Mortality has lately been running amok in the arts community--Michael Landon, Coral Browne, Lee Remick, Jean Arthur, Robert Motherwell, Isaac Bashevis Singer constituting only a partial list. In such gloomy circumstances, it is nice to be able to raise huzzahs for longevity--to the likes of Hal Roach, feisty at 99, to Helen Hayes and Lillian Gish, both active in their 90s, and in particular to Don Ameche, who at the age of 83 has just now returned from a grueling three-month shoot on a new comedy called "Folks." He is back in the nick of time for a weekend retrospective in his honor arranged by the American Cinematheque.
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Don Ameche--A Life Well Spent in Hollywood : He will be honored with a retrospective at the Directors Guild next weekend
The tribute, to be held at the Directors Guild theater, runs from Friday to next Sunday and will present 10 of his films, two later television roles and excerpts from his most recent screen work, including "Cocoon" (1985), "Trading Places" (1983) and "Folks," which is due later this year.
Ameche, it is amazing to realize, made his first screen appearance 58 years ago in a short called "Beauty at the World's Fair"--the fair being the Chicago World's Fair of 1933. He first came to Hollywood just a bit more than 55 years ago, on March 1, 1936, a date that stays in his mind.
He enjoyed his first big success that very year, opposite Loretta Young in "Ramona." By 1938 he was one of what became a triumvirate of stars in the company Darryl Zanuck had assembled at 20th Century Fox. "The three of us," Ameche says affectionately. "Alice Faye, Ty Power and I. Gosh, we were making six pictures a year each, one after another, especially after Loretta left to go independent. Zanuck had to use us a lot. He couldn't borrow stars because he didn't have any he could afford to lend."
The work really was continuous. Ameche remembers the wrap party after "Midnight" (1939). The party roared on until 4 in the morning, and Ameche had an 8 o'clock call that very morning to start "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell." The first day's shooting was a complicated dolly shot during which Ameche had six pages of dialogue to say. When the "Midnight" welkin stopped ringing in the wee hours before dawn, Ameche hadn't had time to memorize a line.
"But," he says, "I was young and I learned lines easily, and somehow I got through the day." There was plenty of partying in those days, and tales of William Powell telling off a drunken interloper in a restaurant, in a tirade of such eloquence that there were words Ameche had never encountered before. "Awesome," he says. On another occasion, one of his fellow revelers was pushed into a car at Chasen's, went on through and fell out the opened door on the other side of the car, conflicting with the pavement badly.
For years Ameche was so famous for inventing the telephone that he and it found their way into skits and comedians' routines. "Answer the Ameche, will ya?" was almost a catch phrase, and fans invariably mentioned it when they met him. Once or twice, Ameche says, the gibes were meaner than funny. But he remains immensely proud of the film, as a tribute to Bell himself and as an example of the filmmaking arts, including performances. "Loretta was terrific," Ameche says.
"Bell's daughter was on the set every day, and every shot had to have her approval. Everything was absolutely authentic." "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell" (1939) is being shown as a Saturday-night double-feature, along with "In Old Chicago" (1938), another of Fox's prime entries in motion-picture history.
The tribute will open with what is still Ameche's favorite of all his films, "Heaven Can Wait," directed by Ernst Lubitsch from a script by Samson Raphaelson in 1943. (The Warren Beatty "Heaven Can Wait" is no relation, being a remake of "Here Comes Mr. Jordan," a 1941 film.) In "Heaven Can Wait," set in the 1890s, Ameche was a playboy who goes to hell, or Hades as it was then known, and who reviews his sins for Satan, who, in a grand satirical gesture, sends him to the waiting Other Place.
"Lubitsich called the whole cast together on a stage the first day of shooting," Ameche says, "and he said, 'Sam (Raphaelson) and I spent a whole year writing this script. We spent another nine months polishing it. Please don't change a word.' " And they didn't, Ameche says. "All I had to do was learn my lines every morning and go to work. I never had to worry about what I was going to do with them. I knew I was in perfect hands."
It was a lovely premise to begin with, Ameche says. "It must have been reassuring to a lot of people to think that a man who had lived the life he had could still get into heaven."
He had no doubt Lubitsch was a genius, but also "a desperately unhappy man," only truly happy when he had a chance to make his movies his way.
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