When Pirates Couldn't Take A Censor's Stronghold

Chicago In Context: These Were The Big Shows Playing
Through Yule '44 and Into a New Year

Frenchman's Creek In Your 1944 Christmas Stocking --- Part Two

It's Christmas 1944, and you're going to the show. Each of companies is out with shiniest baubles. Warners had To Have and Have Not plus Hollywood Canteen in fresh release, while Metro premiered National Velvet at Radio City and kept Meet Me In St. Louis in best venues from a Thanksgiving open. Small markets wouldn't see these until calendar turn to 1945. Entertainment in those days took slower to canvas the country. Paramount wrapped Frenchman's Creek at Broadway's Rivoli after thirteen socko weeks, and just before Christmas, the very time venues in other cities would bring it in as their Yule attraction. Motion Picture Daily (10/13/44) announced "the largest simultaneous booking for a Paramount film in months," with 300 prints for Christmas/New Year dates. Awareness of Frenchman's Creek was fever pitching by this time, its New York reception trumpeted in trades and elsewhere. Movies, like stage plays, benefited from length of Broadway runs, that being barometer of success for both. Frenchman's Creek had come a long way from a property that couldn't be filmed, at least with any fidelity to the Daphne DeMaurier novel from which it derived. Censors had earlier kyboshed efforts by Selznick and MGM to adapt FC, and like Forever Amber to come, the code/Code seemed unbreakable. Paramount would have to denude the book's central theme, which was adultery between heroine "Dona" and her pirate swain. Simply put, the affair could not take place, despite yearnings spoke by the onscreen would-be lovers.

A Pirate Ship Built Twice: At Top Full-Scale,
and Below a Para-Built Miniature

This was the sort of maddening hypocrisy that sunk many a bid for adult content. Rule One and Only: Play by PCA rules or your picture won't be shown, at least not in theatres subscribed to the Code, which all better houses abided by lest a watchdog Legion Of Decency and/or local acolytes be aroused. Radar was up re Frenchman's Creek from announcement it would be filmed. Many knew the DeMaurier blueprint (Dona not only sleeps with her seagoing lover, but bears children by him). To remove all of this would gut DeMaurier's narrative, Paramount figuring to compensate with costumes and Technicolor, letting customer's imagination fill in the rest. Knowing all of studio tricks, the PCA insisted on dialogue that would make plain that nothing illicit had happened between the principals. There would be longing looks, much dialogue professing passion, and even a kiss or two, all leading to Joan Fontaine's inevitable choice to stay home and mind kiddies/husband, her grand adventure a mere mischief that puts her nowhere near the pirate's bed. That last isn't quite accurate --- she does clock time between Arturo DeCordova's sheets, but chastely --- him only entering the morning after to deliver breakfast. Hep viewers knew this was limit of license in a 40's show; they'd get fun from reading between lines (or dissolves), but knew all a while that movies would never lay sex on the line.

Arturo DeCordova speaks the cleansing line to Joan Fontaine: "Of course, if you choose to stay in England, there is nothing that has happened between us that would make you marriage a pretense." Would this have reassured viewers who suspected something more had gone on? Director Mitchell Leisen thought to the end that he had slipped one over on censors. He incorrectly recalled Joan Fontaine's "morning-after" scene to biographer David Chierichetti: "It's quite obvious that she's naked in the bed when she throws her shawl around her shoulders before he (DeCordova) comes in." Wishful thinking on Leisen's part this was, as frame captures at left show Fontaine well-clothed when she awakens and then talks to DeCordova, who knocks before entering. Anecdotal history on Frenchman's Creek is rich: There is Chierichetti's book, which is one of the best career studies of a Classic Era director I've read (full of interviews with those who worked with Leisen); also we have associate producer David Lewis' viewpoint as expressed in The Creative Producer: A Memoir Of The Studio System, also a must. Joan Fontaine had sour memories of Frenchman's Creek, which she claims to have been forced upon her by Selznick on threat of suspension. The latter was also gun held by Paramount to Leisen's head, Frenchman's Creek by the director's estimate "as dull as dishwater and ... a lousy picture."

Movie Magic! Everything Above Players is Matte-Painted

A First Floor Is Built, The Rest a Hanging Miniature

They all agree the production was an ordeal ... 104 days and much of that on shore location where toilets weren't handy. Fontaine alienated co-workers by observing that success of the finished product was burden upon her shoulders alone, which sat not well with Brit co-players who saw her as stuck up to begin with. Leisen was a stylist whose emphasis was on the look of his film, sets and costuming a specialty. Billy Wilder would knock him for that, so much so that many now think of Leisen only in terms of insult his Paramount nemesis laid down (Wilder felt his script for 1941's Hold Back The Dawn was ruined by Leisen's timid handling). Maybe Leisen wasn't the ideal director for a show about pirates, as these are a limpid lot, and his non-flair with action begs for intervention from a Michael Curtiz or Raoul Walsh. Where Leisen prevails is recreation of the period, Frenchman's Creek a sumptuous pageant and likely the most gorgeous Technicolor ever to grace a 40's screen, this apparent even in debased circumstance of Universal's DVD. He'd work closely with matte/miniature departments at Paramount to enhance what was already lavish, sleight-of-hand in Frenchman's Creek a fine demonstration of what behind-scenes paint and model artists could do. In this sense, Leisen was following in tradition his mentor, C.B. DeMille, had estalished at Paramount.

The process of star creation, and how it sometimes failed, can be seen up close in Frenchman's Creek, its launch of Arturo DeCordova being a craft that sank within the year Paramount spent trying to sell him as a "future Valentino." It seemed a sensible enough idea. The war had made outreach to Latin neighbors both practical and profitable. DeCordova had been a major star in Mexico and would be again after his US tide went out. There was precedent too for stars aborn in pirate garb ... consider Errol Flynn. Nothing was specifically wrong with DeCordova. He just couldn't reach off the screen and grab his audience the way Flynn, or indeed Valentino, had. Whatever investment Para was willing to make in him, they couldn't force DeCordova upon a public that didn't want him. This was hard truth Hollywood learned with every personality coming in with fanfare, then going out to obscurity. Frenchman's Creek was a great success that should have made "A Great New Romantic Star" of Arturo DeCordova, but he'd be what patronage would forget first, a rock in shoes of Paramount staffers who imagined they could make an attraction of anybody.

Further down cast listing was Harald Ramond, another who might have made the grade but for ugly scandal that rendered him persona non grata just as Frenchman's Creek was widening out for 1944's holiday season. Ramond had emigrated to the US after a "series of adventures" in Europe, one of which was imprisonment in a German concentration camp (so said studio bio). He had signed with independent producer Charles R. Rogers, who'd loan him to Paramount for big break that was Frenchman's Creek. Ramond had in meantime become involved with Lupe "Spitfire" Valez, who was impregnated by him. She chose to end her life ("sleeping powders," said press) rather than face disgrace of unwed motherhood. Word got out that Ramond had refused to marry Lupe when she came to him in trouble, this despite his insistence to the contrary ("The last time I talked to Lupe I told her that I would marry her any way she wanted"). Wherever truth lay, this was no base for a young man in 1944 to build a Hollywood career upon, so Harald Ramond moved back to Euro pastures, where he'd have twenty years more work in features and television (as Harald Maresch).

And so we're left with what Universal gives us of Frenchman's Creek. Maybe there's a 35mm nitrate print surviving somewhere, but I've doubt of ever seeing it, short of seven hour's flight to a UCLA or some such screening. I know my own affection for this show is perverse. Ladies in forty-pound costumes, men bewigged with poodle dogs travelling in wake. Joan Fontaine's fop of a husband says "Fiddle-Dee-Dee" repeatedly. The pirates don dresses and captured corsets and kiss each other. To quote Paul Cavanagh's deathless putdown from The Mississippi Gambler, "they handle a sword as though it were a parasol." But then there is Basil Rathbone, a lion among lambs. And what fun to see he and Nigel Bruce sharing scenes in this folderol, and right in midst of Holmes-ing it at Universal (breaks on Frenchman's location found the two recording SH radio broadcasts). Wrath-bone shuns the wig when it's time to get dangerous, like when he does rape attempt on Joan. That's the wildest scene in Frenchman's Creek and worth an hour and half's wait. As with The Mark Of Zorro, once Basil's dispatched, the show is essentially over. Everything after that (another thirty minutes of Frenchman) is badly anti-climactic. Still, Frenchman's Creek is loads of fun and priceless mirror to what flipped audiences in late '44 and right thru '45, a monster hit of its day that I'm glad to see available to us now.