John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [99]
In an interview I conducted with Rossano Brazzi in a London street, while he was filming The Final Conflict, he told me, “I kept asking myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ It was like working in hell.
The village we were living in at the start of production was unbelievably primitive. I didn’t know such places could exist in this century. There was no telephone. No radio. No contact with civilization.
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SEARCHING FOR THE DARKNESS
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“We stayed in what was supposedly a motel. You think in the Sahara you’d be hot all the time, but at night it got bitter cold, and this motel had no heating, so you either froze or went to bed. Only Sophia had any kind of heating—a space heater, which some of the film crew installed for her. And it nearly killed her.
“It used up all the oxygen in her room and filled it with deadly carbon monoxide. For several nights she said she had terrible nightmares, but all the time she was being asphyxiated until one night she nearly suffocated to death. It was only because she fell out of bed that she was able to rouse herself. She said that by the time she had crawled to the door, struggling for breath, she was almost comatose. She fell into the corridor just as I was coming by. I managed to find a doctor who used mouth-to-mouth on her, gave her injections of what I think was adrenaline. He brought her around, but he said that she would have died if I hadn’t found her.
“When John Wayne found out, he was furious but he didn’t know who to be angry at. He felt terrible that Sophia had nearly died, and it didn’t help that Henry Hathaway’s biggest concern was how they would have replaced her if she’d died. I could see that Wayne would like to have punched his director, but he held his temper and calmed down. It was a matter of humanity versus commerce. I will give Wayne his due; he was more concerned for Sophia than for the film.
“Sophia’s main problem at that time was her difficulty with the English language. She learned her lines first in Italian and had them translated into English, and she was able to deliver her lines perfectly well. She was still pretty raw back then and hadn’t had a lot of acting experience, but she was doing well, I thought. And the thing she most certainly did have, which was what I’d wanted from her, was tremendous sex appeal. I thought she did, but Henry didn’t.”
Henry Hathaway said frankly if ungallantly, “I was disappointed with Sophia. She had tremendous beauty, but she was so one-dimensional. There was no depth to her acting. I always thought she was overrated.”
Despite the problems, filming wound up more or less on schedule at the end of March 1957. “It was a long, hard shoot,” said Wayne,
“and after all that it wasn’t much of a picture.”
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Duke Meets Nikita
Wayne had three films released in 1957, the first being The Wings of Eagles in January. In September Howard Hughes’s production of Jet Pilot finally saw the light of day. Audiences, unaware the film had been made several years earlier, were baffled at how young Wayne suddenly looked, and they, and the critics, found the anti-Communist story far too much like a comic book to take seriously, which didn’t help Wayne’s cause against Communism or his box-office appeal. The film was an expensive flop and was quickly withdrawn.
Wayne’s third film of 1957 was Legend of the Lost, in December, and its success along with that of The Wings of Eagles put John Wayne in second place in the top ten American box-office stars of 1957. It must have delighted Twentieth Century Fox, for when they signed him in 1957 to make three films, they guaranteed him a fee of $2 million for all three films upon their completion. The first under