The days when Hollywood came to Cedar City – St. George News

Cedar City – The afternoon sun set fire to Red Hill east of the city when the train pulled from Los Angeles to the Cedar City train depot in September 1949.

The film cast and crew who had left Hollywood that morning were happy to settle into their rooms at the El Escalante Hotel across the street from the warehouse. Families dining in the hotel restaurant tried not to embarrass themselves as they stared at the movie stars enjoying their evening meal.

After breakfast early the next morning, the cast and crew headed to Cedar Canyon to begin filming a new western at Duck Creek Ranch and Cedar Breaks.

The film’s stars include Dean Jagger as a cowboy named Jeff Hassard for a murder he did not commit, and Audie Murphy as his son, Ring. They were hiding in the mountains of southern Utah breaking horses while remaining out of the reach of a gang seeking revenge for the killing.

Burl Ives played a supporting role as a porter named Lonesome who befriends the couple. And there was the rancher’s beautiful daughter, Riley, played by Wanda Hendricks, who fell under the spell of the young caribou, Ring.

The film “Sierra” was based on the 1937 novel “The Mountains Are My Kingdom.” It featured all the conventions of Westerns of the time: the handsome cowboy, the local virgin who falls in love with the cowboy, the good guys and the bad guys, the colorful guitar-playing sidekick, the chase, and the shootouts.

But what made the Sierra unique at the time was the location of the pink amphitheater at Cedar Break and the aspens and pines of Cedar Mountain. The film was not a huge success and is largely forgotten today, but there are interesting backstories to the production.

The first is that two unknown actors trying to get a foothold in the film industry had minor roles in the film. Their names: Tony Curtis and James Arness.

Curtis, whose real name is Bernard Schwartz, grew up in East Harlem and, after serving in the Navy in World War II, pursued an acting career. His small role in the movie “Sierra” was one of his early roles. But it wasn’t long before he gained fame through starring roles in films including “Some Like it Hot” with Marilyn Monroe, “Spartacus” with Kirk Douglas, and “Operation Petticoat” with Cary Grant.

Like Curtis, Arness was a World War II vet, having served as an infantryman in Europe where he was wounded at the Battle of Anzio. After a series of small roles in films such as “The Thing from Another World” (in which he played a monster), he became famous for the role of Marshal Matt Dillon in “Gunsmoke.”

The latter role, which ran for 20 years on CBS, led to him spending a lot of time in southern Utah, with much of the TV series filmed on location in Johnson Canyon near Kanab.

But in 1949, Curtis and Arnis Nekrin were just two handsome men trying to catch a break. The people in Cedar City ignored them and focused on the real stars of the movie: Audie Murphy and Wanda Hendricks. Murphy was a Medal of Honor recipient and among the most decorated combat soldiers of World War II.

The soft-spoken son of a Texas sharecropper, he had to lie about his age to enlist in the army. His exploits landed him on the cover of Life magazine and made him the poster boy for soldiers who fought in World War II. But Murphy suffered from what we today call post-traumatic stress disorder.

He suffered from insomnia and bouts of depression, relied on tranquilizers, and slept with a loaded gun under his pillow. His fame opened the door to his film career, which he hoped “Sierra” would advance.

His co-star, Wanda Hendricks, was a budding talent who had fallen in love with and married Murphy earlier that year. Thanks to Hendrix, Murphy got the main role in the film “Sierra”. But during the fall of 1949, in addition to the drama going on in front of the cameras, there was drama going on behind the scenes, as Hendrix and Murphy’s marriage was in trouble, not least because Murphy’s combative flashbacks terrified her.

Another emerging star of the film was Burl Ives. By 1949, he was already a popular singer of popular songs on the CBS Radio Network, but his film career was just beginning. He attended college for a few years, where he played lineman on the football team, but during the Great Depression, he wandered around the country as an itinerant singer, playing the banjo and doing odd jobs to stay afloat.

Despite his charisma and smooth voice, he sometimes got himself into trouble, including a time when he was imprisoned in Mona, Utah, on charges of vagrancy and singing a “licentious song.”

(“Foggy Dew” is an old English folk tune that uses a double meaning to tell the story of a maid who compromises her virtue in favor of a wandering bard.)

But the local extras at Cedar Mountain didn’t hold it against him, and some of the guys were happy to share shots of whiskey with Ives as compensation for his singing around the campfire when the day’s work was done.

After spending four days filming scenes on Cedar Mountain, the cast and crew moved to Kane County, where they spent the next two weeks filming scenes in Kanab Canyon before returning to Hollywood to finish the film. “Sierra” was distributed by Universal Pictures and released to mixed reviews. Audie Murphy’s star power brought audiences to theaters but it was a forgettable film.

The behind-the-scenes drama between Murphy and his co-star/wife Wanda Hendricks continued to escalate until the couple split two years later. Hendricks hoped to make it big, but after a series of B movies, she continued to play supporting roles in TV shows like “My Three Sons” and “Bewitched” as her name slowly faded from the bright lights of Hollywood.

In the coming years, Perle Evez star has risen. His recordings of the songs of “Lavender Blue”, “Blue Tail Fly” and “A Little Bitty Tear” have achieved great success. His film career took off with increasingly prominent film roles in “East of Eden,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “Ensign Pulver,” for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Two of his audio shows are still very popular to this day.

His rendition of “A Holly Jolly Christmas” and his narration as “Sam the Snowman” in the stop-motion Christmas special “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” has aired every holiday season since 1964.

Audie Murphy went on to have a successful film career, including the widely acclaimed film “To Hell and Back,” based on Murphy’s book of the same name in which he wrote about his experiences during the war. He continued to battle his demons, and to his credit, later in life he spoke openly about his struggles with post-traumatic stress to draw attention to the problems of veterans returning from the Korean and Vietnam wars.

It is tragic that he died in 1971 at the age of 46 in a plane crash in Virginia. He was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery where his grave remains to this day among the most visited.

While the “Sierra” crew was in Kanab, Utah Secretary of State Heber Bennion visited the set and chaired a ceremony celebrating the silver anniversary of filmmaking in Utah. Coincidentally, Utah’s film industry began in Cedar City 25 years ago.

It all started in 1924 when Tom Mix, the biggest cowboy star of the 1920s, arrived in town with “Wonder Horse Tony” and his “best friend” Doris May to film the movie “Deadwood Coach.” A crowd of Cedar City children (including my parents) and their parents cheered as Mix exited his train coach at the Cedar City depot. One can’t help but wonder if the irony of real cowboys cheering on the protesting cowboys was lost on Tom Mix or the good people of Iron County.

“Deadwood Coach” was filmed in Cedar Breaks, Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon. The film was a huge success and millions of people across the country came to know the beautiful landscape of southern Utah. “Sierra” was just one of dozens of films filmed in the area in the coming years.

While it was John Ford who introduced the world to the scenic valleys of southeastern Utah, other directors put southern Utah’s color country on the world stage in countless westerns and films as diverse as “Planet of the Apes,” “The Conqueror,” and ” Contour. The Flintstones.” Who knows what the next century will bring for filmmaking in southern Utah.

Editor’s Note: Sources for this article include When Hollywood Came to Town: A History of Filmmaking in Utah by James Darke (2010), the Iron County Record archives, and biographical information about the cast and film found on Wikipedia.

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