PASSAGE TO BORDEAUX

August 7, 1941

HOLLYWOOD. Aug 7— If you have read “Berlin Diary” — and it seems as if the whole world has read William Shirer’s day to day accounts of the events that led up to the war – you will interested to hear he is coming to Hollywood. (1)  He will fly her weekends starting the last week in October to confer with Erich Pommer and Oliver H. P. Garrett (2) on “Passage to Bordeaux” the RKO thriller that is being prepared for production. (3) Shirer once was a foreign correspondent and was present at the historic Munich meeting of Hitler, Chamberlain, and Daladier. (4)

This movie is apparently giving Lucille Ball the opportunity for which the has been crying. She is to have the lead In “Passage to Bordeaux” with Robert Stevenson (5) handling the megaphone. Shirer will not actually do any writing — merely suggesting scenes and situations to Garrett the script writer.

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FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) Berlin Diary (“The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934–1941”) is a first-hand account of the rise of Nazi Germany and its road to war, as witnessed by journalist William L. Shirer. Shirer covered Germany for several years as a radio reporter for CBS. The identities of many of Shirer’s German sources were disguised to protect these people from retaliation by the German secret police, the Gestapo. It sold almost 600,000 copies in the first year of its publication and was widely praised by academics and critics.  This article makes it sound as if the book might become a film, but it is just its author who was Hollywood-bound, to be an advisor on a subject he knew well. 

(2) Erich Pommer (1889-1966) was a German-born film producer and executive. Pommer was perhaps the most powerful person in the German and European Film Industries in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was producer of Fritz Lang’s landmark silent film Metropolis in 1927. During World War II he came to America, where he joined RKO. One of his first projects was producing Dance, Girl, Dance starring Lucille Ball and Maureen O’Sullivan. 

Oliver H.P. Garrett (1894-1952) worked as a journalist before coming to Hollywood in 1927. He would later share an Oscar with Joseph L. Mankiewicz for best screenplay for Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and became a founding member and two term vice president of the Screen Writers Guild.

(3) So what happened to Passage to Bordeaux?  Why was it never made?  Loving Lucy (1982) by Bart Andrews and Thomas Watson sums it up pretty well.  Instead, Lucille Ball was cast (some would say mis-cast) in the film Valley of the Sun, released in early 1942.  The New York times labeled it “ambling” and others called it “forced”. 

(4) On September 30, 1938, British and French prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier sign the Munich Pact with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The agreement averted the outbreak of war but gave Czechoslovakia away to German conquest. 

(5) Robert Stevenson (1905-86) was a director and writer, known for Mary Poppins (1964, Oscar Nominee), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and King Solomon’s Mines (1937).  

In 1944 Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) directed the similarly-titled Passage To Marseille, another French town like Bordeaux, in a WWII storyline meant to recapture the magic of Casablanca in 1942. Frequent “Lucy” performer Hans Conried had an uncredited role in the film.