The accidental [movie] star
John Sweet appeared in just one film in his acting career. It made him famous
twice.
By G.D. Gearino; Staff Writer
The News & Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina
Sunday, November 12 2000
Pittsboro:
It's easy to imagine John Sweet's life as a movie. After the
opening credits, you see Sweet as a youngster in a small town in Ohio before
World War II. Within the first half-hour, he's serving in the Army and is
based in London at Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's headquarters. Perhaps you even
see Ike walk into the frame once or twice. It's the movies. No director
will resist that, even if it didn't actually happen.
Then the film hits its stride: Sweet is plucked from obscurity and made
famous. Women fawn over him, men envy him and the people of his hometown
shake their heads in I-knew-him-when amazement. Sweet even achieves what
is, in the 1940s, the ultimate affirmation of popularity: He is featured
in Life magazine [June 26th 1944].
But remember, this is a movie. It's too soon for happily ever after. Good
fortune rarely goes unchallenged on celluloid.
So Sweet sees it all evaporate. Just as suddenly as his fame developed,
it is gone. He becomes an ordinary guy. Not exactly Joe Lunch-bucket, but
not far from it. Other celebrities he has known, people who have remained
famous, barely acknowledge him. Every time he changes jobs, he slides a
little farther down the professional ladder. Memories fade. Marriages fail.
A daughter is murdered.
We're almost to the end of the film. Sweet retires and moves to North Carolina,
where he lives in perfect anonymity. He putters around his retirement community
with the other pensioners, wearing a sweater even when the weather is warm.
A drive over to Chapel Hill can kill an afternoon. His white beard looks
rakish, but the hair above it is eight-decades thin. The best Sweet can
hope for is the occasional moment of recognition from someone who knows
his history.
But movies, unlike life, don't just sputter to a conclusion. You've paid
your money and you want to see a big ending. Here it comes. Don't go for
popcorn now.
More than a half-century after his brief fame, Sweet is rediscovered. One
more time, the cameras focus on him and microphones are thrust in his face.
One more time, he hobnobs with celebrities. People not only remember him,
they love him. The film ends. The last shot is a close-up of Sweet's beatific
smile.
Fame. Obscurity. Redemption. It is indeed the stuff of movies.
Except in Sweet's case it wasn't like the movies. It was the movies.
A command performance:
Sweet, an articulate man, explains it simply and concisely: "I'm a born-again
movie star."
In 1943, Sweet -- a sergeant in the U.S. Army who served as a typist, far
from the action -- was made into a movie star. He'd never acted in anything
other than high school plays, hadn't studied acting and had no ambition
to become an actor. In fact, Sweet didn't even ask for the role. He was
ordered to do it, more or less, by his commanding officers.
The movie is called "A Canterbury Tale" It wasn't based on the literary
landmark of almost the same name, but it borrowed its spirit from Chaucer's
work. The movie tells the story of three "pilgrims" who are thrown together
by circumstance as they travel to Canterbury, which has been bombed by the
Nazis. Each is troubled, for separate reasons, but each finds happiness
by film's end.
The script called for one of the three main characters to be an American
soldier. The movie's director -- a prominent British filmmaker named Michael
Powell -- surely thought himself lucky in this regard. Not only was England
full of American military men, many of them were actors. Jimmy Stewart,
for instance. Clark Gable. Burgess Meredith.
Powell asked for Meredith and was refused. The Army, Sweet recalls, decided
"it would raise a morale problem for troops sleeping in mudholes, knowing
the stars were still doing the star thing."
Sweet knew none of this at the time, of course. He wasn't involved in the
discussions. He was a nobody, albeit a nobody who had become bored and joined
a theater group as a way to occupy his evenings. The Red Cross was sponsoring
a production of the play "The Eve of St. Mark" by Maxwell Anderson, and
Sweet had won a leading role.
Two things then happened to change Sweet's life forever. First, Powell asked
if he could recruit an ordinary G.I. to perform in the play, since the established
stars were off-limits. He was told he could.
Second, somebody mentioned to Powell that he should check out the young
American performing in the Maxwell Anderson play at the Scala Theatre.
The Powell and the glory:
"I hadn't heard of Powell," Sweet says. "I didn't know a whole lot of things.
I wasn't a film buff."
Powell, like Sweet, has been relegated to the sidelines of film history,
at least in the eyes of American moviegoers. But in the 1940s, Powell was
one of England's top directors. Before making "A Canterbury Tale," Powell
had directed Laurence Olivier in "49th Parallel," which was nominated for
three Academy Awards. He later made "The Red Shoes," likewise nominated
for three Oscars, "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," "Black Narcissus," "The
Tales of Hoffmann" and dozens of other movies. When the British Film Institute
recently released its list of the 100 top British films, five of Powell's
movies made the rankings. Only David Lean, director of "Lawrence of Arabia,"
had more films on the list.
In short, Powell was a major-leaguer. If you want to extend that metaphor,
Sweet was the guy who gets called out of the cheap seats to play in the
game with the professionals.
As it turned out, the guy from the cheap seats hit a home run.
"Having seen the film, I am inclined to hail Sergeant Sweet as a new Gary
Cooper," gushed the reviewer for the London Evening News after the film's
premiere in May 1944. The Sunday Dispatch's reviewer agreed, and even upped
the ante by one: "I prefer him to Gary Cooper. I like him better than I
like James Stewart."
The Sunday Express, not to be outdone for hyperbole, practically canonized
Sweet. "What a man the Sergeant John Sweet is," the paper rhapsodized. "And
what a picture he appears in. ... He has toughness with charm. ... He is
the best of America in battledress. He will make tens of thousands of fans
in this country."
They're right: Sweet is charming in the film, which is available on videotape.
He is occasionally awkward, as any untrained actor is expected to be, but
otherwise he's a great, funny splash of American candor and humor.
The film begins with Sweet, traveling to Canterbury to meet a friend, accidentally
getting off a train at the wrong station during a blackout. He is befriended
by a British soldier and a London shopgirl, both of whom also are seeking
to get to Canterbury. All of them have unhappiness in their lives: Sweet's
girlfriend hasn't been answering his letters, the shopgirl's fiance is missing
in action, and the British soldier -- a classically trained organist --
has been reduced to playing in movie houses.
They eventually get to Canterbury, but most of the movie follows them around
the small village where they've been temporarily stranded. It is in those
scenes where Powell made best use of his lanky, laconic American sergeant.
In one scene, for example, Sweet's character settles into a chair next to
a British villager. The man mentions that his brother lives in America --
specifically, in "Butt City, Montana" -- and wonders if Sweet has run into
him. The man clearly believes all Americans know one another, and Sweet
flawlessly deadpans his way through the whole exchange.
-
-
Man: "The name is Isaac Wells. Maybe you know him."
Sweet: "Tall fellow?"
Man: "Short and fat."
Sweet (after a thoughtful pause): "Can't place him." (Another pause.)
"I come from Three Sisters Falls, Oregon."
Man: "I come from the Seven Sisters Road, London. Put it there." (They
shake hands.)
Sweet: "Pleased to meet you. You sure are a whole mess of sisters ahead
of me."
Fruitless auditions:
Ultimately, however, it all counted for nothing.
Sweet, despite the rave reviews, never made another movie. He finished his
Army hitch and returned to the United States in 1945. As he said to Life
magazine in 1944: "No big fat men with gold watch chains have driven up
in limousines to offer me Hollywood contracts."
He did manage to work for nearly three years on Broadway. Thanks to introductions
made on his behalf by theater industry insiders, Sweet was invited to read
for lead roles in a number of Broadway productions. He didn't get a single
one. Instead, he was offered a series of bit parts.
There wasn't anything puzzling or mysterious about why he kept missing the
lead roles, Sweet says: "I wasn't entitled to have big parts. I wasn't disciplined,
or focused on what actors call 'the craft.' ... When the movie was being
made, I was in the hands of a director who could leave the bad stuff on
the cutting room floor."
In 1948, Sweet concluded he would never make it as an actor. Each audition
was like stepping up to the plate in baseball, "and I wasn't getting a hit,"
he says. "All those nonhits carried the message that I'd be better off doing
something else."
He wangled a teaching job at Bowdoin College in Maine, which lasted eight
years. When the college's administrators concluded Sweet didn't have a sufficient
academic background for the long haul, they gently suggested he continue
his teaching elsewhere. In 1956, he started teaching high school in Chappaqua,
N.Y. (now best known for being home to Hillary Clinton). He stayed there
until his retirement in 1973.
It is, when you think about it, a strange career arc. Sweet started out
at the top -- a star in a major movie -- and then descended to bit player
on Broadway, college lecturer and, finally, high school teacher. It's the
mirror image of the path you'd expect.
"They went from major to minor," he says of his job changes.
His personal life also took some odd turns. He married and divorced three
times. (He now lives with his fourth wife, Barbara, in Chatham County's
Fearrington Village.) And his oldest child -- a daughter who was born while
he served overseas in the Army, and whom he barely knew for a long time
-- was murdered in 1967 in Washington. The killing was never solved, he
says.
In 1984, Sweet moved to the Triangle. His movie-star background was known
to only a few.
Resurrecting Powell:
Michael Powell slid into his own kind of obscurity over the same period.
After hitting his high tide artistically in the 1940s, Powell's reputation
began to slip. In 1961, it plummeted with the release of "Peeping Tom,"
a movie about a voyeuristic killer that was roundly panned. He made only
a handful of films afterward, and by the 1970s Powell was largely forgotten.
His films were rarely shown or mentioned.
But Powell had two important supporters: Francis Ford Coppola and Martin
Scorsese.
Coppola, director of "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now," was an admirer
of Powell and appointed him as director emeritus at American Zoetrope studios,
Coppola's movie production company. Scorsese, director of "Raging Bull"
and "GoodFellas," practically made the resurrection of Powell's memory a
crusade. He pushed for the restoration of many of Powell's films, sought
Powell's advice on countless occasions, presented him with an award at the
Telluride Film Festival and readily acknowledges that numerous scenes in
his films had their inspirations in Powell's movies. (Scorsese's film editor,
Thelma Schoonmaker-Powell, eventually married Powell and lived with him
until his death in 1990.)
Sweet's resurrection had to wait a few more years.
In 1997, Sweet learned that somebody was looking for him. An Englishman
had written to the local paper in the small Ohio town where Sweet grew up,
seeking word of Sweet's whereabouts. When he heard about it, Sweet contacted
the fellow and asked, in essence, who are you and what do you want with
me?
"I was delighted to receive your letter," the man responded. "I had been
trying to trace you for several months. ... A friend of mine, a collector
of WWII movie memorabilia, has been trying to trace you for nine years."
As it turned out, the man was an author named Paul Tritton, and he was writing
a book called "A Canterbury Tale: Memories of a Wartime Movie." Did Sweet
happen to have any photos taken at the time of the production? And did he
have any memories of the moviemaking he'd care to contribute?
Sweet had both. He might have been a star in 1943, but he also was star-struck.
He'd kept dozens of publicity photos from the time and -- with his clerk
training holding true -- had even typewritten short commentaries to go along.
He happily supplied them to the author.
Then, earlier this year, Sweet heard the words that, after 57 years, he
never expected to hear:
Would he like to come to England and be a movie star again?
Sweet remembrance:
The event was a special screening of "A Canterbury Tale" at the Kent International
Film Festival in October. With the help of the Powell and Pressburger Appreciation
Society (screenwriter Emeric Pressburger was Powell's longtime collaborator),
Sweet and his wife were brought to England to appear at the screening. Joining
him was the one co-star who remains alive: an actress named Sheila Sim,
now known as Lady Attenborough thanks to her marriage to famed film director
Lord Richard Attenborough.
The screening drew hundreds of people, and the two stars attracted a herd
of journalists. They were featured on a 15-minute segment on BBC Radio and
interviewed by television and newspaper reporters. Sweet autographed some
150 copies of Tritton's book. "Wherever we appeared there was a great popping
of flashbulbs," he recalls.
There was another bonus for Sweet: the image of himself, huge on the screen,
from nearly 60 years before. Movie stars -- real movie stars -- are accustomed
to this. But among those of us who grew up before videotape, who else can
expect to see their ghostly, younger selves so vividly lifelike?
"It's an astonishing experience for an 84-year-old man to see himself in
his boyhood form," Sweet says.
Now Sweet has returned home, where life has returned to its ordinary, nonfamous
state. He busies himself these days by working on his journal, recording
his life in a series of essays that are produced at a clip of four to five
a month. On a typical afternoon, Sweet climbs the stairs to his loft, scoots
up close to his desk, inserts a piece of yellow paper into his typewriter,
and taps out his memories of stardom found, lost, and then found again.
Roll credits.
Reprinted with permission of The News & Observer of
Raleigh, North Carolina
©
The News & Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina.
Back to
index
