Customer Reviews

Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars

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Contrary to the other reviewers, HAL WALLIS is indeed a worthy book on its subject, the gutsy, somewhat nutty Hollywood production head whose career took a tragic turn when he got too uppity for Jack Warner's taste in 1943, and pretty soon Warner made the studio too uncomfortable a place to work in, and Wallis was forced to leave. He then wound up at Paramount, where his pictures, while individually interesting, lacked the stature of the Warners' studio masterpieces.

What went wrong? As Bernard Dick relates, the Warner Brothers needed Wallis to come up with films that would ape the sheen of high-class MGM, its great rival. Wallis indeed wound up producing dozens of imitation MGM films, everything from WHITE BANNERS to ROBIN HOOD to FOUR DAUGHTERS to JEZEBEL--these four all made within a single year, 1938. Wallis' films stood out from the typical run of Warners productions, which often emphasized a proletarian, socially conscious "street smart" attitude, often featuring Bogart, Robinson, Blondell, etc, stars with whom the underclasses could identify with. Not so Wallis.

At Paramount Wallis decided to become a "starmaker" (the title of his autobiography) with mixed results. He had a taste for strong, supermasculine men, and promoted Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas to superstardom (and ten years later, Elvis Presley, who sort of fits in that mold); but sometimes his predilection for the strong and the silent went haywire and he spent picture after picture trying to make a star from the charisma-free Wendell Corey, whom Dick claims was anti-Semitic to boot.

As for Wallis' female stars, he showed a decided taste for the freakish. Who else but Hal Wallis would have signed up Shirley Booth and Anna Magnani? In an industry dominated by beauty and the hyperfeminine, Booth and Magnani were dark stars indeed. And there was something freakish also about the andrgogynous appeal of Lizabeth Scott and Shirley MacLaine as well. Dick discusses all of these actors at great length, and yes, he seems to slight the Warners movies at the expense of the Paramount and Universal films, but it's plain that he sees the later, independent productions as more revealing of the kind of man Hal Wallis was. And he had the good taste to interview quite a number of Wallis' lesser known stars, including Douglas Dick (no relation I assume to Bernard Dick), the lovely Kristine Miller, and Dolores Hart, now a nun.

He reveals that Martha Hyer began her romance with Wallis (she eventually became his second wife) many years before she had previously admitted, in her memoir, to having dated him. Reading Wallis and Hyer's memoirs you would think that they began seeing each other only after the death of Wallis' first wife, the madcap comedy star Louise Fazenda. But actually that was a white lie and they met when poor Louise was very much alive. Dick does an artful job of deconstructing the Wallis and Hyer memoirs to find out how, when truth is fudged, it invariably finds a way to speak itself through the broken texts of STARMAKER and FINDING MY WAY.

Hal Wallis is a worthy subject for a big biography, but this book doesn't get the job done. It is simply not thorough enough.

A warning: If you're interested in Wallis' fantastic years at Warner Bros. - the era of Bogart, Cagney, Raft, Flynn, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan - this book isn't for you. The author spends much more time dealing with Wallis' independent productions, particularly his big budget productions in the 1960s and early 1970s. Hal Wallis, a superb movie producer, certainly deserves a book that is more focused and complete.

How Bernard Dick managed to write about the life and films of Hal Wallis in such an uninteresting way is certainly an accomplishment. Wallis was in charge of production at Warner Brothers for most of the 30's and into the 40's, but Dick chooses to ignore that period. This was the period when Wallis gave the studio its look and style.

A movie like "Kings Row" gets no mention at all, but Dick plods on for a dozen pages about movies in which Wallis "could have" cast Lizabeth Scott, and plays he "should have" bought and brought to the screen. It's almost like the author doesn't care for his subject or the movies he made. He'd rather that Wallis made some other movies he could write about.

The book does delve a little more deeply into the personal life, more than Wallis chose to in his autobiography. But what is clearly lacking is why we should be interested in this man who was behind so many beloved films - "Now, Voyager", "Dark Victory", "Confessions of a Nazi Spy", "Yankee Doodle Dandy", "The Rose Tattoo", "Beckett", "Gunfight at the OK Corral", "The Maltese Falcon", and of course "Casablanca". Wallis was a producer who had a hand in every creative decision on his movies (just read "Round Up the Usual Suspects" and see how he shaped "Casablanca"). If you are looking to learn what Wallis did to make his films special, it's not in this book. (...)

I agree with the other reviewers: Wallis' prime identity and chief claim to fame was his monumental work at Warner Bros. from 1933-1944. This is what he will be best remembered and revered for - and to just quickly brush over this vital period of his career is really unforgivable. The author must have been just walking through the paycheck line in a hurry with this book. It reads like a college thesis in which the student just wanted a passing grade and really had no commitment or interest in his topic. Obviously the Hyer interview was easy to obtain and the author just sailed through with it and made it the bulk of his lazy research. Pretty sorry and poor stuff - what a disappointment for any movie fan who appreciates the classics!

I am a big fan of the films of Hal Wallis and wanted to read more about him. He also married two intriguing Hollywood filmstars: Louise Fazenda and Martha Hyer. I read through this book and was disappointed and left wanting to know more. There just wasn't enough information about Mr. Wallis and his family. Louise Fazenda is glossed over in a few pages but she was a major star at Warner Brothers and I wanted to know more about her. Why did she put up with her husband's other women for instance? What were the roles that made her a star? I felt cheated. Martha Hyer is given much more coverage and the author says she was the perfect Hollywood wife. The author doesn't go into detail explaining why she was better at it than Ms. Fazenda. Nor is there much coverage of Brent Wallis, Hal Wallis' son with Ms. Fazenda, and Mr. Wallis' only child. In other books about Hollywood moguls we learn a lot more about their private lives and their wives (e.g. Bob Thomas' books about Selznick and Thalberg does justice in coverage of their remarkable wives: Irene Mayer Selznick, Jennifer Jones Selznick, and Norma Shearer Thalberg. I was also frustrated at not knowing more about Minna Wallis, a woman ahead of her time as a Hollywood businesswoman.Too much time is spent on Lizabeth Scott and why she wasn't another Lauren Bacall and what roles she should have taken, etc. There is relatively scarce coverage of Casablanca. The author didn't mention the legend that Ronald Reagan was the first choice to play Rick. Also, when the author discusses the later Wallis films Mary Queen of Scots and Anne of the Thousand Days he spends too much time dwelling on historical facts like why Henry divorced Anne and if Leicester and Elizabeth were lovers, etc. This should have been removed in favor of more coverage of the book's subject Hal Wallis. I hope another biography is written soon doing justice to Wallis and his remarkable family.