Julie Andrews says that of all the movies she’s made, The Americanization of Emily is her favorite. So says James Garner, her co-star. So says Arthur Hiller, who directed. Why has this movie, released in 1964, captivated so many people who know so much about movies?
There are many reasons, but at the top of the list must be the literary, highly pungent script of Paddy Chayefsky. Producer Martin Ransohoff spotted the William Bradford Huie novel in 1959. The book tells of a romance between an Admiral’s aide (the dust cover says it’s “the further adventures of Lieutenant-Commander James Monroe Madison of The Revolt of Mamie Stover”) and a British young woman in WW2 London, and Ransohoff optioned it, thinking it might make a pleasant enough romantic comedy. In time, William Holden was penciled in as the hero, and James Garner was slated to play Bus, Madison’s sidekick. Ransohoff’s choice to direct was William Wyler.
Then Wyler and Holden pulled out, Arthur Hiller was named director, Garner was given the lead, and, most importantly, Paddy Chayefsky was asked to write the screenplay. And what a screenplay he created! The book is a fairly routine love story, with the climactic D-Day invasion the only memorable action. Commander Madison is a writer whose skills as a procurer (of booze and broads, mostly) for Navy brass have landed him in the lap of luxury in London. Emily Barham is a volunteer driver attached to Madison’s unit. Madison and Barham fall in love and, after he makes a movie of the D-Day landing, live happily ever after. End of story.
Enter Paddy Chayefsky. He is not interested in telling a typical Doris Day/Rock Hudson love story. In his hands, Commander (now Charles) Madison is a practicing coward, whose overriding ambition is not to get killed in the war, and whose service as a valued “dog-robber” seems to guarantee survival. Emily Barham, who has lost a father, a husband, and a brother to war, is a Yank-hating moralist, who buys into the nobility of a hero’s death.
This is all Chayefsky. In the book, Madison is as patriotic as the next man, and when the Admiral orders him to film the invasion, he gets a camera crew and obediently joins the invasion fleet.
In the movie, Chayefsky writes a sparkling scene in which Madison and Emily’s mother spar over the reality of war and the folly of glamorizing it. In that one scene, Madison expresses his entire philosophy of life, sacrifice, and honor, and he makes his entire pursuit of survival sound sensible and almost noble. It is an absolutely indispensable scene – and yet, in the book, Ms. Barham never appears, and there is not an iota of dialogue about these subjects.
One shouldn’t be too hard on the book’s author. He was simply writing a different story, a much simpler story. Yet if the screenplay followed the book’s outline, the movie would have been forgotten long ago.
Arthur Hiller was a rookie Hollywood director in 1963, when he began shooting Emily. He would later direct some good movies, like The In-Laws, The Hospital, and Plaza Suite, but nothing, in his mind, to compare with Emily. Julie Andrews, of course, is everybody’s sweetheart no matter what she does, but she, too, singles out this movie as her best. And James Garner is an absolutely perfect Charlie Madison. The rest of the cast is solid: Joyce Grenfell as the dotty mother, Melvyn Douglas as the Admiral, and James Coburn as Bus. There is practically no music in the film other than the song Emily, which was ineligible for an Oscar because the lyrics were never sung.
Hard as it is to believe, The Americanization of Emily was made almost a half century ago. But it is still immensely enjoyable, and Paddy Chayefsky’s message still makes sense today.
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Three collections of these blogs are available at lulu.com. They are, in chronological order, Searching for Joan Leslie, Lines from the Beachcomber, and Tides in the Affairs of Men.
