begun and one week after her divorce from husband Harmon Nelson had been granted, but announced she was unprepared to film her first scene and went home. Filming was suspended for several days, and when Davis returned to the studio she was fretful and distracted. By Christmas she was close to a nervous breakdown. Soon after the holiday, she was diagnosed with a severe case of pleurisy, and as a result she frequently remained in bed until 3:00 pm, finally reporting to work in the late afternoon with a high temperature. Filming of the scene in which Carlota confronts Napoléon III was postponed for two days until she felt well enough to attempt it. John Garfield was cast as Porfirio Diaz at the request of Paul Muni, who appeared with Garfield in the 1932 Broadway play Counsellor at Law. Garfield was relatively unknown in Hollywood at the time, but by the time filming began he had received critical acclaim for his performance in Four Daughters. Studio executives questioned his playing a relatively minor role in Juarez, but the actor was anxious to appear in it, so he remained in the cast, his box-office appeal managing to win out over his heavy Bronx accent. Garfield's reviews were uniformly bad, and Diaz proved to be the only period role he played in his career. The epic film boasted 1,186 supporting players performing on 54 sets designed by art director Anton Grot and his assistant Leo Kuter. The largest was an 11-acre replica of Mexico constructed on a ranch in Calabasas, California. Behind the throne room and living quarters of Maximilian was a 250-foot-long and 50-foot-high backdrop of Mexico City, with Popocatépetl in the distance. Erich Wolfgang Korngold researched the music popular in Mexico during the period and discovered it was "unmistakenly Viennese." He composed 3,000 bars of music for the score, at times emulating the rhythms of Frédéric Chopin and Franz Schubert, and the second theme of the first movement of his Violin Concerto was drawn from his work for the film. Audience reaction to the first preview was so negative the film was recut, with entire scenes transposed. A new ending designed to soften Muni's portrayal of Juárez was filmed, although the scene - in which Juárez visits the cathedral where Maximilian is lying in state and asks for his forgiveness - has no basis in fact. The film opened in