Walter Wanger

Biography

Walter Wanger was, from the early '30s until the mid-'50s, one of the top independent producers in Hollywood, with an array of movies to his credit that included some of the most highly regarded works of Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Fritz Lang, and, later on, Don Siegel. For a time, he rivaled Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick, and was regarded as possessing a golden touch akin to that of Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox. Wanger was also unique, among his generation of moguls and would-be moguls of Hollywood, as the product of a highly educated, erudite, and cultured upbringing, as well as being American-born. If most of the studio founders and chiefs entered the movie business, in part, because as immigrants they were squeezed out of most other areas of opportunity in entertainment, Wanger chose the movies for his career and life's work. Wanger was born Walter Feuchtwanger in San Francisco, CA, in 1894, the third of four children of Sigmund Feuchtwanger, a Bavarian Jewish immigrant and successful seller of clothing, and the former Stella Stettheimer, the eldest of four daughters from a highly educated German American family from Rochester, NY. Wanger was raised in San Francisco, in a household that was thoroughly upper-middle-class European in its orientation, and, yet, also totally assimilated into the life of the city and the nation around them. He was comparatively ignorant of his family's history on either side and also never professed any knowledge of or personal attachment to the Jewish faith, though he did support Jewish causes later in life. His family loved the high arts, and most especially theater, and as a boy he was exposed to some of the finest plays in the country as their touring productions reached San Francisco; he was also well-traveled, accompanying his family on their many trips to Europe. Wanger's father died of heart failure in 1905, at age 50, and the boy was uprooted soon after, his mother choosing to move to Europe for a time as she put her life and her family back together. He attended the Selig Institute in Vevey, Switzerland, picking up a fluent command of German and French. The family returned to America in 1907, this time to New York City, where his mother's family was closely connected socially to the elite of New York's German, Jewish, and German-Jewish communities, including some of the wealthiest families on the East Coast. With these associations and social connections as his entrée, and following the path of intellectual curiosity that was his father's legacy, Wanger soon became immersed in the arts -- painting, theater, literature -- in a way that such rival moguls as Samuel Goldwyn or Darryl F. Zanuck, having arrived in the United States with barely a cent (if that) to their names, or growing up abandoned by their parents (in Zanuck's case) could only have envied. Wanger entered Dartmouth in 1911, and although he never finished his B.A., he carved out a major name for himself once he had decided, finally, to give himself over to the theater. He was enthralled by the best of what he'd seen on-stage while studying and traveling in Europe, and he used this knowledge and inspiration to transform the school's previously undistinguished Dramatic Club into an extraordinarily potent and forward-looking force in theater production, rivaling the work of the best professional companies. Only his inability to study on a sustained basis or complete his degree requirements halted his work. Wanger entered the professional theater world in 1915 as an apprentice (working alongside a youthful Claude Rains, who was the stage manager) to Harley Granville Barker, the British theatrical legend, in a bold but ultimately unsuccessful season. Wanger moved on from there to managing a production of See America First, the first professional creation of a young, aspiring composer named Cole Porter (with Clifton Webb in the cast as a dancer), which vanished after 15 performances. From that failure, Wanger jumped to his first success, as producer of a new play, 'Ception Shoals, starring Nazimova. This proved to be a hit, and it was to have been a start of an ambitious career for Wanger, when events in the Atlantic and Europe caught up with him -- the American entry into the First World War diverted him from pursuing his career on-stage. He joined the army's recruiting efforts in early April of 1917, immediately after war was declared, and later, with help from his family connections, was commissioned a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He tried to join the army's aviation corps but was, by his own admission, a terrible pilot during his tenure with the Lafayette Escadrille under Fiorello LaGuardia. He eventually ended up in intelligence and propaganda, and this put him in contact with the film medium directly for the first time, as he helped monitor the distribution of newsreel material for audiences in Europe. Wanger was attracted by the seriousness of purpose of all of these activities, so much so that he became involved in Woodrow Wilson's post-World War I efforts to secure a lasting peace, and he briefly considered staying in the diplomatic service. After a short string of theatrical failures, in 1920, Wanger made the acquaintance of Jesse L. Lasky, a theatrical producer who had lately gone into the motion picture business through what became known as Paramount Pictures; he was hired as Lasky's assistant, based on his education and critical eye, and as manager of movie production for Paramount. Wanger only lasted there a year before he resigned over a professional disagreement with Lasky, but in that time he ran the entire movie operation, approving scripts, assigning writers, directors, and producers, hiring players and technical experts, and coordinating all activities between the front and back offices. He also put together the production of one of the most successful movies of the immediate postwar era, The Sheik, which made Rudolph Valentino into a star. Wanger next worked in film exhibition and programming in London. He made a brief, successful return to theatrical production and then, in 1923, was rehired by Lasky as Paramount's general manager. He held the job for the next eight years, during which he oversaw the studio's rise to the top of the movie business, and the making of such renowned movies as the romantic comedy It (for which Wanger personally commissioned Elinor Glyn as a screenwriter), the World War I drama Wings, and the zany, nihilist satire The Cocoanuts, and developed such onscreen talents as Clara Bow, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, and the Marx Brothers. Wanger was let go from Paramount in a management change during 1931, and moved to Columbia Pictures before jumping to MGM, where he was responsible for producing Queen Christina, starring Greta Garbo, and the eerie political fantasy Gabriel Over the White House. Wanger left the studio soon after and established himself as an independent producer, with a distribution contract at Paramount. His first film was The President Vanishes, another topical political fantasy film. He produced 13 movies in the next three years, of which the best remembered is probably The Trail of the Lonesome Pine starring Henry Fonda and Fred MacMurray, the first outdoor movie shot in Technicolor. In 1936, Wanger moved his distribution to United Artists and began a program of highly ambitious and often daring productions, starting with Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, starring Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney in a tale of crime and misfortune that anticipated the development of film noir in the following decade. His later productions included Frank Borzage's History Is Made at Night, Tay Garnett's Stand-In, and John Cromwell's Algiers (a remake of Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko, utilizing all of the same establishing and second-unit shots). Algiers turned Charles Boyer into an overnight sensation and a matinee idol in the United States, but had the unfortunate effect of all but burying Duvivier's original film in the United States until its restoration and revival in the early 21st century. Wanger's serious interest in politics also manifested itself with his production of Blockade (1938), a drama set during the Spanish Civil War. In an era when the major studios were either rigidly conservative or terrified of addressing politics at all, Wanger was one of the few producers willing to stick his neck out with a potentially controversial subject, or to display any sympathy with the political left. Wanger's 1939 production schedule was a bit uneven, mixing classy melodrama and thrillers, but it contained one unabashed cinematic jewel -- John Ford's Stagecoach. In addition to being a huge critical success and a hit at the box office, the movie turned John Wayne into a star and put him on the path to becoming a screen legend. The following year, Wanger secured the services of Alfred Hitchcock for Foreign Correspondent, a thriller that reflected Wanger's continued interest in international affairs and politics, which was one of the earlier Hollywood efforts to address (albeit in carefully veiled form) the threat represented by the Nazis. Wanger's activities during the Second World War included a massive amount of support for the war effort, as well as the production of such inspired and serious wartime dramas as Sundown (1941) and Gung Ho! (1943), and the John Ford film The Long Voyage Home. Not all of Wanger's personal fascinations lay with politics and serious social issues. He was also a pushover for Near East romance (hence his interest in The Sheik) and the Arabian Nights fantasies. One strongly suspects that he may well have envied Alexander Korda for his production of The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. for its 1924 predecessor. He successfully produced his own entry in the field in 1942 with The Arabian Nights, directed by John Rawlins and starring Sabu (who had starred in The Thief of Bagdad), Jon Hall, and Maria Montez, which struck a perfect escapist chord in the middle of World War II. Wanger also saw box-office success with Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945), one of the highest regarded of movies in Lang's American output; a remake of Jean Renoir's La Chienne, it is regarded as one of the classics in the field of film noir. After that, however, either Wanger's instincts failed or his luck ran out -- over the five years that followed, he endured a string of withering financial and critical failures that threatened to destroy his reputation as one of the most erudite and ambitious of Hollywood's independent producers. Beginning with the critical disaster of Salome, Where She Danced (which, in fairness, did make a budding star out of Yvonne De Carlo), Wanger saw a string of reverses that culminated in 1948 with his production of Joan of Arc, directed by Victor Fleming, which lost a fortune and became a notorious critical failure as well. At around this same time, the political idealism that he had displayed in the 1930s and early '40s brought Wanger under suspicion before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He found himself suspected of leftist sympathies, and partly in an effort to prove his belief in capitalism, he produced Tulsa. The latter film was actually a pretty good vehicle for Susan Hayward, who was under contract to Wanger and was, in fact, his biggest star. It was also an overt salute to the oil industry, however, and ended up another (and also very expensive) failure. Similarly, his late-'40s film with Lang, Secret Beyond the Door, and The Reckless Moment, a production directed by renowned European filmmaker Max Ophüls, also lost money. Ironically, his one box-office success during this period was a low-budget production called Reign of Terror (later retitled The Black Book), directed by Anthony Mann and released through Eagle-Lion Pictures. A historical thriller set during the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution, with its story about torture, coerced testimony, and political inquisitions, Reign of Terror (1949) could almost have been Wanger's veiled comment of the Red Scare and the threat of the blacklist sweeping Hollywood; actually, it was never really that sophisticated in its intent, though it might be the most interesting B-feature of it day, with fascinating performances, hooked around offbeat casting (including comic actor Robert Cummings in a serious role) and improvised dialogue that all works. This movie's modest profits couldn't rescue Wanger from a string of failures, though, and he was near bankruptcy by the start of the 1950s. In late 1951, Wanger's personal life exploded in the way that eclipsed his other problems. He had married his second wife, the ravishingly beautiful actress Joan Bennett, a little more than a decade earlier, and had come to suspect that she was being unfaithful to him with her agent, Jennings Lang. He finally caught them together in a parking lot, pulled out a pistol, and shot Lang in the groin. The victim recovered fully, Wanger's marriage to Bennett endured for another 14 years, and most of his fellow producers and the moguls behind them rallied to his defense; he served two years on what would normally have been a major felony, falling back on a plea of temporary insanity. Wanger returned to the movie business upon his release, but his 1950s productions were decidedly more modest in scope and budget than the best of his 1930s work, and were done principally for Allied Artists, a classier offshoot of Monogram Pictures. These included the prison drama Riot in Cell Block 11 and the sci-fi horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, both the work of director Don Siegel. By that time, Wanger's judgment had begun to fail him somewhat, as he insisted on recutting Body Snatchers, adding a prologue and a slightly hopeful ending that softened the impact of Siegel's original cut. He also returned to the Arabian Nights successfully with the light-hearted fantasy The Adventures of Haji Baba (1954), based on a 19th century novel directed by Don Weis and starring John Derek, Elaine Stewart, and Thomas Gomez, which was also the first fantasy film of its kind shot in Cinemascope. Even in his reduced circumstances, Wanger still occasionally took chances by embracing controversial social issues, with I Want to Live! (1958), a brutally frank anti-death-penalty film starring Susan Hayward, which remains one of the most highly regarded topical films of its era or on its subject. Wanger joined 20th Century Fox late in the 1950s, and he was one of the many hands that contributed to decision-making on Joseph L. Mankiewicz's epic Cleopatra (1963). His relationship with Fox soon broke down in acrimony and ended in 1962. Its most tangible result was the subsequent publication of Wanger's My Life With "Cleopatra," an account of the production that was intended to tell his side of the story behind a production so out of control that it resulted in the near-collapse of the studio that financed it and the dismissal of the management that had approved it. Cleopatra was the last finished film with which Wanger was associated; he tried keeping his hand in films right to the end, and was hoping to resume production on some small-scale movies as late as 1968. His personal life took a darker turn also, as his marriage to Bennett ended in 1965. In November of 1968, Wanger suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in New York City. In the decades since, the best of Wanger's movies have endured amazingly well as entertainment and prime examples of the cinematic art, though only a relative handful (Stagecoach, Foreign Correspondent, Joan of Arc, I Want to Live!) had shown up on such high-end formats as DVD as of 2005. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide