The Runaways

Since Hollywood is not an actual city, it has gradually become anyplace where films are made. Long ago, Hollywood spread itself out all over the world. All that is left in California is Los Angeles with a hole in it, like a waffle grill that has committed suicide.

Of 38 American films now in production. 21 are so-called runaways. Last week the following locations were among the more interesting of the current worldwide Hollywoods:

sbKYOTO. Yul Brynner, Richard Widmark and George Chakiris are starring in a film called Flight from Ashiya, a hands-across-the-Pacific opera about U.S. airmen who rescue some Japanese sailors during World War II. A Japanese film company is co-producing the picture with Harold Hecht. Flacks have been busy stressing Ashiya's monumental "humanism," and Japanese newspapers are suggesting that the principals are men of depth and tradition.

Greek-American George Chakiris has been described in print as "a man right out of Greek mythology." Onetime Dramatics Instructor Widmark is frequently billed as "a university lecturer." Brynner, whos Super Blue Blade head is as smooth as ice-cold Crisco, has won the rapt admiration of countless head-shaven Buddhist nuns and Zen monks. The Japanese refer to all three actors as bunkajin (men of culture). Trying to talk like bunkajin, the actors have come up with some pretty distinguished bunk. "I'm deeply interested in the serene movement which characterizes Japanese dancers specializing in traditional schools," says Chakiris, never fluffing the line. "I think I have a lot to learn from the symbolism of Kabuki acting," pontificates Brynner. Languid Suzy Parker, who plays a Red Cross nurse, seems to have less Nippo-philia than the boys. Would she pose in a kimono, please? Not a chance.

On the set, concord prevails. In the first day's shooting, Director Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days) completed an entire scene in half an hour. "Nothing to it," he said. He may be right. sbTHE PLAINS OF CASTILE. Samuel (King of Kings) Bronston is back in Spain. This time he has built a 70-acre replica of Peking, mainly out of 1,320,000 feet of steel tubing, but replete with tiered pagodas and gilt roofs shining in the sun. He has dug a canal, surrounded the metropolis with a 40-ft.-high wall, and filled the streets with Chinese from London and Marseille. He has a cast of 6,500. and when he needs quiet for a take, he blows an air-raid siren. In the immediate foreground, he has Ava Gardner. Paul Lukas. Flora Robson, David Niven and Charlton Ben-Heston.

In fact, Bronston has everything but a final script. No one knows precisely what the film is about. Shot in Super Technirama-70, it is to be called 55 Days at Peking. It more or less intends to describe what happened to the 500 Westerners who withstood a Boxer siege there in 1900. A Bronston flack admits that Bronston is seeking "a compromise of accuracy and suspense." Coolies are lying under cork trees while writers are working like coolies, and new Confuciuses arrive on every plane.

David Niven, at least, seems to know what is going on. "It's a classic story of good Boy Scouts," he says, "an open-air western in Chinese." Charlton Heston. on the other hand, is serious about his work, almost to the point of provoking pity.

He is honored to be re-creating what he describes as "the first example of allied cooperation, and the first stirrings of the sleeping giant of China. I hope both the human and political points emerge." Says Niven: "If the politics comes through, we're doomed."

sbPALERMO. Director Luchino Visconti talking: "Vai, vai, tutti avanti. Va bene. Prends-lui la main, Alain. Now Burt. come slowly forward. A little more to the right. Silenzio. That's perfect." In the terrible summer heat of Sicily. Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers) is pushing an international cast through the film version of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard. Alain is France's Alain DeIon. The hand he is taking belongs to Tunis-born Claudia Cardinale. And "Boort," as the Sicilians call him, is Lancaster himself, playing the moribund Prince of Salina.

It is so hot in Palermo that each day's shooting does not begin until 8 p.m.; then it goes on until 4 a.m. This pleases 20th Century-Fox, co-producers of the picture with Italy's Titanus Productions, since Fox might have saved $10 or $20 million had the same discipline prevailed during the shooting of Cleopatra. Moreover, Actress Cardinale has to keep herself covered with relatively unprovocative raiment in order to preserve her milky white skin for the corset-and-crinoline atmosphere of the story. She often goes around Palermo in a high-necked, long-sleeved sweater and a bikini bottom, describing herself as so much "chocolate ice cream with lots of whipped cream on top."

The only other people who have been working this summer in Sicily are the Mafia; and wherever the film crew has gone, hoods have tried to shake it down. But aristocratic Director Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone has clobbered the Mafia at every turn. When their threats grew too intense, he simply left for another town, provoking political upheavals in the vacated town where the flow of movie cash had been cut off.

sbMUNICH. During World War II, Allied prisoners in the Nazis' Stalag 3 simultaneously dug three escape tunnels--starting from barracks latrines, descending 30 feet, then going hundreds of feet under barbed wire and minefields. They called the tunnels Tom, Dick and Harry. Tom and Dick were never finished; the Gestapo discovered them and blew them up. Some 76 men, however, eventually went through Harry and fanned out into Germany. Only two got out of the country (via the Rhine); 24 were caught and returned to Stalag 3; 50 were shot upon discovery.

In the Bavarian forests near Munich, Producer-Director John Sturges has rebuilt Stalag 3, and his Great Escape shows promise of being the best P.O.W. picture since Stalag 17--closely following the bestselling personal-experience story written by Paul Brickhill. Underground, Tom, Dick and Harry are ingenious; they are rigged up with improvised cable cars, electric lights and pumping stations. But above ground the prison camp has an authenticity that is frightening, and visitors instinctively flinch under the guard towers high above masses of barbed wire.

In Munich's student quarter, meanwhile, a Jerry stock market has been set up. Young German brokers buy and sell the chits that students receive when they are hired as extras. Each slip of paper entitles its bearer to work for one day for $7.50--or simply to collect $1.25 if it rains and shooting is called off. When the weather reports are favorable, chits are traded for as much as $2.50. Inclement offings will send the asking price plummeting as low as 50-c-. Of course the brokers take 10%, rain or shine.

-SALERNO. Writer Carl Foreman arrived in Italy last week with a large cast and crew determined to correct his earlier failures. Somehow, says Foreman, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Guns of Navarone got out of hand, and although they were blazingly successful, failed to deliver his central message: "I feel that all we won in the last war was the license to have another. I am trying to reflect the bitterness and disappointment my generation feels. There's a larger theme, that any war, big or little, just or unjust, always degrades the victors equally with the vanquished, and that any war always carries the seeds of another. The only way to change all this is somehow to stop it now."

His new movie is called The Victors. This time Foreman has not only written the script; he is also producing the movie and, for the first time, directing. Based on Alexander Baron's The Human Kind, the picture will have no hero: it is a vast collection of vignettes following the war from 1942 to a confrontation between a U.S. soldier and a Russian soldier in late 1945. Its stars--including Eli Wallach, George Hamilton, Peter Sellers, Vincent (Ben Casey) Edwards, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Melina Mercouri--are so numerous that The Victors may turn into The Second Longest Day. But there is no cause for alarm in the lofty moral tones of Carl Foreman's third inaugural. Foreman, by his own definition, is just a born failure. The Victors should be just as tremendous a flick as The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Guns of Navarone. If the message comes through, it will be prepaid.

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