been successful. Showing business acumen early, as manager of one stock company and later co-founder of another, he was a natural on the stage. After a little acting he moved to the other side of the footlights, directing Melchior Lengyel's Antonia in 1925 (produced by Charles Frohman, with Georges Renavent), Owen Davis's The Great Gatsby in 1926 (with Florence Eldridge), Martin Brown's The Dark in 1927 (with Louis Calhern), Lula Vollmer's Trigger (with Claiborne Foster), Willard Mack's A Free Soul (with Melvyn Douglas), and Zoe Akins's The Furies (with Laurette Taylor) in 1928, and Samson Raphaelson's Young Love (with Dorothy Gish) and Maxwell Anderson's Gypsy (with Wallace Ford) in 1929, before departing for Hollywood.

But the differences between the stage and film had considerably narrowed. With the confining of most film productions to stage set interiors because of the exigencies of dialogue recording, then accomplished with bulky microphones, action scenes became a rarity in many genres, as filmgoer attention was directed toward the same carefully crafted verbal confrontations that were a Broadway staple.