John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [111]
“I was very young and Duke was in his fifties, and he was so terrified about our love scenes that he kept putting them off until he found a reason not to do them at all. So I never even got to kiss Duke Wayne, even though the characters we played loved each other very much.
“It was due to Duke casting me in The Alamo that I then got to do Two Rode Together with James Stewart and Richard Widmark, and which was directed by John Ford. And that eventually led to the television series The High Chaparral, which was the thing that really made me famous. So I owe it all to Duke.”
One actor who chased a part but failed to get it was Sammy Davis Jr., who revealed this to me when I met him at a party in London thrown by Peter Lawford in 1974: “When I heard there was a part for a Negro in Duke’s film, I managed to get a look at the script and I thought, ‘Man, this Negro slave has been written with integrity and dignity.’ Usually Negro slaves were portrayed as stereotypes, but this was different. It was unlike anything I’d done before. I wanted to take a chance and play a straight role instead of always being the song-and-dance comedian. So I personally asked Duke if he would consider me. He said, ‘But this is the role of a slave. It’s a straight part.’ I said, ‘I know. That’s why I want to do it.’ He said,
‘Okay, let me think about it.’
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“I’m pretty sure he was going to give me the part, but he had a lot of influential Texans investing in the film, and they didn’t like the idea that I was seeing [Swedish actress] May Britt at the time. They disapproved of a man of color going out with a girl who was white.
Duke was upfront with me about it. I respected him for being upfront, but I was damn disappointed not to get the gig.”
Duke never considered anyone other than William H. Clothier to be his director of photography. One of their first discussions was about what format they would shoot The Alamo in. Clothier told me,
“At that time, CinemaScope looked just awful because it distorted people. You couldn’t get good close-ups without it looking like people had the mumps. But there were a number of good 70mm processes around then which not only eliminated the distortion but gave greater depth.
“So I was alarmed when Duke said he was thinking about shooting The Alamo in Cinerama, which I thought would be just a terrible mistake. In theory it sounded good, but as Henry Hathaway would tell you, the way the Cinerama camera worked, with three films running behind three lenses in a special camera, gave you all sorts of problems. The first was that you couldn’t get any kind of close-ups. If you watch How the West Was Won, most of which Hathaway directed, and some of it John Ford directed, you don’t see a single close-up. You can’t get closer than a shot from the waist up. And you can’t change lenses. But worst of all, you could see the joins.”
The joins Hathaway was referring to were due to the giant picture being made up of three different films which ran through the Cinerama camera simultaneously, and were projected onto the giant, curved Cinerama screen. The process had been introduced in 1952, a year before CinemaScope, and the result was the first virtual reality cinema experience because it gave the audience a feeling it was moving with the camera.
Clothier recalled, “Duke thought the battle scenes would look tremendous in Cinerama. He was actually a little ahead of his time in his thinking because up