At the last moment, Zanuck gambled on casting Jean Peters as Catana. Peters spent the brief time before leaving for Mexico toughening her feet, because Catana goes barefoot throughout the story. (After the filming, she had to replace all of her shoes because her feet had widened.) A farm-raised student from Ohio State University who had never appeared in a movie, the green-eyed brunette proved a smart choice. An instant success, she starred in 16 pictures over the next 10 years, including Anne of the Indies, Viva Zapata, Vicki, Three Coins in the Fountain and Broken Lance. In 1956, she chucked her career to marry eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, and in 1971 she divorced Hughes and later married film executive Stanley Hough.
The supporting roles were filled with first-rate performers. Cesar Romero got the plum assignment as Cortez, limning a character who is ruthless yet somehow likable. Lee J. Cobb is impressive as Pedro's tragic friend, Juan Garcia, who is heroic when sober and a monster when drunk. Tall Britisher John Sutton reeks of evil as the handsome, fiendish Diego de Silva, inquisitor-general of the dreaded Inquisition. Hefty Thomas Gomez, usually cast as a villain or a shrewd detective, portrays the compassionate priest, Father Bartolome, whose role was beefed up as an antidote to the portrayal of the Inquisition. Silent star Antonio Moreno, white-haired but still handsome, plays Pedro's aristocratic father. Alan Mowbray, grotesquely made up with a hunched back and errant eye, is the expedition's astrologer-physician. Blonde Barbara Lawrence is Pedro's beautiful but unfaithful fiancée, and George Zucco whose uniquely glittering eyes should have been a tip-off is her treacherous father. Marc Lawrence (temporarily eluding his usual gangster roles), Bob Karnes, Jay Silverheels, Reed Hadley and Mimi Aguglia are among the other seasoned actors who are valuable assets to the show.
Only players with speaking roles were sent to Mexico. A record total of 19,500 extras, both Mexican and Indian, were all hired on location.
The costume department, supervised by Charles Le Maire, made hundreds of designs, including 20 changes of costume for Power, 16 for Cobb, 10 for Cesar Romero, and two extravagant gowns for Lawrence. Some 900 costumes were made for the extras playing Spanish soldiers, along with 200 for the Cubans, 200 for the seamen, and 3,000 for the Aztecs. One craftsman, following a description found by researchers, worked for two months making a hand-tooled headdress of gold studded with jewels and crowned by 600 vulture feathers dyed a bright blue, to be worn by Gilberto Gonzales as Montezuma's nephew, Cacamatzin.
Arrangements were made to borrow priceless Aztec jewelled necklaces from the collection at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City so they could be copied by the property department artists. After 600 replicas were made, the necklaces were returned to Mexico under heavy guard. The actual necklace Cortez placed around the neck of Donna Marino his native intrepeter and paramour was loaned by the museum for King's reenactment of the scene with Romero and Stella Inda. Two thousand Aztec shields and 4,000 lances were made at the studio. The hammered silver spurs of the conquistadores and 5,000 pairs of sandals worn by the Aztecs were bought in Mexico. A replica of a cannon of the period was made in Mexico and 21 duplicates were made at Fox, as were 400 crossbows and numerous other props.
Flying his own plane, Henry King scouted most of the Mexican locations from the air. The first, Morelia, was selected because its well-preserved Spanish-style churches and mansions, extravagant gardens and verdant hills resembled those of old Spain.
Charles G. Clarke, ASC and Arthur E. Arling, ASC were the project's directors of photography. "I was always rather embarrassed that they gave me equal billing with Charlie on that," Arling once admitted. "I shot very little of it. It was Charlie who was responsible for the wonderful expedition photography."
Clarke was happily at work on Fox's charming Christmas fable, Miracle on 34th Street, congratulating himself on this temporary escape from his "typecasting" as a photographer of outdoor action, when he was suddenly ordered to Mexico. A burly, adventurous man reminiscent of rugged screen heroes from the George Bancroft-Milton Sills mold, Clarke always felt that his real forte was studio production. On a soundstage, he could utilize his mastery of lighting, as he had on Evelyn Prentice, Kind Lady, and Trouble For Two. Producers, however, tended to remember his work in far-flung locations on such films as Viva Villa, Tarzan and his Mate, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Good Earth. When Clarke reluctantly departed Miracle for Mexico City, Lloyd Ahern, ASC completed the last two weeks of photography.
Tropical heat was a problem during most of the location work. Technicolor stock was stored in three refrigerated chests, each six feet long and four feet wide, with alternating compartments of ice and film. Continual changes in color temperature constituted the greatest challenge to the veteran cinematographer. "The hardest part of exterior photography is keeping consecutive scenes consistent," Clarke noted. "They may be shot hours or days apart, and the light changes from hour to hour and day to day in both direction and color value."
On November 19, day and night exteriors for the Spainish sequences at Morelia were begun. The company worked at this location for six weeks, much of which was devoted to filming the chase and escape action in the early part of the story. Many of these scenes required day-for-night effects.
The volcano Popocatepetl, located 40 miles southeast of Mexico City, was in eruption at the time Cortez camped nearby, but it was long dormant and snow-capped when the movie company arrived. Fortuitously enough, on February 20, 1943 a new volcano Paricutin burst from a cornfield 180 miles west of Mexico City. Following two weeks of earthquakes, a fissure opened in the ground, spewing gas and ash four miles into the air. A cinder cone formed and within six days grew to a height of 550 feet. Lava flows destroyed the nearby villages of Paricutin and San Juan. The first volcano to form in the Western Hemisphere since 1770, it was still in violent eruption and had risen to some 3,000 feet by time of the production's arrival. (Upon its in-activity five years later, Paricutin had reached a height of 9,100 feet.)
[ continued on page 3 ]