Arizona of the Thousand Faces

Arizona in Disguise

From the India of Gunga Din to the setting for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Arizona's mountains, deserts, and valleys have set the scenes for scores of Hollywood movies In 1976, shortly after going to work for the Arizona Motion Picture Development Office, William MacCallum learned something that Hollywood had known for years: Arizona is the perfect “stand-in” for many other locations.

MacCallum, who retired as director of the state motion picture office last summer, was involved in the filming of The Gumball Rally, a spoof of a real-life but highly illegal coast-to-coast road race. The film (and the race) begins on New York's Wall Street and ends on a pier in Long Beach, California.

“The beginning and the end of the race were shot on location in New York and Long Beach, but the rest of the cross-country race was shot in Arizona, with Arizona playing the part of the Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, and the Texas plains,” says MacCallum. It was shot in Flagstaff, along Interstate 17, in Chino Valley, Prescott, Black Canyon City, Sun Lakes, and on the Papago Indian Reservation west of Tucson. “And nobody could tell the difference,” MacCallum chuckles.

The same scenario was followed in 1983 by Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise in The Cannonball Run II, with pretty much the same locations, he says.

“About the same time they were shooting The Gumball Rally, we were involved in the filming near Flagstaff of a television series called 'The Oregon Trail.' It occurred to me that we had something we could really market. Arizona has such diverse topogra phy that with a little effort you can come up with just about every look you could imagine,” he says. (See Arizona Highways, December, '84.) “That is one reason we have been so fortunate in attracting motion picture companies to Arizona. Because we are so close to Hollywood and have that diversity, we can save them a lot of money. If they can shoot it here, there's no need to travel to Texas or Oregon or around the world to the Sahara Desert. Our weather plays an important role, too. We've got the best in the country. Very seldom does it cause shooting delays,” MacCallum adds.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) In The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Max von Sydow portrayed Jesus Christ, and the Lake Powell area in far northern Arizona stood in for the Holy Land.

Arizona's versatility rivals that of storied actor Lon Chaney - the Man of a Thousand Faces says film historian John B. La Due III. “Arizona, at one time or another, has substituted for Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, Canada, China, Israel, the Sudan, North Africa, and a lot of other locations. The Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson once stood in for the Pyrenees. Hillbilly films set in Kentucky and Tennessee have been filmed here. In the Jayhawkers, the area near Patagonia played Kansas, and John Wayne made a French Foreign Legion 12chapter serial called The Three Musketeers near Yuma.”

Some of the earliest roles cast Arizona in silent films as California, Texas, and New York City, but in 1926 Rudolph Valentino and Ronald Colman turned Arizona into the Sahara Desert in Son of the Sheik and Beau Geste, respectively. Those two productions began a long tradition of desert films that included the 1929 version of The Four Feathers, set in the Sudan, The Desert Song, (twice), Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich's Morocco, and The Lost Patrol, led by Victor McLaglen across the desert of Mesopotamia.

Arizona also doubled as North Africa in The Garden of Allah, Bengazi, Desert Sands, Tobruk, and The Desert Fox. In other movies filmed here, Errol Flynn played a legionnaire in Another Dawn as did Gene Hackman in March or Die and Ronald Colman in Under Two Flags. Tyrone Power built a canal, con-quered the elements, and made love to Loretta Young in Suez.

Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Sam Jaffe, and McLaglen crossed Arizona sand dunes and battled Punjabis of India in the classic Gunga Din. In light of today's concerns about violence in entertainment, it is somewhat ironic that 1939's Gunga Din was raked over the coals for excessive violence. One magazine referred to the “wholesale massacres” in the film as being symptomatic of the cultural level of the film industry. The violence in the film would hardly raise an eyebrow today.

A further irony is that RKO spent an unheard of $2 million to build sets for the blockbuster film, chicken feed by today's standards but a huge expenditure in that halcyon era.

In the early '40s, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour hit The Road to Morocco and The Road to Zanzibar, but both those roads passed through Yuma. In 1943 Humphrey Bogart played a tank commander in Sahara not far from the area where Gen. George S. Patton actually trained his tank corps during World War II. Franchot Tone dug Five Graves to Cairo. Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward starred as David and Bathsheba. Gary Cooper and Guy Stockwell followed in Ronald Colman's footsteps in the Beau Geste remake of 1939.

In 1949 the Arizona sand dunes stood in for the coastal desert of South Africa as Burt Lancaster and Claude Raines struggled over stolen diamonds in Rope of Sand. More recently the dunes were featured as

Arizona in Disguise

a remote and barren planet inhabited by such strange creatures as Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi, starring Harrison Ford. Returning to the dunes as Indiana Jones, Ford fought Nazis and cobras in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Some of the scenes in these motion pictures were actually filmed across the border in Buttercup Valley, California, but because the film companies headquartered in Yuma, the locations are credited to Arizona, explains MacCallum.

When Robert Aldrich brought the cast and crew of Flight of the Phoenix to Buttercup Valley in the middle of summer, Australian-born actor Peter Finch wiped his brow and remarked, "It's bloody hot, but it's real!" So hot was it, that barefoot dancer Barrie Chase was forced to perform her dream sequence belly dance at dawn because the scorching sand during the day would have toasted her tootsies, recalls former Phoenix Gazette entertainment columnist Larry Rummel.

Flight of the Phoenix author Elleston Trevor says he was surprised that the Yuma desert was exactly as he had pictured the Sahara, despite Yuma actually being on a lower latitude than Tunis. “One sand dune looks much the same as another, and one could easily get lost in the desert,” he says. The casting of the film was perfect as well, says Trevor. Hardy Kruger as the analytical German engineer was particularly outstanding, he recalls.

Not all of the desert locations were in the Yuma area, says La Due. Scenes for the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told were filmed in Page and nearby Glen Canyon. David and Bathsheba was filmed near Nogales. “A prop well that was at the gates of Jerusalem in the picture is still on a ridge overlooking the Nogales airport, along with the rubble of Jerusalem,” he says.

Remnants and relics left behind by moviemakers abound, says La Due. “There are eight miles of blacktop highway on the Canola Ranch near Green Valley that was built to transport the cast, crew, and cows to a remote location for a cattle stampede scene In The Westerner, with Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan. And the remnants of that movie's version of Vinegaroon, Texas, remain on a mesa on the ranch,” says La Due. A shorter road, 6,000 feet long, was left behind by Aldrich and company after the filming of Flight of the Phoenix, says Rummel. Rubble of a Buddhist temple between Patagonia and Nogales is a silent reminder of one of the most unlikely disguises assumed by Arizona when it played China in The Mountain Road, starring Jimmy Stewart, says La Due. Other scenes for that picture were shot on South Mountain and at Horse Mesa Dam, he says.

Arizona played Korea in Rock Hudson's Battle Hymn, shot at the Nogales Airport and surrounding area, and in The Iron Angel, starring Mickey Rooney and Don “Red” Barry, shot in 1965 on North Mountain in Phoenix.

Not all of Arizona's roles required desert camouflage. In 1940 Gary Cooper played a Texas Ranger who tracks a desperado into Canada and hooks up with Mounties

Arizona in Disguise

Robert Preston and Preston Foster to put down a French Separatist and Indian uprising in Northwest Mounted Police. Cecil B. DeMille used the mountains near Flagstaff as the Canadian Rockies. Twelve years later, the unmistakable red rock country of Sedona offered a spectacular setting for Pony Soldier, another redcoat Mounted Police horse opera starring Tyrone Power and Cameron Mitchell.

Would you believe Arizona's Superstition Mountains as the looming Swiss Alps? Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner filmed The Mountain in the Superstitions in the heat of late spring of 1956. Larry Rummel recalls Wagner complaining about having to bundle up in cold-weather parkas, in near 100° F. weather, to film climbing scenes. The rugged and steep rock faces of the Superstitions were used for close-ups only. Long distance stock shots of real alpine mountains were spliced in.

Masquerading as other states has come easy for Arizona. Pat Garrett shot down Billy the Kid in New Mexico, but Brian Donlevy and Robert Taylor played out their roles in Arizona. In another New Mexico setting, Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck loved, lusted after, and finally shot each other to death in Duel in the Sun, filmed at Texas Ranch, in the Elgin-Sonoita area of southern Arizona. Emilio Estevez and Arizona reprised their roles as Billy Bonney and New Mexico in Young Guns II. In 1933 Jean Harlow played the Bombshell, set in Palm Springs and filmed in Tucson. In 1986's Desert Bloom, Tucson doubled for Las Vegas, complete with casinos.

In Howard Hawks' Red River, John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, and Walter Brennan drive a herd of cattle across Texas and wind up in Abilene, Kansas. Shot entirely in Arizona, Red River prominently features Patagonia, the San Rafael Valley, Elgin, St. David, Sonoita Creek, and the San Pedro and Verde rivers. Old Tucson and Mescal stood in for Vinegaroon, Texas, in Paul Newman's version of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Arizona was quite believable as Texas or New Mexico, or as unspecified areas of the West in dozens of horse operas, but some stand out. The Patagonia and Sonoita areas played the role of Wyoming in the Steve McQueen version of Tom Horn, and, somehow, Mount Wrightson was made to look like part of the Grand Tetons. The Great Sioux Massacre, starring Joseph Cotten, took place in Montana, but Custer made his last stand in Arizona as Old Tucson and Vail stood in for the Little Big Horn.

Southern Arizona was set to play Wyoming in Comes a Horseman, but when the owner of the ranch house used in McClintock! and Tom Horn found out that Jane Fonda was to star in the film, she told the movie company "Hanoi Jane" was not welcome. Instead, Fonda, James Caan, and Jason Robards Jr. traveled north to Flagstaff to make the picture.

Arizona played the title roles in California, with Ray Milland and Barbara Stanwyck, and Albuquerque, starring Randolph Scott, and in perhaps the greatest casting coup ever, in the musical Oklahoma!

The decision to film Oklahoma! in Arizona was not a difficult one, says La Due. "Places in Oklahoma that looked like Oklahoma were cluttered up with things like built-up areas and power lines. Oklahoma in 1954 did not look like the Oklahoma of 1854, but parts of Arizona did. The filming created quite a controversy, and there was a movement in Oklahoma to boycott the picture," he says. The hubbub eventually died down, but in 1959 Arizona did it again, portraying Oklahoma in Edna Ferber's Cimarron.

One motion picture that was not shot in Arizona played an important role in another that was, says Bill MacCallum. "Sometimes even a film that is not done in Arizona can help. Martin Brest came to Arizona to scout locations for the Dustin Hoffman hit

Arizona in Disguise

Rain Man, an odyssey that begins in St. Louis and ends at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles," he says.

The filming was set, with the opening to be shot in St. Louis, the end in Los Angeles, and a few scenes in a Las Vegas casino. The rest of the action was to be filmed in Arizona with Flagstaff, Williams, Sedona, and Globe-Miami substituting for various parts of the country. Later, friction developed between Hoffman and Brest, and Brest was bounced from the film in favor of Barry Levinson. New locations, this time outside Arizona, were selected, MacCallum says.

"We just shrugged and figured you win some and lose some," he says, "but a few months later Brest was signed to direct Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Run. That film is a wild chase movie starting in New York and ending in Los Angeles. Brest realized the locations he'dscouted for Rain Man were perfect for Midnight Run, so he brought the production company to Arizona," he says.

Ironically, one scene in which DeNiro and Grodin crash their car and jump into the river to escape the bad guys had to be filmed in two different locations, one of which was half a world away, MacCallum says. "When Grodin and DeNiro jump from the bank they are in Arizona's Salt River Canyon, but when they splash into the water they are actually in New Zealand, in the only river the moviemakers could find that was warm enough, fast enough, and clear enough for their purposes. So in this one scene, New Zealand doubles for Arizona!"