"Allan Dwan--the last pioneer"
By Peter Bogdonavich
Pub.: Praeger, NY (1971)
Excert: Pages, 111-116
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Suez 1938.
Zanuck cooked up the idea of making it, they developed it, and he assigned it to me. The cast was good and the special effects were unusually good-there was some remarkable stuff of the cyclone destroying the canal. In one instance, I had to have a windstorm come up, blow away some building and actually blow the people through the air. So I got about a hundred of those huge airplane prop fans we use to make wind and lined them up. And those things were practically cyclones-if you walked through them, they?d knock you off your feet. At first they were blowing sand, but I had to discard that because it would cut the skin off people, so instead we used ground up cereal that we threw in front of the blades. The people had to move through that all day long, and I?m telling you, that was an ordeal. Everybody got beaten up good-particularly Ty Power and Annabella.
In one scene, he was supposed to be knocked unconscious, and she ties him to a post, and then the wind whips her away. We had toe put her on a wire and fling her through the air. It was drastic.
Did you work on the script with Philip Dunne?
In the sense of suggesting this and that, and I?d take out some incidents that were a little overwritten or would have cost too much money. They squawked about that, but I suggested we try it without them and Zanuck said, ?You?re right.? It would have cost another couple of hundred thousand dollars to do. Because you start one of those things, you don?t know when to quit. There?s a limit to effects. You can blow too many things down-you still have your story. And anything like a cyclone is a momentary interruption. It?s a means of an end-destroys something so that afterwards you will say, ?Will we go on or are we finished?? And your story?s got to go from then on. They had overwritten it by two reels-got fascinated by destruction. And, of course, a lot of the special effects were miniatures.
What particularly appealed to you about the film?
Well, I liked the human story. Whether the canal was built or not was of no importance to me. It had a peculiar experience in France. The De Lesseps family-he was the builder of the canal, played by Power-started to sue me. We gave him a romance with Eugenie, and they objected to that, so they took it to court. And the court told them that this picture did so much honour to France that no matter what they thought as a family, the case must be discarded, and they threw it out of court.
Did you consider it one of your favorite films?
Well, as an example of what can be done to put history on the screen, yes. I thought it was great. But a little thing like Big Brother was of more interest to me as a story than that was. Or Manhandled. They?re simple, honest stories that happen to people.
On the set photos. Joseph Schildkraut seated on the right.
Tyrone Power on the upper right-hand corner.
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