Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars

Contrary to the other reviewers, HAL WALLIS is indeed a worthy book on its subject, the gutsy, somewhat nutty Hollywood production head whose career took a tragic turn when he got too uppity for Jack Warner's taste in 1943, and pretty soon Warner made the studio too uncomfortable a place to work in, and Wallis was forced to leave. He then wound up at Paramount, where his pictures, while individually interesting, lacked the stature of the Warners' studio masterpieces. What went wrong? As Bernard Dick relates, the Warner Brothers needed Wallis to come up with films that would ape the sheen of high-class MGM, its great rival. Wallis indeed wound up producing dozens of imitation MGM films, everything from WHITE BANNERS to ROBIN HOOD to FOUR DAUGHTERS to JEZEBEL--these four all made within a single year, 1938. Wallis' films stood out from the typical run of Warners productions, which often emphasized a proletarian, socially conscious "street smart" attitude, often featuring Bogart, Robinson, Blondell, etc, stars with whom the underclasses could identify with. Not so Wallis. At Paramount Wallis decided to become a "starmaker" (the title of his autobiography) with mixed results. He had a taste for strong, supermasculine men, and promoted Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas to superstardom (and ten years later, Elvis Presley, who sort of fits in that mold); but sometimes his predilection for the strong and the silent went haywire and he spent picture after picture trying to make a star from the charisma-free Wendell Corey, whom Dick claims was anti-Semitic to boot. As for Wallis' female stars, he showed a decided taste for the freakish. Who else but Hal Wallis would have signed up Shirley Booth and Anna Magnani? In an industry dominated by beauty and the hyperfeminine, Booth and Magnani were dark stars indeed. And there was something freakish also about the andrgogynous appeal of Lizabeth Scott and Shirley MacLaine as well. Dick discusses all of these actors at great length, and yes, he seems to slight the Warners movies at the expense of the Paramount and Universal films, but it's plain that he sees the later, independent productions as more revealing of the kind of man Hal Wallis was. And he had the good taste to interview quite a number of Wallis' lesser known stars, including Douglas Dick (no relation I assume to Bernard Dick), the lovely Kristine Miller, and Dolores Hart, now a nun. He reveals that Martha Hyer began her romance with Wallis (she eventually became his second wife) many years before she had previously admitted, in her memoir, to having dated him. Reading Wallis and Hyer's memoirs you would think that they began seeing each other only after the death of Wallis' first wife, the madcap comedy star Louise Fazenda. But actually that was a white lie and they met when poor Louise was very much alive. Dick does an artful job of deconstructing the Wallis and Hyer memoirs to find out how, when truth is fudged, i