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Are you kidding them, or yourself?
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moon_custafer asked me who should in my opinion have played Dan Roman in William Wellman's The High and the Mighty (1954) instead of the one conspicuously weak link in the otherwise solid ensemble of this parent and original of the star-studded disaster flick, the reluctantly cast co-producer John Wayne.
As written by Ernest K. Gann in the 1953 best-seller which he adapted for the screen himself, Dan Roman is a man with a haunting. He names it to himself as such; he still wakes up screaming from its nightmares; it is not made a mystery for the reader. By the end of the first chapter, we along with the ground crew have been acquainted with the stupid, wrecking story:
"We used to call him Sad Dan, or the Whistler. I'd thought he'd blown his brains out by now, but he's got too much nerve for that. He was flying for Aero Columbia same time I was line chief down there after the war. One day he takes off from Cali with a full load and one of them South American line squalls decides to hit the field at the same time. The wind shifts too late for him to stop and he don't make it over the little hump of ground about half a mile from the field. He hits flat, but the ship breaks in half and there's nothing but fire in ten seconds. Dan gets tossed through the cockpit window and only gets a few scratches which leaves him alive to blame himself. The copilot is killed . . . everybody but Dan [. . .] I knew two of the passengers. They were going down to the Coast for a holiday . . . a blond girl named Alice, and a boy named Tony. I thought they were wonderful people and so did everybody else, including Dan Roman . . ." Ben stopped looking at his cigar and carefully replaced it between his teeth. "Alice was Dan's wife and Tony his only kid."
Fifty-three years old, a flyer since adolescence and a veteran not just of wars in the air but races, endurance flights, every kind of commercial aviation from bush mail to passenger airlines, he thinks now of a plane as a lethal collection of failure points and flies because he doesn't know anything else to do with himself. He's so old for a co-pilot that he embarrasses the much younger captain of Trans-Orient Pacific Flight 420 who has never heard the story of the Aero Columbia crash and imagines the one-time legend must be over the hill. The reader who benefits from the head-hopping of the third-person narrative knows it's because Dan never again wants to find himself in a position of command, more than survivor's guilt-ridden with the responsibility that killed too many people because they trusted him. He doesn't talk much beyond exchanges of technical information and social necessity, not because he's naturally taciturn but because he can hear the hesitation marked permanently in his voice, as if always apologizing a little for being alive. He couldn't stay grounded and sane and staffing a flight crew really is the safest place for him, but at the same time it would not be incorrect to describe him as a lean drink of PTSD with reading glasses and a slight limp.
I can't be too hard on Wayne because he hadn't planned to take the part and did so only because Warner Bros. was about to pull their funding without a name headlining the production, but he was right despite his previously successful collaboration with Wellman and Gann that he was miscast. He brings none of the crucial fragility to Dan Roman, none of the self-doubt, none of the extra-diegetic uncertainty. When the novel's DC-4 en route from Honolulu to San Francisco loses its number-one propeller in a fire just past the point of no return over the Pacific, Dan's part in the action isn't as simple as the old warhorse rising to the occasion. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, as he reassures the passengers about the procedures and prospects of ditching in rough seas, he can't stop himself from silently supplying a running rebuttal of each technically true, contextually specious claim; he's grateful when the passengers themselves begin to form the kind of community that can calm their collective fear because he can't provide the confidence to pull them through himself. He doesn't have the overocean experience of the captain whose decisions he is coming to suspect are the product of fatalism rather than facts and he can't trust that his own instinct to nurse the fuel-bleeding plane through the slow wind-dragged miles to the coast even if it means an instrument landing on the proverbial wing and a prayer is in compliance with the cold equations of their situation rather than a personal need for atonement. It's a smart twist to slip into the high stakes. His presence in the cockpit—an aviation pioneer on a routine passenger flight—should tilt everyone's chances more toward United Airlines Flight 232 than Pan Am Flight 526A, but the audience of the film, like the reader of the book, should never lose sight of the possibility that Dan for all his decades flying by luck and second nature could be wrong. John Wayne would make pictures that questioned his heroism, but he does not let it happen in The High and the Mighty. He's too much the Duke, the hard right icon of American masculinity. Of course his old hand's judgment is superior to these scientifically trained pups. Slapping his younger colleague to snap him out of the freeze that has been creeping up on him all flight, Wayne just looks patriarchal and shaming, whereas the same gesture in the novel works because its open acknowledgement of the captain's fear allows him to stop wasting his energies trying to hide it and devote them instead to trying to save people's lives under circumstances where only a fool wouldn't be afraid—it's an exorcism more than a rebuke, a distinction we can't imagine Wayne's Dan being sensitive to any more than we can picture him second-guessing himself. No apologies are imprinted in the flat rock of his voice. Sometimes he looks at a photo of his wife and child, but the audience never feels their ghosts.
Both Wayne and Wellman had wanted for Dan Roman—and originally gotten—Spencer Tracy, who backed out at the last minute for reasons speculated to range from health to politics. He wouldn't have occurred to me from reading the novel, but since he was capable of including human softness among his expressions of emotion, he should have been fine as Dan. The actor who would have knocked the role out of the park, though, if you ask me, was James Stewart.
In hindsight he's a shoo-in, but even at the time he should have been on the production's radar. By 1953, Stewart was proving through his Westerns with Anthony Mann that he could do weatherbeaten raw nerves better than any other male star on Hollywood's A-list, men whose demons and frailties counted just as much if not more than their grit and marksmanship. His romantic actor's knack for vulnerability was being pushed into weird, weak, reckless places, matters of honor and business curdling into compulsions of vengeance and shame in Winchester '73 (1950) and The Naked Spur (1953), decency a self-dogged bid for redemption in Bend of the River (1952). The Far Country (1955), which actually wrapped production the month before The High and the Mighty started up, would stretch self-sufficiency to the point of maladaptation before snapping back with a recoil too sharp for sentiment. Dan Roman with his nightmares and his expertise and his ambivalent relationship to the only thing he has left to keep him alive would have fallen well within the palette of these struggling men, less centrally perhaps in such a stacked ensemble but no less believably. Stewart could look simultaneously rugged and breakable, anxious and stubborn. His capacity for freakout had been spectacular as far back as George Bailey. He could live under a character's skin, telegraphing emotions as if unconscious or helpless of their escape; he could lock down just as eloquently, superficially undemonstrative as Dan has to be internally cursing himself for not reporting the early, mysterious jolt in the beat of the engines that he persuaded himself was nothing more than his own twangy nerves and now it's more than a thousand miles too late over a heavy night sea with a blown-out engine hanging like a sea anchor from one extinguished wing and a skipper already operating in a state which Dan recognizes from personal experience as controlled fear. Imagine how easily through the flinching pane of Stewart's face we could have understood this awareness for ourselves, the pulled wires of his body that always seemed to have unfurled an extra angle somewhere, the tension nagging like that so often stammer in his factual drawl, the cost of everything he can't let out into his hands or his calculations in a slow-motion crisis with no time for navel-gazing and yet the haunting as always is along for the ride:
Standing firmly on the ground and talking with comrade airmen, it was all very well to fall back on the old pilot's saying—I'm in the front of the ship and if my ass gets there, they'll get there, so why give the passengers a second thought—but the pilots who relied on that phrase to mitigate their responsibility were not those who had ever lost an Alice or a Tony, nor had they ever looked into faces like those waiting hopefully in the cabin.
Like Wellman who famously flew with the Lafayette Flying Corps in World War I and Gann who had piloted commercially on either side of flying the Hump with the ATC, Stewart was even a pilot offscreen, a decorated combat veteran of WWII who didn't retire from active stints in the reserves of the USAF until the mandatory retirement age of the 1960's took him out. In his own lineage of aviation pictures, the part would have followed beautifully on his high-strung boffin convinced of imminent de Havilland Comet-like catastrophe in Henry Koster's No Highway in the Sky (1951) and set the stage for the even more defensive traditionalism of his seat-of-the-pants dinosaur in Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). I can see no way it could realistically have happened. At more or less the exact dates of production of The High and the Mighty—November 1953 into January 1954—Stewart was filming Rear Window (1954) for Hitchcock, after which it looks a little ironically as though he went straight on to Mann's Strategic Air Command (1955), one of the hardest sells for the post-WWII American military-industrial complex I have ever let into my eyes along with its spectacularly VistaVision Technicolor aerial photography of the Convair B-36 and the Boeing B-47 Stratojet. If he was ever under consideration for the part of Dan Roman, I have no evidence of it and in fact according to William Wellman Jr.'s Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel (2015) no one was except Spencer Tracy, hence the absence of any second-stringers to reach out to when it came time to recast the part stat or shut down the film. The meta-irony of the production depending on Wayne in the crunch as Flight 420 after all needed Dan Roman would be easier to relish if it had not knocked a whole chunk of heart and suspense out of the film.
The other chief flaw of The High and the Mighty has nothing to do with John Wayne. Like the novel, the film follows the Vicki Baum model of the interconnected ensemble each with their own story and since there are twenty-two credited roles between the flight crew and passenger manifest alone, the cumulative effect of tracking them all over 147 minutes can make a viewer start to feel as though the flight is passing in real time. Equally out of reach in the forking paths of the multiverse is the version of The High and the Mighty which has less human interest and more aviation detail—not immiscible elements even in Wellman's own filmography, but here the division of plot between cabin and cockpit makes the narrative feel less communally bound than switching on a schedule and I remain constitutionally more inclined toward three-star fixes and gambles with fuel and altitude than marital problems. Claire Trevor, Jan Sterling, Doe Avedon, and Paul Fix nonetheless turn in some characterizations as lovely as kissing a mink coat before flinging it out to the cloud-roaring night of lightening ship and Robert Newton as Gustave Pardee is translated with such fidelity from the page that I am almost tempted to wonder if Gann actually had him in mind for the shambolic, sad-eyed theatrical producer possessed of an enormous incongruous charm which he has always used to get away with being something of a dramallama and now finds himself using to calm his fellow passengers despite being scared stiff of flying himself: "I was guilty of the cheapest theatrics a while ago . . . and now it seems, I'm stuck with it." Please put me through to the shade of Wild Bill Wellman and if he can't find a way to get Jimmy Stewart as Dan Roman without losing me L. B. Jeffries, see if he'll at least give directions to the hell of a good video store next door. The last thing I expected this movie to do was explain what Robert Stack is doing in Airplane! (1980). This kidding brought to you by my stuck backers at Patreon.
moon_custafer asked me who should in my opinion have played Dan Roman in William Wellman's The High and the Mighty (1954) instead of the one conspicuously weak link in the otherwise solid ensemble of this parent and original of the star-studded disaster flick, the reluctantly cast co-producer John Wayne.As written by Ernest K. Gann in the 1953 best-seller which he adapted for the screen himself, Dan Roman is a man with a haunting. He names it to himself as such; he still wakes up screaming from its nightmares; it is not made a mystery for the reader. By the end of the first chapter, we along with the ground crew have been acquainted with the stupid, wrecking story:
"We used to call him Sad Dan, or the Whistler. I'd thought he'd blown his brains out by now, but he's got too much nerve for that. He was flying for Aero Columbia same time I was line chief down there after the war. One day he takes off from Cali with a full load and one of them South American line squalls decides to hit the field at the same time. The wind shifts too late for him to stop and he don't make it over the little hump of ground about half a mile from the field. He hits flat, but the ship breaks in half and there's nothing but fire in ten seconds. Dan gets tossed through the cockpit window and only gets a few scratches which leaves him alive to blame himself. The copilot is killed . . . everybody but Dan [. . .] I knew two of the passengers. They were going down to the Coast for a holiday . . . a blond girl named Alice, and a boy named Tony. I thought they were wonderful people and so did everybody else, including Dan Roman . . ." Ben stopped looking at his cigar and carefully replaced it between his teeth. "Alice was Dan's wife and Tony his only kid."
Fifty-three years old, a flyer since adolescence and a veteran not just of wars in the air but races, endurance flights, every kind of commercial aviation from bush mail to passenger airlines, he thinks now of a plane as a lethal collection of failure points and flies because he doesn't know anything else to do with himself. He's so old for a co-pilot that he embarrasses the much younger captain of Trans-Orient Pacific Flight 420 who has never heard the story of the Aero Columbia crash and imagines the one-time legend must be over the hill. The reader who benefits from the head-hopping of the third-person narrative knows it's because Dan never again wants to find himself in a position of command, more than survivor's guilt-ridden with the responsibility that killed too many people because they trusted him. He doesn't talk much beyond exchanges of technical information and social necessity, not because he's naturally taciturn but because he can hear the hesitation marked permanently in his voice, as if always apologizing a little for being alive. He couldn't stay grounded and sane and staffing a flight crew really is the safest place for him, but at the same time it would not be incorrect to describe him as a lean drink of PTSD with reading glasses and a slight limp.
I can't be too hard on Wayne because he hadn't planned to take the part and did so only because Warner Bros. was about to pull their funding without a name headlining the production, but he was right despite his previously successful collaboration with Wellman and Gann that he was miscast. He brings none of the crucial fragility to Dan Roman, none of the self-doubt, none of the extra-diegetic uncertainty. When the novel's DC-4 en route from Honolulu to San Francisco loses its number-one propeller in a fire just past the point of no return over the Pacific, Dan's part in the action isn't as simple as the old warhorse rising to the occasion. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, as he reassures the passengers about the procedures and prospects of ditching in rough seas, he can't stop himself from silently supplying a running rebuttal of each technically true, contextually specious claim; he's grateful when the passengers themselves begin to form the kind of community that can calm their collective fear because he can't provide the confidence to pull them through himself. He doesn't have the overocean experience of the captain whose decisions he is coming to suspect are the product of fatalism rather than facts and he can't trust that his own instinct to nurse the fuel-bleeding plane through the slow wind-dragged miles to the coast even if it means an instrument landing on the proverbial wing and a prayer is in compliance with the cold equations of their situation rather than a personal need for atonement. It's a smart twist to slip into the high stakes. His presence in the cockpit—an aviation pioneer on a routine passenger flight—should tilt everyone's chances more toward United Airlines Flight 232 than Pan Am Flight 526A, but the audience of the film, like the reader of the book, should never lose sight of the possibility that Dan for all his decades flying by luck and second nature could be wrong. John Wayne would make pictures that questioned his heroism, but he does not let it happen in The High and the Mighty. He's too much the Duke, the hard right icon of American masculinity. Of course his old hand's judgment is superior to these scientifically trained pups. Slapping his younger colleague to snap him out of the freeze that has been creeping up on him all flight, Wayne just looks patriarchal and shaming, whereas the same gesture in the novel works because its open acknowledgement of the captain's fear allows him to stop wasting his energies trying to hide it and devote them instead to trying to save people's lives under circumstances where only a fool wouldn't be afraid—it's an exorcism more than a rebuke, a distinction we can't imagine Wayne's Dan being sensitive to any more than we can picture him second-guessing himself. No apologies are imprinted in the flat rock of his voice. Sometimes he looks at a photo of his wife and child, but the audience never feels their ghosts.
Both Wayne and Wellman had wanted for Dan Roman—and originally gotten—Spencer Tracy, who backed out at the last minute for reasons speculated to range from health to politics. He wouldn't have occurred to me from reading the novel, but since he was capable of including human softness among his expressions of emotion, he should have been fine as Dan. The actor who would have knocked the role out of the park, though, if you ask me, was James Stewart.
In hindsight he's a shoo-in, but even at the time he should have been on the production's radar. By 1953, Stewart was proving through his Westerns with Anthony Mann that he could do weatherbeaten raw nerves better than any other male star on Hollywood's A-list, men whose demons and frailties counted just as much if not more than their grit and marksmanship. His romantic actor's knack for vulnerability was being pushed into weird, weak, reckless places, matters of honor and business curdling into compulsions of vengeance and shame in Winchester '73 (1950) and The Naked Spur (1953), decency a self-dogged bid for redemption in Bend of the River (1952). The Far Country (1955), which actually wrapped production the month before The High and the Mighty started up, would stretch self-sufficiency to the point of maladaptation before snapping back with a recoil too sharp for sentiment. Dan Roman with his nightmares and his expertise and his ambivalent relationship to the only thing he has left to keep him alive would have fallen well within the palette of these struggling men, less centrally perhaps in such a stacked ensemble but no less believably. Stewart could look simultaneously rugged and breakable, anxious and stubborn. His capacity for freakout had been spectacular as far back as George Bailey. He could live under a character's skin, telegraphing emotions as if unconscious or helpless of their escape; he could lock down just as eloquently, superficially undemonstrative as Dan has to be internally cursing himself for not reporting the early, mysterious jolt in the beat of the engines that he persuaded himself was nothing more than his own twangy nerves and now it's more than a thousand miles too late over a heavy night sea with a blown-out engine hanging like a sea anchor from one extinguished wing and a skipper already operating in a state which Dan recognizes from personal experience as controlled fear. Imagine how easily through the flinching pane of Stewart's face we could have understood this awareness for ourselves, the pulled wires of his body that always seemed to have unfurled an extra angle somewhere, the tension nagging like that so often stammer in his factual drawl, the cost of everything he can't let out into his hands or his calculations in a slow-motion crisis with no time for navel-gazing and yet the haunting as always is along for the ride:
Standing firmly on the ground and talking with comrade airmen, it was all very well to fall back on the old pilot's saying—I'm in the front of the ship and if my ass gets there, they'll get there, so why give the passengers a second thought—but the pilots who relied on that phrase to mitigate their responsibility were not those who had ever lost an Alice or a Tony, nor had they ever looked into faces like those waiting hopefully in the cabin.
Like Wellman who famously flew with the Lafayette Flying Corps in World War I and Gann who had piloted commercially on either side of flying the Hump with the ATC, Stewart was even a pilot offscreen, a decorated combat veteran of WWII who didn't retire from active stints in the reserves of the USAF until the mandatory retirement age of the 1960's took him out. In his own lineage of aviation pictures, the part would have followed beautifully on his high-strung boffin convinced of imminent de Havilland Comet-like catastrophe in Henry Koster's No Highway in the Sky (1951) and set the stage for the even more defensive traditionalism of his seat-of-the-pants dinosaur in Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). I can see no way it could realistically have happened. At more or less the exact dates of production of The High and the Mighty—November 1953 into January 1954—Stewart was filming Rear Window (1954) for Hitchcock, after which it looks a little ironically as though he went straight on to Mann's Strategic Air Command (1955), one of the hardest sells for the post-WWII American military-industrial complex I have ever let into my eyes along with its spectacularly VistaVision Technicolor aerial photography of the Convair B-36 and the Boeing B-47 Stratojet. If he was ever under consideration for the part of Dan Roman, I have no evidence of it and in fact according to William Wellman Jr.'s Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel (2015) no one was except Spencer Tracy, hence the absence of any second-stringers to reach out to when it came time to recast the part stat or shut down the film. The meta-irony of the production depending on Wayne in the crunch as Flight 420 after all needed Dan Roman would be easier to relish if it had not knocked a whole chunk of heart and suspense out of the film.
The other chief flaw of The High and the Mighty has nothing to do with John Wayne. Like the novel, the film follows the Vicki Baum model of the interconnected ensemble each with their own story and since there are twenty-two credited roles between the flight crew and passenger manifest alone, the cumulative effect of tracking them all over 147 minutes can make a viewer start to feel as though the flight is passing in real time. Equally out of reach in the forking paths of the multiverse is the version of The High and the Mighty which has less human interest and more aviation detail—not immiscible elements even in Wellman's own filmography, but here the division of plot between cabin and cockpit makes the narrative feel less communally bound than switching on a schedule and I remain constitutionally more inclined toward three-star fixes and gambles with fuel and altitude than marital problems. Claire Trevor, Jan Sterling, Doe Avedon, and Paul Fix nonetheless turn in some characterizations as lovely as kissing a mink coat before flinging it out to the cloud-roaring night of lightening ship and Robert Newton as Gustave Pardee is translated with such fidelity from the page that I am almost tempted to wonder if Gann actually had him in mind for the shambolic, sad-eyed theatrical producer possessed of an enormous incongruous charm which he has always used to get away with being something of a dramallama and now finds himself using to calm his fellow passengers despite being scared stiff of flying himself: "I was guilty of the cheapest theatrics a while ago . . . and now it seems, I'm stuck with it." Please put me through to the shade of Wild Bill Wellman and if he can't find a way to get Jimmy Stewart as Dan Roman without losing me L. B. Jeffries, see if he'll at least give directions to the hell of a good video store next door. The last thing I expected this movie to do was explain what Robert Stack is doing in Airplane! (1980). This kidding brought to you by my stuck backers at Patreon.
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I don't think he would have—he was greying by his mid-forties, but hadn't built up anywhere near the repertoire of lines in his face—but Wayne was just about the same age, and I feel I could trust Stewart to look harrowed enough to make up the difference.
It's just so much a part of the novel, Dan's damage which doesn't manifest in any of the conventionally heroic ways, and it's just not present in the film. I would like it to have been.
[edit] I forgot the important part of this comment, which is that I feel both delighted and vindicated that Stewart also occurred to you; Dan was clearly, metaphysically meant for him.
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All the same, I feel like I need to start saying my first guesses out loud when they occur to me.
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Sounds like a good plan to me. I'm still upset about second-guessing myself into staying silent over something I correctly knew in college.
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Heck, Stewart was freaking out as far back as After the Thin Man. I always thought that was an atypical role for him, but really it fits rather nicely into his body of work.
(I have always found it hard to make myself watch John Wayne movies, even the very good ones.)
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Clearly I should see After the Thin Man!
(I have always found it hard to make myself watch John Wayne movies, even the very good ones.)
(Same. He's not a Reagan-level film-killer for me, but either the movie has to contain something of seriously compensating interest or it has to be The Long Voyage Home (1940).)
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It is my favorite of the series.
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I will keep my eyes open for it on TCM.
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It would not be incorrect to describe him as a lean drink of PTSD with reading glasses and a slight limp.</i. --that's wonderful.
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He plays a very John Wayne character! Which is not what Dan Roman in the novel is!
--that's wonderful.
Thank you.