Tags
1950s, 20th Century America, Alden Ehrenreich, Channing Tatum, Comedies, Eddie Mannix, Esther Williams, Films about Hollywood, George Clooney, George Reeves, Hedda Hopper, Joel and Ethan Coen, Josh Brolin, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Spencer Tracy, The Robe, Tilda Swinton, Veronica Osorio
Hail, Caesar! (2016, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen) is a rather fluffy film set in 1950s Hollywood. While LA Confidential used the period as the setting for a thriller, the Coen brothers use it as a chance to explore the silliness of the period. The plot, such as it is, involves Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix, a ‘fixer’ who works for Capital Pictures, covering up scandals before they can get into the media. The studio is in the middle of making a prestige Sword-and-Sandal pic about a Roman general who undergoes a religious conversion when he accidentally meets Jesus at a well. But the star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) gets kidnapped, and Mannix has to scramble to find him. There’s not really much actual history here, other than the general setting, but I figured I’d dig into some of the characters and look at whom they might be based on.
Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, you may wish to do so before reading this post, since it discusses major plot points.
Eddie Mannix
Eddie Mannix was actually a real person, but Brolin’s character bares only a superficial resemblance to the real thing: basically, they’re both married, Catholic, and work as fixers, but that’s about it. The real Eddie Mannix (d.1963) was MGM’s comptroller and general manager, and worked closely with MGM’s head of publicity to control press coverage of the performers who worked for the studio. It was his job to fix the actual scandals by paying off witnesses and victims, getting the police to look the other way, and so on. He is alleged to have covered up a car accident that Clark Gable got into by making John Huston take the blame for it. (In the film, Mannix at one point alludes to covering up a similar incident.) He reportedly arranged for the destruction of a pornographic film that Joan Crawford had made while she was a teenager. When Spencer Tracy went on one of his periodic benders. Mannix had a system for how to deal with the star.
The real Eddie Mannix
And he was largely responsible for destroying the reputation of an unfortunate young dancer and actress named Patricia Douglas, who was hired to provide companionship at a drinking party for 300 of MGM’s salesmen. Douglas was raped during the party, and when she tried to pursue charges, first in criminal court and then in civil court, Mannix used his contacts in the legal system to make the charges go away.
Brolin as Mannix
Mannix also had an ugly set of relationships. He cheated on his first wife, Bernice, with a dancer named Mary Nolan, whom he beat so frequently that she required 15 surgeries. When she tried to sue him, he had the police run her out of town. He may have arranged Bernice’s death in a car accident. His second wife, Toni Lanier, eventually had a long-term affair with Superman star George Reeves, with Mannix’ blessing. When Reeves called off the affair in 1958, Toni was deeply distressed, and Reeves suddenly had a car accident after the brake fluid drained out of his brake line. Not long after that, Reeves committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Connect the dots if you’re so inclined.
Baird Whitlock and Hail, Caesar!
Whitlock is an established actor who, like Spencer Tracy, has a tendency to go on long benders from which Mannix has to retrieve him. Some reviews have suggested Whitlock is modeled on Kirk Douglas, apparently because of Douglas’ involvement in Sword-and-Sandal pics like Spartacus, but I think he’s actually based more on Richard Burton, because Hail, Caesar! seems to be a spoof of The Robe. Both films are about a jaded Roman soldier who converts to Christianity after a brief encounter with Jesus; both feature a scene in which the tormented soldier stares up at Jesus as he hangs on the cross, and both films have a strategy of only filming Jesus from behind and focusing instead on the soldier’s face. The bloated speeches that Whitlock gives sound a lot like speeches from The Robe. But Quo Vadis and Ben Hur are other obvious inspirations for Hail, Caesar!
Clooney as Whitlock
DeeAnna Moran
Scarlett Johansson plays DeeAnna Moran, who is very obviously modeled on Esther Williams. Like Williams, Moran is a bathing beauty whose water ballet films are a major money-maker in the 50s. (In fact, the Coen brothers arranged for Williams’ tank to be restored so they could film Moran’s mermaid sequence in it.) Moran is on her second divorce, working on a film, and having an affair with director Arne Slessum (Christopher Lambert), when she discovers she’s pregnant. Desperate to protect her wholesome image, Mannix arranges for her to discretely surrender the baby to a third party, with the intention of then adopting the baby as if it weren’t her own. Similarly, Williams discovered that she was pregnant by her second husband while working on Pagan Love Song; she later divorced that husband. While working on Million Dollar Mermaid, she had an affair with Victor Mature. But the detail about Moran giving up the baby and then adopting it back is taken from Loretta Young’s life, when she got pregnant with Clark Gable’s child, reportedly during a train ride.
Johansson as Moran
Hobie Doyle and Carlotta Valdez
Alden Ehrenreich plays Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy. He’s an expert trick-rider and good with a lasso, but totally out of his league when he gets cast in a drawing-room romance as a playboy. Some have suggested that Doyle is modeled on Kirby Grant, best known for the tv series Sky King, but while Grant did singing cowboy films, his central shtick seems to have been trick piloting. Doyle’s more likely to be modeled on Gene Autry, who like Doyle is both a singer and an expert rider. Roy Rogers is another possibility.
Ehrenreich as Doyle, trying to act
Doyle gets sent on a studio-manufactured date with Latina dancer Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio), who is pretty obviously Carmen Miranda. She even makes a joke about being able to dance with fruit on her head. But Miranda’s heyday was the 40s (her career went into decline after WWII), and Carlotta is a young woman. The film doesn’t delve into Miranda’s abusive marriage, alcoholism, or drug usage at all.
Laurence Laurenz and Burt Gurney
Hobie’s movie is being directed by the stuffy British Laurence Laurenz (Ralph Fiennes), who is appalled at how poorly-cast his leading man is. In one amusing sequence, he finds himself forced to give Doyle elocution lessons so he can say the line “Would that it were so simple” without his Southern accent. Laurenz seems to be a version of Laurence Olivier, especially once it’s revealed that he’s having an affair with Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum).
Gurney is a song-and-dance man. We get to see Gurney perform a classic 50s dance number called “Dames”, which is filled with innuendo (it’s probably the best scene in the whole film). It’s clearly a riff on Gene’s Kelly’s Anchors Aweigh, although the Coens were also reportedly inspired by Fred Astaire and Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain. But I doubt there’s any evidence that Kelly (or Astaire or O’Connor) was gay, or that he was a communist sympathizer. And Tatum’s dance style is much more like Kelly’s working class masculinity than Astaire’s upper-class elegance.(See Update.)
Tatum as Gurney
Thora and Thessaly Thacker
Tilda Swinton plays twin sisters Thora and Thessaly, both of whom are gossip columnists in the mold of Hedda Hopper or Luella Parsons. Both women were famous for their ability to ferret out celebrity gossip, and although they had initially been friends, they came to hate each other and feuded for years.Hopper was both feared and despised in the late 30s and 40s for the damage her column could do; Tracy once kicked her in the ass after she revealed his relationship with Katherine Hepburn, while Joseph Cotton pulled a chair out from under her. Joan Bennett once sent her a skunk as a Valentine’s Day gift.
But the angle that Thora and Thessaly are also twin sisters was taken from Esther Lederer and Pauline Philips, better known as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. Landers reportedly became angry when her sister decided to start her own advice column just a few months after Landers had begun hers (without giving her any warning). For much of the rest of their lives, they had a stormy relationship (Van Buren reportedly one tried to persuade a paper to drop her sister’s column and run hers instead) and when Landers died in 2002, they were reportedly not on speaking terms, despite an apparent reconciliation in the 1960s.
Swinton as one of the Thacker sister
Update: As a commenter on this blog pointed out, the affair between Laurenz and Gurney probably owes something to the rumors that Olivier and Danny Kaye were lovers. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support the claims, but that doesn’t mean the Coens might not have gotten inspiration from the rumors. And Kaye was suspected by the FBI of being a Communist, which fits Gurney’s character.
Want to Know More?
Hail, Caesar! [Blu-ray]
Like I said, there isn’t much actual history here, but if you want to read more about Hollywood scandals, you can try The Hollywood Book of Scandals : The Shocking, Often Disgraceful Deeds and Affairs of Over 100 American Movie and TV Idols
An Historian Goes to the Movies 
Ooh wow, this was fascinating! I love reading about the lives that movie stars led in the Golden Age of films in the Forties and Fifties- it’s often fantastic and decadent, but it can be really tragic and sad too.
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Yeah, the Coens stayed away from any of the really tragic stuff, like James Dean or Montgomery Clift. So it’s the fun scandals.
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Another fun source for info about old Hollywood scandals is the “You Must Remember This” podcast. She did a whole episode about Eddie Mannix, including the Patricia Douglas case. Fascinating stuff.
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Yeah, that podcast was one of my initial sources for the Mannix material.
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The George Reeves story is portrayed in Hollywoodland, with Ben Affleck and Adrian Brody; Eddie Mannix is portrayed by Bob Hoskins. I don’t know how accurate that film is, precisely, but it’s certainly of interest to anyone who wants to know more about the era and the studio fixers.
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Yeah, I saw it when it came out. Good performance by Affleck. But I didn’t know much about the story.
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There are twin stories presented in the film. The character of Adrien Brody’s Louis Simo is entirely fictional, however Reeves’ mother did hire an attorney to look into her son’s death. The attorney came back with the news that she should drop it since “some bad people are involved”. Simo’s investigation is pretty much all the clues people have been bringing up to cast doubt upon the official story of Reeves’ death. It’s safe to say that the scene where Simo finds himself beaten up and at the mercy of Eddie Mannix is pure fiction.
The second story of Reeves’ ascent to Superman stardom and his decline is for the most part true to the historical record. It does however contain several events that people have declared not true or half true in the 50 years since. The two major events that are suspect is the scene where Reeves finds himself in his Superman costume confronted by a child holding a real loaded revolver. In a virtuoso piece of acting Affleck as Reeves has to convince the child to lower the gun by claiming the bullet would harm other people in the crowd.
That story has been around for 50 years and it certainly could have happened. However it can’t be verified since exactly where and when it happened can’t be agreed on. The second suspect event is the test screening of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY where the audience making jokes about Superman led to Reeve’s part getting cut down. Over the years several people including the movie’s director claimed that none of Reeves’ part was cut down and that it was always the size that it is in the finished film. The scene does perfectly illustrate how trapped by the role of Superman Reeves’ did feel, but it is considered a Hollywood tall tale.
On a minor note the scene where Reeves burns the Superman suit in celebration of the show’s cancellation is altered for dramatic purposes. In truth Reeves burned the suit at the end of every season of the show’s run, it was his personal ritual. The movie also leaves out that there was talk of a new season of the show in the works just before Reeves death.
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Maybe you should be writing this blog…
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Hey just giving out information. Like you I have passions for movies and history.
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I’m not criticizing. Just being amused.
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Channing Tatum’s Burt Gurney being in romance with Ralph Fiennes’ Laurence Laurenz could be seen as based on the Hollywood rumor that Olivier was having an affair with song and dance actor Danny Kaye (COURT JESTER, SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY). According to Hollywood legend it was this affair that sent Olivier’s wife, GONE WITH THE WIND actress Vivian Leigh, into a metal breakdown.
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Yes, I had thought about that. But a lot of what I found suggested there wasn’t any factual basis to the rumor. Not that that means the Coens couldn’t have used it as inspiration…
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One more clue that they used that legend for inspiration is that Kaye was on an FBI list of suspected Communists that was put out in 1949. Hence, Gurney’s suspected Communist ties in the film.
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Easy mistake to make, but It’s actually Anchors Aweigh, not away. Also, anyone interested in a fictionalized version of the darker scandals of the era might want to pick up The Fade Out, a recently completed Ed Brubaker comic which deals with all this in a noir vein. Not sure if the trades are out yet, but the floppies just wrapped with issue 12. I would track down the issues instead of the trades, as they include essays on related topics in the back of each issue.
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You’re right. Thanks for catching that. I’ve corrected it.
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This movie has been playing on the Cinemax channels a lot lately so I had some time to check it out again. I believe the character of the director Arne Slessum (played by Christopher Lambert) is based on Golden Age Hollywood director Michael Curtiz. Like Slessum, Curtiz was a foreign born Hollywood filmmaker (Hungarian instead of Swedish like in the film) who rose to prominence as one of the ace directors of Hollywood in the 30’s and 40’s. He was the director of the all time classic CASABLANCA, though his filmography has more than a 100 movies from his time in Hollywood alone. These films range through nearly every genre in film, including musicals.
Like Slessum in the film, Curtiz was known for being difficult to understand due to his thick accent. Also he was known for fluid camera work and odd angles, hence the dolly shot with the breakaway set we see in the “Dames” sequence. Finally Curtiz was well known for having numerous affairs while he was married to his third wife, silent film star and screenwriter Bess Meredyth. This fits in with Slessum’s fooling around with DeeAnna Moran. These factors lead me to believe Curtiz was the model for Slessum. What do you think?
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