German Spectacle

Since its publication last year, the chapter in my book Arizona’s Little Hollywood that’s raised the most eyebrows is the one that revealed that Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a German-language Nazi Western, was shot on location in Sedona in September 1935. Readers find it incredible that such an off-the-wall film could have been shot in patriotic Red Rock Country; as pop culture pundit Fern Siegel commented in MediaPost, “Like Woody Allen, my Nazi radar is highly attuned, so Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a 1936 piece of anti-capitalist propaganda, was a surprise.”

I didn’t believe it either until I tracked down a German DVD copy and saw for myself. Sure enough, local landmarks Schnebly Hill, Oak Creek, Munds Mountain Trail, even the dirt trail that is today’s paved State Route 89A are all easily recognizable locations in the movie. There’s even a slow sweeping panorama of the entire area shot from high atop the Mogollon Rim that is probably the best photographic record we have of the Sedona landscape before development.

The question I'm most frequently asked is “How can I see this movie?” It’s not easy. Der Kaiser has never been released on home video in the United States, but pristinely restored DVD special editions (in German and without English subtitles) are available from Amazon.de in Germany, as well as through international dealers on eBay. Thankfully, because the intent of Der Kaiser was strictly to vilify capitalism and twist the story of Sutter’s Mill and America’s 19th-century belief in Manifest Destiny into an analogy for Hitler’s plan for German expansion into foreign territories, there is no anti-Semetic or racist content in the film. But one word of warning before purchasing a DVD: Because the discs are produced in the European PAL video format, you’ll need a multi-region DVD player to watch it.––Joe McNeill

Sedona: “The Edge of the World?”

That’s how clever studio flacks (not New Agers fearful of cataclysm in 2012) described the view from Sedona’s Schnebly Hill in the caption of this 1930 publicity still:

ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
George O’Brien stops on the edge of the Painted Desert to enjoy the beautiful location selected for his next Fox Film Corporation outdoor romance, adapted from the novel The Last of the Duanes by Zane Grey.

Proud Papa

“Father of Film” D.W. Griffith (right) presents the 1946 Oscar for Best Color Cinematography to Leon Shamroy for his work on Leave Her to Heaven, the first Technicolor film shot in Sedona's Red Rock Country.

Sedona Movie Alert!

The woman some call the most beautiful in movie history earned her only Best Actress Academy Award nomination in 1945's Leave her to Heaven: her best scene was shot on Sedona's Schnebly Hill.

Co-starring Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain and Vincent Price, Leave her to Heaven will air on Turner Classic Movies November 22 at 11 a.m. Eastern Time.

Mrs. Hopalong Cassidy

Grace Bradley Boyd stepped off a train in Flagstaff on July 15, 1937, having just barely missed out on a rare treat  in those days – a Sedona honeymoon. Greeting her at the station was her husband of five weeks, actor William Boyd – better known to a legion of young fans as cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy – who had just spent six days filming scenes for his 14th Hoppy picture, Texas Trail, at Foxboro Ranches, which sat on a rim above Sedona’s Schnebly Hill.

Mrs. Boyd was sparkling and mischievous during a memorable 2005 phone interview about Texas Trail that turned into a three-hour chat covering, among other things, Brooklyn, kids, home invasions, and the benefits of a Tai Chi workout. She died at age 97 on September 21, 2010. Here’s a sampling of some of the many things Grace Bradley Boyd told me that afternoon.––Joe McNeill

"Bill had a career of marrying his leading ladies; I was number 5. He said to me, 'Why didn’t you grow up a little faster, it would have saved me an awful lot of trouble!' And I said, 'Well, I grew up as fast as I could!'

"I fell in love with him when I was 12 years old and saw him in The Volga Boatman. We only knew each other three weeks when we married. We met and he proposed on the third night. But we had to wait three weeks because he was that far away from getting a divorce. In those days, it was a year. It turned out we were married on his birthday, June 5th 1937; he was on a picture, Hopalong Rides Again. And when it came out in the papers that we were married, they headlined the story with the title of the picture, Hopalong Rides Again. Everybody said, 'Oh my God!' because they didn’t even know we knew each other.

"People said it wouldn’t last six months, but of course, it turned out to be just perfect. We were married 35 years and were only separated two nights, and both times he had very serious accidents. So he said, 'OK, that’s it. I’m not going to go for that third time!' So I stayed real close.

"Judith Allen [Texas Trail's leading lady] was at Paramount when I was, but I didn’t know her too well. When I first came out to California from New York in ‘33, they picked me up in Pasadena and took me right to the studio and ushered me into Cecil B. DeMille’s office; DeMille was casting for this picture he was going to do about a young girl coming into womanhood (This Day and Age, 1933). So he was insisting upon hiring a virgin. Well, I had come out with my teddy bear and my mother!

"He sat me down and looked at me and said, 'No. You don’t look like a virgin. I see you on a couch with a tiger skin and two Nubian slaves, one on each side, both with a big fan.' I said, 'Oh, sure!' I did not get that part, but DeMille did pick Judith to be the virgin. Then it came out, maybe a few weeks later, that she was married to the top professional wrestler at the time!”

Cisco? Is that you?

Hollywood may have turned O. Henry’s Cisco Kid into “The Robin Hood of the Old West,” but that’s not quite what the writer had in mind. Here’s how he described the ­character at the start of his short story, “The Caballero’s Way”: “The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forebore to count."

Poor Cisco. Not only did Hollywood whitewash his macho personality, but a few amateur historians have mixed up the locations where his sanitized adventures were put on film. Curiously, a few sources on the Internet and elsewhere have listed 1939’s The Cisco Kid and the Lady as a Sedona production, but it’s not. For starters, if any Sedona scenes were shot they didn’t make it into the final cut; it’s highly unlikely a crew would have gone there in those days, shot footage, and not used any of it. But beyond that, a search for any records of a crew coming to Sedona for Cisco Kid and the Lady in 1939 came up empty.




Before the shooting starts: Setting up a Viva Cisco Kid scene on Sedona's Schnebly Hill.

By all reliable accounts, Cisco Kid and the Lady was filmed in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California. Those who say Cisco Kid and the Lady was shot in Sedona almost certainly have it mixed up with Viva Cisco Kid, which is clearly a Sedona production, a fact easily proven by viewing the film and confirmed by the extensive local newspaper coverage of the crew’s 1940 visit to town – and if you still need further evidence, just look at the ­photo above.––Joe McNeill

Will You Save Zane Grey’s The Last of the Duanes?

The Last of the Duanes star George O’Brien takes in the view from Sedona’s Schnebly Hill.

Imagine having the opportunity to step back in time and see Sedona long before its development, with nothing intruding on its stunning natural scenery for as far as the eye can see. That’s what you get in 1930’s The Last of the Duanes, the first talkie shot in Sedona and the oldest surviving Hollywood feature filmed on location in Red Rock Country. Eighty-years years later, it offers an incredible historical record of the town – if we could see a clean copy. Collectors swap weak-looking bootleg DVDs, but with a little detective work, a 35mm print of Duanes was tracked down at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y., from which a nearly pristine exhibition print of the film could be struck – if someone steps up to underwrite the costs of the final restoration work.

For years, the film was feared lost in a 1937 fire that engulfed a Twentieth Century–Fox film vault in Little Ferry, N.J., destroying the negatives of most Fox silent films and early talkies. But when the company hired British-born Alex Gordon, a producer of B-movies such as 1956’s Shake, Rattle & Rock and 1957’s Dragstrip Girl, he instituted a restoration program that located more than 30 missing Fox films, including Duanes.

In the 1960s, Gordon parceled the studio’s remaining vault materials out to various archives for preservation. The films are believed to have been divvied up among the UCLA Film and Television Archives in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Eastman House.

Caroline Yeager, an assistant curator at Eastman House, says the museum holds a restored, tinted black-and-white nitrate print, as well as an acetate and safety negative. Its holdings would yield a clean print that could be screened in a theatre with a little more cleanup work that “I would estimate would cost between $8,000 and $10,000,” Yeager said.

We ask anyone with a serious interest in underwriting the restoration of Duanes, preserving this landmark of Sedona history for the next century, to please contact us for more information at info@sedonamonthly.com.––Erika Ayn Finch