Messagepar Loco » 31 août 2019 15:43
Voici ce qu'écrit à propos du film John French, qui fut l'agent de Robert Shaw et qui lui a consacré un livre intéressant, même s'il n'est pas aussi complet qu'on aurait pu l'espérer.
On peut y lire ceci quant aux motivations de Philip Yordan quant au film et à son scénario. Custer a été utilisé comme "véhicule" pour passer les idées de Yordan, se livrer à une étude d'un personnage et de sa psychologie, si apocryphe soit-elle dans le film, et en mettre plein la vue aux spectateurs. Il n'a jamais voulu faire œuvre d'historien, et attaquer le film sur ce qu'il n'a jamais eu vocation à être me semble basé sur un raisonnement malheureusement très répandu qui consiste à juger uniquement en fonction du prisme de son ressenti et non en fonction de l'objectif de l'artiste. C'est comme dire que Stockhausen n'est pas très dansant : ce n'était pas l'objectif de ses compositions.
"Alors que la guerre du Vietnam battait son plein et que les protestations contre l'implication américaine grandissaient, des campus universitaires aux rues de Washington, Yordan avait dans l'idée qu'un film sur Custer serait un moyen d'exposer un certain nombres de pensées simplistes sur les maux qu'engendrait la guerre. Le scénario, ne tentant pas de creuser le personnage historique de Custer, avançait des motivations freudiennes infondées pour son comportement [...]. [Le film] tenta d'exploiter la largeur de l'écran avec des scènes de trains à pleine vitesse, de descentes de rapides et de cascades spectaculaires, mais ne fut pas un succès. L'accent de Shaw semblait faux chez les Américains. La motivation pseudo-psychologique imposée à une histoire que tout le monde connaissait n'était pas convaincante et, bien que le sentiment anti-guerre ait pu être souligné dans les documents publicitaires, il n'était pas apparent dans le film."
Ci-dessous, le texte intégral des paragraphes consacrés au film dans le livre de John French, Robert Shaw: The Price of Success Dean Street Press.
“Phil Yordan had kept in close touch with Shaw since the end of The Battle of the Bulge and, with the reviews of the American opening, he sent Shaw a script for his next Spanish project, Custer of the West. With the Vietnam War in full swing and protests against American involvement escalating from university campuses to the streets of Washington, Yordan had the idea that a film about Custer would be a hook on which to hang various simplistic morals about the evils of war. The script, making little attempt to delve into Custer’s historical character, and rehearsing spurious Freudian motivations for his behaviour, had little to recommend it. It did, however, have a part for Mary Ure as Custer’s wife, and Yordan, once again, was prepared to pay Shaw $350,000. The style of living to which Shaw had become accustomed needed large infusions of money. Deborah Shaw was about to go to Wycombe Abbey, an expensive girls’ public school, and all the other children would be privately – and equally expensively – educated. There was the alimony due to Jennifer, cars to be bought and sold, friends entertained, lawyers, accountants, agents and private doctors to be paid. Shaw employed a secretary and a nanny and a gardener. Shaw had little choice but to accept Yordan’s offer. There was nothing else likely to pay him so much. He would talk of the freedom the money would give him, freedom to write. But it never did. As if creating a version of Parkinson’s Law, the more money he had the more he spent, his spending simply expanding to match the money available. Shaw was on a treadmill of expense from which he would never escape. The idea of making Custer’s Last Stand in the hills of Almeria in Spain with an English actor and actresses playing Mr and Mrs Custer might not have seemed a terribly good bet but once again Yordan’s ability to finance a film with an unlikely assemblage of personnel was never in question. In addition, Shaw’s name helped him get a distribution deal with Twentieth Century Fox then run by Darryl Zanuck who had expressed a firm belief in his potential as a ‘star’. Yordan had hired the veteran Hollywood director Robert Siodmak whose credits included The Spiral Staircase, The Killers, and Cry of the City, though the Civil War sequence was directed by Irving Lerner, as Siodmak had to return to America on another engagement. The rest of the cast included Yordan’s usual collection of fading stars and might-have-beens, Robert Ryan, Ty Hardin and Jeff Hunter. Yordan had also decided to make the picture in Cinerama, a technique that involved the use of three synchronised cameras and three synchronised projectors to produce a screen image three times wider and twice as deep as the conventional ratio. He argued that the film would get a great deal more publicity and be pushed harder by the distributors because they were keen to publicise the process in general which was hoped would be an antidote to the flagging audiences that were now beginning to beset the film industry. Though this was true, the fact that so few cinemas in the world were equipped with the necessary projectors (only one in England) meant that, for the film to recoup its cost, it would have to run to full houses for months on end. Nor would it be available for showing on television as the ratios were incompatible. Custer of the West attempted to exploit the new screen width with scenes of runaway trains, shooting rapids, and spectacular horse stunts, but it was not a success. Among Americans Shaw’s accent seemed phoney. The pseudo-psychological motivation imposed on a story that everyone was familiar with was not convincing and, though anti-war sentiment may have been emphasised in the publicity handouts, it was not apparent in the film. Shaw both rewrote a great deal of the dialogue (later exaggeratedly claiming ‘I rewrote every line of that picture without credit’) and composed the song Follow Custer, the music for which was written by Bernardo Segall (who, by coincidence, had composed the score for The Luck of Ginger Coffey). But his efforts did not manage to lift what was basically second-rate material. The film was launched with an appropriately grand publicity campaign emphasising the visual effects, but it was nevertheless a critical and commercial flop. After the triumph of his small role in A Man for all Seasons, his performance in the title role of Custer of the West was heavily criticised. His second association with Phil Yordan was a disaster in everything but the fee he earned.”
