Actually, neither star was originally intended for Top Secret Affair. Warner Brothers bought the hit novel Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. as a vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, but Bogart's illness--the cancer that took his life in 1957--prevented him from taking the role, and Bacall dropped out to care for him in his final months. By the time Hayward and Douglas were signed, just about everything but the characters' names from the original novel had been thrown out, and a new script by Roland Kibbee and Allan Scott was approved bearing little or no relation to Marquand's work. Hayward plays a publishing tycoon and the head of a news magazine (a notable resemblance to Clare Booth Luce and Time) who is determined to ruin the reputation of Army General Melville Goodwin (Douglas, in a role said to have been based partly on George S. Patton) after he is picked for an important diplomatic job over the civilian candidate she wanted. Their conflict inevitably turns to romance, and after misunderstandings involving spies and secret information land them both before Congressional committees, she decides what she really wants out of life is a husband and family (this being the 1950s), and they end up back in each other's arms.
Acting honors went not to the two stars but to a supporting cast consisting of Paul Stewart (Charles Foster Kane's loyal manservant in Citizen Kane, 1941) and Jim Backus (James Dean's father in Rebel Without a Cause, 1955, and Thurston Howell of the Gilligan's Island TV sitcom of the 1960s). Even here, the actors were not the first ones announced for the roles; a 1956 New York Times item said the parts would be played by Keenan Wynn and Walter Matthau. The cast also included John Cromwell, the director of Of Human Bondage (1934), Since You Went Away (1944), and The Goddess (1958).
The working titles of the film were Their Secret Affair and the original title of the Marquand novel from which the characters were derived. According to a November 1956 New York Times report, director H. C. Potter claimed that the film's title was changed to reflect that the screenplay no longer resembled the novel. Although Marquand's book also had an affair between the two main characters, it was an adulterous one. Making them single was only one of many changes made to the story before it hit the screen.
The musical score was written by Roy Webb, a seven-time Academy Award nominee for such films as My Favorite Wife (1940) and The Enchanted Cottage (1945), the latter directed by Top Secret Affair cast member John Cromwell. The cinematography is by Stanley Cortez, best known for his work on Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), Cromwell's Since You Went Away, and another Susan Hayward vehicle Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947).
Top Secret Affair was the last film directed by H.C. Potter, who had also brought to the screen Loretta Young's Oscar®-winning performance in The Farmer's Daughter (1947), the Cary Grant vehicles Mr. Lucky (1943) and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), and two Fred Astaire movies, Second Chorus (1940) and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), the last of the Astaire-Rogers RKO pictures.
Director: H.C. Potter
Producers: Martin Rackin, Milton Sperling
Screenplay: Roland Kibbee, Allan Scott; based on characters from John P. Marquand's Melville Goodwin, U.S.A.
Cinematography: Stanley Cortez
Editing: Folmar Blangsted
Art Direction: Malcolm C. Bert
Original Music: Roy Webb
Cast: Susan Hayward (Dorothy Peale), Kirk Douglas (Maj. Gen. Melville Goodwin), Paul Stewart (Phil Bentley), Jim Backus (Col. Homer W. Gooch), John Cromwell (General Daniel Grimshaw).
BW-101m. Letterboxed.
by Rob Nixon
