Decades before Lord of the Rings and Avatar, Hollywood came to New Zealand. CHARLIE GATES reports.

In the summer of 1957, a Hollywood film crew came to Christchurch and Wellington to film a major studio production starring Paul Newman, Jean Simmons and Sandra Dee called Until They Sail.

But the cast of movie stars never set foot in New Zealand to film the romantic melodrama about Kiwi women left behind in World War II.

Instead, Kiwis were recruited as stand-ins and extras during the location shoots, while parts of Cathedral Square in Christchurch and a Māori sculpture in Rotorua were carefully reconstructed in a Hollywood studio for all the scenes featuring the big name cast.

 

Christchurch woman Evelyn Cooper was working as a waitress in a milk bar when Hollywood came calling.

On Monday, February 11, 1957 she was having coffee in a Christchurch restaurant with her husband when a Hollywood film producer approached them.

James E Newcom had been working in Hollywood for about 30 years and was associate producer on Until They Sail. He got his start in Hollywood working in the art department on a 1930s Tarzan movie. 

By 1957, he had edited 33 Hollywood films, including A Star is Born, Annie Get Your Gun and Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. In 1940 he shared an Oscar for his editing work on Gone with the Wind.

For Newcom, Evelyn Cooper's restaurant table marked the end of a long search.

He needed a local to double for movie star Jean Simmons, famous for her Oscar-winning roles in the musical Guys and Dolls and Biblical epic The Robe, but was struggling to find someone suitable. 

Simmons never set foot in New Zealand during the shoot, but they needed a shot of her character from behind in Cathedral Square.

He had interviewed about 30 Christchurch women that day and on Friday, but rejected many for being the wrong height and build. Others had the right look but had cut their hair to look more like Simmons, not realising she had grown out her hair into a 1940s style for the movie's period setting.

STAR'S BODY DOUBLE

But now Newcom had found his double – Evelyn Cooper.

Before that moment, she had never been on stage or filmed by a movie camera. Happily, her husband was a Hoon Hay butcher named Gary Cooper.

She signed a contract with movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) the next morning, kicking off a busy fortnight where she was given a new haircut, fitted for costumes and shuttled from location to location in Christchurch and Wellington. The Press noted that she was having her hair rewaved every day.

In Christchurch, the film crew shot on Stanmore Rd near the Avon River bridge, on the estuary near Moncks Spur, at the railway station and in Lyttelton. Locals drafted in as extras included Christ's College school boy Bruce Middleton, members of the Union Rowing Club and Mr C Kerr of Linwood with his three-year-old horse called Petermere.

The main shoot took place in Cathedral Square and was a re-enactment of New Zealand troops heading off to war in 1940 as hundreds of Christchurch extras cheered them on.

Soldiers marched past the Christ Church Cathedral as the cast appeared to watch from the southwestern corner of the square by the old Post Office building.

It was all overseen by first assistant director Robert E. Relyea who had already worked on the musical film Oklahoma! and a few months later would help shoot the Elvis Presley film Jailhouse Rock.

He later went on to work on The Great Escape, West Side Story, The Magnificent Seven, Bullitt and The Last Action Hero.

A photograph taken by The Press shows a camera mounted on a car tracking along with troops as many people stand and watch.

This is where Evelyn Cooper acted as a stand in for Simmons. One of the Kiwi crew, cameraman John Hutchinson of the New Zealand National Film Unit, stood in for Paul Newman wearing a US Marines officer uniform.

INTENSE MEDIA COVERAGE

And, just like when Avatar and Lord of the Rings were shot more recently in New Zealand, the movie received assistance from the Government and was the subject of intense media coverage.

Army personnel from Burnham Military Camp postponed leave to appear in the military parade scenes.

The Press ran an article every day the film was shooting in Christchurch, detailing everything from the kind of camera lenses used to the local extras enlisted to help.

"The unit has expressed high praise and gratitude for its reception in New Zealand, for the assistance it has received from Government, civic, and army authorities and even for the excellence of the meals brought to the crew while on location," The Press reported.

While the second unit crew filmed in Christchurch, the main cast were being filmed about 11,000 kilometres away on the MGM studio backlot in Culver City, Los Angeles.

The majority of the film was shot in Los Angeles and directed by Robert Wise, who edited Citizen Kane and had directed science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still a few years earlier. He went on to win Oscars for directing West Side Story and the Sound of Music.

Wise did not film in New Zealand, but visited Christchurch in October 1956, where he interviewed Kiwi women whose partners served overseas in World War II.  An article in The Press from November 1956 said the studio was looking for a specific vintage car and photographs of a typical New Zealand Christmas as part of its research.

"The studio insists on complete authenticity on all points before making a film," the article stated.

The Culver City backlot was spread over 15 hectares and included many standing sets for a production line of movies made during the studio's golden age. There was a prison, a cemetery, a New York dock complete with ocean liner, a railway station, a town square and seven different styles of New York street.

CATHEDRAL SQUARE RECREATED

Cathedral Square was reconstructed on one of the New York streets known as Fifth Ave. A chemist and a cinema were mocked up on the backlot to match the southwestern corner of Cathedral Square, which featured Barnett's Chemist in the United Service Hotel building and the Plaza cinema in the corner.

Photographs of the Hollywood set show vintage cars lining the streets and a clapper board with the location "Christchurch Square" written in chalk.

A scene by the Avon River was shot on the banks of Tarzan Lake on the backlot, which was a concrete pond about one metre deep named after the many Tarzan films shot there in the 1930s.

The mock stone bridge that crossed the lake had been used for many MGM movies and posed as Scotland, Germany, France, Spain and Transylvania.

Angry locals carrying torches had chased Frankenstein across that bridge, Lassie the dog had trotted across it on a Scottish adventure, while German and Allied forces fought over the bridge in the 1960s television show Combat!

The recreation of New Zealand on a Hollywood backlot went even further. For a scene not included in the final movie, Hollywood set builders recreated an 1870 Maori carving of Queen Victoria at Ōhinemutu in Rotorua.

The only surviving photograph of the set is held in a folder of photographs at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library in Beverly Hills. It shows the surreal and kitsch sight of a Maori carving lit by studio lights on a Hollywood backlot.

FILM FLOPS

The film did not fare well. It was politely reviewed on its release in December 1957 and lost $1 million at the North American box office. It is now largely forgotten.

The places where it was filmed have also faded into history. The MGM backlot was largely demolished in the 1970s to make way for new housing developments with street names like Astaire Avenue and Hepburn Circle.

Movie star Debbie Reynolds once lamented the studio's passing.

"Those unbelievable backlots are now suburbs with … children playing in the streets. Children who would never believe that castles and pirate ships and Mississippi river boats once stood exactly where their homes are now."

The film also captured a Christchurch that would soon fade from memory. The United Service Hotel and the Plaza Theatre in the corner of Cathedral Square used for the film were both demolished in 1990.

But before the past was devoured, Christchurch people gathered at the Savoy Theatre in Cathedral Square in December 1957 for the Kiwi premiere of Until They Sail.

It was attended by the city's mayor and the band of the 1st Canterbury regiment and the City of Christchurch Highland Pipe Band, which both appeared in the film.

Hundreds of Christchurch people gathered in the dark theatre, which was demolished in 1993, to watch a strange version of their city made by a major Hollywood studio.

Within a few decades, the city as it appeared in the film and the Hollywood studio where it was created were both gone forever.

UNTIL THEY SAIL REVIEW

It is surprising how much this 1950s Hollywood melodrama gets right about New Zealand life during World War II.

It is a carefully observed film about how four Christchurch sisters respond when all the New Zealand men are sent to war and, a few years later, American troops arrive eager for their company.

"I've never seen such a display of flashing white teeth in my life," remarks one of the sisters after Christchurch is swamped by American troops.

For a film largely shot on a Hollywood backlot far away from the streets of Christchurch, there are many surprising references to Kiwi culture.

There are small details like the ferns lining the fake Avon River constructed in Hollywood and the main cast getting about the place on bicycles. 

But there are also more overt references like the moment when Paul Newman's character orders five whiskies in the bar of the St George Hotel in Wellington and says "closing all your bars before six like you do makes everyone tank up before sundown".

It is a strange feeling to see a reference to the six o'clock swill in a 1957 Hollywood film directed by the man who made West Side Story. It is also strange to watch Hollywood movie star Jean Simmons talk about walking down Colombo St.

This largely forgotten film, which is unavailable on the main streaming services and can only be tracked down on DVD from a site like Amazon.com, is a handsomely made product of the classical Hollywood system. 

It has strong performances from a stellar cast and solid, restrained black and white cinematography.

But, even for its time, it feels remarkably reticent and stilted. For a film about the passions of the heart and the social flux created by war, there is very little heat and sexual chemistry on the screen. 

It is full of the births, deaths and marriages that animate any wartime saga, but very little passion, despite the presence of a young and smouldering Paul Newman.

Perhaps in a reflection of 1940s Kiwi culture, everything feels sedate and buttoned down. It is an old fashioned melodrama of veiled passions that, to modern eyes, can sometimes feel quite tedious.

But the film also has a surprisingly progressive female perspective. The four female protagonists have to carefully negotiate the patriarchy as they struggle with sexual harassment from US soldiers and a woman's sexual history being dragged into the trial of her murderer.

Ultimately, this is a sedate and old fashioned film for a rainy Sunday afternoon that probably felt a little dated even at its Christchurch premiere in 1957.