Ohio Irish, Hollywood great
By Michael J. Roberts
“It is not sufficient to catch man’s mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.” ~ Dudley Nichols
It’s no coincidence that great directors often wouldn’t step up to the plate without holding a script from a great screenwriter. Howard Hawks famously said, ‘I’m such a coward that unless I get a good writer, I won’t make a picture.’ Hawks went through great writers, much like Hollywood studios, at a rate of knots, but some directors formed great and enduring partnerships with talented writers, and Dudley Nichols is remembered as one on the key collaborators in the John Ford stock company.
Dudley Nichols was born in Ohio in 1894, and after a two year stint in the navy in WWI he settled in New York to work as a journalist for more than a decade. Dialogue writers were in great demand after the invention of the Talking Picture and at the urging of a Fox executive Nichols headed west with his new bride, Esther, in 1930 - possibly discovering the rivers of gold Ben Hecht wrote of at the time to Ben Mankiewicz, “All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around.”
Nichols was no idiot and his first script work was at Fox for the experienced John Ford, the submarine flick, Men Without Women, in which a young John Wayne had a small part. The director and writer hit it off, aided no doubt that they were both of Irish heritage and considered themselves as much Irish as American. They collaborated on Born Reckless next (Wayne uncredited and a small role for newcomer Ward Bond) and settled into a routine that saw Nichols script a further 12 films for Ford over the next 15 years.
The 1930’s collaborations with Ford set the tone of Nichols style and concerns (some in partnership with friend and writer and other Ford favourite Lamar Trotti). He embraced literary and stage adaptations as easily as more vivid or low brow subjects and invested them with a seriousness of purpose. Hollywood epics like The Hurricane sat with play adaptations like Mary of Scotland, or tense war films like The Lost Patrol or lighthearted Will Rogers vehicles like Steamboat Round The Bend. He adapted Ford’s Irish Rebel film, The Plough and The Stars from the play by Sean O’Casey and Eugene O’Neill’s short stories into the superb The Long Voyage Home, now with star John Wayne. John Wayne had been made a star by the previous Ford/Nichols project, the immortal Stagecoach.
Dudley Nichols won the 1935 writing Oscar for The Informer, another of Ford’s Irish passion projects, but he became the first person to refuse an Oscar as he led a band of writers in a dispute with the Hollywood Studios and they boycotted the ceremony to highlight their cause. It soon led to the formation of the Writers Guild and Nichols served as its president in 1937 and 1938. In the 1930s Nichols also benefited from big stars being attached to his projects and found acclaimed work with the demanding Hawks in Bringing Up Baby, reuniting him with Mary Of Scotland star and formed Ford paramour Katherine Hepburn. He also helped as one of several writers (uncredited) on the wonderful Gunga Din for Hawks, before it was taken over by George Stevens to mark a third film with Cary Grant.
As the war started in Europe Nichols helmed Man Hunt, a significant anti-fascist piece for Fritz Lang, who’d fled the Nazis years earlier, an adaptation of Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male in collaboration with fellow leftist writer Lamar Trotti. The Breen Office took issue with it as being against American isolationism but America soon found its way into WWII via Pearl Harbour. Before helping Ford with his documentary The Battle of Midway, Nichols scripted French exile Jean Renoir’s American directing debut, the very fine and often overlooked Swamp Water. He worked with Renoir again in 1943 to great effect on This Land is Your Land, and in the same year he reteamed with Howard Hawks on the excellent Air Force starring John Garfield. He also tried his hand at directing with the lacklustre Government Girl starring Olivia De Havilland.
Nichols scored a couple of massive Ingrid Bergman hits by adapting Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls (with Gary Cooper) and the charming The Bells of St. Mary’s for Leo McCarey with Bing Crosby playing the priest to Bergman’s nun. Scarlet Street, a great remake of Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (for Fritz Lang again) filled the gap before returning to direction with the odd biopic of Australian nurse Sister Kenny, who battled polio Down Under. Nichols reteamed with his old pal Ford for the last time in 1949, adapting Graham Greene’s novel The Fugitive. The film caused a rift between director and screenwriter as Ford ignored a lot of Nichols work to create an ‘art film’ to befuddle film lovers of every era. Ford’s pean to Catholicism is either an underappreciated masterwork or pretentious tedium but the pair would not work together again.
Dudley Nichols saw out the last decade of his life by producing several worthy films. He directed his own adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play Mourning Becomes Electra, starring his Sister Kenny star Rosalind Russell, and wrote the controversial Pinky for Elia Kazan, which boldly looked at racism at the time. He worked again with Hawks on the western The Big Sky, starring Kirk Douglas and possibly seeing his box office clout disappearing worked on the adaptation of Prince Valiant, a comic strip that starred Robert Wagner and was directed by Henry Hathaway, who Nichols and worked with on the Fox western film Rawhide in 1951. A clutch of nondescript westerns followed, but The Tin Star by Anthony Mann earned Nichols and Academy Award nomination at least.
Dudley Nichols died the way he lived, without fanfare in 1960 at the age of 64 from cancer. He was awarded the Laurel Award in 1954 by the Writers Guild that he’d fought so hard to establish. For a writer who worked with so many famous directors and stars for decades, biographical material about Nichols is scarce, apart from the name of his wife of 30 years, Esther Varez (who died in 1968) - no personal information is extant and he left no family behind it seems. And he never did interviews, which marks him out in a Hollywood culture redolent with self-promotion and ego, so his work really does speak for itself.
“It is deeply gratifying to know that in these reactionary times of hate and conspiracy, there are still voices of protest and sympathy for what is being done to individuals by the so-called ‘free press,’ which is so violent and crude that intelligent criticism is inadequate to cope with it.”
~ Charlie Chaplin letter to Dudley Nichols during HUAC attacks on Hollywood liberals in 1947.