7.3 Daniel Mainwaring's "Build My Gallows High"

 7.3 Daniel Mainwaring's "Build My Gallows High"

Whit checks in on Jeff's work in Acapulco

“Daniel Mainwaring wrote both the original novel (Build My Gallows High) and the screenplay for Out of the Past (1947). He alone is responsible for the thematic density of the film in which such ultimate noir elements as betrayal, the femme fatale, and the frame-up are combined with reckless abandon. 

After completing Out of the Past, Mainwaring, in spite of a brush with Hollywood’s witch-hunters, went on to script three films that represent the perfect cinematic realization of the burgeoning middle-class paranoia of the fifties. The first of these was The Hitch-Hiker (1953, directed by Ida Lupino), in which Kansas desperado Emmett Meyers (William Talman) systematically terrorizes two average family men (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) on a fishing trip. The second was The Phenix City Story (1955, directed by Phil Karlson), based on the real-life struggle of Alabama Attorney General John Patterson against the ruthless, entrenched power of the vice rings that controlled Phenix City. The third was Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, directed by Don Siegel), a marvelous marriage of film noir paranoia, political hysteria, and a science fiction premise.

 In addition to this trilogy (which exhibits a remarkable consistency of tone), Mainwaring wrote The Lawless (1950) for Joseph Losey, as well as The Big Steal (1949), Baby Face Nelson (1957), and The Gun Runners (1958) for Don Siegel.

The following remarks, which pertain to Out of the Past and RKO, were excerpted from comments Mainwaring made when he appeared at a seminar on the gangster film held at Northwestern University in the summer of 1972, a project sponsored by the University of Illinois in conjunction with the American Film Institute and supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. Mainwaring prefaced his remarks with a short biographical statement.” —Daniel Mainwaring: Americana- Link Here

Remarks on Out of the Past: 

I went to Fresno State… In the early twenties I worked as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner… In 1935 I got my first job in the industry as a publicity man at Warner Brothers. Working in publicity you got to see and learn more about picture making than the writers did… I didn’t escape from the publicity racket until 1943. Bill Thomas of Pine and Thomas, who made very small and very bad pictures at Paramount, gave me my first real screenwriting job. 

I wrote six pictures in one year, all of which I’d just as soon forget except Big Town (1947). At the end of the year, I fled to the hills and wrote Build My Gallows High. Bill Dozier, head of RKO, bought it and me with it. Warren Duff, an ex-Warners writer, produced, Jacques Tourneur directed. Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Jane Greer were the stars. On the advice of Gallup’s Audience Research, RKO changed the title to Out of the Past. 

I stayed at RKO until 1949. Howard Hughes dropped my option when I refused to work on I Married a Communist (1949). He used that project to get rid of a lot of writers, directors, and actors. If you turned it down, out you went.

You’d written some mystery novels in the thirties. Did you sense different interests and different themes in this novel in the forties?

Well, Build My Gallows High was a different kind of book, entirely different. First I had a detective named Robin Bishop, and I got sick of him. Bishop got married and then got awfully soft, and I got fed up with him. I changed to Humphrey Campbell, who was a tougher one. With Build My Gallows High I wanted to get away from straight mystery novels. Those detective stories are a bore to write. You’ve got to figure out “whodunit.” I’d get to the end and have to say whodunit and be so mixed up I couldn’t decide myself.

What changes did you make [in the movie] from the novel?

Well, I haven’t read the novel since about ’46, but basically it was the same, although there were more characters in the novel.

An impossibly intricate story to synopsize, Out of the Past is about a double-triple-cross. A private detective re-encounters a former girlfriend and is lured out of a pastoral setting to San Francisco and Mexico to settle a score with old criminal associates. The girlfriend, who originally double-crossed him after she shot his boss, may or may not be double-crossing him again. Reviewer Bosley Crowther of the New York Times tried to keep up with the twists and turns, liked the film enormously, but admitted, “If only we had some way of knowing what’s going on in the last half of this film, we might get more pleasure from it. As it is, the challenge is worth a try.”

Was it told from Bailey’s point of view?

From his point of view. The novel opened in Bridgeport, where he ran a gas station and the guy came looking for him. All the stuff in the mountains, the Tahoe and Bridgeport stuff, was in the novel. Much of the novel took place in that town and along the river. The fishing scene was in the book. That was one of the things that sold the book to pictures, the gimmick of the kid using a casting rod to pull the guy off the cliff. Warren Duff fell in love with that and bought the book. The Mexican stuff was in there, too. I had been to Acapulco a couple of years before I wrote the book. It was just a little bitty town, not like it is today. There were very few cafes, and one hotel. I used to sit in this little cafe across from the movie house, and all day long there would be music blasting from the loudspeakers, so I thought I’d use that in a story someday, which I did. The scenes in San Francisco, however, took place in New York in the book. We switched to San Francisco because we wanted to shoot there. We did change the ending. At the end of the novel Bailey [Robert Mitchum] is killed by Whit’s [Kirk Douglas’] men, not by Kathie [Jane Greer] and the police. The title “Build My Gallows High” is from a poem and I never could find it again. It was a Negro’s poem and I saw it somewhere. I happened to read it and jot it down.

Did you write the screenplay alone?

I wrote the first draft, and Duff wasn’t sure about it. All I had done were those pictures for Pine and Thomas. When I finished and went on to something else, Duff put Jim [James M.] Cain on it. Jim Cain threw my script away and wrote a completely new one. They paid him $20-30 thousand and it had nothing to do with the novel or anything. He took it out of the country and set the whole thing in the city. Duff didn’t like it and called me back. (Frank Fenton had worked on it for awhile.) I made some changes and did the final. But that’s the way things used to work. You’d turn around and spit and some other writer would be on your project.

What were some of the changes you made?

Originally we used a trick. The first script had the deaf-and-dumb boy as the narrator. We started with a shot of a stream with the boy fishing. Two guys came along, and one said to the other, “That’s the kid who used to work for that son of a bitch Bailey.” Cut to a close-up of the kid and a shot of the stream as raindrops begin to fall. Then you hear the voice of the kid saying, “He wasn’t an SOB,” and he told the story. Well, it flashed back twice, and it just didn’t work.

- Cinephilia and Beyond- Link Here