THE LEGEND OF THE LOST (1957)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Henry Hathaway

SCREENWRITER: Robert Presnell Jr, Ben Hecht

FILM STARS: John Wayne, Sophia Loren, Rossano Brazzi, Kurt Kasznar, Youseff Daoud, Sonia Moser, Angela Portaluri, Ibrahim El Hadish

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Bonnie Golightly

TYPE: Novelization

PUBLISHER: WDL THIS EDITION

PUBLISHED: 1959

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1957

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Adventure

WORDS: Legend of the Lost (1957) is not a well-known John Wayne film. I suspect because it is not a western and wasn’t a big big hit it tends to get overlooked. And, that is a pity. It’s a well-made, good looking adventure film which will keep you entertained during its running time, especially with a glass of wine, or beer.

John Wayne plays a down on his luck guide stranded in Timbuctoo (Timbuktu) in French Sudan (now Mali), Africa. There he is hired by a righteous, religious man to take him out to the desert to look for a legendary ruined city his father had died looking for years past. They are joined by a beautiful Tuareg native girl of no fixed abode (a prostitute) who is looking to get out of poverty and Timbuctoo by latching onto the rich foreigner. Two men, a beautiful girl, a desert … what could go wrong?

A lot … in film terms it is Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) meets Rain (1932) meets Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924).

John Wayne as Joe January (how good is that name) is perhaps about ten years too old for his role but he has the conviction and humour to capture the adventurer who internally struggles between looking after number one and doing the right thing. Italian actor Rossano Brazzi as righteous Frenchman Paul Bonnard is suitably noble, then obsessed as the searcher caught between ideals and lust. Italian Sophia Loren, always stunning, is wonderful as the scrappy native girl who knows how to use her body to manipulate men. The whole story revolves around these three. The only other character of note is the French prefect (the prefect is the French State’s representative in a department or region) played by Austrian Kurt Kasznar.

This is prime casting. John Wayne was big box office at the time. He was in the movie star in the Top 10 for 25 consecutive years, from the 1949 until 1974 (based on Quigley’s Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll). Between 1949–1957 he had a consistent run in the Top 10 of box-office stars. He missed in 1958 and then returned to the Top 10 between 1959–1974. He was No 1 box office star in 1950, 1951, 1954, and 1971. The 50s were good for him. And, despite him always being attached in our minds as a western hero, in the 1950s audiences were willing to accept him in anything (yes even as Genghis Khan in much maligned The Conqueror (1956) and a German sea captain in The Sea Chase (1955) both which were hits). Of the 19 films he made in the 1950s only five were westerns. So, to have Wayne play an adventurer in the Sahara Desert was not unexpected casting at the time. Sophia Loren is simply stunning and with her Italian olive features she could pass (almost) for a Tuareg north African native. She is suitably feisty, sexual, seductive and both wayward (of the street) but clearly aspiring to something more, but is it respectability, money or love. Sophia is the greatest and most successful of the Italian stars to cross over into English language films. She is perhaps the greatest and most successful of any star from a non-English speaking country to cross over. She had already made 30 or so films in Italy before someone wisely cast her as a co-star and had her emerging from the water like a Goddess, in Boy on the Dolphin (1956) starring Alan Ladd. It was all up from there. She appeared with just about every major male film star of the time. From Dolphin she went on to The Pride and the Passion (1957) with Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant, and then on to Legend of the Lost. She subsequently appeared with Anthony Perkins , William Holden, Cary Grant (again), Anthony Quinn, Tab Hunter, Clark Gable, Peter Sellers, Maurice Chevalier, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, George Peppard, Trevor Howard, Peter Finch, Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Martin Sheen, John Cassavetes, James Coburn, Peter Finch., Peter O’Toole, Jean Gabin, Omar Sharif, James Mason, Alec Guinness, Maximilian Schell, as well as with fellow Italian legends Vittorio de Sica and Marcello Mastroianni many times. Do not underestimate her fame and popularity. She appeared in the Top 10 four times 1964, 1965, 1969, 1977 and won a best actress Oscar for Two Women in 1960, but her fame went beyond that. She was a movie star. Here she just has to look good (which she does) and do a peasant girl Maureen O’Hara impersonation which she does successfully. Rossano Brazzi was established in America playing suave older continental romantic leads in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Summertime (1955), The Story of Esther Costello (1957), Interlude (1957) (and later South Pacific (1958), and The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1965)). He is good though perhaps cannot reach the total villain stage that obsession leads his character Bonnard to. Director Hathaway said as much when he said the main things wrong with the film were the script and the casting of Brazzi where he said, “he can’t play evil… the more I worked with him the worse he got.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Lost

The script, as Hathaway alluded to, is a little flabby but it is still a cut above the usual action film. Ben Hecht and Robert Presnell Jr. were the writers. I wouldn’t think they wrote together and am tempted to think Robert Presnell Jr. wrote the first draft and Ben Hecht came in and did some doctoring (he did a lot of uncredited and credited script doctoring). Interestingly, given the times, Robert Presnell Jr. who wrote for film (Man in the Attic (1953), A Life in the Balance (1955), Screaming Eagles (1956)) and television was a Hollywood progressive at the time (he was a member of the Committee for the First Amendment and later in the anti-nuclear organization SANE (founded 1958) and active with Amnesty International) but John Wayne’s Batjac production company hired him or bought the script which is not unusual even if people tend to have a binary black and white view of the world. Ben Hecht, playwright, novelist and screenwriter, could write anything and seemed to specialize in genre films with some thought, and characters with some depth. And he was on a roll … in 1957 alone he had two (superior) literate scripts on Hemingway novels made into films, The Sun Also Rises (1957) and A Farewell to Arms (1957). Literate he was, but he wasn’t above snappy dialogue, drama and action to go along with the philosophical grace notes – Scarface (1932), Design for Living (1933), Nothing Sacred (1937), Gunga Din (1939), Wuthering Heights (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Kiss of Death (1947), Circus World (1964). The trouble is audiences were expecting a lot more action from an an adventure film but what they got was a love triangle with soul searching in a desert setting with a dollop of melodrama.

Henry Hathaway (on the second of six films he made with John Wayne), is considered an action director but he could make excellent dramatic films about people – Peter Ibbetson (1935) and John Wayne’s earlier Shepherd of the Hills (1940), Fourteen Hours (1951) – and he does that here, despite the script flaws.

Helping Hathaway loo good is the famed director of photography (and later director), Jack Cardiff, who could work in B&W and colour but was especially known for his wonderfully lush colour photography – A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), Under Capricorn (1949), The Black Rose (1950) ( for Hathaway and also filmed in North Africa), The African Queen (1951), War and Peace (1956) , The Vikings (1958) – and that is what we have here.

Of course, it helps if you have something to film. Another star of this film is the desert. Filmed in Tecnhicolor and Technirama (akin to Cinemascope) the film was filmed on location in Libya. The desert is real, the ruins are real. The lost city of Timgad referred to in the film was the Leptis Magna ruins, a Roman city dating back to the 7th century B.C. near Tripoli, in northwest Libya, while Timbuktu was Zliten, Libya. The real locals and local colour helps a lot. Interiors were done in Cinecittà, Rome.

There are so many things going right for this film, but it falls short. It is immensely watchable but not greatly moving. Still, I could watch it again. Actually, I have. I love John Wayne, and I could watch Sophia Loren all day long.

The film made it a respectable amount, but it was no smash. Against an estimated budget of $1,750,000 it made $2,200,000 at the US box office (it was 33rd on the years US Top Grossers). It’s not known how much it made on the international market, but I suspect, given the content and stars, it would have been more successful internationally).

The novels author, Bonnie Golightly (1919-1998), was born in Illinois, grew up in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, where she owned a used bookstore and lived among a group of artists and writers. Golightly published (some under pseudonyms ) twenty books, including the pulp novels The Wild One (1957), Beat Girl (1959), The Shades of Evil (1960), The Intimate Ones (1960), and The Integration of Maybelle Brown (1961), movie novelizations (A Breath of Scandal (1960) (co-incidentally another Sophie Loren film)), and books about the paranormal, drugs and sexuality. She best known as the possible inspiration for Capote’s main character, Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and for suing Capote, his publisher Random House, and Esquire Magazine (which first published the story as a novella) in 1959. Capote denied the connection, saying that he had never even met Golightly, and she lost the suit. A Bohemian and a Beat of sorts she ran with a colorful circle of friends, ranging from writers like Norman Mailer, Harold Norse, and William Carlos Williams to painters like Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollack’s wife, Lee Krasner. She always loved cats, a trait she shared with her namesake, Holly. Bonnie died in 1998 of lung cancer; she was a lifelong smoker.

The novelization (the UK edition doesn’t indicate it but the US edition does) doesn’t greatly differ from the film though Bonnard’s obsession is more intense, the sexual tension is turned up a bit, the maneuvering between the three in the sexual triangle is more frequently regular and the struggle against the elements is more detailed. The other beauty of the book is in the character detail – even though everyone seems to be going around in circles there’s a lot more motivational detail on the characters of Loren’s Dita (whose breasts are always surging and heaving) and Brazzi’s Bonnard. They are as well detailed as Wayne’s Joe January character though, the film, of course, leans towards the star and draw card.

It’s a good read on a superior pulp level.

Notes:

Allegedly, Wayne, treated Loren with a quiet respect, protecting her during grueling desert shoots and jokingly calling her “Soph.” One day, as a sandstorm whipped up during filming, he stood beside her, shielding her from the wind, muttering with a grin: “This isn’t Rome, sweetheart.”. Could be true but Loren suffered through Italy and World War 2 so she knew where Rome was and wasn’t I would think.
During the filming Wayne injured his foot after slipping on rocky terrain in the Libyan desert, a mishap that reportedly led to a three-week delay in production. He used crutches to continue acting but never complained, embodying his reputation for tough perseverance (he was also a professional and valued that, and also had his production company involved so he needed to finish the film on budget).
US crooner Joe Valino sang the theme sung to the film. He was riding high in the charts in late 1956 with “The Garden of Eden” (#12US) but after a former girlfriend of Valino claimed that he had arranged for her to have an illegal abortion. He denied the charge, but was convicted, and received a 17-year probation. As a result, his music was removed from sale and banned from radio play. I assume it was for that reason his theme song was not sued in the film. The song “The theme to Legend of the Lost” was written by the film’s compose, Italian Angelo Francesco Lavagnino and American (I assume lyricist) Don Wolf. The film used an instrumental theme Lavagnino.