(8 of 9)
In Yugoslavia, remembers Vincent, the worst thing that could happen was to be caught in the hotel elevator with vacationing Russians. "Big overcoats. Big suitcases. No baths. You get a group of them packed into an elevator, and you hold your breath. Bob went up one night with a pack of them. He got out on a lower floor, and Bob, whom I called 'Daddy Bad,' put his foot in the door and pulled out a tube of super glue. He ran the glue up one side of the elevator door and down the other and then said, 'Bye.' The door shut, and I heard it took four hours to get them out of there."
Mitchum says that he enjoyed the work as much as he does any work. "It was the sort of film from which you can't steal the clothes," he jokes, "but it was no duller than working on a movie. Whenever I felt abandoned, I'd go get drunk, which is what I have done all my life."
At times the cast felt like wailing as those Yugoslav peasants did, and began talking in the weary way of old soldiers. "If you're in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, for a week, you've been to all the restaurants, done everything, seen everything," says Vincent. "You live with the same people in the same hotel, and you travel with them. It is like being in a circus. The days often lasted 16 hours, and Dan started shooting before breakfast, before you could get a cup of coffee. He demanded that we jump and move."
Curtis jumped more than anyone else, taking on the job of producer as well as director. A man of "excessive attitudes," as Steele calls him, he would yell and scream, and then suffer what she calls "excruciating remorse" if he thought he had hurt someone's feelings. "He is the most impatient person in the world," says Bergen. "I'd be half a foot away from him and he'd yell at the top of his lungs, 'O.K., Polly, let's go!' It took me weeks to realize he wasn't really yelling. That's just his energy, and he is deaf in one ear. I started to stand behind him and just as he'd be ready to yell for me I'd shout, 'O.K., Curtis, we're ready to shoot!' " But almost everyone became devoted to him. "He is a very strange man," says Houseman. "He spends an enormous amount of time putting his worst foot forward, pretending to be rough and insensitive. But I ended up liking him very much. The job he did was incredible. The Winds of War was an extraordinary undertaking."