her, and, at the inquest, she first testifies that Mitch shot Kyle, but then tearfully changes her story and describes events as they really occurred, since she still cared about Mitch. Mitch and Lucy leave the Hadley home together. Marylee is left to mourn the death of her father, brother and Mitch leaving to Iran and run the company alone. Cast Production Development The film's source novel by Robert Wilder was inspired by the life and death of Zachary Smith Reynolds, son of R. J. Reynolds and heir to the Reynolds Tobacco fortune, who died from a gunshot wound to the head at his family's estate after a birthday party. His wife, torch singer Libby Holman, and close friend Alber Walker, fell under suspicion due to conflicting accounts given about the night's events, though neither were ever formally charged with a crime. The novel had been optioned for a feature film adaptation by RKO Pictures in 1945 before the rights were sold to International Pictures the following year after RKO shelved the project. In 1946, Universal Pictures acquired the rights to the novel after absorbing International Pictures; however, the project remained in limbo due to pressure from the Reynolds family, who threatened to launch a lawsuit against any film version of Wilder's novel. In 1955, producer Albert Zugsmith, convinced the project could be a huge success for the studio, hired George Zuckerman to adapt a screenplay, though a number of notable changes were necessitated to avoid a lawsuit from the Reynolds family: several characters were eliminated or had their ages changed; the Hadley family fortune, which in the novel had been acquired from tobacco, was instead from oil; and its setting changed from North Carolina to Texas. Several drafts of the screenplay were submitted to the Motion Picture Production Code before it was passed in late 1955. Casting Lauren Bacall, whose film career was foundering in the mid-1950s, accepted the relatively unflashy role of Lucy Moore at the behest of her husband, Humphrey Bogart. At the same time she was shooting the film, she was preparing for a television adaptation of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, co-starring Coward and Claudette Colbert. Dorothy Malone, a brunette previously best known as the brainy bespectacled bookstore clerk in a scene with Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946), had more recently played small supporting roles in a long string of B movies. For this