Frank and Hedy

The tale of a movie that didn't take

The Siren was delighted to run across this elegant on-set photo of one of her top 10 most favorite directors, Frank Borzage, and gorgeous Hedy Lamarr. They were making, or rather trying to make, a movie called I Take This Woman, which co-starred Spencer Tracy. You say you’ve never heard of I Take This Woman? How many people in and around MGM in 1938–40 would have loved to say the same.

Shooting began in late October 1938 with Josef von Sternberg in the director’s chair. At the beginning of the decade, Sternberg’s camera had turned Marlene Dietrich a byword for seductive glamour. Now MGM hoped this artist could do the same for Hedy Lamarr. She’d already scored a hit that year in Algiers, with her beauty lensed by onetime Sternberg collaborator James Wong Howe.

But Dietrich and her “Jo” had been the closest of artistic allies, and Sternberg had no such bond with Hedy. Nor, in fairness, with anyone else on the set. On the first day of filming, “Sternberg attempted his first take at 10:20 in the morning, and wasn’t satisfied until 4:30 in the afternoon,” writes Tracy biographer James Curtis. Sternberg couldn’t bear interruptions or noise (he once fired a cinematographer because the man wound his watch while Sternberg was deep in thought) and colleagues were forbidden to approach him. Actress Laraine Day was in the cast, and she recalled that if you wanted to talk to the director, you had to apply for a moment of his time by writing your name on a chalkboard supplied for the purpose. Meanwhile, studio head Louis B. Mayer, who considered Lamarr his personal discovery and was hellbent on making her a major star, had thoughts to contribute whether Sternberg wanted to hear them or not.

Sternberg lasted approximately two weeks.

Frank Borzage, who was everything Sternberg was not in terms of how he treated colleagues, took over on the morning of Nov. 14. By the evening of Nov. 14, production was stopped again. The script was thoroughly re-written, and some weeks later Borzage gave it another try. Alas, he couldn't fix the film either. By early January 1939 it was shelved and had acquired the inevitable nickname of I Re-Take This Woman. According to Curtis, Tracy told Clark Gable that “it was so bad we had to make retakes before we could even put it on the shelf. And when we put it on the shelf, we had to promise the other pictures there that it was only for one night.”

The Siren has seen the movie. It’s not that bad. But it isn’t good.

MGM put W.S. "Woody" Van Dyke on the case in late 1939, pinning all their hopes on the man known as "One Take." Laraine Day claimed you could blow your lines to kingdom come, and as long as you hit your marks, Woody would print the take. It wasn’t just the studio’s investment he was protecting. Van Dyke, a functioning alcoholic, charged toward the nearest liquor source at 5 pm on the dot. The more film in the can, the less grief anybody gave him about that.

I Take This Woman hit theaters in 1940. Pieces of Sternberg and Borzage are in there somewhere, but the script-level problems remained. “Just imagine,” said Tracy, “Hedy had to chase me all during the picture—and I had to run away!” (Someone asks Tracy’s character, “Is that your wife? What did you do, dope her?” Which is the best line in the movie, but Tracy’s point remains.) Not only that, Hedy’s character tries to commit suicide in the first scene because she’s been rejected by, wait for it, Kent Taylor. Kent Taylor! (Taylor replaced Walter Pidgeon, who was in v.1.0 and v.2.0.) Woody Van Dyke’s own verdict on the finished product: “It was the funniest thing to hit Hollywood since Jean Harlow’s funeral.”

All that said, let us swing back around to the lovely photo, and the Siren’s conclusion, which is that of everyone involved, Frank Borzage got a pretty good deal—his name isn’t on the picture, and nobody blamed him for the debacle. But for all Tracy’s complaining, he did better. He had a fling with Hedy Lamarr.