MOVIETONE NEW8 . - Parallax View Annex

BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN (1940)
Direction: William K. Howard. Screenplay: John Bright and Robert Tasker, after a story by Howard.
Cinematography: Hal Mohr. Art direction: Gordon Wiles. Editing: Jack Murray. Production: Howard;
associate: Johnnie Walker. Odessco Productions; release by Paramount. (81 minutes)
The players: Wallace Ford, Aline MacMahon, Jimmy Lydon, Stuart Erwin, Patricia Ellis, Van Heflin,
Georgette Harvey, William Harrigan, and (unbilled) William K. Howard.
B films are not so much maligned as misunderstood.
The designation, often loosely applied to any film
employing unknown or fading actors which is obviously
inartistic and inept, properly denotes not an
aesthetic classification but an economic one. Moreover,
with some few exceptions, its use should be
confined to those 19 30s-5Os American films whose
budgets were rigidly held to a predetermined low
level (varying with the producing organization and
the changing economy) and which were intended
primarily for pre-sold markets (to serve as conveniences
for theatre owners and generally leased to
them by fixed-fee rather than percentage-of-the-gross
arrangement).
Perhaps most neglected and misjudged about B
films is their variousness, for it is somehow difficult
to accept the idea that such an unassuming classification
can encompass as many examples of genres and
gradations of artistic quality as larger budget categories.
What this view overlooks, however, is that
while the limitations of the B film may have sapped
or totally failed to engage the creative energies of
some filmmakers, others found that not having stars
and lavish budgets resulted in,. among other
effects, the salutary "benign neglect" of studio
superiors. Since markets were assured and fee arrangements
only allowed for a limited profit, studio
executives were inclined-as long as budgets were not
exceeded-to pay little attention to the making of
these films. This, for certain creators, provided just
the leeway and impetus needed to permit a personal
expression not always possible in bigger films which
carried the weight of star reputations and financial
success or ruin riding on the outcome of each day's
shooting, and which therefore almost demanded
continual studio supervision and interference. Consequently,
and perhaps surprisingly, it is often easier
to find a truly personal statement among B films than
among their more expensive counterparts.
A good and completely neglected example of this
phenomenon is William K. Howard's Back Door to
Heaven (1939). Though one of the rarer independent
Bs and with a budget somewhat higher than the
average, it is nonetheless a particularly informative
illustration of how the B film could, with care and
attention, serve as a supple and ready vehicle of
self-expression.
4
Howard had a curious career. Today, when he is
remembered at all, he is thought of as one of a long
line of slick, commercial Hollywood directors. In the
late Twenties and into the Thirties, however, he was
considered a stylistic realist, a bright American
artistic hope, a Very Big Man on the Hollywood
Campus, and worthy of being mentioned in the same
breath as such contemporary notables as Stroheim,
Sternberg and Vidor. Indeed, while respectfully noting
his $3500-a-week salary, a fan magazine (Motion
Picture Classics of July 1928) called him an "idol,"
"more discussed than Von Stroheim." On the
strength of his most critically-acclaimed work, White
Gold (1927), judged by some to be one of the
highpoints of the late American silent cinema, he was
rated a challenger to "the Germans"-rare praise at
the time.
Although he failed to live up to such inflated
appraisals, he made in addition to White Gold a
number of very provocative films, including Transatlantic
and Surrender (both 1931), The Trial of
Vivienne Ware (1932), Mary Burns-Fugitive (1935),
and, from Preston Sturges' script, the muchremarked-upon
The Power and the Glory (1933),
often regarded as a prototype for Citizen Kane. In
1937, still a top director, with a big-budget Paramount
comedy just behind him, ThePrincess Comes
Across, Howard went to England to direct a comparatively
lavish costumer, Fire over England. Staying on;
he became involved in a pair of low-budgeters. Upon
his return to the U.S. his career took a sudden,
unexpected, and permanent nosedive. Possibly he was
the object of a studio boycott resulting from his own
halting of production on Princess until Paramount
withdrew the supervisor Howard had ordered off the
set for undue interference (in what was the first
invocation of a newly-gained power under Screen
Directors' Guild policies). But what may have been an
equal part of the problem was Howard's determination
to do as his next project the very uncommercial
Back Door to Heaven.
The original story, which the director had written
himself during his stay in England, was an intensely
personal one. Set in Howard's hometown of St.
Mary's, Ohio, it had been inspired by the lives of his
schoolmates, one of whom had grown up to become a
member of the Dillinger gang. Having killed a sheriff