The Reign of Spain

In Spain today, all the world's a sound stage. The Outlaw of the Red River, with George Montgomery, is now shooting on the banks of the Tagus River. Yacht to Jamaica never left Barcelona. Nor did Horst Buchholz as The Man from Istanbul. Orson Welles's epic of Falstaff, Chimes at Midnight, is packing up in Madrid, but Henry Fonda is just digging in around Segovia for The Battle of the Bulge. And in suburban Madrid, it looks as if Franco lost the Civil War after all: there, in a set ankle-deep in marble-dust snow, 1,500 Red revolutionaries have just taken over a ten-acre mock-up of Moscow. The film is Doctor Zhivago, starring Egypt's Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson and, as Zhivago's young wife, Charlie Chaplin's 20-year-old daughter Geraldine. At $10 million, it is MGM's most free-spending spectacular since Ben-Hur.

Pumping Out Orson. All this action could be just another reason why Douglas Dillon wants out at the Treasury. The hegira from Hollywood and the hegemony of Spain seem inescapable. Spain's low living costs are equaled nowhere in Europe except Greece and Yugoslavia, and its range of scenery and climate are matched nowhere at all. Orson Welles, making do with a fish-and-flour warehouse as studio, paid rent of a mere $120 a month. And he didn't have to fabricate a medieval cobbled-street market, a walled village, or a 12th century Romanesque castle: all were within kilometers of his set. Which left most of his rigid $1,000,000 budget for casting, and he could hardly have made it pay better, signing on Jeanne Moreau as Dolly Tearsheet, Sir John Gielgud as Henry IV, and even Margaret Rutherford as Mrs. Quickly. One other area where Welles didn't cut down: gluttony, which left him hospitalized after he gobbled up a middle-sized lamb and washed down four liters of hot wine.

Spain's other touted economy is that if the director doesn't like the weather, all he has to do is drive a little. Thus David Lean of Zhivago, who had traveled 30,000 miles to find a snowy steppeland for his winter scenes, was assured he need go no further than Soria in the Spanish Pyrenees. "Just like Russia," promised the mayor, counting up the take for the local economy. M-G-M was convinced, built a whole Russian village, a rail line and a river-diverting dam. Only the snows never came, and when Lean went scouting for some, he wound up three feet deep, Jeep and all, in an icy marsh. The scene will be tried again next winter--farther north.

Bailing Out Bronston. The sinking feeling was shared by the Spanish government, which has long cultivated the movie trade. Though it fatuously forbade Lean to play the Internationals during Zhivago's revolutionary skirmishes, Madrid laboriously rounded up turn-of-the-century rail equipment (still in use) and Russian weapons captured during the Civil War. It also promised a squadron of mounted police to play Moscow dragoons. When they didn't show, Lean fell back on some gypsy cavalry, who have already been Moors in El Cid, Boxers in 55 Days in Peking, Macedonians in Alexander the Great and Visigoths in The Fall of the Roman Empire.

In the case of Spain's most lucrative foreign producer, Samuel Bronston, the government has gone even farther. Once so overextended that he couldn't pay his tab at Madrid's Castellana Hilton, Bronston has been bailed out with an official two-year moratorium on his debts, plus a fat crude-oil import license. Of course, Bronston has of late been cranking out some patriotic Spanish shorts as a sort of Cid pro quo.

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