The Young Lions (film)

Last updated

The Young Lions
Young lions allp.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed by Edward Dmytryk
Screenplay by Edward Anhalt
Based on The Young Lions
by Irwin Shaw
Produced by Al Lichtman
Starring
Cinematography Joseph MacDonald
Edited by Dorothy Spencer
Music by Hugo Friedhofer
Distributed by 20th Century-Fox
Release date
  • April 2, 1958 (1958-04-02)
Running time
167 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$3.55 million [1]
Box office$4.48 million (US/ Canada rentals) [2] [3]

The Young Lions is a 1958 American epic World War II drama film directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin. It was made in black-and-white and CinemaScope and was theatrically released by 20th Century-Fox. The film is based on the 1948 novel of the same name by Irwin Shaw.

Contents

Plot

German ski instructor Christian Diestl is hopeful that Adolf Hitler will bring new prosperity and social mobility to Germany, so when war breaks out he joins the army, becoming a lieutenant. Dissatisfied with police duty in Paris, he requests to be transferred and is assigned to the North African campaign front. While there, he sees what the war has done to his captain and the captain's wife, and he is sickened by their behavior.

Michael Whiteacre and Noah Ackerman befriend each other during their U.S. Army draft physical examination. Michael is in show business and romantically involved with American socialite Margaret Freemantle, who dated ski instructor Christian in 1938 while both were in the Bavarian Alps, where she spent her skiing vacation. Upset by his convictions, she left him on New Year's Eve and returned to Michael.

Noah works as a junior department store clerk, and attends a party that Michael throws, where he meets Hope Plowman. Noah falls in love with Hope, declaring that he wants to marry her. Hope invites Noah to her provincial hometown in Vermont, where she intends introducing him to her father. At the last moment, Hope tells her father that Noah is Jewish. Her father is unprepared for the idea of having a Jewish son-in-law — he has never known a Jew. After speaking with Noah, Hope's father approves of him.

Noah and Michael enter the Army on the same day, and attend basic training together. Their commanding officer and some of the men in their boot camp platoon bully Noah and demonstrate antagonism toward him. Noah gains their respect by standing up to them, even though he's much smaller and is badly hurt in fistfights with some of them. Military authorities, however, discover Noah's put-upon situation and court-martial the officer.

Michael is posted overseas to London.

Christian is conflicted, hating what the war has done to his fellow Germans, but unable to escape from his role in the conflict. He despises what his fellow soldiers have done in the name of the Fatherland, but is determined to fulfill his duty to the end. While visiting his seriously wounded captain in a hospital, he is duped into bringing him a bayonet. He later learns from the captain's wife that he committed suicide with it.

Thanks to his fame, Michael spends most of the war in a safe job in London, nowhere near the fighting. He finally decides to volunteer for combat after Margaret shames him into action. By pulling strings, he rejoins his old outfit at the front, in Germany, in the final days of the war. He reunites with Noah there.

Noah risks his own life during combat by swimming across a canal to save a fellow soldier. The soldier is one of the men who abused him in boot camp. Christian discovers the reality of the Third Reich when he stumbles upon a concentration camp and hears the commander talk about the mass exterminations. Shortly afterwards, the camp is liberated by American forces, which include Michael and Noah. The mayor of a nearby town offers working parties of his constituents to "clean up" the camp before American reporters and photographers arrive. He is roughly rebuffed by Captain Green after an imprisoned rabbi asks Green for permission to hold a religious service and the mayor protests.

Seeing how Noah is affected by the camp, Green instructs him to take a walk and sends Michael with him. Nearby, dazed and tired, Christian screams in rage, breaking apart his machine-pistol on a tree-stump. The noise draws the attention of Michael and Noah, and seeing the German, Michael shoots Christian. They silently watch him die, then quietly walk back to the camp.

After the war, a discharged Noah emerges from a subway station. Hope is at a window in their apartment and notices him coming, and lifts up their baby daughter for him to finally see, and he ascends the stairs quickly to embrace his family.

Cast

Production

The film became a box office success and was the key to Martin's comeback in the wake of his split with partner Jerry Lewis. Tony Randall originally had Martin's role, but was replaced after talent agency MCA suggested to director Dmytryk to replace Randall. Clift at first was opposed to Martin, but changed his mind after seeing Randall in Oh, Men! Oh, Women! . [4] Martin, after the failure of his previous movie, accepted $20,000 to star, which was less than he made in a single week of nightclub appearances at the time. [4] The change provoked a mild controversy with rumors circulating that MCA, which represented Brando, Clift, and Martin, had bullied Twentieth-Century Fox, threatening to withhold Brando and Clift. [4] Martin ended up receiving splendid reviews and launched a very successful solo career as an actor.

This was the only film that Brando and Clift made together. However, they do not appear in any scenes together (the scene with Martin and Clift standing over the body of Brando's dead character does not have all three actors in the same frame and Martin's and Clift's scene was filmed at a different time than that of Brando's). The picture was produced by Al Lichtman who died shortly before its release. [5] It was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Film. It was also nominated in 1959 for three Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Sound (Carlton W. Faulkner), and Best Music. [6]

The film made some major changes to the original story of Shaw's novel. In the film version, the character of the German soldier Christian is portrayed more sympathetically as a decent man who is deceived, rather than seduced and corrupted, by his country's Nazi rulers. Although the novel's character is increasingly hardened by his experiences and unrepentant to the end, in the film version he grows ever more disillusioned and renounces his cause in the final scenes. Another major difference is that in the novel's final confrontation, Christian ambushes the two American soldiers, firing first and killing Noah and then being killed in turn by Michael; in the film, Christian, having thrown away his weapon after witnessing the horrors of a concentration camp, stumbles dazedly into the path of the two GIs and is shot dead on sight. As Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times in 1958 in a review of the film, the screen version is "prettier" than the novel and in the former, there is "no noticeable moral difference between the one German and two Americans". [7]

Shaw himself is said to have disliked the changes to his novel in the film version, in particular Brando's sympathetic portrayal of Christian and the playing down of the anti-Semitism that Noah encounters in the original book. [8]

Release

Critical reception

The Young Lions was well received by film critics. Film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 83% of critics gave the film a positive review, with an rating average of 7.6/10. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times , however, gave the film an unfavorable review, calling Marlon Brando's German accent reminiscent of the old vaudeville comedy team Weber and Fields; Montgomery Clift's performance "lackluster"; and the movie as a whole "a formless mosaic". [9] Abel Green of Variety gave the film a positive review, and succinctly summarized the film as "a blockbuster," noting "The Young Lions is a canvas of World War II of scope and stature that gives accent anew to the observation that television's competition is still, fundamentally, a peepshow.... It's a king-sized credit to all concerned, from Edward Anhalt's skillful adaptation of Irwin Shaw's novel to Edward Dmytryk's realistic direction and, not the least the highly competent portrayals of virtually everyone in the cast". [10]

Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote,

Under Edward Dmytryk's direction the film weaves, moderately skillfully, the stories of the two Americans and the German until their paths cross outside a concentration camp at the war's end. There the nervous, cowardly Whitacre shoots the unarmed Diestl. The film's basic flaw is in the assumption that by combining three stories that would otherwise be commonplace, you will produce an epic; and the finish crowns its superficiality with pointlessness. Some of the scenes are good setpieces, but we soon sense that the film's honesty and intelligence are thin. It becomes just another mildly competent war picture, more complicated than most. Yet it is worth seeing because of Brando's performance. [11]

The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films. [12]

Box office

The film was a box office success. [13] It opened at number two at the US box office behind The Bridge on the River Kwai with a gross of $420,000 from the cities sampled by Variety . [14] It went on to take $4,480,000 in theatrical rentals in the United States and Canada. [2] It was the highest-grossing film in Greece for the 1958–59 season with admissions of 148,418. [15]

Related Research Articles

<i>Crossfire</i> (film) 1947 noir drama film directed by Edward Dmytryk

Crossfire is a 1947 American film noir drama film starring Robert Young, Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan which deals with the theme of antisemitism, as did that year's Academy Award for Best Picture winner, Gentleman's Agreement. The film was directed by Edward Dmytryk and the screenplay was written by John Paxton, based on the 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole by screenwriter and director Richard Brooks. The film's supporting cast features Gloria Grahame and Sam Levene. The picture received five Oscar nominations, including Ryan for Best Supporting Actor and Gloria Grahame for Best Supporting Actress. It was the first B movie to receive a Best Picture nomination.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregory Peck</span> American actor (1916–2003)

Eldred Gregory Peck was an American actor and one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1970s. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck the 12th-greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.

<i>The Defiant Ones</i> 1958 film by Stanley Kramer

The Defiant Ones is a 1958 American drama film which tells the story of two escaped prisoners, one white and one black, who are shackled together and who must co-operate in order to survive. It stars Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.

The Search is a 1948 American film directed by Fred Zinnemann that tells the story of a young Auschwitz survivor and his mother who search for each other across post-World War II Europe. It stars Montgomery Clift, Ivan Jandl, Jarmila Novotná and Aline MacMahon.

<i>East of Eden</i> (film) 1955 film by Elia Kazan

East of Eden is a 1955 American epic period drama film directed by Elia Kazan and written by Paul Osborn, adapted from the fourth and final part of John Steinbeck's epic 1952 novel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Dmytryk</span> American film director (1908–1999)

Edward Dmytryk was a Canadian-born American film director and editor. He was known for his 1940s noir films and received an Oscar nomination for Best Director for Crossfire (1947). In 1947, he was named as one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of blacklisted film industry professionals who refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in their investigations during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era. They all served time in prison for contempt of Congress. In 1951, Dmytryk testified to the HUAC and named individuals, including Arnold Manoff, whose careers were then destroyed for many years, to rehabilitate his own career. First hired again by independent producer Stanley Kramer in 1952, Dmytryk is likely best known for directing The Caine Mutiny (1954), a critical and commercial success. The second-highest-grossing film of the year, it was nominated for Best Picture and several other awards at the 1955 Oscars. Dmytryk was nominated for a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures.

<i>One-Eyed Jacks</i> 1961 film

One-Eyed Jacks is a 1961 American Western film directed by and starring Marlon Brando, his only directorial credit. Brando portrays the lead character Rio, and Karl Malden plays his partner, "Dad" Longworth. The supporting cast features Pina Pellicer, Katy Jurado, Ben Johnson and Slim Pickens. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bosley Crowther</span> American film critic (1905–1981)

Francis Bosley Crowther Jr. was an American journalist, writer, and film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His work helped shape the careers of many actors, directors and screenwriters, though some of his reviews of popular films have been seen as unnecessarily harsh. Crowther was an advocate of foreign-language films in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly those of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, and Federico Fellini.

<i>Morituri</i> (1965 film) 1965 film by Bernhard Wicki

Morituri is a 1965 American war thriller film directed by Bernhard Wicki and starring Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner, Janet Margolin and Trevor Howard. The cinematography was by Conrad L. Hall, and the film musical score was composed by Jerry Goldsmith.

<i>The Defector</i> (film) 1966 French film

The Defector is a 1966 thriller film starring Montgomery Clift, Hardy Krüger, Roddy McDowall and Macha Méril. It was directed and co-written by Belgian director/producer Raoul Lévy and based on the 1965 novel L'espion by Paul Thomas.

<i>Mutiny on the Bounty</i> (1962 film) 1962 film by Carol Reed, Lewis Milestone

Mutiny on the Bounty is a 1962 American Technicolor epic historical drama film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard, Richard Harris, Hugh Griffith, Richard Haydn and Tarita in her only role. The screenplay was written by Charles Lederer, based on the novel Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Bronisław Kaper composed the score.

<i>Désirée</i> (film) 1954 film by Henry Koster

Désirée is a 1954 American historical romance film directed by Henry Koster and produced by Julian Blaustein from a screenplay by Daniel Taradash, based on the best-selling novel Désirée by Annemarie Selinko. The music score was by Alex North and the cinematography by Milton R. Krasner. The film was made in CinemaScope.

<i>Knock on Any Door</i> 1949 film by Nicholas Ray

Knock on Any Door is a 1949 American courtroom trial film noir directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart. The movie was based on the 1947 novel of the same name by Willard Motley. The picture gave actor John Derek his breakthrough role as young hoodlum Nick Romano, whose motto was "Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse."

<i>The Quiet American</i> (1958 film) 1958 film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz based on the 1955 novel

The Quiet American is a 1958 American drama romance thriller war film. It was the first film adaptation of Graham Greene's bestselling 1955 novel of the same name, and one of the first films to deal with the geo-politics of Indochina. It was written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and stars Audie Murphy, Michael Redgrave, and Giorgia Moll. It was critically well-received, but was not considered a box-office success.

<i>Bedtime Story</i> (1964 film) 1964 film

Bedtime Story is a 1964 American comedy film starring Marlon Brando, David Niven and Shirley Jones. It was made by Brando's company, Pennebaker Productions, directed by Ralph Levy, produced by Stanley Shapiro, with Robert Arthur as executive producer, from a screenplay by Shapiro and Paul Henning. The music score was by Hans J. Salter and the cinematography by Clifford Stine.

<i>Hitlers Children</i> (1943 film) 1943 American black-and-white propaganda film

Hitler's Children is a 1943 American black-and-white war film made by RKO Radio Pictures. The film stars Tim Holt, Bonita Granville and Kent Smith and was directed by Edward Dmytryk from an adaptation by Emmet Lavery of Gregor Ziemer's book Education for Death, which had previously been adapted as a Disney animated short film.

<i>The Juggler</i> (film) 1953 film

The Juggler is a 1953 drama film starring Kirk Douglas as a survivor of the Holocaust. The screenplay was adapted by Michael Blankfort from his novel of the same name. It was the first American feature film that was made in Israel.

<i>Raintree County</i> (film) 1957 film by Edward Dmytryk

Raintree County is a 1957 American epic historical romance western war film adapted from the 1948 novel of the same name by Ross Lockridge Jr. The film was directed by Edward Dmytryk and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Set in both the American Midwest and the American South against the backdrop of the Antebellum South and the American Civil War, the film tells the story of a small-town Midwestern teacher and poet named John Shawnessy, who meets and marries a beautiful Southern belle named Susanna Drake; however, her emotional instability leads to the destruction of their marriage. The leading roles are played by Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Eva Marie Saint, Nigel Patrick and Lee Marvin.

<i>The Young Lions</i> (novel) 1948 novel by Irwin Shaw

The Young Lions (1948) is a novel by Irwin Shaw about three soldiers in World War II.

<i>No Time to Die</i> (1958 film) 1958 British film by Terence Young

No Time to Die is a 1958 British war film directed by Terence Young and starring Victor Mature, Leo Genn, Anthony Newley and Bonar Colleano. It is about an American sergeant in the British Army during the Second World War.

References

Notes

  1. Solomon, Aubrey. Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1989. ISBN   978-0-8108-4244-1. p251
  2. 1 2 "All-Time Top Grossers". Variety . January 8, 1964. p. 69.
  3. "Top Grossers of 1958". Variety. January 7, 1959. p. 48. Please note figures are for US and Canada only and are domestic rentals accruing to distributors as opposed to theatre gross
  4. 1 2 3 Tosches 1992, p. 300.
  5. "2 Film Vets Die Within One Week; Al Lichtman at 70, Louis K. Sidney 63". Variety . February 26, 1958. p. 16. Retrieved September 27, 2021 via Archive.org.
  6. "The 31st Academy Awards (1959) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Retrieved August 21, 2011.
  7. Crowther, Bosley (April 3, 1958). "Irwin Shaw's 'Young Lions'; War Story Is Offered at the Paramount Brando, Martin and Clift Are Starred", The New York Times .
  8. "The Young Lions (1958) Notes". Turner Classic Movies.
  9. Crowther, Bosley (April 3, 1958). "Screen: Irwin Shaw's 'Young Lions'". The New York Times. p. 23. Retrieved October 6, 2021.
  10. Green, Abel (March 19, 1958). "Films Reviews: The Young Lions". Variety . p. 6. Retrieved October 6, 2021 via Archive.org.
  11. "Stanley Kauffmann on films". The New Republic. April 28, 1958.
  12. Thomas-Mason, Lee. "From Stanley Kubrick to Martin Scorsese: Akira Kurosawa once named his top 100 favourite films of all time". Far Out Magazine. Retrieved January 23, 2023.
  13. Film Favourites By Lachlan Hazelton: The Young Lions.
  14. "National Boxoffice Survey". Variety. April 9, 1958. p. 3. Retrieved May 6, 2023 via Archive.org.
  15. "'Young Lions' Best Of 10 Top Grossers For Greece; '10 C's' Also Big". Variety . August 5, 1959. p. 11. Retrieved January 14, 2021 via Archive.org.