WILD IN THE COUNTRY
– Elvis Presley’s Last Dramatic Role –
(Part 2)
By Mariusz Ogieglo
In the summer of 1960, the American press reported that another famous name would join the group of creators of the new film. Clifford Odets. Coming from a family of Russian and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, an influential playwright – considered by many to be a worthy successor to the Nobel Prize for Literature winner Eugene O’Neill, an actor and screenwriter. Creator of such outstanding plays as “Awake and Sing!” from 1933, hailed by critics as “the earliest quintessence of Jewish art outside of Yiddish theater ” or the later “The Country Girl”, based on which in 1954 Paramount Pictures made a film of the same title starring Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby.
Outside the theatre, Odetts was also professionally associated with Hollywood, where he wrote scripts for films such as “Sweet Smell Of Success” starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis and “The Story Of On Page One” starring Rita Hayworth.
He signed a contract to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of “The Lost Country” in August 1960, and as it soon turned out, it was to be the last film he ever worked on. Odets died three years later, on August 14, 1963, from stomach cancer. He was only fifty-seven years old.
Some in his inner circle, however, disapproved of his involvement in another production starring Presley. ”
It pained me to hear his justifications for writing this script ,” complained Harold Clurman, director of the Group Theatre with which Odets was identified for years, in an interview with Gerald Peary of Sight & Sound magazine.
Oscar Levant, a pianist and friend of the legendary screenwriter, went a step further and stated in his memoirs that “It’s humiliating that Odets had to write such a film. But he simply needed money. As a result, everything that he opposed at the beginning of his career, he now did himself .”
Despite numerous controversies, Odets managed to create a suspenseful, turbulent story about a young, aspiring writer (in the original Salamanca it was an artist), Glenn Tyler (played by Elvis), who comes into conflict with the law after he kills his brother during a fight.
The boy manages to avoid prison thanks to the guarantees of several influential people from the town. He is released on parole, but ends up in the care of his “mean” uncle Rolf, who provides him with a job and a roof over his head (from then on, Glenn lives under one roof with him, his daughter Noreen and her child).
The relative also agrees to take Glenn once a week to meetings with a local psychologist, Irene Sperry.
And it is she who, during one of their weekly meetings, discovers the boy’s literary talent…
The script for Presley’s seventh film was born in proverbial pain. Odets, who, as later sources reported, ”
tried to remain true to his vision of an American rural story ” when writing it, was constantly at odds with the management of 20th Century Fox and would not agree to any changes that they wanted to make to his text. In particular, those concerning the songs performed by the main character, which, as one might guess, were insisted on in the script by Elvis’ manager, Colonel Parker (in fact, at an early stage of work, Parker wanted his client to sing in the film throughout). “Elvis did not fit the script, which became quite complicated ,” the Forwad portal stated years later.
As a result, two weeks before filming began, the film studio severed its cooperation with Odets.
The Wild In The Country script was about half-written when Fox stopped paying the writer. Phillip Dunne took it upon himself to finish it, despite initial reservations . *
Lonely Man
The beginning of work on the film was planned for early November 1960. By that time, not only had the script been completed, but also the locations for filming had been selected and the entire cast had been assembled. As several later sources wrote – “interesting and credible “.
The leading female role, after the final rejection of candidates Simone Signoret and Barbara Bel Geddes, was given to Hope Lange (real name Hope Elise Ross Lange), associated with the 20th Century Fox studio. Born in November 1933, a film, stage and television actress, whose greatest fame and recognition came from her performance in the famous drama “Peyton Place” directed by Mark Robson, made just three years earlier. For her role as Selena Cross, the star received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe nomination – in the same category.
However, not everyone was immediately pleased with Hope Lange’s involvement. Phillip Dunne and Jerry Wald were the least enthusiastic about the choice of the actress, who both claimed that she was too young to play the distinguished and mature psychotherapist, Irenne Sperry.
“Lange, then 27, is excellent, but simply too young for the role of the psychologist who acts as Glenn’s surrogate mother ,” said Timothy Knight, author of the book “Elvis Presley In The Movies” published many years later. “The somewhat jarring and complex aspects of the attraction between the older Irene and the young Glenn disappear in the case of Lange, who replaces the worldly and much more mature Signoret .”
The attractive therapist was not the only woman in the protagonist’s life, however. The budding writer was courted by two other beauties: Betty Lee Parsons, a student, and Noreen Martin.
The first role was played by Millie Perkins, an actress one year younger than Presley (and another one under contract with 20th Century Fox) and a model who had made her big-screen debut just one year earlier in the biographical film “The Diary of Anne Frank.” A moving picture by George Stevens, a Hollywood director who had previously documented evidence of crimes in Nazi death camps, based on the true memoirs of the titular Anne Frank (the titular character was played by the aforementioned Perkins). A young Jewish girl who hid with her family in Amsterdam for over two years, where she wrote about her everyday life in a hideout no larger than 46 square meters in size in a diary, which, after her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, served as the script, first for a play of the same title (which won the Pulitzer Prize) from 1955, and then for the aforementioned film.
“When I got involved with the film and learned about Anne Frank, who she was, her story hit me right in the heart ,” Perkins said in a 2009 interview. “There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to do this. And I had to do it well .”
And although Perkins won the sympathy of both viewers and leading critics with her role as Anne Frank, she had to wait several long months for her next appearance in front of the camera. According to some sources, the film studio could not find a suitable script for her. In addition, the role of Betty Lee Parsons in “Wild In The Country” was very different from the previous one and required the actress to appear in only five short scenes (which, however, did not prevent her from collecting one of the highest fees among the female cast of the film). Despite this, Perkins remembered for years the time spent on the set and working with Elvis, about whom she said in interviews: “I felt that even though (Elvis, author’s note) was younger than me, he was a very humble man who spoke about what he believed in. And I thought, ‘He’s only saying that to show me what a great man he is.’ But I knew that he was a person with a good heart and a beautiful soul. And I mean every possible aspect. However you want to look at it. When you meet someone like that, you know they’re there. Even if they’re sitting there eating fifteen lollipops. It doesn’t matter. It’s just what they’re doing at the time, but it doesn’t capture the essence of that person .”
- Despite such a stormy end to their collaboration, Clifford Odets’ name was listed in the closing credits of the film “Wild In The Country”
Information provided by Mariusz Ogieglo, EP Promised Land (Poland) http://www.elvispromisedland.pl/
If you want to visit more articles about the life of Elvis Presley, enter the following Elvis Radio 24h link: https://elvisradio24h.com/tag/articles Thanks TCB
We remind you that you can also listen to Elvis Radio 24 hours on your mobile phone by downloading our free applications for Android in the Play Store https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.icreo.elvisradio24h1, and for iPhone in your Apple Store https://apps.apple.com/app/elvis-radio-24h/id6444257119. Thank you very much!!..
